‘Moral Girls’ and ‘Filles Fatales’: The Fetishisation of Innocence

Abstract

In 1912, the well-established Parisian painter Paul Chabas exhibited Matin e de Septembre (hereafter September Morn) a painting he had been working on over three summers at the prestigious Salon des Artistes Fran ais. Three years earlier, the forty-year-old Chabas had asked an eleven-year-old girl from the French Savoie to pose for him in Lake Annecy as the morning sun warmed its glacial waters. Over the past twenty years, images of children even hinting at voyeuristic pleasure have been regarded as suspect. Since most paedophiles have been found to possess such images, they are considered inextricably imbricated in the epidemic of child sexual abuse that James Kincaid calls 'the culture of child molesting'. Current child-abuse studies reveal that in the lack of an object, paedophiles may gratify themselves with fantasies triggered by an illustration, and then may be spurred on to seek real equivalents to the image. This connection drawn between child imagery and paedophilia is not new French physicians were documenting it as early as 1860. Amid comparable moral panic ignited by French natalists over the 'white slave trade' and girl-child pornography before the First World War, picturing the body before the age of sexual consent became the subject of vehement protest, extensive legislation, and vigorous prosecution. Yet, unlike the fate of Henson and Mapplethorpe's photography, art by 'official artists' that fetishised the child's body, as epitomised by Chabas, was, and arguably remains, untouchable. Why this happened and continues to happen is the subject of this paper. This article will question why the specious body-concealing gestures deployed by Chabas, together with his nature setting, appeared to inscribe this thirteen-year old as a naturally innocent 'moral girl'. It will question how these signifiers of innocence were able to function as misleading pretexts and, indeed, camouflaging covers for paedophilic eroticism. Drawing upon neurological and sexological discourses, it will also question why eroticism was heightened by the fetishisation of innocence. As there is a lack of a comparable strategy of dissimulation and fetishisation in Henson's 'N', the final question to be addressed will be whether this very absence lies at the heart of the Henson scandal. To unravel the conditions from which these questions arise, this article will, firstly, investigate the 'white slave trade', the child-pornography postcard trade, and pornography legislation in Belle poque Paris. Secondly, it will examine the natalist discourses on 'moral girls' and their healthy bodies, in relationship to Chabas' paintings of pubescent girls exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Fran ais and those by his contemporary, Francis Aubertin, at the Salon de la Soci t National des Beaux-Arts. Thirdly, it will trace the forensic, neurological, and sexological research into child sexual abuse and the sexual life of the child, together with the diverging discourses on children's fantasy. Fourthly, it will consider how the female child's identity became binarised by these debates into either a 'fille fatale' or a 'moral girl'. To address this, it will ascertain, with the aid of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and Henry Krips's scrutiny of fetishisation, which image may be closest to the pornography of 'filles fatales': Henson's photograph of 'N' or Chabas' so-called 'moral girl'.