10 
Germany declared war on France on August 3, 1914. Most French citizens were elated, feeling that at last they would take revenge for the humiliation inflicted by Germany in 1870. Misia Sert, the wife of a newspaper publisher, who was famous for her Paris salon, recalled thinking, “What luck! Oh God, let there be a war,” 1 when she first heard that Austria had declared war on Serbia six days before. Now, with her wish granted, she took part in the celebration that swept the streets of Paris:
On the grands boulevards, in the midst of a rapturously enthusiastic crowd, I suddenly found myself perched on a white horse behind a cavalry officer. I wound some flowers around the neck of his gala uniform, and the general exaltation was so great that not for a moment did I think it strange. Nor were the officer, the horse, or the crowd around us in any way astonished, for the same sight could be seen all over Paris. Flowers were being sold at every street corner: wreaths, sheaves, bouquets, and loose bunches, which a minute later reappeared on soldiers’ caps, on the tips of their bayonets, or behind their ears. People fell into one another’s arms; it did not matter who embraced you; you wept, you laughed, you were crushed, you were moved to tears, you were almost suffocated, you sang, you trampled other people’s feet, and you felt that you had never been more generous, more noble, more prepared for sacrifice and, in short, more wonderfully happy!” 2
Within a month’s time, the mood had changed drastically. With astonishing speed, German troops had swept through neutral Belgium and into France. By August 26, they had reached the Marne, and an advance cavalry unit captured the racecourse at Chantilly, a few miles north of Paris. From the top of the Eiffel Tower, people could see the distant German units approaching. Refugees from the countryside poured into the city, and their presence added to the growing panic. On September 2, the government abandoned the capital to relocate in Bordeaux. Among the valuables taken along was the Mona Lisa, on its second major journey in two years.
General Joseph Gallieni, commander of the French forces, resolved to defend Paris. A map found on the body of a German cavalry officer revealed the enemy’s plan, and Gallieni organized his forces to hit the German flank. He commandeered the Parisian taxi fleet to transport his troops to the front, and thousands of cabs appeared to accomplish the enormous task of moving an army, in what was called “the miracle of the Marne.” The Germans fell back, and Paris was never again threatened.
The war, however, dragged on for four years, ultimately resulting in the deaths of eight and a half million soldiers and another twenty million wounded. An uncounted number of civilians died from disease, starvation, and other war-related causes. France alone lost one and a half million men in battle and its aftermath. The war dwarfed any crime, indeed any previous war. It destroyed a generation of young men and brought to an end the optimistic era known in France as “La Belle Époque.”
Among the technological advancements that made this war so terrible was the airplane. Used at first to scout enemy forces, planes then began to carry bombs. (Initially, bombs were merely dropped by pilots from open cockpits.) To counter attacks and observation from the air, military planners started to conceal potential targets with cloth. Later, special paint designs, called camouflage, were used. Naval warfare was affected by the widespread use of submarines that were equipped with periscopes to spot their targets. Ships were painted with geometric patterns in varying colors to create confusion about their size and direction of travel. The French officer credited with inventing camouflage, Guirand de Scevola, explained his inspiration: “In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to represent them.” 3
i
The year 1914 also saw France lose its most prominent criminologist. For more than a year, Alphonse Bertillon had suffered from pernicious anemia, which his doctors told him would be fatal. He felt a chronic chill and stayed in a single room where he kept a stove burning day and night. Fatigue dogged him, and his vision began to fail.
Bertillon worried continually that his identification system would die with him. The news that countries around the world were replacing bertillonage with fingerprinting gnawed at his spirit and pride. The Argentine criminologist Juan Vucetich, who was the leading exponent of fingerprinting, had cruelly declared, “I can assure you that in all the years during which we applied the anthropometric system, in spite of all our care, we were unable to prove the identity of a single person by measurements.” 4 Later, when Vucetich came to Paris and tried to visit Bertillon, Bertillon kept him waiting for hours in the anteroom of his office, only to open the door, ignore Vucetich’s outstretched hand, and declare, “Sir, you have tried to do me a great deal of harm.” 5 He then slammed the door, and that was all Vucetich saw of Bertillon.
