Throughout the eighteenth century, Paris was home to a large community of migrant people who seasonally journeyed from the South-Eastern region of Savoie to the French capital in search of work. Characterised in Parisian depictions as regionally distinct, poor, and perhaps even criminal, these attitudes have come to define the place that the city’s enclave of Alpine visitors have had in subsequent studies of the subject. Focusing on the twin notions of assimilation and cultural preservation, this article considers how an analysis of the art historical traces of Paris’ Savoyard community may allow for a broader and more nuanced understanding of the place these regional visitors held as active, integrated participants in the economic and cultural life of the French capital in the eighteenth century. The article takes a micro-historical methodological approach, analysing the stories of individual Savoyard migrants, as well as geographically re-integrating the cultural monad of Paris back into a wider range of Alpine people’s economically-motivated journeying in the Early modern period. Through this work, it is hoped that the Savoyard presence in Paris can be better understood in its complexity, while also highlighting the issues of historical (in)visibility which social success and cultural assimilation may cause.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Paris experienced a steady influx of migrants from the Savoie region in the western Alps. While they were by no means the only group of regional people living and working in the city, the supposed otherness of these Alpine visitors to the capital has been emphasised in the historiography of Parisian street life prior to the 1789 Revolution.[1] With historians and art historians focusing on particular items of dress, and a set of specific and distinctive professions, Savoyards have in many ways come to represent the insoluble presence of regional otherness in the heart of the Bourbon’s capital city. Distinct from the assimilation of other regional groups, secondary scholarship has often categorised and defined Paris’ Savoyard population in terms of the cultural difference it supposedly represented.[2] Traversing the long journey from the Alps to the Paris basin, Savoyard migrants simultaneously collapsed and highlighted the geographical and intra-cultural distinctions of the French kingdom during its period of European expansion in the reigns of Louis XIV and his successor Louis XV.
The term ‘Savoyard’ in many ways aids the historicised homogenisation and othering of this group, as this one word blurs the internal geographical, micro-cultural, and social distinctions which characterised the diaspora of migratory people from the Savoie region. While the term ‘Savoyard’ will still be used throughout this discussion as a nomenclature referring to anybody born in or migrating from Savoie, some crucial distinctions will nevertheless be observed. As will be discussed in greater depth later on, Savoie was a small francophone area to the West of the Italian Duchy of Savoy, lying on its border with France. As such, the historical examples that will be discussed are unified by their origin within a community whose language potentially predisposed them towards work in France. Alongside language, and despite internal differences of culture between Savoie’s valleys, some commonalities of dress and material culture persisted across the region, and only in these cases will the discussion refer to a notion of ‘savoyard culture’. Different social hierarchies within the diaspora will be observed and commented on throughout in a number of art historical settings. In each case it is hoped that the reliance on detailed references to geographical location and biographical, archival, and historical information can allow for as great a delineation of the individual circumstances surrounding each of the figures discussed. Far from claiming to speak conclusively for the entire savoyard diaspora, the methodology used in this article focuses instead on a varied range of individual microhistorical instances of migrants’ stories, united by a common origin in Savoie.[3] These people all experienced life away from the Alpine valleys very differently, with some finding huge economic success and others great poverty, all the while delicately balancing the culture of their home region with that of their newly-found communities. By focussing on the stories of individuals, it is hoped that the generalisations that has characterised the treatment of savoyard experience in secondary historical literature can be replaced with an emphasis on real historical people and their narratives of travel, assimilation, and cultural preservation.
The purpose of this discussion is to consider the way that visual sources might allow for a nuanced and alternative understanding of the Savoyard presence in eighteenth-century Paris. Notions of assimilation and cultural preservation will be explored as key aspects characterising the interaction between Alpine migrants and Parisians. Through the analysis of a select number of art historical examples, it is possible to see that the perceived cultural difference presented by Paris’ Savoyard community can be understood to be as much a perpetuated construct as a fact grounded in observable historical reality. Far from producing a pseudo-anthropology of Savoyard life in Ancien Régime France, the discussion instead considers this community and its visual legacies as indicative of art historical problems concerning regional identity as it interacts with notions of geographical and cultural centrality. Rather than pursuing wide narratives of Parisian popular culture, the interpretation of visual material will be intertwined with microhistories of interaction and travel which allow for a greater consideration of Savoyards not just as migrants, but also as a distinct yet mutable cultural presence which existed in and contributed to Parisian life in the eighteenth century. A consideration of the savoyard diaspora and its documentary and visual traces opens up larger questions about the ethics of art historical research regarding migration, and the visibility of certain groups both historically and in the present.[4] In the absence of immobile institutions for the preservation of culture, transient and migrant communities still leave many kinds of visual trace, which must be understood and considered without recourse to the stereotypes and imagery of the host community alone.
PARISIAN TROPES AND THE CRIS DE PARIS
In a 1968 article titled Savoyards in Eighteenth-Century Art, the curator and art historian Edgar Munhall offered a consideration of the impact that Alpine people had on the visual culture of Paris. Discussing the longue durée of savoyard migration, Munhall traced the seasonal departure of Savoyards from their mountain valleys as a pre-eighteenth-century phenomenon, observable in archival records as far back as the fourteenth century.[5] However, despite the depth of analysis given to historical accounts, Munhall goes on to consider imagery of Savoyards – especially depictions set in Paris’ streets – as objective documents of Alpine life in the capital, uncomplicated by visual discourse or social conditions concerning Savoyards’ encounter(s) with Parisians. Munhall’s article recognises that the story of Alpine people and their depictions is akin to that of other historical and contemporary migrant worker.[6] However, little attempt is made to understand the Savoyard presence in eighteenth century Paris throughthe the analysis of any material not produced by and for Parisians, who frequently cast Savoyards as social outsiders. Instead, Munhall characterises the entire Savoyard population of Paris as a group which ‘constituted a real social problem’.[7] This characterisation perpetuates an eighteenth-century stereotype of Alpine people in Paris as uniformly poor and marginalised, and fails to recognise that this perception may be the product of visual and historical biases of visibility and representation. This section of the discussion wishes to address the historiographic and visual traces of Paris’ Savoyard diaspora, attempting to delineate the inconsistencies between historical and art historical understandings of this group regarding their professions and their existence in Paris’ urban environment.
