Article originally published n French by Michel Carassou
Inversions¹ presented itself from the outset as “a review not of homosexuality, but for homosexuality.” Its first issue appeared on 15 November 1924, fifteen days before the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste. We are interested in this journal because Claude Cahun was one of its leading contributors. She was not yet associated with the Surrealist movement, even though she knew of its existence. Later, once she became a member of the Surrealist group, she never referred to her participation in Inversions. Why this silence, when she did not hide her sexual orientation and lived openly with a woman? Was she ashamed of the quality of the publication? Even if she acknowledged its imperfections, it had the merit of addressing—often successfully—the major issues concerning homosexuals at the time. Her silence must have had other motivations.
1. The Context
Inversions was a product of its time. To understand the context in which it emerged, one must recall that in France homosexuality was not a crime—a different situation from that of many other countries, starting with England and Germany. Homosexuality, or more precisely sodomy, had been decriminalised in 1791 by the Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, homosexuality was far from being accepted everywhere in French society.
In fact, homosexuality was relatively well tolerated at the two opposite ends of society: on one side, among the aristocracy and the artistic world, where what Edouard Roditi called the “haute pédale”² flourished as part of an openly libertine culture; on the other, among the very poor, where attractions to one sex or the other were lived out with spontaneity and naturalness.
Between these extremes, the majority of the population—upper and lower middle classes, and part of the working class—rejected homosexuality in the name of morality and the protection of children: Christian morality for some, proletarian morality for others. Many pretended not to notice its existence, others laughed at how it was ridiculed in the satirical press.
The birth of Inversions takes place at the heart of the Années folles, a period of excitement and questioning in every field. Views on homosexuality were slowly changing, linked to two quite different phenomena: one medical, the other literary.
The medical phenomenon was taking place mainly in Germany, where the law still prohibited “unnatural” sexual relations—the infamous paragraph 175 of the Penal Code. To protect homosexuals from prosecution, German doctors from Richard von Krafft-Ebing to Magnus Hirschfeld called for less repression and more therapy, promoting the idea that the invert was above all a sick person. Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee had thousands of members, with branches abroad in England and the Netherlands, and had launched a major publication: the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook of Sexual Intermediaries). In addition, two journals were sold openly at newsstands: Der Eigene (The Unique, in reference to Max Stirner), created in the late 19th century by Adolf Brand; and Die Freundschaft (Friendship), launched in 1919 by Karl Schultz. The dynamism of German homosexuals fascinated some of their French counterparts.
The literary phenomenon concerned France in particular, where more and more writers, from the late 19th century onwards, wrote on the subject—producing a proliferation of novels (such as Les Hors-Nature by Rachilde, Sodome by Henri d’Argis, Escal-Vigor by Georges Eekhoud, or Ryls by Henry-Marx), in which homosexual experience was generally depicted in tragic or miserable terms. After the war, the tone changed with two major authors: Gide, whose Corydon, first published privately in 1911, reappeared in 1924 in a widely distributed edition; and Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time presented the homosexual Charlus as one of its main characters. Several leading writers joined this emerging literature of recognition and affirmation: Crevel, Cocteau, Colette, and others.
Knowing both the German examples and the influence of Gide and Proust, French homosexuals may have felt encouraged to launch their own publication. Was this the case with Inversions? Let us note immediately that Proust is absent from the journal, while Gide’s Corydon is mentioned several times. As for the German authors writing in the Jahrbuch or Der Eigene, they appear only in the second issue of Inversions, linked to the arrival of two new contributors, both German-speaking: Eugène Wilhelm and Axiéros. At first, in its inaugural issue, the journal looked more towards England, with a long article on Oscar Wilde and translations of Shakespeare and Swinburne. True, Great Britain had not seen the emergence of a homosexual emancipation movement—hardly surprising, since English homosexuals were still paralysed by the memory of Wilde’s condemnation. Yet Wilde’s trial had forced some doctors and psychologists to take an interest in sexual inversion. This is at least what Claude Cahun³ asserts, making sure to mention the work of Havelock Ellis.
