Catherine Ostler, THE RENOIR GIRLS: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read
[0:22]and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:27]I had such a great time interviewing Katherine Osler,
[0:31]author of The Renoir Girls,
[0:33]a hidden history of art, war, and betrayal.
[0:35]It was so wonderful because then I actually got to meet Katherine
[0:39]at an event that it just so happened.
[0:41]She was in from the UK around the corner
[0:43]from where I was staying and I got to meet her,
[0:46]which was so exciting.
[0:47]The day that this book hit the New York Times best-seller list
[0:52]and she was over the moon and so was everyone at the party.
[0:55]And I posted about it,
[0:56]but it was just so exciting to be part of the fun.
[0:59]I'm very, very grateful to Plum Sykes,
[1:03]prior guest on my show for introducing me to Katherine
[1:07]and making that connection.
[1:08]And I hope you enjoyed this book.
[1:11]Wow, is Katherine Impressive?
[1:12]Oh, my gosh, I could have talked to her forever.
[1:16]Here's a little bit about her.
[1:17]Katherine Osler is an author and journalist
[1:20]who has been editor-in-chief of Tatler,
[1:22]the English Standard in London,
[1:24]the Evening Standard magazine in London
[1:26]and editor of The Times of London Weekend.
[1:30]She has also written for a wide range of publications,
[1:32]including the Wall Street Journal,
[1:34]the Daily Telegraph London, the Financial Times,
[1:36]and Vogue, she studied English at Oxford University.
[1:40]And her first book was The Duchess Countess,
[1:43]the woman who scandalized 18th century London.
[1:46]Now we have the Renoir Girls and it's amazing.
[1:50]Welcome, Katherine.
[1:51]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Bucks
[1:54]to talk about the Renoir Girls,
[1:56]a hidden history of art, war, and betrayal.
[1:58]Congratulations.
[2:00]Thank you so much.
[2:01]I'm so excited to be on your podcast.
[2:03]I love it.
[2:03]Oh, thank you.
[2:05]Wow, this is an incredible story
[2:08]and you are an incredible researcher
[2:11]to have found all this information.
[2:13]I'm blown away by all of it.
[2:16]Amazing.
[2:17]Why don't you tell everybody where your interest came
[2:20]in this topic and then what you found?
[2:25]OK, sure.
[2:26]I came at this for several angles, really.
[2:28]One was in another book, which is where
[2:30]I seemed to find lots of my ideas, which was a mention
[2:33]in Edmund Duvall's The Hair With Amber Eyes,
[2:35]where he talked about Charles Froucy,
[2:38]the great art critic of 19th century Paris,
[2:40]who collected these tiny Japanese sculptures,
[2:43]the next suitcase.
[2:44]And I was rather smitten by his mistress,
[2:46]who was called Louise Kiondongva.
[2:48]And he mentioned that he persuaded her
[2:51]to get memoir to paint portraits of her three daughters.
[2:55]So he painted her all this daughter in 1880
[2:57]and then the younger two in 1881.
[3:00]So as I was reading this book, I was looking up
[3:02]these pictures and seeing where they were.
[3:04]And strangely, one was in Zurich.
[3:05]And one was in Brazil.
[3:07]And there were these very beautiful pictures
[3:09]of sort of shimmering Parisian child to lay stresses,
[3:15]sat in sashis, sort of exquisite little sort of doll faces.
[3:20]And then about 200 pages later,
[3:22]he mentioned briefly, he was sort of saying what had happened.
[3:26]His story by then had gone to Vienna and Japan,
[3:30]but he sort of went back to France a little bit.
[3:33]And he said that one of these dear little girls
[3:36]had died in Auschwitz as an old lady.
[3:39]And I was so sort of broken by this trajectory of a life.
[3:44]And I'd always been very interested in the Bellapoc
[3:48]that appeared in Paris after the total destruction
[3:51]and devastation of the Franco-Prussian war
[3:54]in which Paris with almost sort of still miraculous
[3:58]sort of speed rebuilds itself.
[4:02]And so in 1771, you've got a city,
[4:06]so it wore itself that it shoots its own art bishop
[4:10]and is eating the animals in the zoo.
