La Belle Свинячая Époque на РostСard'ах. Deuxième partie.
Побыренькому вспоминаем с чего оно всё началось:
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From Sacrifice to Slaughter
How do pigs become pork (and lard, bristles, blood sausage, etc.)? Belle Époque postcards put forth divergent versions of the fatal transformation. Some serve up a nostalgic vision of traditional, intimate sacrifice. Others, with a mix of excitement and dread, offer a largely anticipatory vision of slaughter through industrial production. Either way the pig dies, but the implications are very different.
Sacrificial practices reach far back and across cultures. Calves, goats, and lambs were common victims, but so too were pigs.[62] Deep in our past animals also provided real and symbolic stand ins for human sacrificial victims.[63] This connection becomes especially compelling with pigs, considered so close to humans in so many ways. Pigs are known to devour their own young, and sometimes ours as well, complicating matters further: should they eat one of us, what would it mean-and what would it make us-if we eat them in turn? This intertwining of mutual consumption flirts with human cannibalism and, understandably, troubled our ancestors.[64] There is ample folklore, legend, and historical documentation likening pig and human flesh, from stories about pork replacing human meat in certain ancient dishes, like Mexican pozole;[65] to the tale of St. Nicolas resuscitating three boys cut up and preserved in salt; to accounts of medieval brigands selling pieces of their human victims as pig parts.[66] Such varied and abundant evidence leads Pastoureau to conclude, “Eating pork means more or less being a cannibal.”[67]
The French peasant’s tue-cochon or pig killing was highly codified, with rules, for example, about spilling and collecting blood and transforming it into boudins or blood sausage. It was a time of renewal and reaffirmation, accompanied by extensive culinary rituals, linked to a web of other traditional practices, beliefs, and religious holidays, and in these ways reminiscent of earlier religious sacrifices, even traditional cannibalism. Far from gratuitous cruelty, cannibalism in traditional societies was built upon webs of meaningful relations and deep-rooted beliefs.[68] And the sacrificial tue-cochon resembles cannibalistic ritual, not just in the elaborate ceremonial surrounding both, but also in its broader psychological, philosophical, and spiritual underpinnings.[69] To be sure, there are economic and social dimensions to consider in the tue-cochon, which yielded sustenance for the whole year while affirming family and community ties. But on a deeper level, the whole complex of ritual, ceremony, belief, and custom accompanying the event also mitigated its violence and, as in traditional cannibalism, assuaged participants’ conscience about killing and consuming their counterpart-in this case a porcine “cousin.”[70]
Before the advent of modern industrial pork production, the traditional practices of the tue-cochon had endured, largely unchanged and a fixture of peasant life, for a millenium.[71] Despite endless local variations, the broad lines of the sacrifice were consistent: immobilizing the pig, slitting its throat, collecting its blood, removing its bristles, cutting it open and apart, preparing all sorts of dishes and charcuterie from the carcass, sharing some of this in a carnivorous feast called la Saint-Cochon, and consuming the rest of the preserved meat and lard more sparingly throughout the year. Kinship and community ties determined who could participate, and in what capacity, during the event and ensuing feast. Tasks split along gender lines, with men responsible for killing and butchering, and women for preparing the meat. Blood was a central motif, and the subject of multiple proscriptions, notably involving women.[72] Those in their menstrual period were prohibited from participating. Stirring the blood collected from the pig’s throat-so premature coagulation wouldn’t ruin the boudins-was such a critical operation that it could only be entrusted to women safely into menopause. Scheduling the tue-cochon was tricky as well. It could not take place on religious holidays, nor on the Sabbath day of rest, nor on Friday because eating flesh from warm-blooded animals on the day of Jesus’s sacrifice was prohibited.[73] In addition, it could only happen when the local saigneur was available. Responsible for killing the pig, and especially for administering the fatal blow, the saigneur was a deeply respected member of the community, the central figure of this crucial event in the peasant calendar.