2. Birth of the Journal
After the first issue dated 15 November 1924 and three more issues between December 1924 and March 1925, Inversions was threatened with suppression. It reappeared in April 1925 under another title: L’Amitié. This time it was banned outright and its leaders prosecuted. All issues were published anonymously, bearing only the manager’s name: G. Beyria for Inversions, G. Lestrade for L’Amitié. Reports from the trial give us some information about these two men. Aged 28 and 26 respectively, Gustave-Léon Beyria and Gaston Lestrade were both from Lombez in the Gers, bachelors, and postal employees. They belonged to no literary milieu whatsoever.
For a long time it was thought that Cahun’s involvement in Inversions was limited to her response to the survey launched by the editors when legal proceedings began. In this response, she insisted that the journal had not outraged her morals “whatever they may be, good or bad”, denounced the attack on press freedom, and gave her view on homosexuality and homosexuals, which was “exactly the same as [her] view of heterosexuality and heterosexuals: everything depends on individuals and circumstances.” But some of her remarks in the first person—“Inversions is not yet what I wish it to become”, “its title displeases me”—suggested a more personal involvement.
The importance of Claude Cahun’s role appeared much later, in light of François Leperlier’s research. Under the pseudonym Clarens she published three texts: in issue no. 4 of Inversions, an excerpt from an unpublished youthful text, “Les Jeux uraniens”, with some variants⁴; and two texts in L’Amitié, including the opening, programmatic editorial titled “L’Amitié”.
However, she was present from the very first issue: the major text on Oscar Wilde, already mentioned, is signed R. M. Haribey (R. M. for Renée Mathilde—a signature she had used before—plus an anagram of Beyria), but the article owes much more to Cahun than to Beyria. The history of Wilde belonged to her family tradition and, without naming Marcel Schwob, she describes in detail the support the writer received from the Mercure de France circle, concluding with references to Havelock Ellis.
One can also attribute to her the article on inversion among pigeons (her interest in ornithology is well known), and the choice (if not translation) of texts by major authors of Antiquity and the English literary tradition. As for the editorial “On the Threshold”, probably a collective text, it contains ideas she expressed elsewhere in the journal.
Suzanne—Marcel Moore—equally invested, must have produced the cover illustration and page layout.
How did these two women, cultured and experienced in publishing and journalism, meet the two postal employees from the Gers? The answer lies in the circle around Pierre Morhange, a philosopher close to both Claude Cahun and a well-known writer of the time, Henry-Marx. Henry-Marx had just published a homosexual-themed novel, Ryls, un amour hors-la-loi, which Beyria, under the pseudonym Georges d’Autry, reviewed very positively in the first issue of Inversions. This suggests he knew Henry-Marx personally (perhaps intimately), who was also a socialist activist and involved in a workers’ educational organisation—where Lestrade and Beyria may have encountered him. Henry-Marx was also a playwright; a preface to one of his plays, Un homme en marche, performed at the Comédie-Française in 1923, was written by Pierre Morhange. He is known to have been present at Morhange’s lecture for the launch of the journal Philosophies⁵ in 1925. The year before, Cahun had attended another lecture by Morhange, which she reviewed in Aux écoutes⁶.
Was Henry-Marx at that first lecture as well? Was he accompanied by Beyria and Lestrade? Whatever the case, at some point the protagonists must have met and envisaged creating a journal to defend and promote homosexuality. Henry-Marx appears several times in the history of the publication, notably in his own response to the survey.
3. Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Journal
To launch the journal and produce the first issue, the team was extremely small: four people—Beyria, Lestrade, Claude and Suzanne—and perhaps a fifth: Henry-Marx. It is hardly surprising that Cahun’s contribution was so substantial. It is even more striking that she is completely absent from the next issue’s table of contents. After giving the journal a strong initial push, she may have wanted to step back a little and let the two men take more initiative. This seemed feasible after the arrival of two important new collaborators, openly homosexual militants: first the poet Axiéros (pseudonym of Pierre Guyolot-Dubasty), linked to the anarchist group L’En-dehors and to several members of the German homosexual movement; then, from an older generation, the Alsatian jurist Eugène Wilhelm, German before 1914, who had worked for a long time with Magnus Hirschfeld and also contributed to Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s Akademos.
