443200

2013
FRC24110.1177/0957155812466975MooreFrench Cultural Studies

French Cultural Studies

French Cultural Studies

The spectacular anus of Joseph 24(1) 27­–43

© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0957155812466975
unique historic context frc.sagepub.com

Alison Moore
University of Western Sydney, Australia

Abstract
Joseph Pujol, the ‘Pétomane’ performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the
early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that ‘this artist’s specialty
was no longer in fashion’. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge,
newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of
his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol,
and its pecuniary trials and tribulations, tell us about bodily imagination in late nineteenth-
century France? Pujol’s idiosyncratic career has rarely been considered as an historical object;
and when it has, the gaze has been light-hearted and filled with puns, much like those that
surrounded him in his lifetime. But if the temptation to giggle is resisted for a moment, the
Pétomane can teach us much about symbolic meanings that were ascribed to the anus in late
nineteenth-century Paris.

Keywords
anus, comic performance, fin-de-siècle Paris, French music-hall, Pétomane, Joseph Pujol

No other nineteenth-century figure has managed to remain as legendary as Joseph Pujol, ‘le
Pétomane’, without having become the object of sustained scholarly attention. Pujol’s career
choice was possibly the silliest and most transient of any figure in the history of French public
life, and so by definition he has not inspired either serious or sustained consideration by his-
torians and cultural studies researchers. He made his career as a performer from a body part
that was unacceptable even to discuss in most social situations in France at this time, let alone
to spectacularise or vocalise; and indeed this remains so in most polite contexts of our own
time as well. The anus has nonetheless clearly also been a most common body part referred
to in European comedic cultures since the early modern era (Dundas, 1989). Never in recorded

Corresponding author:
Alison Moore, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797,
Penrith NSW 2751, Australia
Email: alison.moore@uws.edu.au

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28 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

history, however, had any performer made a career of it as a musical and vocal instrument.
Joseph Pujol was truly original.
Understanding the Pétomane phenomenon requires a number of contextual considerations.
As Vanessa Schwarz, Charles Rearick, Mariel Oberthür and others have remarked, Paris in
the last decade of the nineteenth-century became an unprecedented locus of concentrated
entertainment, seeing a rapid burgeoning of cabarets, cafés-concerts, and music-halls
(Schwarz, 1998; Rearick, 1985; Oberthür, 1984). Novelty became a primary attraction in the
entertainment culture of the belle époque, and the Paris music-hall scene where Pujol made
his name was particularly receptive to the unique oddity, spectacle and absurdity of the
Pétomane act. The themes of class irreverence and bourgeois parody in Pujol’s act were
indicative of a Parisian entertainment culture in which social elites subjected themselves to
mockery in exchange for the titillation of the music-hall’s exotic blend of high and low cul-
ture; it provided extravagant spectacle coupled with an abundance of prostitutes, its decora-
tions including shady characters of the Parisian urban poor (Oberthür, 1984).
France had long traditions of humour about the anus, excretion and flatulence. It is worth
considering that longer history, not merely to make a standard historicist claim by referring
to earlier antecedents. Such humour in nineteenth-century France itself explicitly referenced
early modern literary examples – it was a historically self-conscious form of laughter.
Flatulence humour also held a special appeal in a city where the foul odours of the sewers and
the menace of urban sanitary diseases continued to stand in tension with public discourses
about urban modernisation as the mark of civilisation. The sewers were glamorised as a
middle-class tourist attraction, but they were also a genuine health concern, and the fowl
odours of Paris were a sustained source of public dismay. This tension, in combination with
the pre-established set of comedic tropes derived from earlier scatological literature, made
flatulence and excremental matters ripe topics for Parisian laughter in the 1890s.
Both context and text are important to consider for an understanding the Pétomane. The
significance of Pujol’s comedic appeal is teased out here, both through a close reading of the
themes of his act and through the study of recorded responses to it, including the reception of
Pujol’s performance among his contemporaries, and the subsequent representations of him by
chroniclers of that period in the history of the Moulin Rouge. Class was a central theme both
in Pujol’s humour and in receptions of him. The Pétomane at the Moulin Rouge made base
things and lower-class buffoonery available for upper-middle-class laughter, while mocking
bourgeois propriety itself. Such was the Pétomane phenomenon encoded along high and low
culture lines, that in a fin-de-siècle show of snobbery the socialist deputy Louis Calvinhac
could reference it in the statement that ‘Les applaudisseurs du pétomane ne peuvent apprécier
ni connaître Molière’ (Calvinhac, 1896: 91). In the sociological terminology of Victor Turner
and Mikhail Bakhtin, the Moulin Rouge indeed provided a ‘liminal’ space in which the polite
classes could step outside convention and find momentary amusement in the seedier milieux
of central Paris. The music-hall experience was ‘carnivalesque’ in its inversion of the class
order: here the urban working class stood on stage above the high bourgeoisie, mocking its
sensibilities and grotesquely parodying its propriety (Turner, 1969; Bakhtin, 1984). The
Pétomane’s act did not endure long, since the Parisian audiences, as Charles Rearick has
noted, ‘were hungry for novelty’ (Rearick, 1985: 75). But popular comedic texts continued to
exploit Pujol’s example for many years afterwards, in forms neither restricted to the music-
hall audience nor loyal to the thematic logic of the Pétomane’s original form.