In France as in much of Europe, pigs were slaughtered between December and February, with cold weather providing better conditions for keeping fresh meat, some to be consumed soon, but the rest preserved through smoking and salting, to last through the seasons. The tue-cochon was a high point in the year for the family, on the farm, and in the village. Often timed to just precede Christmas or carnival, it provided meat for those occasions. Like a holiday in itself, the feast of la Saint-Cochon was a carnivalesque event with a name patterned on religious saints’ days. The consumption of the remaining pork products through the year marked other key moments in the liturgical calendar, like the eating of a ham on Christmas Eve. And on the morning of the tue-cochon, to mark the completion of the annual cycle, the last meat from the previous year would be served for breakfast. In some regions this was a fat sausage called a Jésus, the name pointing to the underlying religious dimension in this process of renewal through sacrifice.[74]
As such practices-and the reassurance they provided-were beginning to fade into the past, Belle Époque pig postcards would record, commemorate, and celebrate them. Many focus in particular on the time-honored ceremonial of the tue-cochon. Some cards, including humorous ones, get at the gravity of the creature’s sacrifice by likening it to human execution, invoking the title of Victor Hugo’s novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man or, in a carnivalesque turn (fig. 24), showing a pig sacrificing a man (the title reads, The World Upside-down).[75]
Fig. 24, Anonymous, Le Monde Renversé (The World Upside-down), ca. 1900. Trade card. Author’s collection.And the tue-cochon is so much a part of daily life that it may figure in the card’s handwritten inscription, instead of in its published text or image. One such card (fig. 25), sent in 1905, offers a comical image of four particularly round pigs bounding across a meadow as the sun rises, with four-leaf clover motifs in both upper corners-a sweet, banal, happy image, like countless pig-themed good luck cards.
Fig. 25, Anonymous, Animaux de la Ferme (Farm Animals), 1905. Postcard. Author’s collection.But in a note written across the card’s face, the sender remarks, “This is appropriate for the occasion, we killed him yesterday, at ‘Las Serres.’ Today the salt pork is being prepared and will be ready in September.”[76] The sender writes in correct, standard French, with elevated diction for this humble context. It is not what one would expect from a farmer, particularly at this time, and, apparently the card circulated within a family of well-to-do wine and armagnac merchants. They lived in the town of Auch, in the Gers department, but had a nearby farm (called “Las Serres”), and the card was sent by one relative to another living in the city of Orléans, in the Loire Valley.[77] Tellingly, even among the members of this urban, bourgeois family, there is no hesitation, squeamishness, or avoidance in talking about the fate of this pig (“we killed him”), and the use of the direct object pronoun “him” without any explicit antecedent shows that both parties to the communication knew the animal. Despite the modern postcard medium used to deliver the message, this all remains within the traditional realm of food produced locally, raised with care, and slaughtered and consumed with respect, dignity, and gratitude, within a tight circle of family, friends, and neighbors. Clearly, news of the pig’s sacrifice was considered important, worthy of sharing with those in that circle who couldn’t be present for the occasion.
The tue-cochon was a communal event, and in one characteristic card a group of Breton peasants (presumably family members, probably also neighbors) gather round to participate and watch, with great solemnity and sense of purpose (fig. 26).