The future of the journal seemed assured, all the more so since Cahun had promoted it, as can be seen in the Mercure de France of 15 December 1924, which carried a review of Inversions by Charles-Henri Hirsch. Unfortunately, it was a highly homophobic article beginning: “Inversions, the first official review of Mr and Mrs Pederasts,” and later referring to “a salute to lesbians”—and so on. The author clearly aimed at the woman or women who had sent Inversions to the Mercure. This confirms Cahun’s personal efforts to reach out to a publication she believed would be less hostile, and whose past defence of Wilde she recalled in the very issue Hirsch derided.
The Mercure article had consequences. It increased the journal’s visibility and triggered the anger of several “fathers of families”, who petitioned the Minister of Justice to have it banned. Legal proceedings were opened in the Paris courts. In this tense context, and perhaps not solely for this reason, Cahun became more visibly present in the journal again.
Another problem had arisen: while she had taken some distance from the editorial work, Beyria and Lestrade seem to have been insufficiently vigilant and allowed two troubling figures into the journal—Camille Spiess and his biographer Louis Estève, both contributors to the anarchist newspaper L’En-dehors. In the opening article of issue no. 3, “Love and Sexuality”, Spiess elevates the figure of the androgyne as “the great secret of the illuminated man or regenerated humanity”, praising an asexual, Platonic homoeroticism opposed to sexual inversion, which he claims “could only have germinated in the mind of a Jew.” His target was, of course, Hirschfeld. After mentioning what he calls “the impotence of the female psyche”, Spiess adds further antisemitic attacks: “The Jew is the enemy of man, that is to say, of truth, because he hates the human race.”
Once again, as in her adolescence, Cahun was confronted with antisemitism. We recall her statement in her response to the survey: “Inversions is not yet what I wish it to be.” Her reservations are understandable. But from this moment we see her determination to regain control—working closely with Eugène Wilhelm, who revived his pre-war pseudonym Numa Praetorius to present the history of the German homosexual movement and Hirschfeld’s work. Their aim, through strategic countermeasures⁷, was to isolate Spiess and Estève, who seemed to enjoy support within and beyond the journal. These countermeasures included a cover quotation from Freud—another Jew—about eminent homosexuals, and, immediately following Spiess’s article, a Sapphic poem signed Mary Orfano, the only female pseudonym to appear in the journal⁸.
The poem, titled “We…”, was echoed by “You”, the title of the excerpt from “Les Jeux uraniens” published in issue no. 4—a number marked by efforts to defend the journal’s existence through the opening of a public survey, which would eventually include a contribution by Havelock Ellis.
Claude Cahun appears only discreetly in this final issue of Inversions; she is far more present in the sole issue of L’Amitié. Because of the legal troubles, and perhaps after a power struggle connected to the Spiess affair, this new publication was largely conceived and directed by the young woman. It is unclear whether she was behind all the new contributions—such as that of the feminist Suzanne de Callias—but she was certainly responsible for recruiting her friend from Nantes, Marc-Adolphe Guégan, who contributed two poems under the pseudonym Paul Saint-Armel. As for the new title—did she choose it? If she disliked the previous one, she embraced this one, using it for her editorial and defending the ideas she believed it expressed.
4. Claude Cahun and Homosexuality
Through her response to the survey, and through her various contributions to Inversions and L’Amitié, several of Claude Cahun’s ideas on homosexuality emerge—ideas she expressed nowhere else as precisely.
