p. 20 “the Romantic grisette was rarely represented labouring – a considerable contrast to her later incarnation, the midinette. Henri Monnier’s 1829 lithograph Les Grisettes depict only scenes of romantic entanglements between a bourgeois man and his grisette mistress. Also typical of the genre was the 1834 song “Les Tribulations de Mlle Flore, coururiere en robe” in which a mournful seamstress sings of her parade of unfaithful lovers: a painter, a drummer, a hussar, gendarmes, cooks, infantrymen. Flore never hints at her own work; we only know she is a seamstress because of the song’s title The grisette, rather than actually working, was instead often pictured as a devotee of popular fiction, especially sentimental Parisian novels like those of Paul de Kock… Already in the 18th century, she was seen to hold more cultural capital in the form of Parisian fashion sense than many noblewomen. Jules Janin’s entry for “La Grisette” for 1840s “moral encyclopedia Les Francais peints par eux-memes defined the gristte’s taste as both a contrast to the idle luxury of bourgeois women and as a national heritage. “Their industrious hands ceaselessly and forever shape gauze, silk, velvt, linen .. this innocent continual conquest at the point of a needle is a thousand times more durable than all of our conquests at the point of a sword … They reign as despots over European finery… And must this French taste be universal so that those girls, those children of the poor, who will die poor like their mothers, become the omnipotent representative of fashion in the entire universe!”
p. 21 The grisette’s sexual availability went virtually unquestioned in Romantic-era fiction. Ernest Desprez counselled young men in search of a grisette mistress that “the virtuous grisette is one that has only one lover”.
P23 By 1850, the grisette had become an object of melancholic nostalgia, harkening back to an earlier Paris….representing “the passage into modernity, first as a new aesthetic, that of debris and ruins, then as an existential feeling, that of the loss of the city as a physical and spiritual home.”
p. 26 By the turn of the century, the grisette still regularly appeared throughout popular culture as a sign of heightened romantic longing for a lost Paris, a France of small-scale industry, sentiment amd elegance. She was frequently conflated with contemporary garment workers, tethering living belle epoque working women with a figure of literary wistfulness. Parisian garment workers in this period inhabited new post-Haussman city spaces with novel freedoms of movement, increased access to the consumer economy and (for some) newfound political activism… The most popular grisette of the turn of the century was Musett’s Mimi Pinson, who was featured in songs, poems, postcards, ballet, vaudeville shows, short stories, novels, films and even a series of dolls… a statue of Museet by Antonin Mercie was dedicated with great fanfare in front of the Theatre Francaise.”
P. 38 In the Parisian imaginary, the belle epoque midinette tended, like her grisette grandmother, to inhabit a liminal moral space between libertinage and bourgeois feminine virtue. Often surrounded by carefree coquettes who toil alongside her in the couture workshop and encourage her romantic follies, the midinette heroine was, more or less, a good girl. She might take a lover, or be seduced or raped, but she is generally a young woman of romantic loyalty and goodness. While melodramatic tragedy was one possible trajectory for fictive midinettes, they were often represented as unchaste, but, ultimately content, either happily married, in concubinage or managing their own couture shops.”
p. 39 the term midinette referenced the moment in the workday when these young women were best observed by lubricious flaneurs, the noon lunch hour… a spectacular urban figure, inseparable from the commercial delights of post-Hausmann Paris, .. like an enchanting species of city bird (to which she was regularly compared).
P 65 For French manufacturers, Parisian garment workers were women who required protection because of their talent and importance to the French economy, and because they were embedded in a charmingly archaic paternalistic workplace…The Bon Marche was praised for providing dowries for single female employees. La Samarataine had created a nursery for employees’ children. Two fashion houses were singled out for providing maternity benefits. In striking contrast, Carette’s comparatively brief section on British employers’ pension policies explained tersely that in England “It is not the custom of industrial or commercial businesses to provide for the retirement of their employees or labourers… The laborer is used to counting on no one but himself.”
p. 139 lunch reform “the reality of the malnourished sweated laborer is nearly elided in favour of a chic coquette who chooses not to eat her fill in order to revel in the pleasures of Parisian couture (rather than being deprived of adequate nourishment because of a meager salary.)”
p. 171 Recent scholarship .. reappraises women’s wartime strikes, noting, among other things, the way in which the garment strikes were read as “a festice assembly of women who sang their way into the Ministers’ – and the public’s – hearts.” .. the female and more traditionally feminine nature of the garment strikes made them more sympathetic than munitions strikes, including munitionettes.. the relatively sympathetic treatment of Parisian garment worker protest was embedded in a symbolic system of the midinette that pre-dated the war.”
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