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Moore 29

‘Je suis un invisible corps …’

At the age of about ten years old in the late 1960s, on the Mediterranean just outside Toulon,
Joseph Pujol (1857–1945), the son of a comfortable family of Catalan stonemasons, discov-
ered something strange and disturbing about his rectum. Nothing could have been more revo-
lutionary in the life of Pujol than the revelation of the peculiar capacity he appeared naturally
to possess to draw water into his anus and expel it again at will. The same mechanism per-
formed on dry land allowed air to be aspirated and expelled, providing a highly malleable
anal voice. That discovery made the difference between the mundane peaceful existence of
petit commerce provincial towards which he would otherwise have been demographically
prone, and the utterly unique life he experienced instead – one of spectacle, laughter, bohe-
mian sociability, fame and fortune in Paris and beyond. Joseph Pujol was not content to have
a simple party trick; rather, as the son of a stonemason, or like the baker he would later
become, he treated his unusual ability as the raw material to be crafted into something pleas-
ing and profitable. He trained his sonic instrument just as others would train their vocal
chords, and by the time he was a young adult he could produce a startling range of sounds,
nuanced by tonal, timbre and dynamic variation, and animated by caricature and buffoonery.
His sounds included (obviously) the imitation of every conceivable variety of flatulent noise,
but his skills also permitted short and simple melodies; and the articulations of embouchure
he developed allowed him to enunciate letters of the alphabet and imitate qualitatively spe-
cific sounds like that of fabric tearing or thunder rumbling. His subtle control of the release
of air with different levels of muscular tension of his anal sphincter meant that he could vary
the length and dynamic range of his sounds, producing dramatic vocal sighs, yawns and
whimpers. He incorporated these skills into his general music-hall training (he also sang and
played the trombone), and around 1880 he gave himself a stage name under which he began
performing in Marseille, Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand (Nohain and Caradec, 2000 [1967]:
37). He was the Pétomane.
Of course, none of this will be new to anyone familiar with the history of French popular
culture. In part the notoriety of the Pétomane derives from various cinematic representations
of his life, such as the 1983 film by the Italian director Pasquale Festa Campanile, Il peto-
mane, starring Ugo Tognazzi; or Steve Ochs’ 2005 film, Le Pétomane: parti avec le vent; or
the Channel 4 documentary made about him in 1979 by Ian McNaughton of Monty Python
fame. But in large part, the Pétomane’s late twentieth-century fame is due to the work of two
theatre, music-hall and café-concert scholars whose study of Pujol has remained until now
the only published work about him based on original archival research (Nohain and Caradec,
2000). One reason for the long hiatus in Pétomane scholarly research derives from the diffi-
culty of accessing the archival materials to which Nohain and Caradec were privy. Those
materials were once held in the Musée National des Arts et des Traditions populaires near the
Bois-de-Boulogne in Paris, but the museum was closed to all public access in 2005.
The original 1967 biographical study of the Pétomane by the theatre historian François
Caradec and the television producer Jean Nohain, as well as its various revised versions, is
light-hearted in tone: ‘une histoire souriante – et documentée – du spectacle au temps des
années folles, sur lesquelles soufflait ... un vent (de folie)’ (Nohain and Caradec, 2000: back
cover). It is full of flatulence puns made in the spirit, the authors suggest, of Pujol’s own
humoristic appeal, and hence the most appropriate way to honour his memory. It was origi-
nally published by the always risqué Jean-Jacques Pauvert, best known for his re-edition of

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30 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

the works of the Marquis de Sade. (Pauvert stood trial in 1956 for publishing those works
deemed ‘contraires aux bonnes mœurs’ under the law of 19 July 1939 (Brochier, 1967: 73).)
The Nohain and Caradec volume was not so controversial, and passed into obscurity until it
underwent something of a revival in the 1980s, and there have now been several French re-
editions and foreign language translations of it produced since that time (Nohain and Caradec,
1996, 2000). A version of the Pétomane story, derived from Nohain and Caradec’s account,
now features in every book in that curious new genre of popular cultural histories of excretion
and flatulence (for example, Dawson 2010, 1999; Spinard, 1999; Feixas, 1996; Freixinos
1992). There is insufficient space here to discuss the details of Pujol’s unusual life except to
sketch out the features of his successful if tumultuous career as a professional ‘fartiste’, in
order to address the concerns at the heart of this article – his reception and uptake in comedy
culture of late nineteenth-century France and the reasons for his acclaim in that particular
time and place.
There is no doubt a significant genealogy of scatological art and literature that helps to
contextualise the reception of Pujol in fin-de-siècle France, and which might arguably extend
back to Rabelais or the medieval langue d’oïl fabliaux. The themes of mockery of class distinc-
tion, profit and intellectual property, and national and regional attributions of meaning to fart
humour were readily deployable at the fin de siècle, in part because of the already long-estab-
lished traditions of scatological political satire in France. Excretion, flatulence and anuses were
often invoked to critique social relations of corruption, predation and exploitation. Many readers
will recall, no doubt, the famous image from 1831 by the well-known caricature lithographer
Honoré Daumier, captioned Gargantua in reference to Rabelais’s sixteenth-century scatological
story of two giants, which Daumier referenced to critique the covertly non-egalitarian reign of
Louis Philippe d’Orléans – the self-styled king of the masses under whom the haute bourgeoi-
sie got richer and the urban working poor got considerably poorer. Daumier depicted the work-
ing class being gobbled up by the ‘poire’ and defecated out again as royal decrees, and of
course spent time in jail for that image (see Figure 1).
Rabelais underwent a considerable revival in France in the nineteenth century. In 1854
there was a new edition of La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, illustrated with stunning
detail and artistry by the graphic illustrator Gustave Doré (Rabelais, 1854). In 1873 there was
a new collection of Rabelais-inspired flatulence poems by Léon Willem called Farce nou-
velle et joyeuse du pet (Guerrand, 1997: 14). In the last years of the ancien régime, an anony-
mous author who was probably – by the estimation of the Bibliothèque Nationale – the
publicist Alphonse Martainville, had published a little-known work called Merdiana, ou
manuel des chieurs, a work of scatological comic satire that used humour about flatulence
and excretion to make fun of aristocrats and foreign nationalities (Anon., 1803). The work
was republished in 1803 and then again in 1870, with the relaxation of censorship that fol-
lowed the demise of the Second Empire. Scatology, it seems, needed to be revivified in the
late nineteenth century by drawing on earlier ‘carnivalesque’ cultural traditions. Like the
Rabelaisian texts that were the object of Bakhtin’s analysis, nineteenth-century scatology
indeed relied upon ‘a game in which “exalted” and “sacred” things were combined with
images of the lower stratum’ (Bahktin, 1984: 192). While it may be generally problematic for
historicist values to apply that term to examples of humour that fall outside the cultural con-
text which Bakhtin was considering when he coined it (early modern urban society), in the
case of the nineteenth-century scatological texts discussed above, the imaginative world of
Rabelais was quite clearly and explicitly referenced.

