The second menu of Chope du Nègre, dated 17 February 1916, shows that the tavern used the same template for several years (Figure 2). This earlier menu highlights some details of the village scene in red, making the characters’ lips thicker and their grins larger, which worsens the offensive representation of Africans. Both menus identify the tavern’s owner as A. Roget, about whom I have been unable to find more information.
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The menus also indicate that the bar sold Bière du Nègre de J. Prudhon & Cie, the name of a beer company.1 Below is an image of a stoneware mug with a metal lid made by this company, revealing what their beer products might have looked like (Figure 3). Although I have not yet verified the production date, the stein is stamped with “Marque Déposée,” meaning “Registered Trademark.” This suggests the image was used on all its products. Whatever the date, the Black man on this tankard resembles the caricatures of the Black Africans on the menu.
As my research emphasizes, the words “nègre” or “négresse” were often accompanied by offensive caricatures of Black Africans. This was not unusual in 1920s Paris. Critics have pointed out that the popular craze for African art and African American music and dance did not reject stereotypes. Sometimes these stereotypes were given positive value, but the stereotype was not dismantled. Other times Black people and culture were celebrated so long as they reproduced established stereotypes. For instance, Josephine Baker’s performance in La Revue Nègre (1925)—especially her danse sauvage with partner Joe Alex—projected animalistic representations of Africans and African Americans. Some thought her performance was denigrating, whereas others praised it for transfusing new blood and energy into a France sorely in need of renewal (Dalton and Gates 916). Each side was reading the stereotypes differently. Black Africans and Black Americans, like the drummer at Zelli’s, might have experienced tolerance and admiration in Paris, but the signs of their imagined inferiority were present everywhere, even in a popular tavern in the Opéra district.
1 I wonder whether J. Prudhon might be a joking reference to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), a French philosopher considered by many to be the father of anarchism. Besides the humor of an anarchist producing inebriating brews, his father ran a small brewery in a suburb of the French town where Proudhon was born and Proudhon worked there as a child. The tavern eventually went bankrupt (Woodcock).
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Debra A. Moddelmog is dean of liberal arts emerita and professor of English emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno. She co-edited Ernest Hemingway in Context with Suzanne del Gizzo and is the author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway. Her edition of The Sun Also Rises was recently published by Broadview Press. Feedback can be sent to dmoddelmog@unr.edu