Her conceptions rest largely on the theories of the English psychologist and philosopher Havelock Ellis, the founder of sexology. Ellis had strong connections in France: a friend of Remy de Gourmont, his books were translated and published by the Mercure de France, his literary agent was Sylvia Beach, and he was close to the anarchist circles of L’En-dehors. Cahun, who had read him since the end of the war and was now translating him, recognised Ellis as a guiding thinker. In Inversions she mentions him from the first issue; later she invokes him in defence of the journal, by soliciting—or fabricating¹⁰—a reply from him to the survey; and in her major text opening L’Amitié, she pays him warm homage after comparing him to a swallow (not gratuitously, but echoing something Ellis himself had written¹¹).
The personal and social philosophy she outlines owes much to him: on one side, a desire for the total development of the individual (“as complete a physical and intellectual development as is within them”, she writes); on the other, “the great ideals of socialism and pacifism”—meaning libertarian socialism. She adds that, in all matters connected to fraternity, homosexuals are better equipped than heterosexuals. In saying this, she takes some liberties with Ellis’s thought. This happens again when she borrows a judgement of his concerning what she calls “abnormal friendship”:
“Friendships that enter through the erotic gate attain an intimacy and contain an intellectually erotic charm that normal friendship between persons of the same sex cannot reach.”¹²
Here she acknowledges her interpretation is bold, “without guarantee from Havelock Ellis,” she admits; indeed, she has transformed his text by combining fragments of sentences and adding “between persons of the same sex”. Her aim is to define the relationship she advocates between two women or two men: a fulfilled relationship evolving from physical love towards friendship.
Although Ellis recognises inversion, respects individuals, and does not condemn their practices, he does not urge them to live their sexuality fully; rather, he advises sublimating it in intellectual work or social action. Is this not, ultimately, what Claude Cahun chose to do in her personal life and partnership?
In fact, nothing in Ellis’s views seems to trouble her, even if they are not always daring in matters of morality; when necessary, she takes liberties, adapting to homosexual relationships considerations that were originally purely heterosexual. She then turns to another English author, Edward Carpenter—friend and collaborator of Ellis (for Sexual Inversion), but himself a declared homosexual and activist. She refers to Carpenter in her second article in L’Amitié, “Friendship and Freedom”, evoking the “intermediate sex”, the subject of his widely disseminated book The Intermediate Sex (1908), never translated into French. According to Carpenter, this intermediate sex generates a new revolutionary class, composed of individuals with exceptional altruistic qualities, whom he no longer wishes to call homosexuals or inverts but uranists¹³. Cahun had already used the adjective uranian and, before the legal troubles, when the editors considered changing the title of Inversions, Urania was proposed.
Returning to Ellis: other themes of his—neo-Malthusian and already ecological—particularly interested Cahun: contraception and birth control, eugenics and child education. These themes are central to the book The Task of Social Hygiene, which Claude Cahun—then Lucie Schwob—had undertaken to translate. In her article “L’Amitié”, she alludes to this “eugenic ideal”; she envisages it for homosexuals, who can achieve it “negatively” (by not having children), and she offers a striking judgement: “Abstinence is a strength. It is the passive resistance of the prophet Gandhi.”
Thus, with Claude Cahun, we are far from a pejorative or victimised view of homosexuality. She offers a very elevated conception—intellectual and moral—and inscribes it in an activist project: the publication of a journal whose founding objective was clearly defined: writing “not about homosexuality but for homosexuality.” When presenting L’Amitié, she is animated by a strong desire to continue publication and to pursue a double struggle: for press freedom and for the promotion of homosexuality.
5. Claude Cahun’s Silence
Claude Cahun’s militant project was abruptly halted when the journal was banned. L’Amitié met the fate previously threatened for Inversions, and the two managers were brought before the 12th Correctional Chamber of the Paris courts. What is striking is that afterwards Claude Cahun never mentioned the case, nor even the existence of the journal. Why this silence, maintained until the end of her life?
The first reason seems to lie in her desire not to upset her father. In a letter to Charles-Henri Barbier of 21 January 1951, she admits she could neither have published Aveux non avenus during Maurice Schwob’s lifetime nor joined the Surrealist group he loathed. We may suppose she would not have wanted him to know of her collaboration with a homosexual journal.