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Moore 31

Figure 1.  Georges Besson (ed.) (1959) Daumier. Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, plate 1.

But in the final 20 years or so the nineteenth century, there emerged some new possibilities
for anal humour that contained elements not seen in previous scatological texts. While the
earlier traditions may well help to explain how there might be a cultural space for the recep-
tion of the Pétomane in fin-de-siècle France, it is less clear how much they might be said to
have caused Pujol to cultivate his peculiar talents. In fact, one of the striking discrepancies
immediately apparent between Pujol’s own semiotic emphasis, and that which was attributed
to him by external commentators and imitators, is the relative lack of excretory or scatologi-
cal references in Pujol’s own imagination of his art. The jokes were certainly about flatu-
lence, about social class and propriety, but they were never in fact about excrement or foul
odours. Hence, while it is clear that some of the semiotic components of Pujol’s comedy and
some of the reception discourses about him drew from earlier Rabelaisian precedents, the
context of the long tradition of French scatological humour is perhaps less adequate as a sin-
gular explanation for the mentality of this peculiar individual than we might at first
imagine.
Part of what enabled the Pétomane’s unusual career as a professional farter was undoubt-
edly the particular character of the venue in which he debuted in Paris. The Moulin Rouge
was an elaborately constructed and decorated large-scale venue attracting a mix of low to
upper-middle-class patrons, foreign bourgeois and provincial well-to-do tourists. It was
launched by theatre entrepreneur Joseph Oller in 1889 as a dance-hall, and with its growing
success it was established increasingly as a more grandiose music-hall theatre. Like other

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32 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

venues of a similar genre, it was located in Montmartre, in the entertainment centre of the
city, and enjoyed a reputation of greater notoriety than the more numerous small local neigh-
bourhood venues where patrons could consume alcohol and be entertained by musical per-
formers, commonly known as cafés-concerts. However, in practice the performance style
often varied little between the kinds of venue, and indeed many performers moved between
them, trading the same acts each time (Moore Whiting, 1999: 28). Like the Moulin Rouge,
the infamous Folies-Bergères underwent a similar transformation from even humbler origins
to become a full scale music-hall in the 1890s, and indeed numerous caf’conc’ in the last
decade of the century increasingly moved towards the English-style model of varied acts and
lavish theatricality, in order to charge higher entrance fees and to attract a generally more
well-to-do audience (Rearick,1985: 83).
There is no doubt that the lure for many upper-class gentlemen of venues such as the
Moulin Rouge and the Chat Noir derived in part from the ambiguous possibilities they pro-
vided for alcohol consumption, entertainment and yet more salacious forms of leisure.
Prostitution flourished in Montmartre in this era, and women were generally admitted free or
at lower cost to music-hall venues. Belle époque entertainment was in general characterised
by a remarkable degree of corporeal excess and histrionic gesture. Rae Beth Gordon notes
that scatological humour was not uncommon in the café-concert style of venue, where fren-
zied singer-dancers, referred to as ‘épileptiques’, could also be found. Comparisons were
sometimes made between the spectacle of theatrical dancers and the back-arching hysterics
of the Salpêtrière (Gordon, 2009: 25). Another famous colleague of the Pétomane was Jeanne
Wéber, ‘la Goulue’, who performed belly dancing with her voluptuous form, inspiring erotic
fascination and disgust in a society where corpulence too was coming to hold a particular
value associated with degeneration and sickly health, as Christopher Forth has noted of the
fin-de-siècle debates around the Dreyfus Affair (Forth, 2004: 18–98). Gordon argues through-
out her 2009 book, Dances With Darwin, that caf’-conc’ and music-hall culture was an
important avenue for the spectacularisation of visions of hysteria, madness, primitiveness and
degeneration that proliferated in scientific thinking in this period. These were places where
one went to be titillated and entertained, but also confronted and shocked by performers prod-
ding at issues of common social discomfort. Scatological humour featured with some regular-
ity in these theatrical genres too. According to the popular literary newspaper, Gil Blas
illustré, there was a can-can dancer at the Moulin Rouge named Mademoiselle Grille-d’Égout
(Anon., 1891). And the librettist Georges Montorgueil complained that both scatological
references and boob jokes were part of the standard fare of the cafés-concerts (Montorgueil,
1893: 8).
Gustave Geffroy, a journalist, art critic and founding member of the Académie Goncourt,
reflected on the disturbing mixture of ‘spectacle’ and ‘ordure’ to be found in the cafés-
concerts in an 1894 text ostensibly about the Moulin Rouge singer Yvette Guilbert which
appeared in a booklet illustrated by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. As Bettina Knapp and Myra
Chipman remarked, Guilbert’s songs were renowned for their exploration of the ‘degraded or
morbid side of life’ (cited in Golden, 2000: 12). Geffroy’s text is a general excursus on the
ambivalence of the music-halls and cafés-concerts, while Yvette Guilbert is represented only
through Toulouse-Lautrec’s illustrations. Geffroy was careful not to denigrate the audience,
whom he regarded with some pity for their desperation and alienation from modern life, lead-
ing them to seek comfort and pleasure, often to their detriment: ‘Il est certain que la répulsion
peu être vive, que l’esprit peut gagner là un malaise, un effroi, un dégoût, une sorte de