Fig. 26, Anonymous, La vie aux champs - Un sacrifice (Life in the Countryside - A Sacrifice), Série C - Héliotypie Dugas et Cie, Nantes, 1918. Postcard. Author’s collection.In the middle of the farmyard, in front of a traditional-looking, thatch-roofed farmhouse, the pig lies on a board atop a barrel. Two men and one older woman hold down its rear legs and midsection as the saigneur attends to the head and neck, and especially to the all-important cut he’s made there, while another old woman collects the resulting blood in a bucket below. The pig’s sacrifice has brought all else on the farm to a halt: one woman pauses in the middle of her knitting, the children have been brought here to see what’s happening, and a dog lurks, hopeful for a scrap. All watch intently, focused on the saigneur, and on his critical task. Unlike the studio-produced card IN BRITTANY Peasant from the Huelgoat and Carhaix area-the three Friends (fig. 7), this scene was clearly photographed in situ, and the onlookers’ garb, from their rumpled, soiled clothes down to their muddy clogs, seems genuine. Yet, it’s hard to tell for sure from the image if the blood is still flowing (it seems not), and certainly it would have been easier to shoot the photo with a dead, rather than a dying, flailing pig. So, perhaps this is not the scene itself, but a recreation after the fact, like a police reenactment of a crime-not exactly the real thing, though informed nonetheless by a keen desire to get it right and preserve the moment for posterity. And then there is the card’s title, nearly hidden in the thatched roof: Life in the countryside - A sacrifice.[78] The designation Life in the countryside, like Picturesque Brittany in fig. 18, points to certain types of scenes and customs to be recorded and remembered as part of the collective cultural heritage. The tue-cochon in particular (“the sacrifice”) exemplifies the larger category of rural existence (“life in the countryside”), and is subjected to an ethnographic gaze eager to capture this colorful way of life before it fades or vanishes.
In their drive to frame some elusive authenticity, ethnographically-minded tue-cochon cards like this one get up close to show the sacrifice unfolding in vivid photographic detail. Some individual cards focus on the most critical moment: the mortal blow and saignée or bleeding of the animal. There are also series featuring the stages of the sacrifice on separate cards. One series entitled Play in one act-THE DEATH OF THE PIG highlights such tableaux as “In the executioner’s hands, the fatal moment” (the saigneur slitting the pig’s throat, while his assistant helps hold the animal down), “The last grooming” (with them singeing off the bristles), or “The body on display before becoming andouilles” (as the men stand beside the carcass that’s suspended from a ladder and split down the middle, exposing its innards) (fig. 27).
Fig. 27, Anonymous, Drame en un acte - LA MORT DU COCHON, IVe tableau, L’exposition du corps avant de devenir andouilles (Play in One Act: THE DEATH OF THE PIG, 4th Scene, The Body on Display Before Becoming Andouilles), 1917. Postcard. Author’s collection.In short, such cards deal frankly with the death, dismemberment, blood, and guts of the sacrificial victim.
While a fascinating and revealing phenomenon, the rural tue-cochon was by far not the only means of pork production before widespread industrialization. From the Middle Ages onward, the slaughtering of hogs in towns and cities represented a significant economic activity and constituted an intermediate point between peasants’ highly ritualized, seasonal harvesting, and rationalized modern industrial production. Compared to later industrial processing, this urban butchering remained relatively small-scale and, because of limited options for transportation, tied to both the region for stock and local community for customers. But it also differed from peasant practices in the more substantial volume of meat and lard generated, possibility of nearly year-round production, obedience to practical, commercial imperatives, and, therefore, general lack of larger symbolic and spiritual considerations. And unlike the respected rural saigneur, the urban butcher, while often wealthy and powerful, was a suspect figure whose reputation for violence and cruelty survives in modern fictional characters like the bloodthirsty, anthropophagic butcher in the film Delicatessen (dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1991).
By the end of the eighteenth century, moreover, the practice of butchering livestock in city streets and alleyways had become suspect as well. In growing agglomerations the noise, stench, and gore of urban butchering came to be seen increasingly as offensive and unhygienic, needing to be controlled, contained, regulated, and, ideally, relegated to closed, dedicated facilities outside the center-a development exemplified by the opening of the so-called Cité du sang (City of blood), the slaughterhouse complex at La Villette, in 1867.[79] The modern slaughterhouse was thus born largely out of hygienic concerns, but there were aesthetic, moral, and philosophical dimensions to this evolution as well.[80] A new sensibility was emerging, which also informed the replacement of cities’ overflowing old churchyard cemeteries with large new modern nécropoles on the periphery, like the Père-Lachaise. Death, both human and animal, was exiled from the city center. It was a key first step toward the radical exclusion of death from the realm of the living, in our sanitized modern world of vacuum-packed pork roasts, hospitals, and even modern military technologies, from machine guns to drones that isolate us ever more from the enemy being killed.[81]
The modern meatpacking industry, in particular, is a marvel of collective denial. Noélie Vialles’s excellent study of slaughterhouses in the Adour region[82] exposes how we rely today upon a complex system of avoidances to distance ourselves from the horrors inside slaughterhouses-a far cry from the tue-cochon as a communal event and highpoint of the peasant calendar-or even from the once-common spectacle of butchers slaughtering on city streets. It is telling that, unlike the respected traditional saigneur, or the dreaded urban butcher, those responsible for killing livestock today are relegated to virtual nonexistence, their work invisible, anonymous, and designated only by euphemism (in the United States, this work often devolves to illegal aliens, at the margins of American society).