[4:12]By 1889, they're putting up the Eiffel Tower
[4:16]and they are the center of the universe.
[4:19]And it was an extraordinary kind of period of growth
[4:22]in fashion and building and arts.
[4:25]And you get the rise of impressionism and a writing,
[4:28]this amazing period of creativity.
[4:31]And we'd sort of continue until the beginning
[4:34]of the first while Boral, possibly the sinking
[4:36]of the Titanic, how I'd be looking at it.
[4:38]But this, so that period had always drawn me in.
[4:42]And the other thing that I found myself compelled by
[4:45]always was the Dreyfuss affair, that in 12 years
[4:50]where France is rent a part by the trial
[4:54]of a Jewish army officer who's falsely convicted of treason.
[4:59]And he's basically sort of set up by his colleagues
[5:02]in the army.
[5:03]And it very quickly becomes apparent
[5:05]to most French people and everybody around the world,
[5:09]the Italians, the Germans, who is accused of spying,
[5:12]Queen Victoria, everybody's, that this man is innocent.
[5:16]And half of France hangs on to the idea that he's guilty
[5:19]because they can't bear for the army to be wrong
[5:22]because France in itself is so divided since the revolution.
[5:27]Some people think it should be a monarchy,
[5:29]some people think it should still be a Catholic country.
[5:32]And this trial comes to sort of represent
[5:35]the polarization of French society.
[5:38]So I went on this slightly sort of mad quest
[5:42]to work out through one family,
[5:45]the story of the Jews in France sort of from art
[5:49]to the Second World War.
[5:51]And this is a war.
[5:52]Wow.
[5:53]The story is a lot about betrayal, right?
[5:55]Betrayal of country, betrayal of France.
[5:58]Yeah.
[5:59]Friendships, betrayal of community.
[6:00]Speak a little bit about that and how that emotion
[6:05]and comes across so clearly.
[6:07]Well, what was very painful to me was the realization
[6:12]that after the revolution, France had become
[6:16]the most welcoming place in Europe,
[6:18]very, it was very early that they declared they had
[6:21]free and equal rights for Jews.
[6:25]I mean, of course it wasn't always free and equal
[6:26]because Paris, by the end of the 19th century,
[6:29]was also the richest and the poorest place in France.
[6:32]But by religion, it was freedom.
[6:35]And so everybody wanted to come to Paris.
[6:38]It was, as Walter Benjamin would later describe it,
[6:41]the capital of the 19th century.
[6:43]So in spite of this terrible war of 1870,
[6:46]people are pouring in and it's the center of culture
[6:49]and the center of commerce in Europe.
[6:52]And various Jewish families move there,
[6:55]including the kind of verse in the last previous generation
[7:00]who are the family I'm writing about in the book.
[7:02]And also the Afrucy, who's the family of Charles Afrucy,
[7:06]the mother's lover and Remoir's great patron.
[7:09]And they are, I was very struck by their love of France.
[7:13]They are sort of totally smitten by French history
[7:17]and French culture.
[7:19]They are, you know, they worship the enlightenment
[7:23]and the art of the 18th century.
[7:25]And like the French themselves, they start collecting
[7:29]all the possessions of Marianne to a net, for example.
[7:32]And all the sort of tapestries and the bouges and the whatos.
[7:36]And they also want to buy shadow and restore them.
[7:41]And this is an act of sort of patriotism.
[7:45]They will, we will say French history
[7:47]because of course, after the French Revolution,
[7:49]unlike England say lots of these shatters were empty
[7:53]and they've been ransacked and they're also
[7:56]the origin owners had been, you know,
[7:59]taken to the guillotine in many cases.
[8:01]So there was this enormous art market in France,
[8:05]but they were beyond that and became great supporters
[8:08]of the Impressionists.
[8:09]And often they were incredibly generous.
[8:12]So one of the older system married
[8:15]into the commando family and a relative Isaac to commando
[8:20]gave the Louvre over 800 pictures,
[8:23]such an enormous collection
[8:25]that they had to build whole new rums to store it.
