In the aisles of science: the play “Gutenberg - drame historique en 5 actes et en prose” (1869) by Juliette Figuier

Abstract:

The aim of this article is to look at, through the case of Juliette Figuier, the often invisible role of intellectual women in the dissemination of scientific culture in France and Brazil. It focuses on her play Gutenberg (1869) which was translated into Portuguese in 1877 and circulated in Brazil. The play, which deals with the mythical life of the inventor of the printing press, is included in the list of narratives about science produced by popularizers of science - such as her husband, Louis Figuier. Often mistaken as a work of the latter, Gutenberg was originally written by Juliette Figuier. The article seeks to discuss through this case how women could participate in the production of cultural goods which projected the image of Science in a mediating role.

Keywords:
Scientific theatre; Science popularization; Women’s writing

Resumo:

O objetivo deste artigo é abordar, a partir do caso de Juliette Figuier, a atuação frequentemente invisibilizada de mulheres intelectuais na disseminação da cultura científica entre França e Brasil. O objeto de estudo é a peça teatral Gutenberg (1869) da autora, que também circulou pelo Brasil através de uma tradução em português, de 1877. A peça, que trata da vida mitificada do inventor da imprensa, insere-se no rol de narrativas sobre a ciência realizada pelos vulgarizadores das ciências - como seu marido Louis Figuier. Muitas vezes confundida como obra do vulgarizador, Gutenberg, no entanto, foi originalmente escrita por Juliette Figuier. O artigo, com este caso, procura discutir como mulheres podiam participar da produção de bens culturais que projetaram a imagem sobre a “ciência”, em um papel de mediação.

Palavras-chave:
Teatro científico; Vulgarização científica; Escrita feminina

The phenomenon of the popularization of science in the nineteenth century has been widely debated in the history of science and in the history of books and publications in European and American countries. It is seen as the fruit of the industrial revolution, the development of mass culture, especially through the publishing market, and the expansion of the teaching system (Mollier, 2001; Béguet, 1990; Fyfe & Lightmann, 2007; Secord, 2014; Bensaude-Vincent, 1993). Recent studies on the circulation of printed material have emphasized the importance of mediatic supports, such as the press, in the existing circuits in France, Portugal, and Brazil, which through “cultural transfers” processes (Espagne, 1999) allow the observance of the shaping of the globalization of culture and a transnational civilization of newspapers to be observed (Dutra, Mollier, 2006; Guimarães, 2012; Kalifa Régnier, Thérenty, 2011, amongst others).

This process also included the dissemination of scientific culture, whether through the institutionalization of science or through the propagation of its values in a broader society (as in the debate on professionalization) which came to be defended as universal. In relation to the propagation of values linked to the discourses of science, such as the idea of invention or discovery, professional dedication, merit, and the example of abnegated know ledge, the so-called “popularizers of science” contributed in a striking form to this. In different regions of the planet, such as Latin America, this expanded the public of science (Cabrera, 1998; Nieto-Galán, 2011; Vergara, 2008). To great extent, this was possible through the action of writers in the press, including translations of texts by the popular izers of science, especially from French writers.

We analyzed in another article the circulation of writings of the French science popularizer Louis Figuier in the Brazilian press (Kodama, 2018). Louis Figuier can be considered an interesting case of the cultural practices of mediator intellectuals for the natural sciences (Gomes, Hansen, 2016). Well-known to newspaper readers, his texts were widely used both for the consumption of news about technical and scientific novelties and for the discourse in defense of popular science teaching.

In this article, we aim to explore Juliette Figuier’s production and the process of the erasing of her writing. We will highlight as a particular case the circulation of the play Gutenberg - drame historique em 5 actes et en prose by Juliette Figuier, published in 1869 and translated into Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro in 1877. Later the play was integrated into Louis Figuier’s project of disseminating science through the theater, which he called “scientific theater”. Although Juliette Figuier was the real author of various plays which were part of scientific theater, until recently little recognition was given to this fact. The scientific theater plays were considered to have been written by Louis Figuier, while Juliette Figuier was often seen only as a collaborator (Cardot, 1989; Vautrin, 2018). The play which circulated in Brazil in 1877 had little repercussion in the newspapers of the period, later being forgotten and having its authorship wrongly attributed to Louis Figuier.

In the modernizing context of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the action of the women who participated in cultural mediation practices, above all in the sciences, is little known. Based on the trajectory of Juliette Figuier and her theater play Gutenberg, we seek to reflect on her participation in scientific popularization practices and, at the same time, to highlight the process which resulted in her erasure and the later disassociation between her name and her work. We draw on the category of intellectual mediators, following Gomes and Hansen’s proposals (2016), to qualify her trajectory, as well as the type of production carried out by her. As these authors recurrently state, the productions of mediating intellectuals have become difficult to qualify, to a large extent because they pres ented hybrid forms, in works considered “minor”, such as children’s books, school books, or those aimed at a popular public, and in texts in the daily press. While scientific popularization works per se fit in here, and strictly speaking were regarded as being “relegated” because they were aimed at the lay public, it is notable that women had even less space in the terrain of science. In this article we seek to demonstrate that the theater plays with scientific themes attributed to the popularizer Louis Figuier could only have been produced through the original authorship of Juliette Figuier.