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Moore 33

courbature morale dont il sera quelques temps à se défaire’ (Geffroy, 1894: 8). He described
this genre of venue in terms of monstrosity, abjection, sludge and ill-health: ‘le monstre est
vivace, et nul ne défendrait son insolente santé’, further speaking of ‘le bas-fond remué, la
montée de ruisseau, la débâcle de fange’ (Geffroy, 1894: 11). Similarly, a new periodical of
the quartiers of the Grandes Carrières, Clignancourt, Goutte d’Or and La Chapelle was estab-
lished in 1892 with the self-proclaimed mission of cleaning up the reputation of the 18th
arrondissement: ‘L’Aurore Montmartroise apparaît; Pour effacer le souvenir du pétomane’
(L’Aurore Montmartoise, 1893, title page).
Geffroy complained that venues such as the Moulin Rouge fostered class inequality, since
five sous would get an entry, but if one actually wanted to hear or see anything, the better
seats were more likely to cost five, six or seven francs (Geffroy, 1894: 10). It is also clear that
for Geffroy abject references in musical theatre were a sign of something particularly French
and inscribed in long cultural tradition (‘Ils font partie d’une lignée’), referring to the lewd
corbels on Romanesque stone churches of the Middle Ages, and to the literature of Rabelais.
In this tradition, according to Geffroy, the lower functions are embraced in styles of realist
representation – ‘contrepoids ... d’une cérébralité alerte’ – as a necessary balance to French
intellectualism (Geffroy, 1894: 15).
The Pétomane was referred to explicitly in relation to this kind of view of popular musical
theatre, not only during his own career, but some ten years after he had quit the Parisian stage.
In an article entitled ‘Décadence’ in Le Courrier Français of 1906, Berthe Mariani chose to
remind readers of the Pétomane to make a point about the decadent, foolish and abject quali-
ties of popular theatre, even as many venues were by then losing ground to other styles of
theatre and to the new entertainment technology of the cinema. ‘Cette génération des dégéné-
rés’ needed ‘quelque chose de très bête ou de très sale – les deux réunis constituent le chic
suprême. C’est ici le cas de reparler d’un homme qui fut assez fort pour établir sa fortune en
prenant base la bêtise de ses contemporains’ (Mariani, 1906: 4–6).
Already in the 1870s, the new musical theatres, in Huysmans’s words, were ‘laid et ...
superbe, c’est d’un gout outrageux et exquis’ (Huysmans, 1879: 28). Music-halls and cafés-
concerts had begun to appear in urban cultural life in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille and other
large towns since the mid 1860s, and were thus an established and appropriate milieu for the
peculiar character of the Pétomane’s talents. Arguably, it may never have occurred to Pujol
to package his capacities in such a fashion if he had not been exposed to the caf’-conc’ and
music-hall scenes in the south of France in his youth. Joseph Pujol came from a family of five
children, and of the others his sister Louise Pont was also a locally successful caf’-conc’ and
music-hall singer. His brother Marius was also in the theatre, and both he and another brother
Louis later collaborated with Joseph in his post-Pétomane theatre projects (Nohain and
Caradec, 2000: 28).
Pujol performed in small theatres and at private functions throughout the 1880s in towns
throughout the south of France, and in 1890 he took his act to Paris. He was hired by Charles
Zidler and performed every night in front of the elephant on the outdoor patio stage at the
Moulin Rouge from 1892 to 1894, according to one contemporary fellow performer, earning
more than any other artist employed there at the time (Pagnol, 1947: 73). His performance
was widely reviewed and commented upon in a range of popular Parisian newspapers. Then
he was embroiled in a series of legal battles – the first in 1894 when the Moulin Rouge led a
successful court case against him for breach of contract when Pujol established his own thea-
tre company called the Théâtre Pompadour; the second in 1898 when he unsuccessfully