Aware that Bertillon was dying, the French government wished to honor his achievements. He had already received the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor for his work, but he desired the rosette of the Legion, which signified a higher distinction. The government offered the rosette on one condition: Bertillon had to acknowledge his error regarding the handwriting analysis of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, now reinstated as an officer. Bertillon is said to have shouted from the bed where he spent his final days: “No! Never! Never!” 6
Bertillon died on February 13, 1914. In his will he ordered that his brain be donated to the Laboratory of Anthropology. Afterward, his wife burned all the letters that he had exchanged with the mysterious Swedish woman with whom he had carried on a love affair years before. In doing so, she ensured that her husband, who had been known for his abhorrence of publicity, would retain his privacy even in death.
Though bertillonage was abandoned soon afterward, it has been revived in a different form today. Computer programs have been devised to analyze faces and to compare them with those of known criminals. Called biometrics, this system was used in Massachusetts in 2006 to scan some nine million driver’s license photographs to locate a man wanted on rape charges.
Biometrics relies on the distinctive characteristics of what are called the nodal points of faces. These include the distance between the eyes, the width of the nose, the depth of the eye sockets, chin and jawline patterns—much the same as the system originally devised by Bertillon. Computers allow for the use of a much greater number of points than Bertillon employed, however. One computer program is said to use some eight thousand facial data points. 7
Facial identification systems have also been paired with television cameras to scan crowds at sporting events and at other venues in an attempt to identify terrorists, although it is not known how successful they have been. The use of such systems would be superior to fingerprinting in situations where it is impossible to take the fingerprints of every person present. Bertillon’s insistence that physical features are as definitive a means of identification as fingerprints may yet be confirmed.
ii
Guillaume Apollinaire, who had done so much to popularize and publicize the work of Picasso and others, knew that the war, like the art of his friends, was a profound break with the past. A poem he wrote about an automobile journey he had made just as the war clouds gathered reflected this sense of fracture:
The 31st of the month of July 1914 8
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little auto…
We said farewell to an entire epoch
Furious giants were casting their shadows over Europe
And when after passing that afternoon
Through Fontainebleau
We arrived in Paris
At the moment the mobilization notices were being posted
We understood my friend and I
That the little auto had taken us into an epoch that was New
And then even though we were both grown men
We had nevertheless just been born 9
Apollinaire was essentially a man without a country. France, his adopted homeland, classified him as Russian. In a burst of patriotism, and out of a desire to be born again as a Frenchman, he enlisted in the French army (unlike Picasso, who sat out the war in Paris and Rome, finding new mistresses and finally a wife). Writing to a friend about his assignment, Apollinaire quipped, “I love art so much that I have joined the artillery.” 10
He did well in the army, winning promotion to sergeant and then, after a transfer to the infantry, becoming an officer. This new assignment brought him into the trenches, the worst of all places to be in the war. He wrote: “Nine days without washing, sleeping on the ground without straw, ground infested with vermin, not a drop of water except that used to vaporize the gas masks.… It is fantastic what one can stand.… One of the parapets of my trench is partly made of corpses.… There are no head lice, but swarms of body lice, pubic lice.… No writer will ever be able to tell the simple horror of the trenches, the mysterious life that is led there.” 11
On March 18, 1916, while reading a copy of a literary magazine to which he regularly contributed, Apollinaire was wounded in the head when an artillery shell landed nearby. If he had not been wearing a helmet, he would have been killed outright, but even so the shrapnel pierced the helmet. Taken to an ambulance, he had pieces of metal (he called the wound “a splinter,” but it was more serious) removed from his skull. The doctor thought he would recover quickly, so, as was usual in trench warfare, Apollinaire was not immediately evacuated from the combat zone. A week later, however, his condition worsened, and he had to be transported to a hospital in Paris.