While female work in the press has been highlighted in research in recent years (Duarte, 2016), studies of women who acted in the dissemination of science are relatively scarce, also taking into account the obstacles imposed on the access to women to scientific education. Nevertheless, various women have been recognized in practices of the popularization of science.¹ Often this female participation involved the translation of texts for the popularization of science, as in the case of Rosaria Orrego, who wrote for the Chilean women’s magazine Revista de Valparaiso (Errázuriz, 2019), or also Vitoria Colonna, translator of the book Francinet by Augustine Fouillé in Brazil (Raffaini, 2016). Other women, as in the case of Juliette Figuier, participated in collaborations with men and at the same time creatively produced cultural goods about science aimed at the general public.

We have already pointed out that what is at issue is not highlighting that Juliette Figuier had already claimed for herself the role of a specialist in the popularization of science, as her husband Louis Figuier is well known for doing. Scientific popularization, fruit of the institutionalization of science (Vergara, 2008), also became a literary and journalistic specialization, an area in which Louis Figuier was one of the main references. We can thus qualify Juliette as an intellectual mediator, since as a woman active in literature, she sought in her way to create a new and hybrid production, bringing characters from the history of science and technology to the general public in the first scientific plays attributed to Louis Figuier.

The article also intends to return to the discussion raised by Valérie Narayana (2011) about the “metamorphoses” which the intellectual production of Juliette Figuier underwent, in particular her theatrical work with scientific themes. As Narayana states, while on the one hand, the recurrent practice of women writers of using pseudonyms or their husband’s names, as in the case of Juliette Figuier, served as a social “mask”, protecting their identity and reputation, on the other, it made possible their erasure (Narayana, 2011). In this set of “confiscated” plays reworked by the great popularizer is the play that will now be discussed.

Juliette as a writer of novels and plays, or “what is an author”?

Gender debates about women novelists and dramatists in the nineteenth century have allowed a better knowledge of the work of many women, amongst whom we can count Juliette Figuier.² The status of an author whose public name was her husband’s name preceded by a feminine treatment, Madame Louis Figuier, was one of the reasons for the erasure of her works over time. The practice adopted by women literati of using pseudonyms or a male “nom de plume” is well known, whether to “protect the reputation” of the identity of the women writer from the public or as a female strategy to obtain a greater acceptance of readers. This was done by Amantine Dupin, under the name George Sand; Eugénie Saffray, who signed as Raoul de Navery; and the Brönte sisters, who used the pseudonym of the Bell brothers; amongst so many others.

It should be noted that the property rights of women authors at her time depended on the matrimonial regime and the “moral” property emanating from the spouse, who had the right to consent to and to administer the publications of women writers. The first bill in France which sought to regulate the rights of women authors dated from 1839 but got nowhere, meaning that there was no complete law about female literary property until 1957 (Prassoloff, 1992). We agree with the Aina Pérez and Meri Torras’ questions, drawing on Foucault’s critique, inserting the gender of the author and asking “what is a female author” implies thinking about “how to define relations between sexual gender and the attributes which qualify them as a cultural creator”. As stated, the gender marks of the ‘body which writes’, using Barthes’ expression, “determine the modes of producing and reading literary and artistic corpora” (Pérez, Torras, 2019, p. 9).

Louise Juliette Bouscaren was born on 4 February 1827, in the Department of Hérault.³ According to the reports of close friends, she received a good education, “strong and independent, at the same time liberal and scientific”, completing her studies with courses of literature, history, physics, and botany.⁴ Her father was Jean Jules Bouscaren, a landowner in Montpellier and her mother, Sophie Cambon, granddaughter of a cloth industrialist and niece of Joseph Cambon, a member of the Convention. From a Protestant family, Juliette was tutored by the renowned pastor Charles Grawitz, who had a striking impact on her education, including her interest in the theater. In 1848, she married Louis Figuier, a doctor in medicine from Montpellier, and the couple settled in Paris in 1855, when he received the invite to write a scientific section in one of the most read newspapers in France at the moment, La Presse, run by Émile de Girardin.

In her first feuilleton-novel, Mos de Lavène, published in Revue des Deux Mondes, in 1858, Juliette Figuier tested a female pseudonym, Claire Sénart. Her work was critically well received, after which she threw herself into the writer’s career, from then on using the name Mme. Louis Figuier in her publications. When she entered the Parisian intellectual scene, her origins in the South of France became a mark of her novels, which helped her construct her identity as an author. Coated in the romantic formula of the “local color”, in a serene and simple environment, with a candid and naïve perspective of life in countryside, her first works addressed the contrasts of the rural scene in relation to the hectic urban life of the Parisian capital.

Image 1
- Juliette Figuier

It should be noted that the network of relations between her husband and some of the important figures in the publishing world were important for Madame Figuier’s ability to enter into the universe of gens de lettres.⁵ In Girardin’s newspaper, she published her second feuilleton-novel, Les Soeurs de Lait, scènes de la vie du Bas-Languedoc. At the beginning of the 1860s, her novels appear in Hachette publishers’ popular catalogue. The latter also published Louis Figuier’s almanaque Année Scientifique.