During the Belle Époque, French pork production was split between a past and a future that coexisted, however incongruously, in the present. On the one hand, there was traditional sacrifice that yielded ever less pork for a rural population itself in decline. Yet as we see in contemporary postcards, the tue-cochon held a grip on the French imagination disproportionate to the actual volume of food that it provided. On the other hand, France was already experiencing the emergence of what Pastoureau calls “true industrial pork raising.”[83] And many postcards deal in one way or another with the implications of the large-scale slaughter carried out by this nascent pork industry. Cards can appear giddy about the novelty but profoundly uneasy as well. Postcard publishers, with their stock tue-cochon and “last day of a condemned man” views and series, were used to depicting pigs’ traditional transformation into pork, but puzzled over how to handle things when the killing was divorced from the sacrificial context that had long surrounded a pig’s death and given it meaning, mitigating the accompanying violence. Some postcards get at this by recording the bleak, carceral spaces of modern slaughterhouses, bearing witness to this unsettling new state of affairs. Certain of these cards feature the facilities’ forbidding exteriors, with walls, gates, and guards shutting out both curious passersby and viewers like ourselves.[84] Others do take us inside, but just to glimpse what’s there. One photographic card, “LYON-VAISE.-The Slaughterhouses. The bleeding of the pigs” (fig. 21) shows a large workspace, illuminated by harsh electric lights, where rows of pig carcasses hang from their hind legs, dripping onto a blood-soaked floor. This is a striking departure from rustic “sacrifice” cards that foreground the heroic struggle between a single pig and a skillful saigneur and focus on the inevitable result, the pig’s demise. Here, in contrast, the card emphasizes the institutional setting, with its vats, hoists, and metal framework for suspending the carcasses-an assembly, or rather disassembly line. The slaughterhouse workers, seen from afar like the many pigs they process, seem but tiny cogs in a vast, industrial machine. Tellingly, cards like this lack the most salient feature of tue-cochon images: they don’t show pigs dying, nor dead pigs up close. Indeed the “LYON-VAISE” card exemplifies the fundamental shift in perspective that was happening at the time: all is seen from a distance, as if the workers and the whole complex of the slaughterhouse were shrinking into oblivion, fading from sight as from public consciousness. It is a critical step away from the forthrightness of traditional sacrifice, and toward the regime of avoidance and anonymity that for Vialles characterizes our relationship to modern slaughter.
Other types of pig postcards utilize different strategies for creating an effective distance from slaughter’s disturbing realities. While photographic, documentary cards use physical barriers or physical distance, illustrated comic cards rely instead upon humor and whimsy to provide a reassuring sense of detachment. In one such card (fig. 28), sent from Salon-de-Provence to Apt in 1905, an elegant couple approaches a store whose sign reads “AUTOMATIC CHARCUTERIE: HERE WE DO ALL SORTS OF PIGGY THINGS,”[85] the word play on “cochonneries” in the original French alluding to both inferior goods produced there and off-color jokes woven into the accompanying text.