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34 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

attempted a legal suit against the Moulin Rouge after they replaced him with a female fake-
Pétomane, called la Femme-Pétomane, who imitated his act with the use of a bellows hidden
under her skirt (Rearick, 1985: 75; Nohain and Caradec, 2000: 76). These court cases were
highly publicised, leaving a significant corpus of media commentary on Pujol’s remarkable
act and its range of meanings to Parisian society.
When we examine the press commentary about Pujol’s trials and tribulations, it is clear
that a symbolic relation between money, social class and the anus was at play. Yvette Guilbert
recounted that the Moulin Rouge poster about him read: ‘Tous les soirs, de 8 heures a 9 heu-
res le pétomane: le seul qui ne paie pas de droits d’auteurs’ (Guilbert cited in Pagnol, 1947:
74). Pujol’s act toyed heavily with the possibility of humour around the idea of anality in
contradiction both to class distinction and to gendered propriety and pudeur. He was himself
always finely dressed, elegant and demure. Visual representations of him performing always
showed the clientele to be well-dressed ladies and gentlemen of polite society, such as in the
vision that appeared in the comedic newspaper Paris Qui Rit in 1892. We may note the visual
juxtaposition of the refinement of dress of the audience and of Pujol and the grotesque posi-
tioning of his behind in their faces (see Figure 2).
A plagiarised story of 1893 called Le Ventomane by Grente-Dancourt referred to the jux-
taposition of high class and low humour in terms reminiscent of Gustave Geffroy‘s claim
about the functional necessity of scatology in French culture:

La noblesse des faubourgs et tout ce que Paris compte de notabilités littéraires, artistiques et
mondaines ! (Gravement.) Le beau toujours attire les foules, et les plus blasés éprouvent, à de
certaines heures, l’invincible besoin de se retremper dans l’idéal et de respirer un autre air que celui
qu’ils respirent tous les jours! (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 5)

Grente-Dancourt also used the Pétomane gag in a parody of the divine mystery of wind as
evoked in John’s Gospel (3:8), joining irreverent anal humour to the mockery of Catholic
faith. His Ventomane pamphlet begins: ‘Je suis un invisible corps, Qui de bas lieu tire mon
être, Et je n’ose faire connaître, Ni qui je suis, ni d’où je sors’ (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 5).
Satirical journalists found many things to say about the apparently endlessly amusing
story of a man who not only could sing with his anus, but who made financial gain from it,
and who fought to hold onto those earnings and to maximise them in a legal struggle. In June
1892 Le Courrier Français, one of the belle époque’s most widely read popular satirical
newspapers, published a little poem about the Pétomane by Raoul Ponchon. It described the
latest new craze surrounding to Pujol’s ability, relating it to matters of class distinction, and
included a punch-line drawing together the symbolic association of the anus with money:

Cet homme peut à volonté,

Péter, puer en société,
Et cela hiver comme été;
Chacun voulut voir ce prodige,
Et toute la ville, vous dis-je,
Fut comme prise de vertige,
Et voilà que cet indigent,
Qui croyait em–bêter les gens,
Gagner en pétant d’argent. (Ponchon, 1892a: 1)

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Moore 35

Figure 2.  Paris Qui Rit, 9 October 1892. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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36 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

Later, as the various court cases were taking place, press journalists returned repeatedly to the
amusing irony of the commodity of Pujol’s anus being fought over for so much money. The
Pétomane was no longer, they laughed, ‘le seul artiste qui ne paie pas des droits d’auteur’.
An obvious place to look for an explanation of this type of humour at the fin de siècle is in
the psychological account of that other great anal thinker in Europe at that time, Sigmund
Freud. Class, money and excretion were symbolically linked in the civilised European mind,
Freud argued in the 1908 article ‘Character Und Analerotik’ and in a number of other works
around that time (Freud, 1995 [1908]: 295–7); but we know from his correspondence with
Wilhelm Fliess that he had in fact thought about it as early as the 1890s (Freud and Fliess, 1986
[1897]: 226–9). Excretion, Freud claimed, is the bodily function that teaches the bourgeois
child about monetary value. Excrement is the thing of lowest value while money or gold is the
highest, therefore in the unconscious mind they are interchangeable, giving rise to expressions
like the German Dukatenscheisser, or ‘shitter of ducats’, referring to a wealthy spendthrift.
While it may seem like an obvious course of inquiry, then, to apply Freud’s theory to a study
of scatological joking about class and profit, there is a different line of approach that might be
used to bring intelligibility to the comparison. Freud does not appear ever to have mentioned
the Pétomane in any of his professional writings or correspondence, though he did refer to
other Moulin Rouge artists such as Yvette Guibert and Sarah Bernhardt whom he heard per-
form at other Parisian clubs while he was a student with Charcot at the Salpêtrière. The claim
espoused here is not that the Pétomane necessarily influenced Freud’s thinking directly in the
development of psychoanalytic theories of money and anality, but rather that there was a set of
ready-made symbolic associations in late nineteenth-century European cultures to which
Freud was exposed, and his ideas about anality and money, bodies and social class, thus belong
in a popular imaginary that overlapped with the reception of Joseph Pujol.
Pujol’s act was given a range of other meanings too. In September 1892 Eugène Fourier
described Pujol in Gil Blas illustré as ‘Un type bien moderne, bien fin de siècle, celui-là, et qui
mérite une étude particulière’ (Fourier, 1892). Ironic reference to Pujol as the representative of
the truly Roman dimension of high French culture was common. An 1893 edition of Les Annales
politiques et littéraires claimed ironically that Pujol must be descended from Roman patrician
lineage because Saint Augustine had mentioned an emperor who could produce: ‘des sons nom-
breux par en bas de sorte qu’ils paraissent chanter de ce côté’. In the slightly more popular weekly
Le Chat noir, Fransisque Sarcey remarked that his preference for a performance by the Pétomane
over a concert by Saint Celia herself was a sign of ‘le goût inné de certaines plaisanteries de ma
race’; and the race he claimed was that is of the Gaulois – the race of Rabelais (Sarcey, 1893).
Ethnicity recurred as a theme about his performances as well. The Pétomane spoke
French with a strong accent – born in the 1850s and raised prior to the era of free, secular
and compulsory education in France’s uniquely recognised national tongue, Catalan
Occitan would undoubtedly have been his first language. In Le Courrier Français, Raoul
Ponchon quipped: ‘Tous ces bruits – disons-le bien vite – Étaient des bruits sans fonde-
ment: Il soignait une laryngite, Dans le midi, tout simplement’ (Ponchon, 1892b: 79).
‘Dans le midi’ here held the double-entendre of ‘in the nether region’ as well as ‘in the
south of France’. That theme appeared too in some of the imitator texts that appeared at
the time. In 1896 another theatrical script called ‘Bistrouille Pétomane’ in the Chanson de
poche, collection Bibi-Tapin: chanson et monologue curieux des cabarets de Paris,
describes a narrative of two provincial soldiers, one with a heavy Marseille accent, who
sneak into a Pétomane performance (Anon., 1896).