By May he was experiencing dizzy spells and paralysis in his left arm. The surgeons decided to do a trepanation—opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain. Technically, the procedure was a success, for the paralysis and dizziness disappeared. Friends, however, thought Apollinaire had changed. One of them described him as “irascible and self-absorbed, dull-eyed, heavy-browed—that is what the trepanation had produced. His mouth was distorted with suffering—the same mouth that only a short time before had smiled so broadly as it uttered learned observations, jokes, delightful comments of all kinds.” 12
Fearing that his “cure” would qualify him to be returned to the trenches, a friend found Apollinaire a job in the military offices in Paris—as, of all things, a censor. Given Apollinaire’s background, the officer in charge must have found it perfectly appropriate to assign him oversight of the literary magazines—a task that Apollinaire did, going so far as to censor some of his own work.
Germaine Albert-Birot, the editor of one such magazine, called Sic, persuaded Apollinaire to write a play with Cubist sets and costumes. Titled Les Mamelles de Terésias (“The Breasts of Terésias”), it is about a woman who becomes a man. Onstage, “Thérèse” performed this transformation when she opened her blouse and gas-filled balloons rose into the air. The most significant thing about the play was its subtitle, Drame sur-réaliste. Apollinaire intended sur-réaliste to be a synonym for supernaturaliste, but in the 1920s, the word was adopted by a group of artists whose work was characterized by fantasy and elements of the subconscious. Surrealists (as they became known), like many younger poets and painters, found Apollinaire’s work and spirit an inspiration.
Tragically, he would not be there to enjoy the acclaim. At the beginning of 1918, Apollinaire contracted pneumonia, which sent him back to the hospital, where he learned that the government had turned down his nomination for the Legion of Honor. Despite his status as a war hero (he had received the Croix de Guerre), the affair of the stolen statuettes, and the suspicion that he might have had something to do with the theft of the Mona Lisa, had not been forgotten.
He did not let the disappointment dampen his zest for love and work. He resumed his former acquaintance with a young, red-haired woman who was completely unconnected to the world of art. The final poem in his last book, Caligrammes, was about her. In May they were married in a parish church near his apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Still producing new work, he began to cough heavily in October. An influenza epidemic would kill millions worldwide during the next year, and Apollinaire was among its first victims. He died on November 9, and two days later, news arrived of the armistice that ended the war. As friends came to view his body, laid out on a bed in the newlyweds’ apartment, crowds thronged the streets, shouting “À bas Guillaume!” (“Down with William,” referring to the German emperor, Wilhelm II, who was forced to abdicate after the war).
iii
The years since the theft of the Mona Lisa had seen Picasso’s artistic reputation increase. Kahnweiler arranged for his work to be exhibited in Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Prague, and New York. In March 1914, a group of Parisian investor-collectors held a sale of contemporary paintings it had acquired over the previous ten years. The newspapers covered the event closely. A still life by Matisse brought 5,000 francs, quite a sum considering that works by Van Gogh and Gauguin went for less. But when a painting from Picasso’s rose period, Family of Saltimbanques, went under the hammer for 11,500 francs to a buyer from Munich, heads turned in the art world. Picasso would never know poverty again.
Picasso’s love life had thrived as well. He broke with Fernande in 1912 after she had an affair with an Italian painter, though some speculated that was a relief to Picasso, who was already in love with Marcelle Humbert, a circus performer whose real name was Eva Gouel. At about the same time, he began to paste objects such as chair caning and newspaper headlines directly onto the canvas, creating (along with Braque, who accompanied him in this as well as cubism) works known as collages. Increasingly those headlines reflected violence and the ominous approach of war.