Fig. 28, J. Coulon, CHARCUTERIE AUTOMATIQUE (AUTOMATIC CHARCUTERIE), Collection A. B. E. N., 1905. Postcard. Author’s collection.Out front, the old charcutier and his young male and female clerks demonstrate a fanciful Machine-Cochon, a miniature pork processing plant where a squealing pig disappears into a funnel-shaped orifice, and finished products stream out the other end. As the charcutier declares, in the first of five comic stanzas in rhyming couplets,
This evening we’re showing
The Machine-Cochon.
The pig enters, alive as can be,
And leaves as charcuterie.[86]
Press one button for ham, he explains, another for pâté, another for hard sausage. Andouille and boudin come out different-sized tubes. As if this weren’t all magical enough, should you find the preparations too salty, run the machine backwards and the pig comes out again, alive. And while ostensibly still about charcuterie, the concluding stanza turns risqué:
So enter, Sir, Madam,
Take advantage of my deals.
If you’d like a hard sausage,
Ask my salesman,
And for stuffed tongue,
My saleslady’s the one.[87]
Customers long for the handsome clerk’s “sausage” and his pretty female counterpart’s tongue. Ending on this ribald note, the card’s humorous verse injects a dose of gauloiserie to divert attention from the horror of mechanized slaughter. So, too, the whimsical technology works to deny slaughter’s reality, as well as its finality, for with this contraption the pig’s death is reassuringly reversible. And the venue is just as fanciful, taking pork processing out of a closed, institutional, industrial setting, and locating it outside, in the open, on a charmingly tree-lined, provincial street where well-dressed couples stroll and visit traditional local stores like this charcuterie. As in the Félix Potin Painter in the Village card (fig. 5), a contrived, nostalgic scenario masks or at least distracts us from the upheavals of the rapidly-evolving modern food industry.
What about the bourgeois consumers’ yearning for human flesh (“sausage” and tongue), conflated with that of the processed pig? Intriguingly, within a context evoking industrial pork production, there is also this intimation of cannibalism.[88] Taking the theme further, one chromo shows an innocent young pig that inadvertently eats his father’s remains by sampling an internationally-marketed brand of lard produced by N.K. Fairbank & Company of Chicago (fig. 29).
Fig. 29, Anonymous, N.K. FAIRBANK & Cie CHICAGO, SAINDOUX RAFFINÉ (REFINED LARD), LITH. F. APPEL, ca. 1900. Trade card. Author’s collection.The little porker, wearing fancy pajamas and a bib sporting the brand’s slogan, “ABSOLUTE PURITY,” takes a tub from atop a barrel marked “REFINED LARD,” and licks the contents enthusiastically. His horrorstruck mother sticks her frilly-bonneted head in the window and cries, “Stop, you unfortunate thing, that’s YOUR FATHER’S FAT!!!!!”[89] The foregrounded ears of corn are a recurrent motif in the company’s advertising from this period and promote the virtues of lard produced from corn-fed, rather than slop-fed pigs. But taken to an extreme, as in another advertising card’s slogan, “N.K. FAIRBANK & CO’S LARD is Pure CORN JUICE Boiled down,”[90] this emphasis on corn makes us wonder. Is the lard made of pig or corn? Is it animal or vegetable? The mother’s oddly bovine hooves are also disconcerting: have other animals’ parts been mixed in the lard? What of the anthropomorphic hogs whose relative’s lard has been rendered? Are we too eating our own when we consume animals who resemble us? Despite the slogans, how “refined” is this lard, how “absolute” its purity? Unwittingly, this advertisement recalls stories circulating at the time about slaughterhouse workers fallen into vats and rendered into so-called “pure” lard-most famously in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s influential indictment of the Chicago meatpacking industry (published in 1906, and translated almost immediately into French and 16 other languages).[91] Both the mother pig’s exclamation and subtler visual cues make us suspect that we are eating something other than what the manufacturer claims, and perhaps something we shouldn’t be eating at all. Far from traditional, intentional cannibalism in which the participants know what they are eating and why, modern industrial meat production had brought about a new form of what may be called “accidental” cannibalism. The potential for unpleasant, even dangerous surprises lurking in meat (and, for that matter, all food products) became all the greater with the nationalization and eventual globalization of food production, progressively dissociating consumers from food sources. Fairbank lard, made in Chicago but marketed abroad, provides a suggestive early example. The little pig plays the unsuspecting consumer, unaware of industrial food products’ provenance. And the mother’s desperate cry conjures up a whole panoply of modern food fears focused on this thorny issue of origins. Such fears would eventually lead to a new ideal of transparency in the supply chain, from farm to table, or, what French meat producers in the wake of the mad cow scare of 1996 began vaunting in their advertising as la traçabilité, or traceability.[92]
While the Fairbanks postcard draws attention to the death of the pig as a necessary step to obtain meat products, a 1919 chromo promoting Good sausages from the PRODIGAL PIG (fig. 30)[93] features a very alive pig slashing himself into neat sausage rounds, like a streamlined version of the earlier Machine-Cochon (fig. 28).