Eighteenth-century Parisian society was not visited solely by Savoyard migrants, but included a vast number of seasonal workers from across France and its neighbouring states, who each year made their way to the city in search of work. Over time, mobile groups from different areas of the kingdom acquired reputations within certain specific spheres of employment. Migrants from the Limousin region of South-Central France worked as stonemasons in the Place de Grève during the dry summer months, when Paris’ construction sites were busy.[8] Alongside seasonal work, some regional incomers were not constrained by factors such as climate, and came to the capital all year round. These included women from Burgundy, who travelled to Paris to find employment as wetnurses as it was believed that the healthy rustic lifestyle back in their region of origin better aided the nourishment of the city’s babies.[9] The figure of the Savoyard stands out within the litany of regional migrants as being at once one of the most represented in the capital’s visual culture, yet also the hardest to define in terms of a trade or a clear relationship to the economy and society of early modern Paris. In the first volume of his 1985 work The Identity of France, the French historian Fernand Braudel provides an exhaustive list of the city’s regional migrant trades. By contrast to the neat joining of regional identity and profession characterising Limousins and Burgundians, Paris’s Savoyard community appear to have been noticeable in a neat system adjoining regional people to certain trades.[10] Braudel writes that migrants from Savoie were employed as ‘porters, removal men, ostlers, chimney sweeps and domestic servants.’[11] Far from aligning the Savoyards with one profession, the paucity of documents detailing their lives in Paris is filled by Braudel with a multitude of potential professions. Another consideration of the historian’s recorded plurality of savoyard professions suggests the lack of a defined social and economic niche for savoyard migrants like those created by other regional visitors over generations. Furthermore, the professions mentioned by Braudel do not correspond to Parisian representations of Savoyards produced in the eighteenth century.
Savoyards appear as one of the only identifiably regional figures to be reproduced consistently in popular imagery of the cris de Paris: prints, sketches, and occasionally paintings which detailed the city’s various street sellers and hawkers engaged in the selling of their wares. Corresponding to the perception of their uncertain professional status at the periphery of Parisian society, Savoyards are most often shown performing entertainments for the infrequent income of specie, rather than engaged in true employment. As Edgar Munhall points out in his 1968 article, the ludic figure of the Savoyard first appeared in Parisian imagery of the cris de Paris in prints produced in 1719 by Nicolas Guérard le fils.[12] In the thirteenth plate of Guérard’s Diverses petites figures des cris de Paris (1719, Fig. 1), three figures stand in the right-hand foreground: two children and one adult. One of the boys stoops down to look into the boîte à curiosité (peep-show box) operated by the Savoyard child wearing a long coat and a battered tricorn hat: the stereotypical outfit of male Alpine migrants. Standing behind the boy operating the box is his father, dressed similarly, who blows a trumpet to attract customers and to accompany his son’s cry of ‘plus de curiosité, que de rareté.’[13] When compared to Savoyards in cris de Paris images produced much later in the eighteenth century, it is possible to see how unchanging the city’s iconography of Alpine migrants was across the period as a whole. An ink on paper sketch of cris, produced in 1779 by the painter Claude-Louis Desrais and now in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows Alpine migrants within a larger gridded view of Parisian hawkers. In the lower right-hand three squares (Fig. 2) we can see the Savoyard figures next to one another: a male peepshow box operator, a woman playing a traditional Savoyard vielle (called a hurdy-gurdy in the anglophone world), and finally a man dancing with a trained marmot. This iconography demonstrates the stereotypical range of professions which Savoyards have been characterised by in art historical discussions such as that of Edgar Munhall, who stated as fact that the ‘equipment of the wandering Savoyards’ was ‘a hurdy-gurdy, a boîte à curiosité…[and] a marmot’.[14]
While Paris may have experienced a large and consistent seasonal influx of migrants from across the regions of the Bourbon kingdom and beyond, these groups did not all impact the city’s popular imagery in the same pervasive fashion as those from Savoie. A visual culture of the Limousin stonemasons only occurred in the nineteenth century; as they became increasingly associated with major civic building projects such as the restoration of Notre Dame which began in the 1840s.[15] Many other groups of regional migrants, such as the wetnurses of Burgundy, never found themselves the subject of popular imagery of any kind, and their impression on the urban life of Paris exists primarily in written, documentary evidence. Far from representing integration between the capital and regional France, Savoyard migrants appear to have stood out as rural figures dislocated from their new-found urban surroundings. Guérard and Desrais’ cris de Paris scenes, produced over half a century apart from one another, present a largely unchanging Parisian iconography of Savoyards as entertainers accompanied by decontextualised elements of their native mountain valleys, such as the vielle and the dancing marmot, and operating amusements in the French capital’s streets. The question posed by these scenes of Savoyards as entertainers is one of stereotype and its relationship to an observed reality. How much can cris images be taken to represent savoyard migrant life in the French capital, and to what extent do their depictions rest on visual tropes rather than historical reality? If there is truth to the professions depicted in these three individual scenes of the cris, what kind of an experience of Alpine migrants does this evidence? What further considerations do Guérard and Desrais’ images pose regarding the social make-up of the migrant diaspora itself, and the visibility of its internal strata to Parisian viewers? In the face of a supposed paucity of historical documentary evidence of Savoyards’ lives in eighteenth century Paris, visual sources such as scenes of the cris de Paris have often been utilised as snapshots representing the totality of Alpine migrant experience. Retelling the story of savoyard migration from its geographical source can allow for a reconsideration of the cultural and social dynamics of savoyard imagery and its relation to the diaspora’s range of historical experience.