[8:29]And then by the 1930s, the sun, the girls' brother
[8:34]gave their shadow outside Paris to the French nation
[8:38]for a while the gall used to meet state leaders there.
[8:41]And commando left his house in Paris.
[8:44]So they were incredibly generous
[8:48]and it just made it, I mean, it's deeply painful story
[8:53]in the end anyway, I'm afraid,
[8:56]as concerns one of the three sisters.
[8:58]But the fact that they so loved their country
[9:02]and their country betrayed them
[9:04]because the French people who were sent
[9:09]two outfits from France were sent by the French
[9:13]on French railways from the French staff at Drollsey.
[9:17]There's no, and Elizabeth in my book
[9:20]was betrayed by the local mayor.
[9:22]She was living in occupied France
[9:24]in a tiny village in the middle of the countryside near Le Mans.
[9:28]She's nearly 70, she can't even really walk.
[9:31]But the local mayor who's known her family for generations
[9:35]and is a petanist signed a document saying
[9:38]that he knew she was Jewish.
[9:40]And so in the very last weeks of the war in France,
[9:43]she got sent to Drollsey by him.
[9:47]So I felt, although some people left early,
[9:51]I think a lot of people,
[9:52]because people always wonder why just some people leave
[9:55]and some people don't leave and there's expression in Israel.
[10:00]which is, you know, we were founded by the pessimists. People who got out early, but the
[10:04]fact is they felt French and what was happening or coming was unimaginable as we can all
[10:11]well imagine it was unimaginable. And they couldn't believe that they wouldn't be treated
[10:17]as the French were. And that is just, you know, a tragedy of sort of, you know, inexpressible
[10:27]propulsion was already. My gosh, the scene of her, of Elizabeth walking out with her
[10:32]cane, sort of just like not able to walk and still being sent to Auschwitz as an elderly lady
[10:39]who comes from such a nice family. I mean, it's just so horrific. I mean, it just never ceases
[10:46]to be gut-wrenching all of the scenes of so many lives disrupted that is not able to be captured
[10:53]by the numbers alone. Right? It's these stories and scenes that make it real for other people.
[10:58]That's exactly it. I think the numbers are overwhelming. You know, we don't know. You can't
[11:03]one can't imagine numbers. So we have to sort of name these people and follow their stories
[11:07]to really understand what happened, I think, as far as we can. How do you feel it having so much
[11:16]knowledge and background? And I can't believe you don't have like a PhD in art history,
[11:20]by the way, you should just go teach it Oxford or something like that in your next chapter of
[11:24]your life. But there's rampant anti-Semitism and France and all of these horrible things happening.
[11:31]Like how do you does it help you to see the context of all of that when you read or see all
[11:37]of the things happening in the news? Like, does, are you like, oh, this came from this and this
[11:42]came from that and I understand this or how do you feel about it? I feel horrible. I feel absolutely
[11:48]traumatized because I think the levels of ignorance and sort of denial about history is staggering.
[11:57]I mean, I don't know quite how it is in America, but history is not on the compulsory GCU syllabus
[12:03]in Britain and a very well-known political donor put out a tweet not that long ago. He's got two
[12:10]million followers or something. And he said if they hadn't built the state of Israel,
[12:17]there would be no anti-Semitism. So I think the young here and possibly elsewhere don't
[12:26]understand how deep-rooted and dangerous and sort of viral this thing is. And I know it's very
[12:36]complicated. There are many sides of it these days. But you do see the same tropes reemerging. And
[12:45]I suppose I would hope that somebody, people might read this book who didn't know that, who would
[12:52]realize what would have been out there for many centuries actually. But no, I mean, when I started
[13:03]this book, it was way before the 7th of October, obviously. So I was writing it very much
[13:08]as history. So it's very difficult for me to, as it is for anybody, to cope with the fact that
[13:17]the same ideas and the same tropes have popped up again, like some sort of terrible kind of monster.
[13:26]I was particularly struck by in the art actually and the horribles of anti-Semitic cartoons.