Fig. 30, Anonymous, On mange avec plaisir et . . . sans fatigue: les “bons saucissons du COCHON PRODIGUE”! (“We eat with pleasure and . . . without fatigue: Good Sausages from THE PRODIGAL PIG”!), B. SIRVIN, IMP. ÉDIT. TOULOUSE-PARIS, 1919. Trade card. Author’s collection.The vivid colors, bright illumination, caricatural mode, and snappy advertising copy all suggest forced light-heartedness in an attempt to obscure grisly subject matter with humor. This advertisement for mass-produced sausage from Auvergne, with its familiar claim of “purity” to allay fears about processed meat content, offers a tellingly obfuscatory vision of industrial meat production. In contrast to rationalized slaughter’s ruthless logic, the image defies the laws of physics and biology: the bisected pig remains standing; it performs deft knife work without hands; like the three small sausage rounds, the heavy blade seems suspended in midair; and the large platform-like disks have no explicable provenance. Rather than real blood and innards displayed in tue-cochon cards, the sausage rounds and pig’s insides are made of the same composite material, a bright, festive shade of red interspersed with gold and silver flecks, like a colorful confetti mix. All the slicing is done, as if by magic, without bloodshed or apparent pain or suffering for the animal. The image’s graphic qualities, particularly its dark outlines, recall Japanese prints so influential in French art circles over the preceding half century, and the pig’s self-immolation is reminiscent of Japanese seppuku (also known informally as hara-kiri), a custom that already fascinated western observers at the time.[94] As the jolly pig becomes a brave samurai, we glimpse two emblematically divergent perspectives: his death gets redeemed as an honorable, meaningful one, with seppuku standing in for the sacrificial ritual of the tue-cochon; or his exotic cultural practice casts him as a foreigner, undoing the period’s pervasive identification of pigs with Frenchman, and figuring instead the growing alienation of the French from the pigs they ate, as from the ways the meat was processed.
Within the corpus of Belle Époque pig postcards, there are many examples of pigs smoking pipes or cigars, and many more still of pigs surrounded by ice and snow-skating on frozen ponds, frolicking in wintry landscapes, and so forth. Why? To some extent, pigs smoking can be explained by their widespread anthropomorphization on postcards, and cold can be explained by the seasonality of both the tue-cochon and of postcard publishing, since so many pig cards marked winter holidays, especially New Year’s, but also carnival and the feast of Saint Antoine. But on another level, postcards like these, along with the abundant maritime-themed cards we’ve already encountered, point to the shift in preservation techniques within the broader transition underway from local, traditional to modern, industrialized food production, and specifically from preserving meat with smoke and salt, to preserving through refrigeration, a new technology evolving rapidly at the time. In this connection, wintry pig postcards with no explicit link to winter holidays are of particular interest, as they associate pigs with cold itself, rather than with specific events during the cold season. In one such card (fig. 31), postmarked 1901, little pigs in a circle dance fervently on a snowy field around a large snow pig, its arms outstretched and a demoniacal expression on its face, like a malevolent idol in a cult-like adoration scene. Maybe this is just the illustrator’s fantasy, but in the context of the period it’s tempting to see more.