THE ALPINE SPHERE
In the first half of the eighteenth century, most Parisians considered the Alps to be a vast and largely unexplored wilderness. Aside from a handful of ambassadors,[16] some soldiers,[17] and a few mostly politically-motivated travellers,[18] the mountains characterised the impenetrability of the Savoie region, which passed into French possession initially in 1690, and again from 1703-13.[19] After this time, the Bourbon crown would exercise a constant economic and military presence in the western Alps, but true annexation of Savoie by France would come much later in 1860.[20] The Alps can in one sense be understood to have been a trans-national fact of European geography in the pre-modern period, with a certain amount of shared culture that superseded the individual national divides demarcated by the ever-changing borders that snaked across the mountain chain. However, the landscape also contrived to produce differences within the cultural identities of those living in the mountains, as the Alpine mountain passes were frozen for half of each year, making travel impossible. The subsequent isolation entailed by the cold months led to close-knit communities who differed subtly in language and customs, as well as material and visual cultures. These regions included the individual Swiss cantons, the French Alpine possessions of Dauphiné and Provence,[21] and the Duchy of Savoy (later the Kingdom of Sicily, and later still the Kingdom of Sardinia) to which Savoie intermittently belonged between periods of French annexation.[22] To subdivide further, the region of Savoie, from which the Savoyard migrants of Paris originated, was internally demarcated by the cultural differences of its various valleys such as le Vallée des Villards, Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne et Hermillon, Valloires, Le Vallée des Arves, La Tarentaise, and La Vallée de Thônes.[23] Each had their own specific material culture, but all were united through a shared regional costume and a fondness for decorating their small mountain churches in the dense and ornate Sabaudian baroque style.[24]
One cultural distinction to make in the case of Savoyards is with the francophone Swiss who, while only being geographically separated by a few Alpine lakes, and who also shared a certain amount of history and culture, underwent a wholly separate history of migration and labour, being most famous in the premodern period as itinerant mercenaries.[25] Swiss migrants abroad, like their Savoyard counterparts in Paris, had their own story of visual stereotyping based on set types of professions. One example of this can be found in an ink on silk illustration from the Huang Qing Zhigong Tu. This manuscript was produced in Beijing around 1769 for the Qianlong emperor and depicts different European nationalities with whom the Qing Dynasty traded or interacted with on other commercial levels.[26] Around half of the figures in the manuscript are depicted in regional costumes, such as the Russian, Polish and Hungarian figures. Other illustrations depicting the French, Swedish, and Portuguese merchants style their subjects as contemporary Europeans, clad in wigs, topcoats, tights, swords, and tricorns. Differing from both kinds of representation, the Helvetian (Fig. 3) is shown neither in traditional dress, nor in the raiment of a contemporary European merchant. Instead, the stout figure of the Swiss man is clothed in the guise of his profession as a mercenary, dressed in the traditional costume of a yellow tabard and ruff, with a feathered cap and a halberd.[27] As with the visual imagery of Savoyards in Paris, the mode of representation for this migrant Swiss figure has been defined by profession, highlighted through the visual reference to specific costume and attributes. The yellow costume with a halberd is in some ways akin to the boîte à curiosité, long coats, and battered hats present in Guérard and Desrais’ cris de Paris scenes. The costume of the Swiss mercenary, however, is an observable historical entity: visible still in the clothing of the Swiss guard in Vatican City. However, while the Savoyards of Paris were depicted like the Swiss man in Beijing through a visual appeal to the imagery of professions, their occupations are more elusive in the historical records.
To better understand the identity of Savoyard migrants in relation Parisian visual culture, it is imperative to consider how these people chose to present themselves, and the strategies of assimilation and difference which this act may suggest.
THE SAVOYARD DIASPORA ON THE RHINE AND THE RHÔNE
Outside of Paris, in other cities and towns in France and the surrounding regions of the Alps and the Rhineland, it is interesting to note that Savoyards were not always of the lower classes, and instead often found economic and social success in their new homes. These wealthy and settled Savoyards had come to their host communities originally as economic migrants, but often stayed for good, eschewing the patterns of seasonal journeying that characterise the movements of Paris’ itinerant Alpine residents. Migrant Savoyards occasionally signified their newly-found status through portraiture: a visual medium which allows for a consideration of savoyard imagery from the perspective of the migrants themselves, and away from the visual culture of Paris. In a portrait from 1688, an Alpine man originally named François Martin had himself depicted as a wealthy member of his community in the town of Staufen, situated in the German Rhineland region of Baden-Würtenburg (Fig. 4).[28] In the painting, Martin carries a sword and wears the clothing of an affluent western European in the late seventeenth century: a lace jabot, a long coat, and red heeled shoes. The arquebus slung over his shoulder suggests a role in the town watch or a similar local military company.[29] Furthering this assumption, Martin wears a round, black, brimmed hat which is similar to those found in the traditional costume of many German-speaking Rhinish areas such as Alsace, and which in the seventeenth century were reserved for militia men.[30] The sitter’s costume presents a sharp departure from the uniform of the Savoyard entertainers found in cris de Paris imagery. Instead of a scruffy coat and battered tricorn, François Martin wears an outfit which signifies affluence and new-found social status in the town to which he has emigrated. The clothing worn by Martin may have been recognisable as that of a city guard officer by the population of Staufen and other nearby areas, but his new Rhinish identity is also signalled in a more overt manner beyond the politics of dress. Painted next to the standing figure is a Germanicised version of his name: Frantz Martin, rendered in thick black letters in Gothic font, and squeezed into the space formed between the barrel of Martin’s rifle and the top of his shoulder.