In the private sphere, Juliette Figuier ran a salon where she received important figures from the intellectual world linked to her husband’s activities, which also opened the way for her own insertion as a writer. The Figuiers’ salon was considered by some witnesses as one of the most renowned and pleasant of the time.⁶ In the Parisian intellectual bourgeois world to which she came to belong, the prestige and recognition of femmes savantes could only be fully achieved through this sphere of relations. Through these networks Juliette came into contact, for example, with George Sand, an unequalled character in the sphere of women writers and the source of inspiration for many female writers. Juliette sent her novel Mos de Lavène to Sand in a gesture of admiration, but also as part of a ritual that was part of the rite of office for initiates to reach the position of women writer.⁷

Juliette Bouscaren portrayed in her novel her memories of the landscape between Montpellier and Gigean, a wine growing region where her mother was from. It is this scenario which surrounds the character who gives a title to the novel. As is explained at the beginning of the plot, the term Mos was a relic of the Spanish presence in Southern France and meant Senhora or Lady of Lavène. The Mos created by Juliette is the summary of the “obsessing figure of the Mother, which absorbs all the others”, according to Michelle Perrot (2017) about the reinforcement gained by the female image in the nineteenth century. The way local festivities, habits, clothing, and manufacturing techniques were dealt with denoted the opening to “realism” which had already been evoked as the contribution of various female works in the period (Finch, 2000). The romantic evocation of nature is present in her novels published between 1858 and 1864: Fiancés de la Gardiole (1860), Le Franciman (1860), Le Soeurs de Lait (1861), Le Gardian de la Camargue (1862), La prédicante des Cevennes (1864), and in the travel report, L’Italie d’après nature, which was published in 1868 (See Table 1: works published by Juliette Figuier). The female figure, above all the mother, but also wife, daughter, or sister - is the engine of intimate life which models her novels and plays. This characteristic presides over the “scientific” plays written by Juliette Bouscaren, as presented in Gutenberg, as will be seen below.

Chart 1
Juliette Figuier’s published works

Chart 1
continuation

However, a tragic event marked her life: the death of the couple’s only child at the age of 17 in 1867. After this she apparently stopped writing novels. According to her close friends, she became less active and turned instead to painting flowers and domestic life. However, by looking at her publications over the year, it can be seen that she redirected her career to writing for the theater, especially the play Gutenberg - drame historique em 5 actes, which she submitted to Odéon theater in 1869.

Image 2
- Cover of Gutenberg - drame historique en cinq actes.

The first eclipse of authorship

The attempt to stage the play, however, was unsuccessful since in submitting her text to the Odéon, another play with a very similar title competed with it to be staged in the Théatre-Français. The play in question was Gutenberg: drame en cinq actes et en vers, by Édouard Fournier. For unexplained reasons, according to Juliette Bouscaren, Fournier’s play was announced to open in the Odéon, instead of Théatre-Français to which he had presented his text. Her competitor was an experienced writer who had been writing theatrical plays for a long time and was also considered a specialist in the history of the press, having collaborated with Paul Lacroix on the book Histoire de l’imprimerie et des arts et professions qui se rattachent à la typographie (1852).

Madame Figuier questioned in the preface of Gutenberg the procedure by which her play had been passed over. To avoid the suspicion of plagiarism, she decided to publish her version before Fournier’s play opened, so that the public could judge the originality of her work (Figuier, 1869).⁸ On his part, Fournier waited for Madame Figuier to first receive her text back from the censor board after which he presented his to the board of the theater, where it was launched in April 1869. In the preface to Fournier’s Gutenberg the author mentioned Madame Figuier’s work, acknowledging her value as a novelist, but attributed the choice of theme to the influence of the works of her husband, Louis Figuier (Fournier, 1869, p. V).⁹

Fournier also highlighted the main differences between the two plays, including that hers was a drama, a “sweet but always believable fiction” concerned more with the biography of the hero, only superficially dealing with the historic facts linked to the invention, while his, in addition to being in verse, was based on aspects of the invention and the historic period. Evoking what Alexandre Dumas said about the character of geniuses - that a hero could not have another passion other than their own work - Fournier criticized Madame Figuier, who tried to give Gutenberg two other loves. One, the “very imaginary” daughter of Laurent Coster, and the other Annette (Ennel), to whom Gutenberg had given a written promise of marriage, but who was almost forgotten by him in his distractions as an inventor. In his opinion, the play would have been better resolved if it had been a comedy and not a drama, as she intended (Fournier 1869, p. XIII). This oscillation of the main character was for him the weak point in her plot. This criticism of a rival author pointed to the actual characteristics of Juliette Figuier’s writing present in her novels.

