The inventor of the famous beauty contest launched in 1920 is a Belgian who did not carry female emancipation in his heart.

When we talk about Miss France, a host of names come to mind. Jean-Pierre Foucault, irremovable Monsieur Loyal in the beauty contest for over twenty years; Geneviève de Fontenay, who has ruled the competition for half a century. On the other hand, that of Maurice de Waleffe probably tells you nothing.

And yet it was he who, in 1920, invented the competition which now brings together 8 million viewers in front of their screens. Let us take advantage of the centenary of the event and the holding of the competition at the Dome of Marseille, Saturday December 14, to draw the portrait.

A funny fellow, Maurice de Waleffe. Short on legs, undermined like Tintin with the physique of Achille Talon and a Dupont mustache, he left his native Belgium and his upper middle class family in 1894, at the age of 20, to pursue a career in Paris. Bad people will say that he uses his particle to integrate into good society. The very bad languages ​​that his social ascent is mainly due to the maternal portfolio. He is in turn a great reporter (he will go so far as to disguise himself as a choirboy to attend a private mass celebrated by Pope Pius IX), daily patron, editorialist, writer (who proposed banning those under 30 years of writing books to unclog bookstores) or even social columnist.

He has an opinion on almost everything, and does not fail to make it known. "Journalism is a job where, by definition, you have to have an idea a day. In forty years of journalism, I must have had a few", does he gargle in The Revue des deux mondes. Even going too far.

Very hostile to Germany, he disapproved of the endless pacifism of a Jean Jaurès, whom he squarely called to be shot shortly before the start of the First World War: "The general who would order four men and a corporal to stick citizen Jaurès on the wall and put him at close range with the lead he lacked in his brain, do you think this general would not have done his most basic duty ? Yes, and I would help it ", does it thunder in L'Echo de Paris in the summer of 1914.

A few days after this article, the socialist leader falls under the bullets of Raoul Villain, an unbalanced nationalist student, at the Café du croissant, in Paris. What will be worth to Maurice de Waleffe a reputation (deserved) of man of right, even of tightly packed right. An example ? In the early 1930s, he erected Benito Mussolini as "the politician in Europe he most admires" in The European. Two aspects of his CV which will earn him strong enmities on the left, and the nickname "Potato" or its German translation, "Kartoffel", in the very young Duck chained.

Caricature of Maurice de Waleffe in "L'Ere Nouvelle", April 5, 1927. (L'ERE NOUVELLE)

Politics is not, however, its core business. A certain idea of ​​the greatness of France, yes. For him, this happened in 1917 by encouraging war widows to adopt orphans. And by the return of the pants (and the silk stocking that goes with it) for men, during the 1920s, because he believes that their protruding muscles are wasted by shapeless pants. He also has an idea for restore vigor to these gentlemen who have returned traumatized from the front line and revive the national birth rate: create an competition exalting French female beauty …

Maurice de Waleffe, who is rather in favor of authoritarian regimes, chooses democracy in this specific case, with a vote organized in Parisian cinemas in 1920. It thus distributes the photos of young women preselected by a 95% male jury designed to recall the frozen beauties, underlines Aro Velmet in his article (in English) Beauty and big business, gender, race and civilizational decline in French beauty pageants, 1920–37. "The choice of the majority will indicate the instinctive type of a nation", summarizes our Monsieur Loyal. A young woman from Espelette (Pyrénées-Atlantique), Agnès Souret, crushes the competition, and instantly becomes a movie and cabaret star. The Folies Bergère made her a golden bridge to star in a number where she was lugged around in a basket by throwing flowers at the spectators. Her mother's chaperone broods over her knitting from behind the scenes. It is proposed to be exhibited in this way across the Atlantic. She refuses a seven-figure offer from P.T. Barnum, the American show magnate who simultaneously launched Miss America.

Still. Maurice de Waleffe is not happy with the result. Dreamed of a robust provincial as an antidote to what he believed to be "the urban degeneration". He inherits from an evanescent young woman, from a bourgeois family, and who looked very Parisian in the photo presented to the voters.

The second Miss France competition will not take place until five years later, with a radically different voting system. No more screenings at the cinema, place a jury of carefully selected esthetes, "like at the Olympics." In fact, it is more reminiscent of the cattle fair, as Raymonde Allain, Miss France 1928 writes, in Marianne : "Mrs. de Waleffe takes me by the hand and introduces me to each member of the jury, like a heifer at the fair. 'Look at the neck, look at these fasteners, look at this profile'. And she lifts my head. And she turn it. Right. Left. " A member of the jury finds his hairstyle "Weird". Madame de Waleffe undoes the mats right away. Another no longer sees the neck. The same roughly ties Raymonde Allain's hair with a handkerchief. "This is how you become a beauty queen", concludes, fatalist, the future winner.

Mr. de Waleffe, it's Janus, continues the winner. On the one hand, it represents the oldest traditions of chivalry; on the other, the most American methods of contemporary trade.Raymonde Allain, Miss France 1928to "Marianne"

We could not have better described the schizophrenia that emanates from the great work of the Belgian, underlines for Franceinfo the American academic Holly Grout, specialist in beauty contests. "Charged with the heavy task of regenerating the French race, the beauty queen testifies to a patriarchal, even parochial design. But as a product of appeal for a new consumer society – from the outset, many societies offer prizes to Miss France – she can't get out of the modern world that basically created her. "

The same duality reigns regarding the role of the contest for the status of women. "On the one hand, these competitions have strengthened the status of women as decorative objects, in reaction to their emancipation obtained during the war, Holly Grout continues. But on the other hand, these well-endowed competitions have often offered women unprecedented financial independence. "

Evidenced by the fate of Roberte Cusey, who had nothing more in a hurry than to open a beauty salon after his victory in 1927, declining his name as a brand of clothes having storefront on the Champs-Elysées in 1934 Not exactly the path marked out by the Belgian journalist to revive the birth rate and the "French race".

Maurice de Waleffe may disapprove of the career choices of his laureates – whom he does not brood during their public appearances, unlike Geneviève de Fontenay several decades later – he is aware of having found a formula that works. He declined it frantically at the end of the 1920s. Miss Lebanon, Miss Algeria, Miss Russia (finally, Miss non-Bolshevik Russian emigrant, a competition that will lead in the wing from the first edition because the winner was not Russian). His greatest success? Obtain public subsidies for the creation of Miss Outre-Mer, an election sponsored by President Albert Lebrun in person, to revive the birth rate (again) in what was not yet called the Dom-Tom.

Waleffe's business is going so well that the press ends up denouncing the way he earns his living on the backs of young women.

Mr. de Waleffe lives on beauty like others in grocery or prostitution.The newspaper "Le Populaire"

The newspaper cites the example of dinners organized by Maurice de Waleffe with his flock of young women, where he charges men to watch for candidates at the restaurant entrance (20 francs) and other men to dine in their company (150 francs). But it will take the arrival of World War II for him to stop the competition, which he will never see resume before his death, March 3, 1946.

As an epitaph, this sentence pronounced in the early 1930s on the possibility of electing a Mister France: "Never ! Maurice de Waleffe replied to a journalist from The Little Gironde. Man is a force in motion, while woman is harmony at rest. And then, what men would offer themselves to our votes? It would be lamentable! " The Mister France contest, the ancestor of Mister France, however was born in the early 1960s. But it never had the success of its female version.

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