Gaston Mardochée Brunswick, French singer-songwriter, revolutionary socialist and anti-militarist better known by his pseudonym Montéhus, was born on July 9, 1872 shortly after the Paris Commune of 1871 https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/03/150th-anniversary-of-paris-commune.html. . The eldest of 22 children born to a working-class Jewish family in Paris, he was the son of a Communard, and shoemaker named Abraham Brunschwig, and he was committed to left-wing politics throughout his life.
Montéhus was raised in a post-Commune context, which accounts for his commitment to left-wing politics. The "Revolutionary jingoist" as he liked to present himself, he was close to the "wretched of the Earth" spoken of by Eugène Pottier in L'Internationale.
He began to sing in public at the age of 12, in 1884, a decade before the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair.Montéhus published his first song (Au camarade du 153ème) in 1897. He adopted his pseudonym then to avoid the anti-Semitism then rampant in French society (his concerts were often interrupted by racist violence).
As he began his military service, the Dreyfus affair broke out which was the political crisis, beginning in 1894 and continuing through 1906, in France during the Third Republic. The controversy centred on the question of the guilt or innocence of army captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been convicted of treason for allegedly selling military secrets to the Germans in December 1894. At first the public supported the conviction; it was willing to believe in the guilt of Dreyfus, who was Jewish. Much of the early publicity surrounding the case came from anti-Semitic groups (especially the newspaper La Libre Parole, edited by Édouard Drumontan anti-Dreyfusard , nationalist and anti-Semite), to whom Dreyfus symbolized the supposed disloyalty of French Jews.
Initially a moderate socialist, he became virulently anti-militarist and libertarian in outlook close to the positions of Gustave Hervé and his newspaper La Guerre Sociale .After a brief stint in Chalon-sur-Saône, where he was defeated in an election,the anti-militarist settled in Paris in 1902.On 5 March 1902, he is initiated into Freemasonry at ″l'Union de Belleville″ lodge in Paris.
In the second half of the 19th century, song was central to popular culture. Books, which are expensive , are not easily accessible to proletarians and when it has a strong political dimension, the song can be a real propaganda tool, Montéhus was one of the champions of the Red Revolt.
Author of hundreds of songs, the best known of which, such as: Gloire au 17e ( 1907) and La Grève des Mères (1910), were taken up by revolutionary Paris. In Paris he was hired at Les Ambassadeurs, where his repertoire were often interrupted by the reactionary anti-Semites of Édouard Drumontan or by the police (because of their subversive content), and Édouard Drumontan would get his men to distribute leaflets against "the Jewish Brunswick" who "belched infamies at the leaders of the French army", and provoke fights.
The courageous singer, who had to emigrate to the concerts of the suburbs to find an audience likely to hear his vengeful verses. There, his success was resounding. The people, who admirably understood the artist's rancor for having felt the same outrages and the same disgusts, did not spare him their applause. In the press, only one newspaper clearly defended him. It was L' Aurore , under the signature of Urbain Gohier .
Here is what Gohier wrote on February 9, 1902: An artist has emerged who devotes himself with great ardor to singing pity, fraternity, hatred of war, the suffering of the soldier, the horror of the barracks. His name is Montéhus. And after speaking out against the nationalist bands who organized a violent obstruction to prevent him from performing, Gohier continued: Small, thin, pale, the artist sings or says these things with all his nerves. Ten years ago, the crowd applauded Le Père la Victoire , En revenant de la R'vue , and all the nonsense of nationalism. Today, it applauds Montéhus.
A contemporary of Jean-Baptiste Clément, Eugène Pottier, Jules Jouy, Pierre Dupont and Gaston Couté, Montéhus like them used his songs as propaganda tool for socialist and anarchist dissent, with his lively catchy songs, he used his artistic talents to advocate for social justice and workers' rights. He became a prominent figure in the French socialist movement, using his music to spread revolutionary ideas and inspire the working class to fight for better living and working conditions.
Montéhus was a staunch critic of the capitalist system and the inequalities it perpetuated, using his music to express solidarity with workers and call for a more just and egalitarian society. His songs often reflected the harsh realities faced by the working class, highlighting issues such as poverty, exploitation, and oppression. With his powerful lyrics and rousing melodies, Montéhus became a voice for the marginalized and downtrodden, galvanizing support for the labor movement and socialist causes.
In addition to his musical contributions, Montéhus was also actively involved in politics, participating in protests, demonstrations, and strikes. He used his platform as a popular musician to raise awareness about social and political injustices, advocating for systemic change and challenging the status quo. . opposing war, capitalist exploitation, prostitution, poverty, religious hypocrisy, and even income tax in his lyrics.