However, it cannot be disregarded that the condition of being female may have weighed heavily in the decision of the Odéon board. After all, it involved a woman speaking about a prevalently masculine theme, such as the invention of the printing press which was part of the repertoire of the history of science and technology in the nineteenth century. Theater was a dangerous arena and one with great competition between agents, writers, and actors (Charle, 2008). In the case of women, the various social barriers were even more resistant. During the nineteenth century, as Alison Finch observed, women were allowed little space on stage and kept under close vigilance. Women could not attend the par terre, actresses continued to be a minority in Comédie Française, and could not participate in reading committees, nor train new actors. After 1824, women were explicitly forbidden from directing theaters (Finch 2000, 63). While some female theatrical names became famous, as exceptions, the vast majority remained unknown, as surveys of playwrights in recent years have shown.¹⁰

Despite not managing to stage her version of Gutenberg, the criticism in the French press was quite benevolent to her, highlighting the characteristics of her style with adjectives directed at the feminine (enchanting, gracious), highlighting these:

A woman of distinct spirit, who has written enchanting works with both good sense and grace, Madame Louis Figuier, let herself be seduced by the passion for letters and resolved to write for theater. She initially chose a historical subject, which had not been covered, although it is the most considerable and moving in the world, the story of the inventor of the printing press, Gutenberg.¹¹

Although Juliette Figuier did not manage to have her first play staged, she did not give up on the project of investing in the theater. Thus, in April 1871, far from the Parisian capital, in Nice, she launched a vaudeville play, Les Pelotons de Clairette. After a season which in the words of her husband Louis Figuier to the writer George Sand was “an enchanting success”, the comedy would be staged in Paris in November of the same year.

Her performance in the theater had to be delicately woven, often with important support, such as from George Sand, as Louis Figuier’s letter to the latter demonstrates. In this letter he stated that his wife had thrown herself with ardor into theatrical work, and only “misfortunate luck” would prevent her dramatic productions from appearing on one of the Parisian stages.¹²

The cleavage of female performance in the public space kept Juliette’s intimate identity hidden. In the name of modesty, but above all aware of the barriers erected against women who threw themselves into the world of literature, she did not reveal her name to the public who went to see her third play, the drama Le Presbytère. After the play’s debut in 1872 in Paris, asked by the crowd about who wrote it, the director Henri Larochelle stated to the audience that he did not know the true name¹³ and that he owed the public an explanation for this mystery. Thus, when a printed version of the play appeared, in its preface Mme. Louis Figuier presented herself with the following justification:

I have remained anonymous until the present moment because I belong to the frag ile sex. The mistrust which exists towards any women author is universal. To overcome this distrust, it was necessary to breach with this custom. Usually, it is the name of the author which results in a play being accepted, here the play is something which had to make the author be accepted. For this reason, I only decided to put my name to it after it had been performed for the fifteenth time. Staging Le Presbytère under the veil of anonymity was a difficult task. It involved finding a director who was willing to read, receive, and represent this drama under his own responsibility (Figuier, 1872, p. II).

The female condition is the first point to which she calls attention in this presentation, a question that was central in her works, both in her novels and theatrical works, such as Gutenberg.

Gutenberg, the play

Gutenberg - drame historique en 5 actes can fit into a long list of pedagogical biographies dedicated to savants and inventors, a group which expanded in the nineteenth century. As the historiography demonstrates, the biographies of inventers underwent profound changes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coming to be included in the construction of laicized and republican discourse about great men and “heroes of the nation” (Agulhon, 2003; Bonnet, 2001). The importance of tributes to the inventor in various European cities is well known, amongst which was the unveiling of a statue of Gutenberg in Strasbourg in 1840, with the participation of the French Academy, whose president was Lamartine, and the support of the representatives of Parisian book printers (Da Pasquale, 2015).

In the second half of the century, histories of Gutenberg multiplied in works by science popularizers. Louis Figuier wrote a chapter about the history of the printing press in Histoire des inventions anciennes et modernes in 1854 and published a biography of Gutenberg in the 1867 five volume collection, Vies des savants illustres. There is no doubt that Louis Figuier’s work served as a base for the creation of Juliette’s play, since information found in the biography is used in the theatrical text. However, instead of supposing that Juliette Figuier had only absorbed elements of her husband’s work, it is possible to assume that part of Louis Figuier’s biography on Gutenberg had also been created in collaboration with his wife. In the 1867 biography are parts of supposed dialogues between Gutenberg and his sister Hebèle which were almost literally published in the play, and which differ from the more linear biographic narrative preponderant in Louis Figuier’s book. A mention of a possible marriage between Gutenberg and Annette de la Porte de Fer is also made in the biography and explored in the play. The hypothesis raised in Louis Figuier’s 1867 biography that Gutenberg had been an apprentice in Harlem in Laurent Coster’s textile business, is discussed by Juliette Figuier in the play, which indicates the dialogue between the works. Figuier’s work highlights the characterization of the family origins of the hero who, coming from an intermediary social condition and raised in a free city, Mainz, obtained a liberal education which made him an entrepreneur in the invention of the printing press.