[13:32]I mean, very similar things have been drawn in the West. I won't go into sort of where or how
[13:39]it's too unpleasant. But I don't know whether they're conscious copies or whether there's some sort
[13:45]of unconscious imitation that goes on from somewhere. So I don't know. I think people aren't very good
[13:52]at separating what's going on from the prejudices and the strange sort of beliefs.
[14:00]You know, it's where it all gets wrapped up into sort of anti-capped. I mean, I just feel what
[14:07]what happened in 19th century France is that everything that it began and everything went wrong,
[14:12]the Jews became the scapegoats. And one must always be aware of the temptation of scapegoating
[14:20]it because it makes people feel comfortable, doesn't it, in a way, if you can locate all the
[14:25]world outside of yourself. So true. Oh my gosh. Well, I have to say, I mean, the book is out now
[14:32]and it's getting so much press, even in publications that have not necessarily uplifted other
[14:39]stories from the Jewish perspective or about Jewish themes or whatever. And I obviously,
[14:45]that is not the only thing in your book, right? But it is a thread and the fact that it is
[14:50]becoming pushed by the mainstream is so fabulous and amazing. No, seriously. So that's like a huge
[14:57]sigh of relief. Like, oh, my gosh. I hope you and it's not so easy. So that's amazing. I know
[15:07]some people like, was it hard to get published? I mean, I was like, well, you know, you could look
[15:12]at this book in many ways as you say. It's a story of art. It's a family, but there we are. It's a sort
[15:18]of, you know, and the story of that period in French history is the story of antisemitism, I'm afraid.
[15:24]You know, it's also the story of what they lost of before the war, which is this beautiful life
[15:30]and the, yes, those in the art and the impressionists and the experimental nature of creativity,
[15:37]which I think often happens in response to war. In that case, the Franco-Prussian war, but
[15:43]did you, how did you, because, so you've been the editor-in-chief of several massive publications
[15:49]and yet you are clearly a historian at heart. How have you paired these, these two loves
[15:57]and in your daily work and you're writing in your research and bookwriting worlds,
[16:04]all of that? Tell me about that. Okay. Well, I love being in it. Okay. One of the reasons I love being
[16:09]editor because I love art and the visuals and I love a story that is both is coming at you
[16:17]from all directions. You know, the words and the pictures brought up a better, so, you know,
[16:22]I guess it's slightly my magazine side that drew me to who's in the portrait, who's in the
[16:30]memoir portrait. What's the story? Why did he paint it? You know, so it is in that sense,
[16:35]his visual story. There are lots of pictures in the book as you know of who's who wear and who
[16:40]painted them. So it's interesting, isn't it? So I, I've always been very interested in the 18th
[16:46]century, which is, you know, in artistic terms where this story begins and is also the beginning
[16:52]of the rise of newspapers in England. And I suppose I've always been interested in where history
[16:58]and literature meets the press and the media. I could never decide whether I was a writer
[17:05]and an editor and I found that as I was a writer, I was often writing sort of 2,000 word biographies
[17:11]of people, you know, little posh histories and I always love history. So why did that person
[17:17]to become that? Well, become that unique person and what experiences form them? And I
[17:22]suppose eventually I just decided to expand it into what I really loved, which was to do it at
[17:27]length in history. So it's the, the lives of others and, you know, the images that go with it have
[17:33]always been what compels me. That's so fascinating. Oh my gosh. Were you ever at a stage in your
[17:41]career where you were getting a lot of rejection or you felt like, yes, I'm interested in this,
[17:46]but I just can't find my way or was it all smooth sailing? It wasn't to me saying at all. I mean,
[17:51]I tell you what, I just couldn't quite decide. I kept saying driving friends mad by saying,
[17:56]I want to write book and then we're like, well, get on with it, you know, keep writing 2,000 word
[18:01]pieces. Why don't you write this book? And then it wasn't so much rejection as the fact that it
[18:06]took me forever to decide what my first book could be and to write the proposal of it. I just found
[18:14]the idea of it. So daunting having thought, you know, the great joy of journalism is the close deadline,
[18:21]you know, and you're just running towards it and then it's all over. So it was doing that proposal
[18:26]and then getting the first book, which was about an 18th century maid of honour, you know,
[18:31]just sort of getting forming it in my, I found that very difficult and I was sort of overjoyed
[18:38]when I got there and it came out. But having not done it before, the publisher was very nice,
[18:43]the challenges when my head really was, how do you make myself do it when I've got longer than a
[18:49]week to do it? My sort of, I'm a terrible over a search. I so love research. Honestly, I could
[18:56]go on forever, I'll go here and there and the joy of this one was that there are some living
[19:01]descendants. So I could go to archives, I could read the whole a priest, I could meet people, you know,
[19:07]I could have gone on forever very happily. I loved it. So it's kind of that my challenge is always
[19:14]forcing myself to sit down and finish the goddamn thing to be honest. I'm barely carrying on with it.