While Paris may have been one great pole of attraction for migrant Savoyards, the portrait of Frantz/François Martin offers evidence to suggest a different kind of economic European geography prior to the Alpine region’s forced contact with, and occasional joining to the Bourbon kingdom. The portrait was painted during the first year of the Nine Years’ War, which saw France engaged in fighting a coalition of England, Portugal, the Duchy of Savoy, Sweden, Spain, and Scotland, who all came to the aid of the Holy Roman Empire.[31] The war was fought largely along the Rhine, and towns like Staufen were not exempt. On two occasions during the course of the conflict, Parisian newspapers reported that the maréchal de Lorge and the duc de Vendôme stationed their troops in the town in the Octobers of 1690 and 1692 respectively.[32] Within this immediate historical and political context, the portrait of François Martin not only allows for a consideration of Savoyard migrant identity outside of French influence, but it arguably sets up the identity of the sitter in opposition to this, depicting the sitter as a Rhinish bourgeois militia officer. With the beginning of a new war fought along the Rhine between France and the protestant states of Europe, Martin’s portrait and its assertion of his newly germanicised name in Gothic font proudly displays the former migrant’s sense of cultural and civic affiliation.
However, despite its proliferation of Rhinish iconographies, both textual and sumptuary, the portrait also retains a reference to Martin’s origins in the valleys of Savoie. In the lower-right corner of the canvas, beneath the painting’s date which is also executed in thick black lettering, is a red shield with a heart-shaped heraldic device topped by a stylised number four. The linear symbol atop a heart-shape is a marque au chiffre, and can be found on the armorial device of the Savoyard town of Mégevette, just East of Geneva, and North of both Chamonix and Annécy. The sigil is originally from the Rhineland,[33] but was adopted by Savoyard migrants as a symbol of migrant identity in their new-found communities.[34] Martin includes his own initials FM into the space in the centre of the heart shape, furthering the association of his name with the marque and its meanings. Church records show that Martin was living in Mégevette with his wife Claudine Champtronna when their daughter Claudi was baptised on the 10th of July 1668.[35] The birth of a daughter may have been the reason why the family decided to emigrate in search of work, and they moved from the Alps to Staufen some time between 1668, when Claudi was baptised and 1688, when the portrait was executed.[36] The choice of Staufen may have been inspired by the well-worn path between the towns of northern Savoie and the Rhineland. Mégevette is situated just north of the towns such as Magland and Saint-Nicolas-de-Véroce, places which by the later seventeenth century had established trading connections with Protestant Germanic towns on the Rhine in both Alsace and the Holy Roman Empire.[37] These towns’ links to Catholic France emerged in the eighteenth century, following Savoie’s annexations in the 1690s and early 1700s.[38] In addition to the path of migration from Savoie to the Rhine, this geographical connection may not have simply operated one-way, and this possibility is hinted at in the baptism records of Mégevette. Living in the town at the same time as the Martin family and baptising his son Claude on the 18th of October 1668 was a man called François Allemand.[39] It is not recorded where Allemand originated from, but his name suggests, perhaps, the gallicisation of a German origin, just as Frantz Martin became the preferred appellation of a Savoyard migrant-turned Rhinish bourgeois.
The choice of a place to migrate to in search of work did not, however, have to mean either Paris or the states outside of France, as in the case of Martin who chose the latter. The economic and geographical choices made by the Savoyard silk designer Philippe de Lasalle in the eighteenth century suggest a number of considerations concerning migration which complicate Paris’ supposed supremacy in a wider and more complex story of Alpine people’s movement across France. Referred to in his own time as ‘the Raphael of silk’,[40] Lasalle had, by the middle of the 1750s, acquired a reputation as a producer of the finest silk brocades in Lyon, whose creations were woven with naturalistic imagery and portraits of prominent sitters including king Louis XV of France.[41] Initially, however, Lasalle was born in 1732 in the Savoyard village of Seyssel, situated to the South of Geneva and to the West of Annécy. As a young child he was orphaned, a fact that may have prompted the necessity for travel outside of the Alpine valleys at a much younger age than Martin, who had started a family before relocating to Staufen. Lasalle found an apprenticeship in the workshop of Pierre Sarabat in Lyon,[42] before moving briefly to Paris to undertake further training in the studios of Jean-Jacques Bachelier and François Boucher. Rather than stay in Paris, however, Lasalle returned to Lyon to work first for and then with Jacques-Charles Dutillieu: an established Lyonnaise designer of silks and brocades. Throughout the 1750s Lasalle developed his business, expanding his network of buyers to the German and Italian States across the Rhine and the Alps,[43] perhaps evidencing the lasting geographical and economic connections of the Savoyard diaspora.
Unlike François Martin, who travelled with his family far away from their home town of Mégevette to seek economic prosperity, Lasalle travelled comparatively little to make the trip from Seyssel to Lyon. His short period of artistic training in Paris acting was both his geographically furthest and temporally shortest journey. Despite being the capital of the francophone world, Paris was not the obvious place of migration for Lasalle when leaving Seyssel in search of economic opportunity in the silk industry, whose primary centres such as Lyon were situated much closer. By the end of the 1730s Turin in the northern Alpine edge of the Kingdom of Sardinia had become a major centre of silk production.[44] From the 1690s onwards, duke Victor-Amadeus II had given money for the foundation of silk workshops in the city and its surrounding towns of Pinerolo, Racconigi, Venaria-Reale, and Cuneo.[45] Closer still to Seyssel, Annécy also had a long-standing silk industry.[46] Why Lasalle chose Lyon and not Turin is uncertain. It is possible, perhaps, that the shared French language between Savoyards and the Lyonnaise made Lyon preferable to the capital of Savoy. Certainly, the notion of a shared French language was a regularly cited discourse concerning cultural affiliation to France in the Western areas of the Duchy of Savoy, and occurred up in occasions such Louis XIV’s propaganda campaigns of the 1690s and early 1700s,[47] as well as savoyard local histories such as Jean-Baptiste de Tillier’s book Historique de Val’ d’Aoste, written between 1737-40.[48] However, there is no clear evidence to suggest whether language may have been the deciding factor in Lasalle’s choice of the Francophone over the Italophone sphere of silk industry, and the previous case of Franz Martin suggests that language was less of a barrier to migration than we might believe, and that movement often followed certain established historical pathways of trade and exchange. What is important to note is that Philippe de Lasalle was born in the geographical range of a transalpine silk industry, and his choice of Lyon as a site of migration illustrates how Paris was not the only pole of attraction for people leaving Savoie to find work. Despite being the largest city in France, other places offered a multitude of different economic and social possibilities, often in specialised industries not represented in the French capital.