In the play, despite having faced financial difficulties, Gutenberg received a good education, allowing the theme of his social condition to be explored, conducive to the education of the citizen: he was from an honorable family origin, but above all a hard working one. The character also suited the industrial ideas of invention (Carnino, 2015). Johannes Gutenberg was thus a goldsmith, from a modest family but with a noble origin. His only good was the paternal house of the Gensfleich family.¹⁴

Madame Figuier’s text begins with his origins in the old Gensfleisch family house, along with Frielo, his loyal apprentice,¹⁵ his sister Hebèle, and Annette, to whom he was engaged. In Mainz he created the technique of printing copies of manuscripts. Due to this trade, Gutenberg saw himself obliged to abandon his sister Hebèle who, due to lack of means, was put into the convent of St. Claire at the request of her brother. Although he was engaged to Annette de la Porte de Fer, Gutenberg told her that he would not marry her in order to dedicate himself entirely to the art of “imitating manuscripts”. However, pressurized by her, he signed a promise of marriage.

The story continues with accusations made against Gutenberg due to his first prints, seen as works of witchcraft by copyists and burghers from the principality and resulting in him being persecuted by corporations of local artisans. At the advice of the Prince Elector of Mainz, Gutenberg left for Harlem. There he met the engraver Laurent Coster, who taught him the technique of printing with mobile metallic types, and his daughter Martha, with whom Gutenberg fell in love. Coster promised to teach him his technique, making him his son-in-law. On the eve of his marriage to Martha, Gutenberg was forced by Annette, who had come to make him live up to this promise to marry her, to leave with her for Strasbourg. In possession of Coster’s technique, Gutenberg created in Arbogast convent a company with Peter Schöffer and Johannes Fust, a banker from Mainz, to create his printshop. Fust, however, collected Gutenberg’s debt for the loan given after the printing of his first Bible and withdrew his right to continue in the printing company, re-establishing partnership only with Schoeffer. Fust and Schöffer thus took over Gutenberg’s company and Fust moved to Paris.

After years of bitter poverty, Gutenberg returned to Mainz and was finally rescued from oblivion by his contemporaries and by the prince elector, who granted him the right to a lifelong pension, declaring him a councilor of the prince. All of this upheaval in his life happened to a great extent due to Annette, who returning to her native land after the dissolution of Gutenberg’s company with Schöffer, asked local notables to honor the name of its illustrious citizen. Martha, daughter of Laurent Coster, who had become a nun after the death of her father, went to the Gensfleisch house to declare to Gutenberg that she had met Johannes Fust before he died of the plague in Paris. In his final moments, repentant, Fust confessed his robbery. Martha became the emissary of his request for pardon from Gutenberg. The play ends with the recognition of the inventor and the people’s praise of the “father of the printing press.”

Gutenberg wandered through the popular repertoire, easily accepted by the general public. At the time, Juliette Figuier’s plays were categorized as belonging to the deuxième théâtre, as the light comedies, vaudevilles and melodramas staged in more accessible concert halls were pejoratively called.

The elements of the plot in the tone of melodrama corroborate this tendency of the play: the promise of marriage between Gutenberg and Ana Annette; Martha’s chaste love for her father’s apprentice; the submission of his sister Hébèle in contrast with the passion of her sister-in-law; Schöffer’s betrayal of Gutenberg due to Annette’s jealousy; the unscrupulous ambition of the banker Fust. In Juliette Figuier’s narrative there stand out the idealized attitudes of women, whether in their subjection to men or their passions, revealing points of flight to a partial liberty of their creation, where the limits are established by the values of marriage and the role of the wife.

Although she exalts the character who gave his name to the play, Juliette especially highlights Annette de la Porte de Fer, who is responsible for the unrolling of events, at times animated by jealous, other times moved by a sublime feeling of devotion to her love. Obstinate and decided, it is Annette who presents Gutenberg’s plan to found a printworks in Strasbourg, making acquaintances from that city her fiancé’s partners: Fust, who funds him, and Peter Schöffer.

Peter Schöffer, Gutenberg’s partner in the printworks in Strasbourg, falls in love with Annette. On being rejected, out of vengeance, he married Fust’s daughter, the banker who had funded the company. Out of envy and rivalry, Schöffer allied with Fust taking from Gutenberg the rights to the invention.

The praise of the great man that Juliete Figuier’s play sought to promote did not ignore the actions of female figures who helped the hero to obtain his recognition as the true inventor of the printing press.

Second eclipse: the erasure of Juliette Figuier’s authorship of Gutenberg and Louis Figuier’s scientific theater

In 1879, a very shortened version of Gutenberg appeared with the title Gutenberg in Harlem in a collection of plays entitled Théâtre Scientifique, by a certain Jean Mirval (1879). Prefaced by none less than Louis Figuier, the book was intended to be, as he stated, a “diffusion of science through theater.” The publication contained various texts to be staged in a single act, including the dramatization of Gutenberg. However, despite disguising its authorship, the volume Théâtre Scientifique by Jean Mirval emphasized the same presence of fiancées, sisters, nieces, and mothers of famous men of science characteristic of the plays written by Juliette Figuier between 1869 and 1877. As in the original Gutenberg, the collected dramas portrayed great figures of science as romantic and dreamy characters, noble and devoted to work.

