Читать книгу The Art of the Shoe - Marie-Josèphe Bossan - Страница 19

At the beginning of the 18th-century, France still held sway over the world of elegance.

From the Regency to the French Revolution (1715–1789), there was little variation in shoe shapes. The toe could be round or pointed and was sometimes raised, but never square. A heel was named after Louis XV le Bien-Aimé (1710–1774). Elegant ladies favored two different styles: the mule for indoors and high-heeled shoes for more formal outfits. Mules with heels of variable height had uppers of white leather, velvet, or silk, which was usually embroidered. Many models of mules and shoes are depicted in the work of the period’s artists, including the prints of Beaudoin and Moreau le Jeune and the paintings of Quentin de Latour, Boucher, Gainsborough, and Hogarth, among others. Fragonard’s The Swing shows a mischievous young woman in a wind-swept skirt carried high by her swinging, which sends her pink mule towards the nose of her suitor stretched out among the branches beneath the lovely creature.

The curved lines of the Louis XV style are also recognizable in the period’s heeled shoes, which now attain their maximum height. The curved heel, positioned under the arch of the foot, served as a shank and stabilized the shoe’s balance, although walking in them remained precarious – like walking in Venetian chopines during the Renaissance. To overcome this drawback, fashionable women began using canes in 1786, as the Count de Vaublanc noted in his memoirs: “If she wasn’t holding her weight back with a cane, the doll would fall on her nose.”

The pinnacle of 18th-century refinement would come to be nestled in diamond-encrusted heels, which in this instance were referred to as venez-y voir (take a look), although the coquetry was secret, due to the fact that dresses almost touched the floor. Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806), whose glorification of the feminine foot and shoe is well known, is clearly referring to the shoe in the following description:

“It was a shoe of mother-of-pearl with a flower made of diamonds: the edges were trimmed in diamonds, as was the heel, which was quite slender in spite of this ornament. This pair of shoes cost two thousand écus, not counting the diamonds in the flower, which were worth three or four times this amount: it was a gift from Saintepallaire” (The Pretty Foot, p. 240). These enchanting shoes were of white embroidered leather or precious silks to match dresses and were finished with a buckle that could be changed for each outfit. As in the previous century, polished silver buckles, decorated with glass gems or precious stones, were stored in jewelry boxes and passed down through inheritance. Women continued to protect their shoes when going out by wearing the wooden pattens, which were now secured with two leather straps fastened to the top of the foot; the sole was fitted with a notch for the heel. 18th-century France experienced a passion for the East, as evidenced in historical, economic, and cultural contexts. In the context of footwear, the taste for the exotic led to a craze for pointed shoes with raised toes, variously referred to as shoes à la turque (Turkish) en sabot chinois (Chinese), or à l’orientale (Eastern).

Men wore simple, flat-heeled shoes embellished with a buckle. Made of dark-coloured or black leather, these shoes emphasized the light-coloured stockings men wore with silk pants. Certain shoes of this type made of silk or velvet to match men’s doublets enjoyed great popularity. A taste for imported English boots (and many other English fashion details) was revived around 1779. A new type of soft leather boot with cuffs to be worn with hunting outfits and court uniforms began to gain popularity during the last twenty years of the 18th-century and would remain common until the 19th century.

56. William Hogarth. Mariage à la Mode. After the Marriage, 1734–1735. Oil on canvas. 70 x 91 cm. National Gallery, London.

57. Fragonard. The Swing. Oil on canvas. 81 x 64.2 cm. Wallace Collection, London.

58. Woman’s shoe. Louis XV period, France, 18th century. Silver buckle accentuated with stones from the Rhine. International Shoe Museum, Romans.

59. Woman’s shoe, toe upturned in the eastern style. Louis XV period, France, 18th century. International Shoe Museum, Romans.