The stories of Martin and Lasalle are just two narratives within a larger view of Savoyard migration outside of Paris, yet they allow for a consideration of the French capital as one point in a constellation of areas with established connections and industries across the network of the Alpine diaspora. Far from representing the sole site of Savoyard migratory activity, Paris can instead be considered as a cultural monad with its own particular visual history pertaining to Alpine people that is at once singular and defined by the place of Savoyard migrants observable in the life of the city.
CULTURAL VISIBILITY IN PARIS – ASSIMILATION AND PRESERVATION
While the biographies of Martin and Lasalle evidence the economic prosperity found by certain migrant Savoyards, not all members of the diaspora found similar success. By the first third of the 18th century, many cities in France and Savoy had banned begging, and classed street entertainment within this bracket. Metz and Turin both prohibited street performers and beggars in 1676 and 1723 respectively, enforcing prison sentences for anyone caught making money in the cities’ streets through other means than the vending of wares.[49] It is possible to suppose, then, that the Parisian stereotype of the Alpine migrant as a street entertainer was in some way predicated poorer Savoyards need to migrate to the city to avoid begging laws elsewhere. Certainly, Paris had some association with Savoyards being less socially mobile members of the city’s population. An example from this social stratum is Jean Riffault, known even in the official documentation concerning his arrest and trial as la Marmotte, who was executed in 1722 for a number of robberies and violent crimes in Central Paris.[50] Marmotte was a pejorative slang term used to describe Savoyards in Paris, and pertains to the dancing marmots brought from the Alps to the city like the one dancing on a leash in Desrais’ 1779 sketch. By printing this nickname alongside Riffault’s given name, the authorities of Paris allowed for a consideration of the criminal as an Alpine migrant.[51] The problem raised by Riffault is one of documentary evidence where regional origins are not recorded apart from in rare cases such as his arrest document, which nevertheless communicates this information through coded slang. The Savoyards were a francophone diaspora living in the capital of the French-speaking world. Their documentary existence in Paris can only reveal a partial aspect of their historical presence, as it is only when references, whether official or masked in argot, are insinuated about their origins in the Alpine valleys that it is possible to distinguish Savoyards from the rest of Parisian society. The arrest report of Riffault La Marmotte poses wider questions regarding documentary evidence and the way in which archival evidence can help to reconstruct only the visible aspects of a diaspora. Otherness is frequently noticeable, overtly or not, only when the possibility of cultural assimilation has not yet erased the recognisable signifiers of difference.
Aside from the unlawful activities of certain Savoyards in the French capital, an engraving produced in 1729 at the Chez Chartier printing house, located on Paris’ Rue St Jacques, allows for a consideration of how a larger body of non-criminal Alpine people may have appeared as integrated members of Paris’ population. Far from the activities of Jean Riffault, it is possible through this print to faintly identify a possible Savoyard existence that was not characterised by economic struggle and social liminality. Titled Le Véritable Portrait de grand empirique Gros Thomas (1729, Fig. 5), the engraving shows the huge frame of its titular figure, who was one of Paris’ most famous tooth-pullers in the eighteenth century. Thomas is dressed opulently in a brocaded coat and tricorn hat with either fur or feather trimming, both items of clothing decorated with a rosette. The street dentist stands under a mobile awning, and the shop sign of a large crowned tooth can be seen to the left of the scene. The dentist’s hulking body is emphasised through a contrast with the slight and diminutive figure of one of his Savoyard assistants, posed standing in the doorway of the mobile hut that acted as their site of business parked on the Pont Neuf by its equestrian statue of Henri IV.[52] Dressed in breeches, a wig, and a tricorn hat, the unnamed Alpine man appears in the manner of his dress as simply another contemporary Parisian, and is bereft of any kind of stereotypical characteristics such as tatty brown clothing, a large battered hat with a wide brim, or a boîte à curiosité. The ordinary nature of this Savoyard figure assisting Thomas tantalisingly asks the question of how many other migrant Alpine men in employment used their money to assimilate in Paris, obscuring themselves from the visual record in the process through an erasure of the signifiers of regional otherness. If the savoyard figures in Guérard and Desrais’ cris de Paris scenes evoked social liminality and observable otherness based on a familiar host of Alpine iconographies such as the vielle and the marmot, the Chez Chartier print appears to reflect the opposite. Here, an employed man of the Alpine diaspora appears just as any other Parisian, working in a non-stereotypical profession, and dressed in an everyday and contemporary fashion. The engraving implicitly suggests that employment – as distinct from performing for in the street money – had the potential to make Paris’ Savoyard population into an unseen and perhaps accepted part of the city’s society through economic participation and the erasure of regional otherness.