As theater critics understood at the time, behind Jean Mirval were the Figuiers. “Jean Mirval is, I believe, a pseudonym and one would easily believe that it hides part of the dual personality of the author of Année Scientifique and Madame Louis Figuier”, wrote one critic.¹⁶

At the peak of Jules Verne’s fame in the theater, Louis Figuier appears to have sought the same success, insisting on the enterprise of scientific theater: “to make science loved... this has been the constant target of my life (...) and I ask myself if we cannot imagine in popularizing it by another way: the theater,” he wrote in the preface to Théâtre Scientifique. However, his wife died in December of that year. Figuier, rather than detaching himself from the signs of failure of the project, appeared to be even more firm in investing in theater. In 1882, a new collection appeared, La Science au Théâtre, with some new plays and others reworked, such as the drama Keppler - or Astrology and Astronomy and the comedies La Femme Avant le Déluge, Le Premier Voyage Aérien and République des Abeilles.

In 1886, Louis Figuier released Gutenberg - pièce historique em 5 actes, published by Tress & Stock. This time he appeared as the sole author. Much longer than Juliette Figuier’s version, his play gave much greater emphasis to the events in Gutenberg’s life and the wars in the principality of Mainz. To stage the play, he hired a team and paid for the entire production, which included stage effects with electric lights and gunpowder, seeking to call the attention of the public.

In 1889, Gutenberg was published once again by Louis Figuier in the collection La Science au Théâtre without any mention of Madame Figuier. It is interesting to note that the erasure of Juliette Figuier from the plays goes hand in hand with Louis Figuier’s insistence on continuing his project for a scientific theater, even though the signs of failure were obvious. At the end of his life he had little money, despite having obtained great success during his career as a popularizer. In an interview with the US journalist Ida M. Tarbell, he referred to scientific theater as his unfinished mission, which would take him beyond life. The journalist and writer, who was in Paris between 1893 and 1894, visited Louis Figuier in his apartment during the final years of his life and after these meetings published various impressions about Figuier’s career in an article in Popular Science Monthly in 1897. Looking around the salon in the apartment where he lived alone, surrounded by family portraits in the middle of decaying decoration, Tarbell could not miss the paintings of flowers hung on the walls, some with a serial number labelled on the edge, demonstrating that they had taken part in exhibitions. These were Juliette’s, who, according to one of her closest friends, painted in as “gracious” a form as she wrote. At the end of her life, Juliette appears to have lost interest in writings and to appear in public, with her final appearance being linked to her flower paintings that she exhibited in salons. Without her name being mentioned in Tarbell’s article, those paintings indicated that Juliette’s presence was still alive for the widower Louis, and how important was his search for theater of science. “My wife will continue with her painting and I will be very successful with my plays (...) because this is the console of my life!”, Louis Figuier told the journalist (Tarbell, 1897, p. 840).

Image 3
- Poster of Gutenberg.

Increasingly alone, and even without obtaining a financial return, Figuier continued to dedicate himself to scientific theater, creating other plays at his own expense until the end of his life. Possibly, in this attitude considered insane by his contemporaries there was a hidden search to remember his wife. However, what was not mentioned in the interview was the removal of Juliette Figuier from the authorship of the plays which were part of Louis Figuier’s scientific theater. After all, it was well known among the circle of colleagues and friends that it was Juliette Figuier who had started in the theater, publishing her first play, Gutenberg, in 1869, much before the investments of her husband.

The translation of Gutenberg and its circulation in Brazil

Also significant was that this original publication by Madame Figuier, originally released in 1869, would be translated in Brazil in 1877 by a printer called Josino Chaves. Irrespective of the failure of Louis Figuier’s project to disseminate science through the theater, the scientific imagination which animated him was present in various cultural productions of the period, crossing countries and oceans. Some newspapers in Brazil had reported on the shows which Louis Figuier had staged in Europe, such as Diário do Brasil and O Globo, which reported, for example, the staging of Denis Papin in Gaité theater, with special effects including steam, firebombs, and explosions.¹⁷Gazeta da Tarde reported in 1888 the staging of Les Six Parties du Monde (Figuier, n.d.), translated as Sexta parte do mundo (Sixth Part of this World), by a company called Recreio in Trindade theater in Lisbon.

The reporting on the publication of Gutenberg in Brazilian newspaper indicates that Madame Figuier was not known to readers, unlike the popularizer Louis Figuier, as can be seen in this report from Diário do Rio de Janeiro:

A women writer who signed her work with the name of someone famous in European science, Mrs. Louis Figuier, taking inspiration from the eventful life of the immortal inventor of the printing press, wrote a historic drama about him in five acts, which she called Gutenberg. (...) Sr. Josino Chaves, with the purpose of popularizing Gutenberg by Mrs. Louis Figuier, has translated this into our language and has just pub lished it.¹⁸

Since the name Mme. Louis Figuier was actually a “mask” which did not fully reveal the author (Narayana, 2011), her identification was due to the famous name of Louis. O Globo presented the new publication in Portuguese with a jocular note, joking about the gender of the author’s name, putting the name of the translator into the feminine, as can be seen in the following citation:

Gutemberg is the title of a historical drama in five acts, originally by Mme. Louise Figuier which was translated into our language by Sra. Josina Chaves. The author states that among all the physiognomic copies of the history of men, she found Gutenberg marvelous, not only having changed the order of modern society, but also because the life of the famous inventor was in addition to this fertile in adventures of all kinds. This book was printed on the press of Srs. Brown & Evaristo.¹⁹

Unless I am mistaken, the journalists must have considered that it was funny to present the translator of the play Josino Chaves as a woman, as Senhora (Mrs.) Josina Chaves, imitating the case of the author, whom supposedly being a man became Louise Figuier.