[19:24]Oh my gosh, I love it. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? I think what I've learned is,
[19:29]you know, I think I was very fearful for a long time. I think I thought it was, I held sort of
[19:35]authors and books and stories in such the reverence, you know, I'd loved reading since I was a
[19:40]tiny child. And I thought it was a bit sort of over there. And how can I do that? And yes,
[19:46]I can sort of write my 2000 words. But how am I going to, I just think actually what's
[19:52]what's the point? You know, what you do suspend. It's sort of, I'm afraid it's the kind of
[19:57]of field of fear and do it anyway thing. I think it's just-
[20:00]And I'm sure a million other people have said this is like the first drop once you get over the hump of the first draft and the rewriting is, I think, particularly nonfiction probably.
[20:11]I don't know, writing is rewriting, so just getting anything down and then playing with it.
[20:18]And I'm sure everybody who listens to your podcast would avoid AI like the plague anyway, but I am horrified by the things I've seen in really distinguished publications that are very obviously formed by AI now.
[20:31]So I think anyone young would be well advised to sort of stay away from that, particularly as history is concerned actually it's not accurate it's not helpful and it hasn't got any taste.
[20:44]Tell me how you really feel.
[20:47]Well, you know, I just honestly, I love it, I love it.
[20:52]Okay, and then last question, like what chapter of your life do you think you're in?
[20:58]Oh, watch, oh very hard to say because I did this thing where I had this career and then I sort of did a massive sort of left, you know, I went off on a whole nother tangent.
[21:09]I feel it's very odd because I feel like I'm sort of in the early days of a new phase.
[21:15]So I don't know quite a new phase that I sort of really love and find very interesting, but you know, I think we all have as everyone says different careers now perhaps where you sort of reinvent yourself at different moments.
[21:33]Okay, one of the great joys of books I think is that you don't really know where they're going to take you have unexpected encounters through the research or after publication and you know, so that's really wonderful.
[21:46]And do you have another book you're already researching?
[21:49]I've got to cut, I've got the journalist in me has more right when the editor in me probably has more ideas than I can ever do myself. So I'm sort of researching a few at the same time and trying to decide which one to land on.
[22:06]100% sure this is a procrastinating technique something but that's my current excuse and I'm just going to stick to it for a little bit.
[22:14]Why can I say I'm not surprised to hear that answer.
[22:18]You need like a team, you need to have like here are my five ideas like you take it and run with it and then like let's meet up a dinner.
[22:27]Yeah, you're right, that would be great.
[22:30]Yeah, you can probably find a lot of interns who would be super interested in that.
[22:34]Oh, and you want to apply.
[22:36]Yeah.
[22:38]You good idea actually.
[22:40]Yes, there's one in London and second world war and one about French history someone I sort of met in the course of my book and then you know some letters from the first before the first world war that I know a sitting on red in a house in Yorkshire.
[22:54]You know, so my brain is going off in about three different directions.
[22:58]Oh my gosh, you just need a few more of you and then you'll be good.
[23:01]Well, thank you so much for introducing us to the Renoir girls to this period of French history to this period of Jewish history and just being so entertaining thought provoking and formative and bringing us this deeply important read.
[23:17]So thank you so much.
[23:19]Thank you so much.
[23:21]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi formerly momstone have time to read books.
[23:26]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word.
[23:34]Thanks so much.
[23:35]Oh, and bye the books.