If the Chez Chartier engraving alludes to stories of assimilation, Savoyard women in Paris potentially evidence another side of Alpine culture in the capital, namely the preservation of their culture. In a 1737 etching by Edmé Bouchardon from the first of the twelve cahiers of the artist’s cris de Paris series, titled Études prises dans le bas peuple ou les cris de Paris,[53] Savoyards are represented by the figure of a woman cradling her baby in a cot on her lap (Fig. 6). The woman does not engage in a trade in the manner of other figures in the volume, such as the seller of brooms or the purveyor of rabbit skins. Instead, she communicates savoyard identity through reference to the region-specific iconography of her clothing, as well as the cradle in which she rocks her baby. Carved wooden cribs were a characteristic part of Early Modern Savoyard material culture, and an example of this kind of object can be seen in the collection of The Science Museum in London (c.1700-1750, Fig. 7). Like the cradle in Bouchardon’s print, the Science Museum’s cot has a similar shape, and is equipped with handles on the corners to aid the rocking of the baby inside. Alongside this detail of the Alpine woman’s cradle, Bouchardon’s Savoyarde wears a white linen headscarf which, later in the eighteenth century, would come to be called a marmotte by Parisians, reappropriating the earlier derogatory slang term to encompass the articulation of all observable aspects of Savoyard culture. The prevalence of the headscarf in Savoie’s regional costume can be dated back to the seventeenth century, and appears not only as a detail in representations made by Parisian artists, but also in endogenous self-representations, such as a beehive from the Vallée de Thônes, now in the collection of the Musée des Patrimoines François et Lucien Cochat. Dating from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century (Fig. 8),[54] the hive is carved from a single round tree trunk and features a bas-relief carving of a woman from the Thônes valley. With her hands placed on the hips of her wide-bustled skirt, the figure’s head is topped with an arcing form that suggests the same type of head covering depicted by Bouchardon. Like the cot, the headscarf may seem like an incidental detail on the part of the artist, but its place in the print illustrates another aspect of traditional Savoyard cultural presentation seemingly present in the streets of the French capital. The combination of this clothing alongside the carved wooden cradle in Bouchardon’s depiction of the Savoyarde suggests that Alpine women in Paris may have retained core elements of their mountain culture, contrasting the disappearance of regional difference potentially practised by Savoie’s employed men.
The 1729 engraving of Le Grand Thomas and his assistant allows for a consideration of Savoyard men in Paris defined not in terms of observable otherness on the fringes of Paris’ economy, but through assimilation and labour. By contrast, Alpine women appear to have potentially preserved key and noticeable features of savoyard culture intact following their move to the French capital. The demands of childcare, and the gendered barriers barring them from certain professions denied Savoie’s migrant women the opportunity to assimilate in the manner that the dentist’s assistant had done, yet they continued to live in the capital as they travelled with their husbands and children. Both the cradle and the headscarf in Bouchardon’s print allow a tantalising glimpse into the role of Savoyarde women as potential preservers of their cultural heritage living within Parisian society. So far, this discussion has concerned itself with the ability of Savoyard men to adapt to new communities and adopt the mores peculiar to new cultures. Representations of employed, even socially successful Savoyards such as the portrait of François Martin and the printed detail of the dental assistant, allow for a wider consideration of cultural mutability and adaptability within the moneyed and employed ranks of the Savoyard migrant community of eighteenth-century Paris and elsewhere. It appears that Jean Riffault’s othering nickname La Marmotte accompanied his antisocial behaviour and inability to live peaceably within the French capital, while relative levels of prosperity and employment are reflected rather as lacunae in the historical record. The case of Savoie’s migrant women provides an alternative term to the idea of cultural assimilation, namely cultural preservation. In the incidental details from Bouchardon’s print, it is possible to detect traces of identifiably Alpine culture visible within the street life of the French capital. The cot and headscarf hint at potential households of Savoyard culture existing in the streets of Paris. What food might have been cooked, what songs sung, and what stories told, we cannot know, however these visual details prompt a reconsideration of cultural difference not as a lack of integration, but as a potential mode of preservation of a community’s origins within a new place. While employment may have rendered many Savoyard men effectively invisible, Savoyard women can potentially be considered as having outwardly signified their regional otherness during their seasonal stays in the city. The case of Savoie’s migrant women suggests that Paris was not simply a centralised capital city representing a homogenised version of French identity, but instead a hub of overlapping and commingling regional differences which signalled themselves to varying degrees of visibility.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it is possible to understand that a distance exists between the stereotypical image of Alpine people and their professions in Paris, and the lives that these migrants may have led as seasonal visitors to the French capital over the course of the eighteenth century. Characterised as country people from a still largely unexplored region of Europe, Savoyards were widely depicted as engaging in ludic professions which existed alongside but not within the activities of the Parisian economy. Through a select number of examples, it is possible to understand that Savoyard identity did not always conform to the image of it perpetuated in cris de Paris scenes. Instead, the Savoyard diaspora in Paris appear to have used the same complex tactics of cultural preservation and, conversely, assimilation which characterised the settled lives of Alpine people elsewhere. The case of the Savoyards and their contrasting depictions between caricature and reality prompts wider questions not only about how the representatives of different regions and cultures were represented and othered historically, but how contemporary scholarship might go about reconstructing marginalised historical experience without reproducing stereotypes. Is otherness only visible when it has made no attempt to assimilate, and how can notions of assimilation complicate efforts to trace what appears to be a larger and much more invisible body of cultural and historical experience?
The portrait of François Martin demonstrates the desire among wealthy Savoyard migrants to produce visual representations of themselves as successful and settled members of their new-found communities, contrasting the stereotypes found in images of the cris de Paris. François/Frantz Martin chose to Germanicise his name in Gothic font and to overtly dress in the manner of a wealthy bourgeois captain of the city guard of Staufen. Similarly, while not commissioned by or created for a Savoyard migrant, the incidental detail of La Grand Thomas’ assistant in the Chez Chartier engraving helps to show how the same visual strategies of clothing and deportment displayed by Martin are noticeable, however fleetingly, within the French capital itself. Moving from the invisible to the visible, Jean Riffault’s criminal nickname evidences his Alpine origins, and asks again how many other figures found in the documents and records of eighteenth-century Paris may also have been born in Savoie, but did not accompany their names with an identifiably Alpine sobriquet. The consideration of Savoyard women in Paris contrasts yet compliments the overall picture of Alpine assimilation noticeable in the representations of Martin and the dental assistant. Through Bouchardon’s print, it is possible to consider ways in which Savoie’s women kept some elements of Savoyard culture alive in their Parisian homes. However, a lack of documentary evidence and a traditional focus on male Savoyard experience has undermined Savoyard women’s contribution to the cultural landscape of Alpine migrants in Paris.