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Moore 37

If Pujol was keen to prevent the theft of his act from imitators, he had little control over
the substantial plagiarism of his ideas in the numerous comic scripts that circulated during
the 1890s. Grente-Dancourt’s Le Ventomane clearly described the performance of Pujol:
‘Le Maître, qui s’est recueilli, s’incline légèrement, pose ses deux mains sur ses deux
genoux, et, dans cette attitude dont le laisser-aller n’exclut ni la noblesse, ni la grâce,
souriant, il ouvre le ... la ... hum ! ... et commence’ (Grente-Dancourt, 1893: 6). In this
version of the story though, the Ventomane’s finale occurs when he accidentally over-
shoots, and exits the stage, it is implied, with a turd in his pants (Grente-Dancourt, 1893:
9). The word péter is left unspoken throughout the story, in a comic gesture of pudeur, and
yet the scatological ending is far more grotesque than anything Pujol himself did on stage.
Another 1893 script by a certain Humblot, called Pétomane par amour!, tells the story of
a man who claims to owe his happiness to the Pétomane because when he, Zéphirin, and
his fiancée Stéphanie hear the ‘fartist’ perform at the soirée of a wealthy and distinguished
lady, Stéphanie promises to marry Zéphirin if only he will learn to do what the Pétomane
does. So Zéphirin begs the Pétomane for lessons and after some sound advice from the
virtuoso and after much practice, he is able to make a few simple sounds and is thereafter
happily married (Humblot, 1893: 14–16).
The film-maker Marcel Pagnol, in a 1947 publication reflecting on laughter called
Notes sur le rire, remarked that Pujol’s central theme was the outrageousness of farting
in polite society. Flatulence is only funny, he argued, if it is a priest or a mayor who is
caught doing it. That account of scatological humour is a fair statement about the timbre
of the jokes made by Pujol himself. However, in other Pétomane-inspired texts of the fin
de siècle, and in press commentaries about him, there are many examples of laughter
about the flatulence of the peasant, the common soldier, the provincial, and especially
the provincial–peasant–common soldier. The 1896 booklet ‘Bistrouille Pétomane’ sug-
gested that theme, pitting a pair of clowning peasant soldiers against their sergeant, a
figure of superior military and social status (Anon., 1896). One of the soldiers inno-
cently imagines his own original innovation on the Pétomane act – instead of singing
with this arse, he makes farting sounds with his mouth. This gets him into trouble with
his sergeant, who appears from the orthography in the text to have a strong southern or
perhaps Corsican accent, reprimanding him: ‘pourr incongruérrruité dé honorrrante à la
face de vot’ supériorr!’ (Anon., 1896: 5). The sergeant threatens him so ferociously that
he gives the soldier colic. In attempting to answer his sergeant in the same vocal farting
language, he thus accidentally vomits excrement all over the officer before him (Anon.,
1896: 6). In this also far more grotesque tale, class and ethnicity feature not in the usual
Pétomane-style allusion to polite society and aristocracy, but as a sign of the resistance
of the lower-class provincial in the face of his commanding officer. The question of
which class farting made for the funniest joke was clearly also a matter of who was
doing the laughing.

