Intellectual Philanthropy

The Seduction of the Masses

Aurélie Vialette

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781557538239
• eBook ISBN: 9781612495460
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What's in a nineteenth-century philanthropist? Fear of an uprising. But the frightened philanthropist has a remedy. Aware that the urban surge of the working-class masses in Spain would create a state of emergency, he or she devises a means to seduce the masses away from rebellion by taking on himself or herself the role of the seducer: the capitalist intellectual hero invested in the caretaking of the unpredictable working class. Intellectual Philanthropy examines cultural practices used by philanthropists in modern Iberia. It explains the meaning and role of intellectual philanthropy by focusing on the devices and apparatuses philanthropists devised to realize their projects. Intellectual philanthropists considered themselves activists in that they aimed to impact social structures and deployed a rhetoric of the affect to convince the workers to join their philanthropic enterprise.

Philanthropy, in the nineteenth century, was not necessarily linked to money. Motivations could be moral or political; they could arise from a desire to enhance social status or to acquire influence. To explicitly designate this conceptualization of the philanthropic act, the author proposes its own name: intellectual philanthropy. Intellectual philanthropy is the use of philanthropic platforms by intellectuals to deploy cultural and educational structures in which workers could acquire a cultural capital constructed and organized by the philanthropists. Vialette argues that intellectual philanthropy appeared as a reaction to the feared political and cultural organization of the working class, rather than as a process of worker emancipation.

These philanthropic processes aimed at organizing the ­workers emotionally and rationally into what she calls micro-societies. Philanthropists used the technique of seduction and expressed love to and for a targeted class. However, this seduction prevented real communication, and created a moral and symbolic indebtedness. This process was perverse in that, through its cultural and educational structures, philanthropy would give workers cultural capital that was not just emancipatory, but also a way to restrict their agency.

Part One

Staging Philanthropy

Chapter One

Musical Philanthropy

The Working-Class Spectacle

Per aquest instint que té la multitut de posarse a fer tota plegada lo que ha vist fer a un home sol.

Due to the instinct proper to the multitude to imitate in mass what they saw done in a single man alone.

Raymon Casellas, Les multituts

Music and Revolution

There is an elective affinity between music and revolution. The most eloquent example of this affinity might be La Marseillaise, which had an impact from the very moment Rouget de Lisle conceived it on a revolutionary spring night in 1792.¹ La Marseillaise had a crucial influence on Catalan social leaders and composers starting in the nineteenth century, from Nicolau Manent, the composer of Lo cant de la Marsellesa (1877), to Josep Anselm Clavé and Ignasi Iglésias i Pujadas.² Clavé adapted the music for his version of the revolutionary song, translated the text into Catalan, and dedicated his adaptation to Abdò Terrades, who has been called “primer apostol de la democracia catalana” (the “first apostle of the Catalan democracy”).³ The piece Clavé adapted was performed for the first time on 1 October 1871. The year, here, is not inconsequential: it was the year of the Paris Commune. In addition, the spring night on which Rouget de Lisle wrote his famous song opened up a global horizon of social hope suited to the spring season: the Commune, which for Karl Marx was the very first autonomous proletarian insurrection, took place in the spring, just like many popular uprisings, such as the 1868 revolution in Spain, the Catalan anarchists’ uprisings at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Czech Prague Spring of 1968, the Spanish uprising on 15 May 2011 (the “Indignados movement”), the Arab Spring that same year, and the “Nuit debout” in France on 31 March 2016. If there is an affinity between music and revolution, it is not independent from the affinity between revolution and springtime. Revolution is renovation.

Actions taking place in the spring possess the symbolism of renewal, which was very much understood in Catalonia in the nineteenth century and was at the core of many cultural activities. The Jocs Florals were literary contests that promoted and disseminated the Catalan language and that were based on a linguistic and literary discourse of renovation of culture; they, not to mention a number of musical festivals, took place in the spring along with the renewal of nature.⁴ Les flors de maig (“The Flowers of May,” 1858), for example, became an emblematic song in Catalonia.⁵ Spring appears as a fleeting instant auspicious for renewal, rebirth, and change.