60. Woman’s shoes. Louis XV period. Jacquemart Collection, International Shoe Museum, Romans.

61. Man’s shoe buckle and its original case. 18th century.

The return to greater simplicity and to straight lines preferred during Louis XVI’s reign had its counterpart in footwear. For example, the buckle on men’s shoes assumed greater prominence and women’s heels became shorter. Additionally, women’s heels were sheathed in white leather, while their shoe buckles were usually superceded by an ornament made of gathered fabric called a bouillonné, which was placed on the shoe’s upper and matched the dress.

Shoemakers had stopped making shoes differentiated for the left and right foot during the Renaissance, but the practice made a limited comeback at the end of 18th century. By the second half of the 19th century it would become a standard manufacturing technique as shoemaking was industrialized.

In the years before the French Revolution, shoemakers managed thriving shops. The writer Sébastien Mercier records that, “in their black outfit and powdered wig, they look like Clerks of the Court.” But when the Revolution came, shoemakers sympathized with the spirit of the new era: seventy-seven shoemakers participated in the storming of the Bastille.

In Arras, Robespierre drafted the shoe repairmen’s official grievances, while in Vierzon, an appointee to the Public Safety Committee wrote to representative Laplance in September 1793 that he had replaced the court “made up of old wigged heads” and appointed a shoemaker to it. When the revolutionary Saint Just saw that ten thousand soldiers in the Rhine army were going barefoot, he ordered the city of Strasbourg to remove the shoes of ten thousand aristocrats with instructions to deliver the shoes to the soldiers before ten o’clock the next morning. To avoid the guillotine, everything reminiscent of aristocratic luxury had to be eliminated, making way for a simpler, but still elegant style. Even shoes sported a revolutionary cockade, the symbol of the new patriotic religion. Men dared not wear fine shoes with buckles out of fear of being labeled an aristocrat, although Robespierre himself risked wearing them. The masses generally wore clogs.

It was at this time that Antoine Simon was working as an obscure shoemaker on the rue des Cordeliers in Paris. A Jacobin and later a member of the Paris Commune, he was chosen by the Convention to look after the young dauphin in the Temple after the child was separated from his mother, Queen Marie-Antoinette, on July 3, 1793. Himself an illiterate, the new tutor to the Capet son had orders to make the child forget his social status. And with the help of his wife, the shoemaker succeeded in transforming the child into a perfect little sans-culotte, teaching his nine-year-old pupil a repertoire of invectives against God, his family, and the aristocracy, as well as revolutionary songs, such as “ça ira, ça ira” and “la Carmagnole.”

Unlike the tormenter he is often depicted as, the coarse, uneducated shoemaker grew fond of little Louis XVII, as did Madame Simon. To amuse the child, Simon bought him a dog named Caster, followed by birds that he set up in a large aviary with seventeen bars where the child raised pigeons, a fact affirmed by the Temple’s own accounts, which record the purchase of feed for the young Capet’s pigeon. But in January 1794, by order of the Committee for Public Safety, Simon was relieved of his duties. It was against his will and against the will of the child, who begged the shoemaker to take him away and teach him how to make shoes. Alas, Simon the shoemaker was guillotined after 9 thermidor (the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794).

From 1795 to 1799, footwear under the Directory began to evolve into the early neo-classical style favored by Napoleon I. The light, flat, and pointed new style, for both men and women, confirmed the end of the former regime’s heel. The most elegant and striking women of this period, known as les merveilleuses, wore sandals equipped with ribbons which they wore intertwined around their legs.

62. Embroided mules. France, early 18th century.

63. Woman’s shoe. England, 18th century. International Shoe Museum, Romans.

64. Carved, lacquered and painted wooden clogs. Louis XVI period, France, 18th century. International Shoe Museum, Romans.

65. Plates from Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclodedia.

66. Woman’s mule. France, around 1789. Guillen Collection, International Shoe Museum, Romans.

67. Cruikshank. “Shoeing Asses”. International Shoe Museum, Romans.

68. Emperor’s boots. Private collection.

69. Flat court shoes of Napoleon I for his coronation in 1804. Lost during World War II.