Fig. 31, Anonymous, Untitled, 1901. Postcard. Author’s collection.A strange energy circulates here, in the almost unnatural light illuminating the composition and the zeal moving the pigs, which whirl together like a wheel, fan, or turbine spinning on a central axis, while the mysteriously frosty snow pig suggests experiments at the time with deep freezing, storing, and transporting frozen animal carcasses. The 1900 Paris World’s Fair had staged a huge, public tribute to electrical power, notably in its massive (and massively popular) Palace of Electricity, surmounted by a six meter high statue of The Fairy of Electricity[95] with similarly outstretched arms, all of which produced the greatest effect at night, when floodlit by electric lamps. Perhaps, then, this card offers a humble response to The Fairy of Electricity, an homage to artificial cold like the far more grandiose Parisian homage to artificial light, and maybe even an ironic take on the public’s wild enthusiasm for new technological marvels. On another equally evocative card (fig. 32), an elegantly-dressed belle sits upon a strangely-constituted snow pig, its body sheathed in a sort of sausage casing, like some processed frozen pork product.
Fig. 32, Anonymous, Untitled, ca. 1900. Postcard. Author’s collection.The pig smiles as the woman’s hand rests tenderly but possessively upon its back with index finger outstretched, as if she’s emphasizing, “this is mine” (though a snow man in the background ogles her, she picks the pig instead). Her impeccably fashionable attire and knowing gaze toward us, the card’s eager viewers, signal her connections to a burgeoning commercial culture. Rather than a peasant woman’s maternal love for her piglet, this card highlights a well-heeled consumer’s prerogative to choose what she wants: a premonitory vision of supermarket shopping as it would evolve in the decades ahead.
Perhaps the incongruity of such postcards also figures a noteworthy historical lag, since France was a leader in early refrigeration technology, but slow to adopt it for actual food industry use. In France, refrigeration remained less a part of daily reality than of an imaginary of the period, and specifically of what Capatti calls a “polar obsession,” that we glimpse in fanciful images like these.[96] Meanwhile other modern conveniences and conveyances were becoming ever more a part of daily life and of the food supply. Trains, bicycles, automobiles, and of course flying machines loomed especially large as hallmarks of modernity.
When Pigs Fly
During the pig’s sacrifice at the center of Robert Marteau’s short novel The Day the Pig Was Killed, set in the years following World War II, an airplane still provides a jarring contrast, much as it would have a half century earlier: an incursion of the modern world into the traditional scene of the tue-cochon at the farm.[97] Belle Époque postcards offer many such juxtapositions. All sorts of encounters occur between pigs and various manifestations of the modern world, like the Old Pig of Marseille confronting the Pont Transbordeur (fig. 20), the Fairbank piglet eating industrially processed lard (fig. 29), or unsuspecting swine getting fed into fanciful but suggestive automatic butchering machines (fig. 28). In postcards, modernity often takes the form of new-fangled transportation, like automobiles, bicycles, or trains, with various images of pigs run over on road or rail. For example, The Run-Over Pig (fig. 33) is one of the many popular Legend of Saint-Saulge postcards featuring colorful locals, speaking in patois, encountering various aspects of the modern world: the legal and electoral systems, advertising, posters, streetlighting, telephones, or, in this instance, trains.[98]
Fig. 33, Anonymous, LÉGENDE DE SAINT SAULGE. 5. Le Cochon écrasé (THE LEGEND OF SAINT SAULGE. 5. The Run-Over Pig), Collection Roubé, 1917. Postcard. Author’s collection.As the pig gets sliced in half by a locomotive’s front wheel, a peasant grieves in patois, cursing “th’ nasty invention” and wondering what she’ll become without her “poor l’il porker.”[99] Further underscoring the close bond between owner and pig, the creature looks beseechingly at her in its last moment, like a faithful dog, while the locomotive chops up the carcass with the expediency of the Machine-Cochon vaunted elsewhere (fig. 28). In another postcard (fig. 34), postmarked 1908, a chauffeur-driven car with three well-dressed passengers hits a pig on a country road, and the characters react with varying degrees of composure: men look on calmly, women throw up their arms in dismay, and the victim cries, predictably, like a stuck pig, as the vehicle’s rear wheel strikes him.