There are no reports showing that the play was staged in Brazil. However, it is possible to emphasize some meanings in its translation, as well as the actions of Madame Figuier as an intellectual mediator.

Some appropriations and the circulation of Gutenberg are visible, as in O Heroe newspaper, which evokes Madame Figuier’s text on the history of the press emphasizing the entrance of the most humble people into the narrative on the progress of science:

If only masters were allowed to complete everything, there would not have been accentuated in this history the fact of so many and so sublime productions which have also emerged in a less cultivated center of instruction and which now compose the proletariat of all nations; and in the case of being necessary to present a fact, we have in history a Gutenberg, who emerged from the center of the proletariat to throw to civilization the universal book of the teaching and confraternization of peoples - the printing press.²⁰

The nexus between the narrative of science and technology is explained in the example of the invention of the printing press, which democratized knowledge, with it being a condition of this knowledge. Citing Madame Figuier, the article adds: “[the printing press] has the power to express all opinions; feelings different and contrary to the human conscience”. The article in O Heroe written by Guilherme Vasques takes from Juliette Figuier’s play the valuation of the “artistic” craft, based on the image of the humble print worker, and her anxiousness for knowledge and education.

The biographers of inventor heroes gained an impulse through their symbolic nature, often representative of different social groups. Gutenberg was thus a symbol of printers, typesetters, journalists, and also the nascent industrial science as one of the personifications of the “inventor”. “Children of Gutenberg”, as those who worked with words and their printing proclaimed themselves, created in the main state capitals of Brazil various publications in defense of their profession and subjects such as popular education, above all from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. As Tania de Luca highlights, the category, which incorporated trades such as compositor, paginator, and typographic printer, was present in the public space through newspapers defending this group of workers (Luca, 2020). In a moment of the growth of associativism of this category, the invocation of the father or inventor of printing seemed to be everywhere.²¹ The publications of associations of professionals and mutualist societies (Batalha, 2010) represent the interests of craftsmen and workers, and a conception of work integrated with the dictates of modernization. Some of these publications deal with themes of practical and industrial science as a legitimating, educational, and moralizing instrument for their categories. Scientific teaching is discussed in them and in their pages can be found various articles about scientific popularization. As Tania de Luca states, printers formed one of the first professional categories to gain expression and to seek representation in the public sphere (Luca, 2020). Without wanting to homogenize this printed material, it is interesting to observe that many evoke Gutenberg, both in titles and articles.

This political appropriation of history of the printing press is present in various newspapers of printer associations which defended in their pages the raising of awareness of their workers through education. Madame Figuier’s text on Gutenberg returns to the repertoire of narratives about the history of the invention of the printing press, which is strongly incorporated in the history of science in the nineteenth century, above all in the dissemination of science. The valorization of the inventor composes the discourse on science that was part of the “industrialist acclimatization of groups of workers, and constituted a form of ideological pacification” (Carnino, 2015, p. 210). Gutenberg’s supposed humble origin endorsed this discourse, also mobilized in the Brazilian press by professional categories, such as the translator of Gutenberg.

Final considerations

In a somewhat torturous manner, the trajectory of the Gutenberg play reveals how oscillations and fragilities were interposed in Juliette Figuier’s authorial affirmation, impacting on actual knowledge of her.

Her play was situated like a good part of scientific popularization productions, between an exalting vision of science and the more humble trades, valuing “science for all”, and the emptying of contestation, thereby supplying only restricted access of the public to the sciences themselves. The failure of the scientific theater plays among the public, as mentioned by authors who have looked at the theme (Cardot, 1989; Vautrin, 2018), was due to their moralizing nature, detached from scientific knowledge itself. However, at the same time, the mixed genre to which Madame Figuier’s plays belonged negotiated in the discourse about science the “amusing” and the pleasant which dramatization allowed. Madame Figuier’s plays explored the anecdotal side of the life of scientists, those aspects which were most easily linked to the expressiveness of the “popular” about the sciences. Through these, she was able to highlight the female presence, which became more diluted under the pen of Louis Figuier. These are the characteristics of a mediation carried out by Juliette Figuier.

Its translation and some appropriate readings which circulated in the Brazilian newspapers showed that these ideas of the myth of the hero gained repercussion for some social segments of the new “scientific” era. With her pen, Juliette Figuier helped to weave, in the aisles of science, the actual scientific myth of the savant inventor which was strengthened in the pedagogical discourses on science and in the professionalization process which came to dominate the following century.