After the war began, Braque, a Frenchman, joined the army, along with many others from the original bande á Picasso. Like Apollinaire, Braque was wounded in battle, and when he returned he was no longer as creative as he had been; he and Picasso never worked together again. Kahnweiler, a German, had to leave Paris for the duration of the war, making it difficult for Picasso to sell his work. Picasso’s mistress, Eva, had been in poor health for some time and died in December 1915. With most of his friends gone, Picasso now found intellectual stimulation only at the Stein apartment on the rue de Fleurus. Gertrude later wrote, “I very well remember at the beginning of the war being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.” 13
Paul Poiret, the fashion designer and friend of Picasso, opened an art gallery on the rue d’Antin in 1916. Criticized because it seemed a frivolous thing to do during wartime, Poiret was defended in the newspaper L’Intransigeant, whose critic wrote, “Artists have to live, like other people, and France, more than any other nation, needs art.” 14 In need of money, Picasso remounted the rolled-up canvas of his controversial 1907 painting and let Poiret display it. For the first time, it appeared under the title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a name Picasso is said to have disliked. 15
That same year, while designing the costumes and scenery for a production of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Picasso met a ballerina named Olga Kokhlova, whom he would soon marry. In November 1918, Olga brought the news of Apollinaire’s death to Picasso as he was shaving. He put down his razor and began to draw the face he saw in the mirror. He was later to claim it was the last self-portrait he ever made. 16
iv
The carnage of the war, in which millions died for a cause no one could understand, left disillusionment and cynicism in its wake. Artists, or those who aspired to be artists, felt themselves unable to adequately express the emotions the unprecedented horror produced. George Grosz and John Heartfield, 17 two German artists, condemned the “cloud-wandering tendencies of so-called sacred art, whose adherents mused on cubes and gothic while the generals painted in blood.” 18
In the midst of the war, in the city of Geneva in the neutral nation of Switzerland, arose a new form, or theory, of art. Called Dada, 19 it was born at the Cabaret Voltaire, where refugees from other nations often gathered. The idea is generally said to have originated with Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet, but many others contributed. Dada has been called “a nihilistic creed of disintegration, showing the meaninglessness of all western thought, art, morals, traditions.” 20 In short, it was a reaction against the civilization that had created the war. However, Dada artists made their point through black humor and absurdity. To them, art could be more—or less—than a drawing, a painting, a poem, a play; it might be something “created” at random or even an event where the actions of the participants, spontaneously generated, are the art. “Everything the artist spits is art,” declared Kurt Schwitters, one of the group. 21 The idea spread rapidly, for it appealed to those who felt that traditional art was inadequate in the face of the ultimate failure of civilization.
One of those who fell under Dada’s influence was Marcel Duchamp, a Frenchman from a family of artists. His cubist painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, had created a sensation at the 1913 New York Armory Show, the first major exhibition of modern art in the United States. Inspired by the spirit of Dada, Duchamp began to exhibit “readymades,” which were manufactured objects that he had transformed into art by either altering them slightly or simply giving them a title and declaring them art. One famous example was a urinal, turned upside down, that he signed “R. Mutt” and titled Fountain.
In 1919, the four hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death, Duchamp took an ordinary postcard-sized reproduction of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache and goatee on it. He wrote at the bottom his “title”: L.H.O.O.Q. With that alteration, Leonardo’s painting made the transition from a masterpiece of Renaissance art to an icon of modernism. Duchamp chose that particular painting to transform—or deface, if you like—because its theft had made it the most famous painting in the world, which it undoubtedly still is. The Mona Lisa was the biggest target Duchamp could aim at to show his contempt for what the old, prewar world had called “art.”
And the title? Pronounced in French, L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like Elle a chaud au cul, which is usually translated as “She has a hot ass.” And that is what La Gioconda is smiling about.
The Mona Lisa, one of the world’s most recognizable images. The French call her La Joconde and the Italians, La Gioconda, since the woman in the painting is considered to be Lisa Gherardini, who in 1495 married Francesco del Giocondo of Florence. Leonardo da Vinci began work on the portrait around 1503, when Lisa was twenty-four.