Eighteenth century Paris’ Savoyard population teeters on the edge of historical obscurity. Through considering the stories and visual evidence of Frantz Martin, Jean Riffault, Philippe de Lasalle, and the unnamed Alpine workers and mothers that have been examined here, it is possible to consider the existence of a previously unexplored sphere of experience and self-presentation that has gone largely undiscussed. By understanding what it is culturally that has been lost, altered, elided, or even kept unchanged, it is possible to discuss in greater depth the notions of assimilation and preservation which characterise migrant experience throughout history such as that of the Parisian Savoyard diaspora. Far from relying on the visible aspects of a story clouded by documentary lacunae, considering assimilation and its lack of visibility is a key issue raised by Paris’ eighteenth-century Savoyards. Loss and invisibility, as well as self-conscious acts of cultural stewardship, are notions which should inform the study of any displaced or mobile historical group, and the visual and historical evidence that they leave behind as they make new lives in new surroundings.
Citations
[1] As will be discussed, Savoyards’ place in the society of eighteenth century Prais, and othering depictions of the members of this diaspora feature in the written work of the historian Fernand Braudel, as well as a 1968 article by the curator and art historian Edgar Munhall. -Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, Volume One: History and Environment, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana Press, 1989). -Edgar Munhall, “Savoyards in Eighteenth-Century Art”, Apollo 78 (1968), 86-94.
[2] Edgar Munhall characterises the Savoyard diaspora in Paris as an entirely separate entity to the social goings-on of the city around it. He writes that: ‘in Paris they [Savoyards] tended to live in extreme poverty in their own communities, where, it is recorded, the elders supervised the work of the young Savoyards, even organizing communal courts to punish their malefactors.’ -Munhall, “Savoyards”, 89.
[3] The historian Maria Fusaro remarks that ‘’microhistory has proved itself particularly useful in analysing phenomena which lay outside the reach of the nation-state’. While Fusaro wrote this comment in reference to an analysis of historical approaches relating to analyses of the interconnected cultures of the Mediterranean, her words resonate with a study of the Alpine sphere, whose migrants’ lives often played out freely across the borders of early modern Europe. -Maria Fusaro, “After Braudel – A Reassessment of Mediterranean History between the Northern Invasion and the Caravane Maritime”, in Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean – Braudel’s Maritime Legacy, eds. Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood and Mohamed-Salah Omri (London: IB Taurus, 2020), 9.
[4] This article began life as a conference paper at the 2022 meeting of the American Society of Eighteenth Century Scholars in Baltimore as part of a panel concerning the visual history of migrants in the eighteenth century. I would like to extend my thanks to Thea Goldring and Marina Kliger for accepting me as a speaker, and to The Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England for funding my trip to America.
[5] Munhall, “Savoyards”, 86.
[6] ibid, 89.
[7] ibid, 86.
[8] Casey Harrison, “The Rise and Decline of a Revolutionary Space: Paris’ Place de Grève and the Stonemasons of Creuze, 1750-1900”, in Journal of Social History 34, no. 2 (2000): 403-436.
[9] ‘Nourrice Bourgogne’, Le Petit Parisien, 16 November, 1922, 5. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k605204q/f5.item.r=%22nourrice%20bourgogne%22.zoom -Harrison, “Revolutionary Space”, 187.
[10] Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, Volume One: History and Environment, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 69, 253-4.
[11] Corresponding to Braudel, Vincent Milliot in his book Les “Cris de Paris”, ou, Le peuple travesti also characterised Alpine migrants as having been chimney sweeps. This is also a profession which Munhall discusses in relation to young Savoyards, who would then grow up to take on, in the opinion stated in his article, the stereotypical work of street entertainment. -Vincent Milliot, Les “Cris de Paris”, ou, Le peuple travesti: les représentations des petits métiers parisiens (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 90. – Munhall, “Savoyards”, 88. -Braudel, Identity, 69, 186-8.
[12] Munhall, “Savoyards”, 90.
[13] For more information regarding the wider art historical context of cris de Paris imagery, consult: Katie Scott: “Edmé Bouchardon’s ‘Cris de Paris’ – Crying Food in Early Modern Paris”, Word & Image 29, no. 1 (2013), 59-91.
[14] One such team of peep-show box operators were Anne and Jean-Antoine Fodéré, from the Savoyard village of Bessans. However, as Chantal and Gilbert Maistre and Geogres Heitz acknowledge, the Fodéré couple operated in Italy, and the image of the Parisian peep-show operator is less traceable as a documented historical presence in Paris. -Maistre, Maistre, and Heitz, Colporteurs et marchands savoyards, 27.
[15] Stephen Murray, “Notre-Dame of Paris and the Anticipation of Gothic”, The Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (July 1998), 250.
[16] France maintained embassies in Switzerland, with diplomats residing in Soleure (Solothurn), and also in the Duchy of Savoy’s capital, Turin. -Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda Under Louis XIV – Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 50. -Lucy Norton, First Lady of Versailles – Marie Adelaïde of Savoy, Dauphine of France (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 9.
[17] -Braudel, Identity, 355. –The Alps in Swiss Painting, ed. Hans Hartman and Luc Boissonas (Chur: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Grisons, 1977), 34-5. -Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, Volume One: History and Identity, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 355.
[18] One such transalpine traveller was the comtesse de Verrue. Born in Paris, she had been married to the count of Verrua in 1689, and moved to Turin where she became the mistress of Victor Amadeus II. In 1700, however, she crossed back over the Alps to escape the savoyard court and returned to Paris seeking political refuge. -Geoffrey Symcox, Victor Amadeus II – Absolutism in the Savoyard State 1675-1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 74-6. -Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 36.
[19] Phil McCluskey, “Enemies of the Patrie? Savoyard Identity and the Dilemmas of War, 1690-1713”, in Performances of Peace, Utrecht 1713, eds. Renger E. de Bruin, Cornelis van der Haven, Lotte Jensen and David Onnekink (Amsterdam: BRILL, 2015), 55.