Fig. 34, Anonymous, Un Obstacle (An Obstacle), J. C. Paris, 1908. Postcard. Author’s collection.The title, An Obstacle, recalls one of the period’s best-known advertising slogans, “The Michelin Tire drinks up obstacles,”[100] though here rather than bits of metal or glass the tire would need, less plausibly still, to swallow the whole hog. Presumably, these forward-thinking automobilists have driven into the countryside to reconnect on their own comfortable terms with the terroir. But their desire to avoid such rustic unpleasantries as the slaughtering of hogs gets thwarted by the obtrusive “obstacle” of the pig’s body, like some kind of alimentary return of the repressed.
Such encounters between pigs and cars or trains are plausible and probably happened with some frequency, but other cards venture instead into the phantasmic realm of pigs riding bicycles, driving cars, or, most improbable of all, flying. Postcard artists exploited the aeronautic theme from every imaginable angle, spinning off pigs with wings, pigs piloting hot air balloons or primitive planes, pig-carrying zeppelins using champagne power for proto-jet propulsion, piggy banks with propellers transporting human passengers, and normally ponderous pigs transformed into lighter-than-air craft. At least on Belle Époque postcards, modernity is when pigs fly, figuring in the most emphatic way possible the development and expansion of transportation technologies that, through their ability to move foodstuffs like pork products ever further and faster, were revolutionizing the food industry.
One exemplary card (fig. 35), from the 1909 Carnival in Nice, displays a float called euphemistically A Rough Landing.
Fig. 35, Anonymous, CARNAVAL DE NICE 1909. Un Aterrisage mouvementé. Ludovic Isnart, Constructeur (THE CARNIVAL IN NICE 1909. A Rough Landing. Ludovic Isnart, Builder), Édition Giletta, phot., Nice, 1909. Postcard. Author’s collection.This elaborate crash-involving pedestrians, dogs, trees, lampposts, a horse and carriage, an early airplane, and a pig-shaped dirigible-juxtaposes past and present. On the one hand, within the context of carnival, pigs conjure up age-old cyles of fat and lean, and with them the time-honored ritual of the tue-cochon. On the other, in the year when Blériot crossed the Channel and French aviation came into its own, planes epitomize a new reign of rapid, far-reaching transport that, amid so many other changes, was helping to sweep away traditional modes of food production, and replace them with cold-bloodedly efficient, industrial methods. This is in short a transitional image, of the old and the new colliding.
But perhaps most revealing of all about transportation’s crucial role in shaping the modern food world is a card where its convenience is conspicuously missing (fig. 36).
Fig. 36, Anonymous, Untitled, 1905. Postcard. Author’s collection.In a nondescript rural setting, a dirt road begins from a distant barn, and runs up to the foreground, where an urban chef figure straddles a pig, his soup skimmer held high in the air like a riding crop. The implied trajectory runs from countryside to city, framing an absurd farm-to-table fantasy in which the chef would somehow ride this unruly four-legged provision into town. Modern transportation appears all the more essential by its notable absence, while the farm receding from view and the chef restraining the pig with a rope around its neck evoke conventional marketplace and tue-cochon scenes, as the chef’s fallen salt shaker likewise points to traditional meat preservation.
An awareness of old customs coexists here with an awareness of change and its implications, particularly the growing modern discontinuities between food suppliers and consumers. Ultimately this is an image emblematic of the entire Belle Époque pig postcard corpus. Caught between a past slipping away and a future not yet fully realized, these cards engage the viewer’s imagination in both poignant remembrance and anticipatory reverie.