After her father’s death she was able to join the Surrealists. But there, too, it would have been unthinkable to mention Inversions. André Breton’s homophobia was well known and, although he tolerated lesbians and accepted—grudgingly—that Cahun could come to the café dressed as a man and accompanied by Suzanne, he would hardly have welcomed any involvement in “pederastic” publication.
Another reason for her silence may lie in the hostile reactions to the journal. The satirical press attacked it viciously. Only L’En-dehors, the journal of individualist anarchists, directed by E. Armand, gave it support—and even that was measured. Cahun was certainly hurt by the hostile article in the Mercure de France, from which she had expected sympathy. She found herself extremely isolated in the face of a homophobic press that would have attacked her even more fiercely had it known the writer was a woman.
Time passed and morals evolved; she could have spoken later. Morals evolved, yes—but not the law. Measures criminalising homosexuality were introduced by the French state in 1942 and maintained after Liberation. Both communists and Gaullists promoted an outdated moral order. It was not a favourable moment for homosexual emancipation.
However, the main reason for Cahun’s silence is probably found in the court records¹⁴ of a trial that dragged on. Beyria and Lestrade were tried in first instance on 20 March 1926. Despite the pleadings of Me Ernest-Charles and Me Beffay, both were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment without parole and a 200-franc fine. The Court of Appeal reduced these penalties on 27 October 1926 to three months’ imprisonment and a 100-franc fine; the judgement was upheld by the Court of Cassation on 31 March 1927.
On one side, the defendants were represented by two lawyers. One of them, Me Ernest-Charles, was a leading figure at the Paris bar, a specialist in literary trials; also a literary critic, he was president of the National Journalists’ Union. We also note that they appealed the first judgement and then lodged a cassation plea—legal costs far exceeding the means of two postal workers at a time when legal aid did not exist.
On the other side, we notice that Claude Cahun’s name—nor those of Eugène Wilhelm or Henry-Marx—never appeared during the trial. The reasoning of the Court of Cassation shows the defence strategy (likely devised with Wilhelm): “[…] the defendants, both former¹⁵ postal workers, do not appear to have taken any personal part in writing the journal; their role seems to have consisted merely in receiving anonymous articles and handling their printing and sale.”
There is no doubt they were well defended for such a version of events to be accepted. Thus their roles were minimised and the involvement of any other person denied. None of the contributors were questioned.
We can infer a tacit agreement within the editorial team: Cahun, Wilhelm, and perhaps Henry-Marx took charge of the legal matters, but their names were never to appear.
They spared no effort. In the end, sentences were reduced, but Beyria and Lestrade still served time in prison. Through the two managers, the journal was condemned for offending public morals, for “insidious incitement to the most repugnant of vices”, and for “the grave danger of promoting and propagating contraception methods,” and for “neo-Malthusian methods” seen as threatening “the future of the race.”
Contraception and neo-Malthusian ideas—these were precisely what Claude Cahun, in particular, sought to promote in Inversions, and which formed the grounds for the conviction of the two managers, legally responsible for the content. Unable to assume this responsibility vis-à-vis her father, we can imagine her guilt, her wish to bury the whole affair, her determination never to mention it again.
At the end of this extraordinary trial—which brought the history of Inversions to a close—it becomes clear that, for Claude Cahun, living her homosexuality openly was one thing, but expressing it publicly was quite another.
True, she later published Aveux non avenus, a book in which homosexuality appears, but in veiled terms. She also continued her advocacy for birth control, translating Ellis’s The Task of Social Hygiene. With difficulty, she persuaded the Mercure de France to publish the first volume, but the second—more focused on education, pacifism and socialism—was rejected.
Above all, she organised her life in accordance with her ideals. Of her conviction regarding the special gifts of homosexual couples for matters of fraternity, she and Suzanne would later give a beautiful demonstration through their political engagement and Resistance activity.
Michel Carassou
Claude Cahun 