Music, revolution, and spring seem to be three intertwined elements. This was asserted by one of the most important music theorists, Igor Stravinsky, who had composed the then considered revolutionary Rite of Spring that triggered a riot during its première on 29 May 1913. In his Poetics of Music, a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1939–40, Stravinsky offers a platform for thinking about the relationship between music and revolution. He affirms that art, and in particular music, is opposed to revolution because it is in essence opposed to chaos and to the interruption of equilibrium that is implied in any revolutionary act: “If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established convention would be known as revolutionary” (10–11). The composer discusses the revolutionary aspects that a piece of music can have, especially in reference to one of his own works that carries the stamp of the revolutionary season, The Rite of Spring: “The quality of being revolutionary is generally attributed to artists in our day with a laudatory intent, undoubtedly because we are living in a period when revolution enjoys a kind of prestige among yesterday’s elite … For revolution is one thing, innovation another” (11–13). In his text, Stravinsky emphasizes the fact that we tend to confuse revolution with novelty in language or with structures that rupture pre-established cultural codes. For this reason, it is extremely difficult to establish the revolutionary character of a work of music. For as Stravinsky explains, musical creativity consists of the creation of a language that always intends to establish new codes and to renew traditions. But innovation is not, he says, synonymous with revolution, and a work of music cannot be analyzed only according to the historical events that occurred at the time it was created. It is possible to argue that for Stravinsky, music is harmony, and revolution is cacophony. In fact, while revolution implies a series of noises, that is, a cacophony, music for him—even the most avant-garde music of his time—always has to be connected to harmony, a vast concept that includes not only musical language, but also the environment that materializes the work.

The association between music, revolution, and spring was very much present in nineteenth-century Catalonia, especially because of one particular musical practice, considered at that time a possible interruption of the status quo and an open door to future revolutionary praxis: the Cors de Clavé. The Cors put on stage hundreds and sometimes thousands of illiterate workers, singing in unison, which was an absolutely innovative cultural practice, one that ruptured pre-established cultural codes. The most important musical encounters were the festivals, many of which took place in spring.⁶ But, as Stravinsky insisted, innovation and revolution should not be thought of as synonyms. In this particular case, the usual connection of the working class with revolution created an analogy that also associated the singing working class with revolution when, I contend, it was all but the opposite.

In this chapter, I focus on one of the most eloquent enactments of the displacement of the working-class revolutionary act in nineteenth-century Catalonia: the creation of the workers’ choral groups, the Cors de Clavé, founded in 1845 by the ex-worker, philanthropist, and politician Josep Anselm Clavé. I interpret the Cors de Clavé as a project that intended to create musical harmony through philanthropy in the midst of the revolutionary nineteenth-century Catalan working-class environment. I argue that this project was an attempt to create social harmony in a society in which a number of issues were triggering fear of a working-class rebellion: chief among them the revolutionary movement initiated in 1843, the 1855 general strike in Catalonia, the prohibition of syndicalism by the Spanish government at different moments during the century, the Gloriosa Revolution in 1868 and the influence of republican ideas on the workers.⁷ I would like to introduce the notion of musical philanthropy to talk about one philanthropic practice that acknowledging the affinity between music and revolution vies for the masses’ dissolution by staging the workers. It is philanthropic in three senses: it involves its own political economy, it demonstrates a drive to further the most disfavored in bourgeois society, and it articulates the intellectual and material means to do so. Staging here means that the workers appeared on scene as themselves in musical productions that occurred every weekend in many cities in Catalonia and beyond. But at the same time, it also includes the idea of having the workers perform as subjects of the industry, which implies a theatricality and the creation of a symbolic stage in which the spectacle of the harmonious working class as a whole was enacted—a rather complementary and yet different angle on what Rancière has called an industrial harmony (Staging 209).