‘Un cas extraordinaire d’aspiration rectale et d’anus musical’

The Pétomane also attracted the curiosity of men of science, who asked to study his unusual
physiology, and it is thanks to the work of the Bordelais doctor Marcel Baudoin, whose
article entitled ‘Un cas extraordinaire d’aspiration rectale et d’anus musical’ was published

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38 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

in the journal La Semaine médicale in 1892, that we have a detailed medical observation of
what exactly Pujol did with his body (Baudoin, 1892). Other studies of Pujol’s physical
mechanism were conducted by doctors, firstly in Clermont-Ferrand in 1892 (Nohain and
Caradec, 2000: 97), then in Paris, when he performed a demonstration for the Société
d’anatomie et de physiologie at the Saint-André hospital (Baudoin, 1892: 145). Later, when
Pujol returned to the south, a Toulouse doctor also examined him and wrote about it
(Charpy, 1904). These accounts reveal a striking contrast between the physical reality of
his skill and the production of meanings about his act. Pujol was not farting at all, in the
sense that there were no intestinal gases released with the production of sounds by his anus.
The air he expelled and used his sphincter muscles to make vibrate, much as we do with our
vocal chords when we speak and sing, was fresh air he had anally ‘breathed in’ – as fresh
at least as the air ever was in Paris in the 1890s.
François Caradec and Alain Weill note how the music-halls and cafés-concerts both
tended to be highly topical genres in terms of their theatrical content. Musicians and danc-
ers there relied considerably on their skill at improvisation – songs were often written and
performed on the same day, and hence themes that circulated in public life, in everyday
conversation, in newspapers, scandal and rumour tended to find their way onto the musical
stage faster than in other kinds of theatre (Caradec and Weill, 2007). That topicality may
help to explain why a performer could be so successful with an act that reminded audiences
at once of the stinking Paris sewers, the incessant public debates about noxious gases of
modern urban life, and the association of social class with filth and propriety. This is the
other context to Pujol’s reception that is crucial for understanding how the humour of his
performance operated. Many of the same newspapers that picked up on the Pétomane phe-
nomenon were also, in that same period, often joking and complaining about the filth of the
Seine and the stench of Parisian air which was the result of drainage problems around the
départements along the river, and from the new crisis of an over-burdened sewerage system
in need of yet more technological development than that than that undertaken by Haussmann
under the Second Empire (Barnes, 2006).
A number of scholars have shown the extent to which France throughout the nineteenth
century was gripped by concerns about sewerage management, urban disease and foul odours
that resulted from the dramatic population increase across that century and its intensification
in urban centres, especially Paris (Corbin, 1982; Vigarello, 1985; Reid, 1991; Kudlick, 1996;
Guerrand, 2001; Barnes, 2006). In the first wave of this urban crisis during the 1830s there had
emerged a common discourse that associated the working classes, prostitutes and the most
poverty-stricken Parisians generally with filth, stench, disease and degeneration (Parent-
Duchâtelet, 1837). Cleanliness came to be associated with class privilege (Vigarello, 1985:
199–206). Excrement thus stood for the lower classes, as in Daumier’s famous satirical image.
That association was reinforced under the Second Empire when the newly technologised
égoûts were first opened to the public, allowing the more privileged classes to step down for
a moment into the bowels of Paris, assured of the odourlessness and tidiness of this latest sign
of Haussmannian triumph over the masses and their abject waste (Reid, 1991: 47). The con-
quest of filth was hailed as a sign that French civilisation had attained perfection in the likeness
of Rome before the fall (Mayer, 1867). And for a few decades, until the end of the summer of
1880, there was no apparent foul smell emanating from the sewerage system of Paris.
In the decade before Joseph Pujol brought his act to the Moulin Rouge, a new crisis of
urban sanitation emerged in Paris, this one provoking sustained press commentary

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Moore 39

and political debate. The sewer tours had to be stopped, as the spectacle of an odourless and
pristine interior of the conquered belly of Paris could no longer be provided. By that time, the
old medical paradigm of miasma theory, according to which foul odours were taken as the
causative sign of mysterious illness, had dwindled in response to the bacteriological research
of Louis Pasteur, and most medical scientists now viewed odour as not necessarily nefarious
to health (Corbin, 1982: 260). But as David Barnes has shown, that question remained a topic
of widespread public debates and scepticism, since it was also clear that the ‘Great Stink of
Paris’ coincided with new waves of cholera and typhoid, and was commonly complained
about in political opposition (Barnes, 2006: 12–15). On 23 November 1884 the front page of
the republican satirical newspaper Le Grelot showed a Dr Épatant devouring a choleric
excreta in order to prove that it was not contagious, transforming it through digestion into a
bouquet of fragrant violets (Figure 3). The bourgeois conquest of urban filth was implied in
the sewer renovations of the Second Empire through the promotion of these achievements as
the signs of a great civilisation; and this, in the context of longer nineteenth-century patterns
of associating class privilege with propriety, now produced some easy targets for scatological
republican satire and low-brow comedy. It was in the 1870s and 1880s that Émile Zola pro-
duced the social realist novels most peppered with scatological imagery referring to social
class, capitalism and wealth, Le Ventre de Paris (1873), La Terre (1887) and others in the
Rougon-Macquard series (Bellos, 1979: 35–8).
Although Pujol was not actually releasing any intestinal gasses when he produced the novel
range of tones and timbres that his highly trained sphincter muscles had cultivated, public
perceptions of him appeared to have unanimously imagined the sounds to represent genuine
flatulent odour. That was probably less because the truth was unknown than because the view
of him as farting enabled his example to inspire endless riffs on scatological themes – themes
derived from those longer French literary and satirical traditions into which the Pétomane’s act
could be semiotically inscribed. He was, after all, producing fart-like sounds with his anus.
Pujol’s performance suggested actual flatulence too, insofar as a part of his act included imitat-
ing the farts of various personae, ‘the young maiden’ for whom he squeezed out a dainty whin-
ing sound, ‘the mother-in-law’ for whom he ripped out a bombastic honk in that long tradition
of mother-in-law humour that poked fun at both feminine pudeur and at matriarchal familial
power. But Pujol also imitated other kinds of sounds – human voices, canon-fire and thunder-
claps – and using a small tube which he inserted into his rectum, and which protruded through
a hole in his trousers, he blew out candles from a distance away, smoked cigarettes, and chan-
nelled a concentrated stream of air into various musical instruments with his anus, so produc-
ing simple melodies on them. Though his stage name suggested the action of his body was
péter, in fact, the idea that he might be releasing intestinal gas or foul odour was not referenced
at all in the spectrum of meanings that he himself appears to have designated in relation to his
anal sound range. Most typically, he played upon the idea of his anus as a kind of mouth, and
his lower intestine as a lung-like bellows, which was in fact a more accurate representation of
the mechanism by which he performed his sonic feats. He mocked the conventions of polite
society and the gendered pretention of propriety and poked fun at political figures. From eve-
ryone else’s point of view, however, the Pétomane was farting. No one could smell anything,
but they loved to joke about it nonetheless.
The renowned early twentieth-century songwriter Vincent Scotto in his retrospective
Souvenirs de Paris published just after World War Two remarked that when he visited the
Pétomane in Marseilles just before the war, he found him still keen to perform: ‘il ne songeait