The sensational French newspapers of the day reflected the feelings of Parisians that the theft of the painting was an unimaginable crime. Headline writers struggled to describe its enormity. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Next door to each other in Montmartre, the two cabarets of Le Ciel (Heaven) and L’Enfer (Hell) were elaborate theme restaurants where the waiters dressed as angels or devils and the irreverent entertainment poked fun at religious (or irreligious) practices. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
A journalist dubbed the young criminals who terrorized Paris in the early 1900s apaches. Edmond Locard, a criminologist, collected examples of their art, such as this clay depiction of a criminal about to face the guillotine. (From the authors’ collection)
A newspaper artist depicted the police arresting the anarchist bomber Ravachol in 1892. A restaurant owner had recognized him from the description of Ravachol circulated by Alphonse Bertillon, who pioneered the science of criminal identification. On the way to jail, Ravachol struggled to break free, shouting to others in the street for help: “Follow me, brothers! Vive l’anarchie! Vive la dynamite!” (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
François-Eugène Vidocq was truly a larger-than-life figure. In real life a criminal imprisoned many times, he changed course to become the first head of the Sûreté, France’s equivalent of the FBI, and later set himself up as a private detective. He was the model for countless fictional criminals and detectives as well. (From the authors’ collection)
Pierre Ponson du Terrail was among the first to write novels that featured a criminal as the hero. Gino Starace, the cover artist for this later reprint of one of Ponson’s books, captured the ghoulish spirit that Parisians loved. (From the authors’ collection)
The ultimate French criminal “hero” was Fantômas, the creation of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, who turned out a 400-page novel every month for nearly three years. Able to change his appearance almost at will, Fantômas committed countless acts of cruelty and violence, evading his hapless nemesis Inspector Juve in every one of the books, delighting readers. (From the authors’ collection)
Pierre-François Lacenaire, depicted here killing an old woman in her bed while his accomplice finishes off her son in the next room, became as famous for his literary work as for his crimes. “To kill without remorse is the highest of pleasures,” he wrote. “It is impossible to destroy my hatred of mankind. This hatred is the product of a lifetime, the outcome of my every thought.” (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Marie Lafarge was another criminal whose self-portrayal earned her notoriety; to many, she was a saint who had been unjustly accused. Despite Marie’s protestations of innocence, however, scientist Mathieu Orfila demonstrated conclusively that she had poisoned her husband. It was the first time that the science of toxicology had been used to convict a person of murder. (From the authors’ collection)
Joseph Vacher was nicknamed “the French Ripper,” but in fact his victims far outnumbered those of the English serial killer. Alexandre Lacas-sagne, one of the founders of French scientific criminology, convinced a jury that Vacher’s claims of insanity were unfounded. (From the authors’ collection)
The trunk in which the body of Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé was transported from Paris to Lyons. Lacassagne performed an autopsy on the remains that conclusively identified them and led to the apprehension of Gouffé’s murderers. At the trial, miniatures of the trunk were sold by vendors outside the courthouse. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
The Parisian apaches acquired a romantic aura because of their distinctive dances and styles of dress. Nevertheless, newspapers portrayed them as ruthless thugs, as in this drawing of an apache strangling a victim while the apache’s girlfriend watches without emotion. (From the authors’ collection)
Edmond Locard took fingerprints of monkeys throughout Paris to find this particular animal, whose owner was using him as a thief. The case echoed Edgar Allan Poe’s classic detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Locard acknowledged that real-life detectives often followed the lead of their fictional counterparts. (From the authors’ collection)
Alphonse Bertillon, the complicated and conflicted individual who developed the first effective system of identifying criminals. (From the authors’ collection)
Three of the charts Bertillon prepared to categorize parts of the face: types of noses, ears, and eyes. Bertillon believed that giving names to different forms of body parts would enable police to create a portrait parlé, or “spoken portrait,” of suspects. (From the authors’ collection)
Bertillon was the first to make detailed photographs of crime scenes as references for police investigating crimes. (From the authors’ collection)
As criminals realized that their photographs could be used to associate them with other crimes they may have committed, they began to resist sitting for the camera. Since exposure times were longer then, it was often necessary to strap the prisoner in place to obtain a sharp image. (From the authors’ collection)