Musical philanthropy staged the workers to create an apparent social harmony. This social harmony was made possible through a specific medium, the stage, and a specific cultural activity—music. To demonstrate this idea, I will concentrate on the staging of the male Catalan working class in the second half of the nineteenth century. My analysis proves that staging the workers aimed at controlling and displacing the revolutionary act. I show that turning the working class into a spectacle through philanthropy created an illusion of cultural equality that, in fact, was a fetishization of the workers as cultural subjects. This sort of staging is an enabling fiction (Rita Felski) that allowed the creation of an entrance for the workers into the public sphere, suspending, by means of the theater stand, “the material inequalities and the political antagonisms between the participants” (Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics 168).

Staging the Workers through Philanthropy: The Cors de Clavé

The choruses of industrial workers were gathered by Clavé as a solution to the supposed lack of morality in the industrial Catalan working class. According to Clavé’s assertion published in 1863 in El Metrónomo, his concern was one shared by many of his fellow philanthropists: reforming and raising the moral standards of the workers. Music, for him, was a solution for the organization of the working class’s daily life, in particular for its leisure time, and permitted the workers to avoid that “vagando desalado[s] en busca de distracciones gratas á su limitada inteligencia, á su corazon enfermo, se [encenegaran] en torpes vicios … [dando] ya el primer paso en la senda de su perdicion” (Clavé, “Historia II” 2). Clavé’s language indicates that he considered the workers of “limited intelligence” and “sick heart.” Music was, therefore, both an intellectual and moral remedy to pacify what was perceived as the “natural” character of the workers. He presented his project in the following terms:

Vencidos por completo los infinitos obstáculos con que una injusta prevención dificultó por largos años mi aspiracion mas halagüeña y evidenciado el fin moral que me impulsó á la creacion de la PRIMERA SOCIEDAD CORAL DE ESPAÑA … poderoso elemento de moralidad y de progreso para los hijos del trabajo … por el íntimo convencimiento de cuánto contribuye el bello arte de la música á morigerar las costumbres, cultivar la inteligencia, elevar los sentimientos y ennoblecer el espíritu de los modestos hijos de los campos y talleres. (Clavé, “Fundación” 1–2)

Clavé’s project consisted of creating a concrete musical practice, choral music for the workers, that would simultaneously promote both the workers’ education (through literacy classes, collective readings, etc.) and the gathering of the city’s inhabitants around the performance of and listening to music. The composer transformed the significance of musical or theatrical representations by staging performances on a weekly basis in the streets and public parks of Barcelona, which allotted various physical spaces to music across the city. Through the practice of music, these workers gained access to several urban spaces, in which they achieved a visible presence in the Iberian cultural panorama. I explain throughout this chapter that this situation encompassed a restaging of the streets, the parks, and the theaters—spaces through which the composer tried to rework social and cultural divisions. The practice of music was a way to construct a new urban space and occupy it with the working masses. In those urban spaces, artistic production and practice were actually the performance of the working class’s participation in the city’s cultural life. Likewise, in those same spaces, through music, the group of workers would gain both a way to interact in the public sphere and an eventual socio-cultural integration.

A study of nineteenth-century newspapers shows both the growing importance of this practice for the critics, and the interest that the chorus members aroused in the rest of society.⁸ The public was eager to know how a former worker (Clavé) could direct a group of uneducated workers in these kinds of musical activities and was curious to ascertain the success of the performances.⁹ In fact, instead of doing what many intellectuals did at that time—that is, writing for and about the working class but ignoring their habits and form of coexistence—Clavé invented concrete and practical forms of communication with the masses. The composer was trying to rework social divisions through the practice of music and “tenia una voluntat socialment integradora que responia a uns ideals de fraternitat i humanisme, de llibertat i indiscriminació” (“it had a social intention of integration that corresponded to some ideals of fraternity and humanism”; Carbonell i Guberna, Josep Anselm Clavé 107).

Industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe meant a growing presence of the working-class multitudes in urban spaces, a presence considered a visual and physical nuisance as well as a possible revolutionary threat, given that these multitudes occupied the space in a disorganized collective way. This presence of the workers in spaces which were closely related to the spaces traditionally reserved for the elite and their apparatuses of power was perceived as a contamination. The objective was, if not to block their access to urban spaces, at least to control their radius of action. The choral associations of the workers in Catalonia were created at this unique moment in history, and were specifically designed for the Catalan industrial workers, the cornerstones of the new industrial society.

In this context, what kind of response is musical philanthropy and its collective practice by the industrial workers in the public sphere? What are the roles of urban spaces in the realization of this practice? The study of the Catalan working class’s musical philanthropic phenomenon and its historicization demonstrates that the establishment of musical spaces for the workers is crucial to an understanding of social tensions and the formation of new collectives. Instead of operating from the exclusion of the political and the cultural, the formation of these collectives functions from a dynamic that reassembles the social in the sense coined by Bruno Latour, that is, a process through which the actions of individuals are not the product of an individual conscience but constitute a network of agents that allow the production of collectivities (7–16). The workers’ choral movement redefined cultural practices and, in its realization, permitted a production of the social. Latour explains that the social is not an established domain but a movement of reassembling, of re-association (7). This movement is what permits the engendering of collectivities. The actions of individuals constitute nodes, conglomerates, that are part of a series of agencies that we have to untangle (44). But how is the social reassembled into a collectivity in the Cors de Clavé? Staging the workers and transforming the working class into a spectacle created a dynamic that was presented as the production and establishment of a peaceful collectivity and, consequently, as the production of a possible social harmony.

Clavé’s musical practice reassembled the social in a revolutionary way because it regularly occupied specific urban spaces (plazas, public parks) with choruses of workers and gathered masses of people around the activities of dancing and listening to music. The bailes coreados, one of his inventions that had unprecedented success, are an example of how he tried to bring the public literally together with singers in one act; this act consisted of attracting and talking to the audience outside of the spaces traditionally assigned to popular and classical concerts.¹⁰ The public was not only watching or listening but also actively participating through dancing. In addition, the bailes coreados took place in an open space, creating conflicts with the government of Barcelona at the time. In fact, the choral association was fined, and the concerts were prohibited or censored many times. In 1853, the mayor of Barcelona tried to stop the Choruses’ activities by insisting that the role of the workers was to work in the factories and not sing or dance. He taxed Clavé 19% of the concerts’ revenues and demanded that he pay for lighting the Passeig de Gràcia because, he argued, it would provide security for the public on their way to the concerts. In addition, despite the fact that the composer rented the venues in which the concerts took place, the authorities pressured the owners to cancel them—which occurred many times at the very beginning because everyone was afraid of the possibility of this massive gathering of workers’ turning into a protest.

The Campos Elíseos, for example, were located between Barcelona and Gracia (still a village at that time), and not in the center of the city where all the theaters were.¹¹ The performances organized there constituted a redefinition of the musical space because it was the locus for a new musical practice, a new genre (the workers’ music) and the subsequent constitution of a new public. This was the basis of the establishment of an innovative cultural ritual in a dynamic urban space. The Campos was the space in which was projected a peaceful image of the working class: the musical space in itself redefined the relationship between workers and society by fostering the civility of cultural exchange.

This was a space very much in opposition with the traditional theaters in Spain. A theater, such as the Liceu in Barcelona or the Zarzuela in Madrid, where the choruses performed, was only used as a theater. In Madrid for example, the workers were eager consumers of theater. In some of them, such as the Apolo, social classes could mix during the afternoon shows, but were separated at night by the price per class of seat they had paid for to enter (Salaün, El cuplé 43–45). Conversely, in the Campos Elíseos, people shared space and time in a more democratic way because, once the entrance fee was paid, the public could move about freely and dance throughout the entire area. Roberto Goycoolea Prado explains that “en los parques de las ciudades centroeuropeas … el público podía deambular alrededor de la orqu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Intellectual Philanthropists and their Weapons of Mass Seduction
• Part One: Staging Philanthropy
• Part Two: Bibliophilanthropy
• Part Three: Philanthropy and the Female Working Class
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Book
• About the Author