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40 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

Figure 3.  Le Grelot, 23 November 1884. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Moore 41

qu’à remonter sur quelque scene’. But the time of Pétomania had passed, Scotto claimed: ‘la
mode n’était plus vraiment à la spécialité de cet artiste’ (Sotto, cited in Nohain and Caradec,
2000: 9). Neither Sotto nor Nohain and Caradec ventured any opinion about why the
Pétomane, who was so funny to late nineteenth-century audiences, was not longer so in the
interwar period. But the claim that the Pétomane moment had passed some time in the early
twentieth century appears to correspond to the conclusion drawn by the small number of
Pétomane historical commentators, who are more inclined to speculate on what might have
changed. Marcel Pagnol suggested that a fart joker could be funny enough to make a career
out of his act at the fin de siècle, but not in the aftermath of trench warfare and gas attacks,
and even less so in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation that had left French people humour-
less on the whole, and certainly ill-inclined towards any such frivolous form of laughter
(Pagnol, 1947: 92). But the Pétomane was himself barely interested in the notion of his anal
sounds as odorous gas: nor was that the reality of his feats. He cultivated a more complex set
of virtuoso skills than he has generally been given credit for, and his own humour was far
more focused on class parody, caricature, absurdity and light-hearted buffoonery than on any
attempt to reference the common Parisian social concerns about odour and anal filth which
his performance often prompted in the minds of others.
It is more likely that the Pétomane phenomenon passed from vogue because it was unique
to a particular moment in the history of French musical theatre. In its early years the Moulin
Rouge thrived on novelty and hired new acts regularly to feed a burgeoning public hunger
for the new. Pujol’s routine was so successful that it spurned multiple uptakes in comedic
texts such as the ‘Bistrouille Pétomane’, and those of Grente-Dencourt and Humblot, and
even the occasional imitator. These copies possibly contributed to the Pétomane becoming
too familiar to shock any more. But after 1900 the Moulin Rouge also underwent major
renovation and was transformed into a far more conventional music-hall catering increas-
ingly to wealthy foreign and provincial tourists, and less to the middle and upper-middle
class of Paris (Rearick, 1985: 95).
If the Pétomane was only à la mode in Paris for a decade or so, this may also be because
imitating his highly unconventional virtuosity was no simple feat. He was highly skilled in
techniques that were unlikely for anyone to cultivate so seriously given their cultural attribu-
tion of absurdity and non-respectability. Becoming a Pétomane required a particular physical
propensity that may not be within everyone’s grasp. As the Dr Baudoin who examined Pujol’s
physiology wrote: ‘il n’y a aucune observation analogue dans les annales de la science’
(Baudoin, 1892: 144). To be a Pétomane also required genuine commitment to musical and
performance training of no ordinary kind. It required a courageous, eccentric and original
enough personality to pursue the most absurd and outrageous form of musicality with suffi-
cient determination to become a virtuoso of it. Perhaps above all, it also required the music-
hall genre of venue as it stood just before the end of the nineteenth century. It is clearly not
the case that a successful Pétomane-style performer would be unviable in any other context,
as the more recent example of Britain’s guest-show performer Mr Methane suggests (Dawson,
1999: 38). But stinking Paris at the fin de siècle, with its polluted Seine and choleric crisis, its
abandoned sewer tours and its cultural associations with mud, swamp and excrement, with its
bohemian urban celebration of decadence and its Third Republic blossoming of political cri-
tique and class subversion, was certainly a more fertile ground for a Pétomane than any other
time–space nexus either before or after.

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42 French Cultural Studies 24(1)

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Filmography
Le Pétomane (1979) Documentary by Ian McNaughton. Channel 4, UK.
Il petomane (1983) Film directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. Filmauro, Italy.
Le Pétomane: parti avec le vent (2005) Film directed by Steve Ochs. Hero Filmworks, USA.

Alison M. Moore is a Senior Lecturer in modern European history at the University of Western Sydney.
Her research interests are in the history of medicine, biology, psychiatry, sexuality, bodies, genders and
historiography in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Her recent publications include (with Peter
Cryle), Frigidity: An Intellectual History (2011) and she is the editor of Sexing Political Culture in the
History of France (2012).46675FRC0010.1177/0957155812466975French Cultural StudiesMoore2012

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