Guillaume Apollinaire was himself a noted poet, but his contributions to art went well beyond that. His enthusiasm, generosity with praise, and openness to all forms of new art made him what one historian called a “ringmaster of the arts.” (From the authors’ collection)
Pablo Picasso and his mistress Fernande Olivier with their two dogs. Picasso always had a variety of animals around him, including a pet mouse he kept in a drawer. (© RMN/ Droits réservés)
A survey taken in 2008 indicated that Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon was the most frequently illustrated work in art history texts. Yet when he first showed it to friends and colleagues, their reaction led him to roll up the painting and keep it hidden for several years. (Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY; © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)
Two views of Octave Garnier, one of the three principal members of the Bonnot Gang. The change in appearance that he accomplished indicates how important Bertillon’s methods of identification were to the police. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Raymond Callemin, known to his friends as “Raymond-la-Science” because he inevitably found scientific backing for his beliefs. At the commune of anarchists, he introduced a “scientific” diet of brown rice, raw vegetables, porridge, and pasta with cheese. Salt, pepper, and vinegar were banned as being “unscientific,” although herbs were acceptable. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Jules Bonnot, the ostensible leader of the Bonnot Gang, the man the press dubbed “the Demon Chauffeur” for his reckless feats at the wheel of the world’s first “getaway car.” Some allege that Bonnot had been a driver for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sher-lock Holmes. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
The Delaunay-Belleville that Bon-not and his cohorts used to escape from the scene of their first crime. This French marque was widely regarded as the finest automobile in the world. Purchasers had to supply their own “coach,” or upper body, so the cars were identifiable only by the distinctive circular radiator. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
André Soudy, posed by a police photographer reconstructing the scene of the bank robbery at Chantilly. Though Soudy never killed anyone, he was later guillotined for his involvement with the Bonnot Gang. Several others, either peripherally involved or outright innocent, received harsh prison terms. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
There were several Paris news-papers that illustrated the events of the day with drawings of crime scenes. This one depicts one of the Bonnot Gang’s most spectacular crimes: the shooting of Louis Jouin, the head of the police force as-signed to apprehend the gang. Cornered in his hiding place, Bonnot shot and killed Jouin before jumping from an up-stairs window and escaping. (From the authors’ collection)
A newspaper artist’s rendering of the last stand of Octave Garnier and René Valet, the only members of the Bonnot Gang still at large. The two men had held at bay a force of over 700 police and soldiers for an entire day before dynamite blasts destroyed their refuge. (From the authors’ collection)
Postcards like this one depicted the seige at Choisy-le-Roi, where Bonnot single-handedly resisted a force of at least a hundred men. Newsreel cameras recorded the scene, and when it was shown in theaters, audiences cheered whenever Bonnot appeared on a balcony to fire his rifle. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Vincenzo Perugia, the man who confessed to stealing the Mona Lisa. Had he acted alone? That was a mystery whose answer took another two decades to solve. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
When the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre, Le Petit Journal, Paris’s most popular pictorial newspaper, devoted its front page to a history of the painting from Leonardo’s presentation of it to King François I to its theft from the museum. (From the authors’ collection)
Alphonse Bertillon’s crime scene photographs, overhead and from the side, of the body of Adolphe Steinheil. Nearly two decades older than his beautiful wife, Meg, he had looked the other way while she engaged in a series of sexual liaisons, including one that reputedly killed Félix Faure, the president of France. (Paris Préfecture de Police museum)
Meg Steinheil in the dock at her trial for murder. Her performance under questioning was so affecting that journalists dubbed her the “Sarah Bernhardt of the Assizes,” after the most famous actress of the day. (From the authors’ collection)
At left, Gaston Calmette, who was shot to death in his office on March 16, 1914, by Henriette Caillaux, center. At right is her husband, Joseph, at that time the finance minister of France, who had been the object of constant attacks by the newspaper Calmette edited. Henriette explained her action by saying, “There is no justice in France. There is only the revolver.” (From the authors’ collection)