[20] Paul Guichonnet, “De la restauration à l’annexion (1814-1860)”, in Histoire de la Savoie, ed. Paul Guichonnet (Toulouse: Privat, Éditeur, 1973): 361-404.
[21] Jon Mathieu, History of The Alps, 1500-1900 – Environment, Development, and Society, trans. Matthew Vester (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2009), 49.
[22] Savoyard territories by the beginning of the eighteenth century included the principality of Piedmont (including Turin, from where the Duchy was ruled), the Duchy of Aosta, the Duchy of Savoie, the County of Nice, and the miniscule Principality of Oneglia. -Symcox, Victor Amadeus II, 40-53, 37-40, 26-36, 18-25, 25-6.
[23] Estella Canziani, Costumes, mœurs et légendes de Savoie (Chambéry: Imprimeries Réunies de Chambéry, 1978), 1-64.
[24] Dominique Peyre, “L’art baroque des vallées de Savoie” in Savoie Baroque, ed. Dominique Peyre (Montmélian: La Fontaine de Siloé, 1998), 115-154.
[25] Devanthéry, “The Swiss as European Savages?”, 275.
[26] For more on this topic, consult: Laura Hostetler, “The Qing Court and Peoples of Central and Inner Asia: Representations of Tributary Relationships from the Huang Qing Zhigong tu” in Managing Frontiers in Qing China, The Lifanyuan and Libu Revisited, eds. Dittmar Schorkowitz and Ning Chia (Amsterdam: BRILL, 2016): 184-223.
[27] Camilla Annerfeldt, “Costume as a Social Marker in the Works of Caravaggio”, in New Caravaggio, ed. Maj-Britt Andersson (Uppsala: The caravaggio-Seminar at Uppsala University, 2014), 61-2.
[28] Maistre, Maistre, and Heitz, Colporteurs et marchands savoyards, 9.
[29] ibid, 10.
[30] The brimmed black hat is one of the few items of Alsatian costume that was worn throughout the different areas of Alsace. It can be found in the costume of men from the villages of Schleithal, Kochersburg, Donon, Soultzeren, and Oltingue across the region’s four main areas of Haute-Alsace, Bas-Alsace, the Vosges, and Sundgau. Many Savoyard migrants moved to Alsace, and a community of Alpine traders existed in Neuf-Brisach in the first decade of the eighteenth century. -Marguerite Doerflinger, Coutumes traditionnels en Alsace (Colmar: Editions S.A.E.P, 1978) 20, 36, 64, 73, 80. – Maistre, Maistre, and Heitz, Colporteurs et marchands savoyards, 21.
[31] Ragnhild Hatton, Europe in the Age of Louis XIV (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969) 102-3.
[32] -Gazette, 1 January, 1690, 571. -Mercure de France, 1 September, 1692, 329-34.
[33] Maistre, Maistre, and Heitz, Colporteurs, 97.
[34] Other Alpine people such as Claude Hugard, who also settled in Staufen in the later seventeenth century, used the marque au chiffre freely on his wax seals, tombstones, and even a wine press at his estate. -ibid, 99-102.
[35] 5 MI 611 [List of Baptisms in Mégevette, Haute-Savoie Archives Départementales], 27.
[36] McCluskey, “Enemies of the Patrie?”, 55.
[37] Braudel, The Identity of France, 68-9.
[38] ibid, 69.
[39] 5 MI 611 [List of Baptisms in Mégevette, Haute-Savoie Archives Départementales], 27.
[40] Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization – How Textiles Made the World (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 92.
[41] ibid, 94-5.
[42] Daryl M. Hafer, “Philippe de Lasalle – From mise-en-carte to Industrial Design”, Winterthur Portfolio 12 (1977), 139.
[43] ibid, 144.
[44] Martha D. Pollak, Turin: 1564-1680 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 13.
[45] In addition to these, Victor-Amadeus II set up wool works at Susa, Ivrea, and Biello, as well as a cotton processing site at Chieri, and hemp factories in Carignano, Carmagnola, and Savigliano. -Geoffrey Symcox, Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the Savoyard State, 1675-1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 43-9.
[46] By the eighteenth century, however, Annécy’s silk industry had been somewhat eclipsed by the governmental attention and funds given to Turin for the stimulation of silk production there. ibid, 28-9.
[47] McCluskey, “Enemies of the Patrie?”, .
[48] Jean-Baptiste de Tillier, Historique de la vallée d’Aoste (Aosta: L. Mensio, 1887).
[49] Metz banned beggars in 1676, while Turin followed suit later during Victor Amadeus II’s Constituzione Sabaudiӕ (Savoyard constitution) of 1723. -John Dormandy, A History of Savoy – Gatekeeper of The Alps (Stroud: Fonthill, 2018), 109.
[50] Arrest de la cour de parlement portant condemnation de mort, préalablement appliqué à la question ordinaire & extraordinaire, pour avoir révélation de ses complices, contre Jean Riffault, dit la marmotte, convaincu de vol avec effraction & par les fenêtres pendant le jour; de vols d’épées de vols dans le Tuilleries & autres maisons royales; ancien complice de défunts Louis-Dominique Cartouche; Balagny, dit le capucin; Guy le Sage, & autres exécutez à mort. Du Juillet 1722 (Paris: Chez Louis-Denis Delatour and Pierre Simon, 1722), 1.
[51] It is, however, important to note that Riffault’s slang nickname is a term from Parisian street language: the language of the host community, and was published to be read by Parisians. -ibid.
[52] Colin Jones, “Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-Century Paris”, in Past & Present, no. 166 (February, 2000), 104.
[53] Scott, “Crying Food”, 65-6.
[54] Ellen Lapper and Aladin Borioli, Ruches, 2400 A.E.C. – 1852 E.C. / Hives 2400 B.C.E to 1852 C.E. (Switzerland: RVB Books, 2020), 232.