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• 1
  Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, such as Arabella Buckley, secretary of Charles Lyell, the suffragette Lydia Becker, and Anne Pratt amongst others in England, as shown by Bernard Lightman (2007).
• 2
  For some decades, researchers have been bringing to light the writing of various women in the French speaking cultural space, in a movement which has sought to recuperate their agency and participation in cultural and scientific life. More recently, Rosselo-Rochet (2017) in a survey of women in French dramaturgy, highlights a set of 345 women playwrights in the ninth century, 36 of whom had more than five plays in the theaters. Among these was Juliette Figuier with 12 published plays.
• 3
  Birth certificate of Louise Juliette Bouscaren. Archives Départamentales d’Hérault, 5MI 1:74, n.122. Available at: https://archives-pierresvives.herault.fr/ark:/37279/vta557bad2a09168/daogrp/0/35. Last accessed: Oct. 21, 2020.
• 4
  No author, 1892. “L’auteur de ‘Savant de Pyrénées’, M^me Louis Figuier.” In: Le savant des Pyrénées, Juliette Figuier (1892).
• 5
  She became a member of the Société de Gens de Lettres in 1859. Bulletin de la Société des Gens de Lettres, 14^th year, n. 3, March 1859.
• 6
  Le Progrès de la Côte-d’Or, Dec. 2, 1894, p. 9-12.
• 7
  Letter from Madame L. Figuier à George Sand, Feb. 6, 1859 (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Paris).
• 8
  She explains this as follows: “I should pay homage to the courtesy of Mr. Eduardo Founier, who had the gentleness of not wanting to read his Gutenberg to the director of Odéon before the latter had given his opinion on the play I had written. Days after my Gutenberg was returned to me, the newspapers announced that Odéon Theater had received Gutenberg from Mr. Eduardo Fournier. Due to this position, I took it on myself to print my drama before Mr. Eduardo Fournier’s was enacted on stage. From this explanation it must be understood that I did not borrow from any one either the subject or the conception of my play.” “Prologue” (Figuier, 1869, p. II).
• 9
  As Fournier stated in his preface “Madame Louis Figuier, who is a valuable novelist, could not always live with so much knowledge without the desire to put a part in a novel, a legend, or a drama” (Fournier, 1869, p. V).
• 10
  Works which have sought to survey the participation of women in playwriting are much more recent. According to Finch (2000), around of a quarter of the 700 plays encountered were written in co-authorship. See also the survey made more recently by Rosselo-Rochet (2017).
• 11
  Edmond Croset. La Presse, Aug. 22, 1869.
• 12
  “Madame Figuier threw herself into the work of the theater with ardor and it would only take a happy coincidence for the dramatic production to see the light of the ramp on one of our Parisian stages.” Correspondence of Louis and Juliette Figuier to G. Sand, Paris, Aug. 25, 1871 (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Paris).
• 13
  “I wish I could tell you the name of the author of the play which has just been performed before you, but I assure you that I do not know. I thank you for having favorably received the work, while waiting for me to let you know the name of the author” Figuier (1872, p. I).
• 14
  “In our city of Mainz, titles of nobility are less a heritage of ancestors than a testimony of personal merit, and we are the children of a modest artist, who knew how, by his talents and his exemplary life, to rise to the rank of patrician.” Mme. Louis Figuier (1869, p. 8).
• 15
  Louis Figuier certifies that Frielo was the name of Gutenberg’s father. Cf. Louis Figuier (1867, p. 311).
• 16
  Léon Duprat, Revue Théâtrale. La Presse, Apr. 27, 1879, p. 1.
• 17
  Diário do Brasil states: “A French scholar, well known in this city for his works of scientific dissemination, Mr. Luiz Figuier, proposed to put on, in one of the theaters of Paris, shows of scientific plays. The first play announced is Denis Papin, whose hero is the inventor of the famous steam digester which demonstrates the motive strength of steam. However, many French do not believe in the adaptation of scientific problems for the stage, or were incredulous, or made fun of the new project of the scientific popularization theater.” Diário do Brazil, Dec. 17, 1882, p. 4. The report in O Globo is from June 7, 1882.
• 18
  Diário do Rio de Janeiro, n. 194, July 20, 1877.
• 19
  O Globo, July 19, 1877, p. 2.
• 20
  O Heroe, Sept. 15, 1880, p. 4.
• 21
  To a certain extent, we can indicate this figure of the “father” as tributary to the process which was studied by Jean-Claude Bonnet in the creation of the national pantheon. According to Bonnet, the importance of the paternal image - crystallization around this image - recurrently used in Enlightenment thought is ambivalent, since it dealt with on the one hand a contestation and resumption of the figure of the principal father, the king; and on the other, the appropriation which would multiply and theatricalize this image (Bonnet, 1998, p. 19).

• **
  This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (Capes) - Funding Code 001. I would like to give posthumous thanks to Professor Dominique Kalifa, who received me as a visiting professor while carried out the research presented in this article. I would also like to thank Patrice Bret, Anne Rasmussen, and Kapil Raj for their kind welcome during the same period.
• 25
  Translated by Eoin O’Neill

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 July 2023
• Date of issue
  May-Aug 2023

History

• Received
  16 Sept 2022
• Accepted
  30 Jan 2023