He also defended the cause of women in a remarkable way. In 1905, Montéhus created a song that caused a real scandal within French society. Anticipating the First World War by a few years, the song La grève des mères (The Mothers' Strike) was intended to be a denunciation of war, of youth serving as cannon fodder and encouraged mothers – like the Lysistratas of fertility – to no longer give sons to sacrifice to the executioners.
This goualante will be so badly received, not by critics but by censors, that a judge will declare that La grève des mères is a pro abortion song .Montéhus will therefore appear before the courts for inciting abortion and will be sentenced to two months in prison – a sentence later converted into a heavy fine that he had to pay. But the reactionaries did not stop there La grève des Mères was banned from public performance on 5 October.
Montéhus - La grève des mères
In 1907 he sang Gloire au 17ème which highlighted the action of soldiers from the 17th line Infantry regiment who, having been ordered to shoot winegrowers on a demonstration of wine growers in Béziers during the winegrowers' revolt refused to fire and then mutinied and fraternized with the revolters.The Revolt of the Languedoc winegrowers was a mass movement in 1907 in Languedoc and the Pyrénées-Orientales of France that was repressed by the government of Georges Clemenceau. It was caused by a serious crisis in winemaking at the start of the 20th century. The movement was also called the "paupers revolt" of the Midi.
Montéhus - Gloire au 17ème
In 1912, he wrote The song of the young guards,( Le chant des jeunes gardes ) commissioned by the French Section of the Workers' International ( Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, SFIO) of which he was a member for its youth movement, sung by generations of young socialists and young communists, and still considered the anthem of the National Union of Students of France (Union nationale des étudiants de France or UNEF). The French Section of the Workers' International ( Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière, SFIO) was a political party in France that was founded in 1905 and succeeded in 1969 by the modern-day Socialist Party.
Le chant des jeunes gardes (1936)
During Lenin's exile in France from 1909 to 1912, Montéhus became friendly with him and sang at some of his gatherings.
Montéhus' pacifism however faded when the Great War broke out (1914) he became a staunch supporter of the war effort following Gustave Hervé's turn, applauding and patriotism he joined the Sacred Union (Union Sacrée) and the fight against the German invader and became a war cabaret singer, tasked with remobilizing soldiers on leave and civilians, and fighting against defeatism, always at the rear, far from the front.He composed numerous patriotic songs, which earned him the Croix de Guerre in 1918. He sang :
We sing the Marseillaise
For in these terrible days
We leave the International
For the final victory
We will sing it when we return
If this visceral patriotism was shared by many socialists, like many of them too, he returned to it after the war, when the horrors of the fighting were reported to him. Discredited among the working people for having defended what made them die in mass graves, touched by the death of several of his friends, members of his audience, he wrote one of his most famous songs, La butte rouge (to music by Georges Krier), a song which tells not, as is wrongly considered, of the fighting on the Butte Montmartre during the Commune, but rather of the fighting on the Butte de Berzieux, in the Marne.The class struggle is making a comeback:
What she drank, good blood, this earth
Blood of workers and blood of peasants,
Because the bandits who are the cause of wars
Never die, we only kill the innocent
Playing much more on the register of emotion than the rest of his repertoire, it also translates the loss of pre-war illusions, the end of lightness and the heavy character of the tragic return of History. Thus, the last verse gives:
The red hill is its name, the baptism took place one morning
Where all who climbed rolled into the ravine
Today there are vineyards, grapes grow there
But I see crosses bearing the names of friends.
The song would be covered by many artists, from Francis Marty to Zebda, including Yves Montand and Claude Vinci!
When he considered joining the Communist Party in 1922, as the French Communist Party did not accept Freemasons, he preferred to remain faithful to his lodge, but Montéhus returned at the time of the Popular Front, and rejoinined the SFIO and wrote songs to mobilize workers and sing his support for the new government. At the age of 64, Montéhus was once again in the spotlight with " Le decor va change", "Vas-Y Léon! ", "Le Cri des grévistes", "L'Espoir d' un gueux" , songs in which he supported the Popular Front and Léon Blum the first Socialist (and the first Jewish) premier of France, who presided over the Popular Front coalition government in 1936–37.
Vas-y Léon (1936)
Silenced by Vichy, he managed to avoid being sent to a concentration camp, but was forced to wear the yellow star until the Liberation of France. He wrote the Chant des Gaullistes in 1944. In 1947 he was decorated with the Legion of Honor by the President of the Council Paul Ramadier , He died almost forgotten from the collective memory, five years later supported only by his family on 31 December 1952 and was cremated at Père-Lachaise.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-communards-wall-at-pere-lachaise.html where his ashes remain.
Mireille Osmin, federal secretary of the Seine, described him as "more of a libertarian than a socialist, more of a rebel than a revolutionary." Montéhus was a reflection of the socialism of his time. Willingly republican while denouncing the bourgeois Republic, a man of deep conviction and a political pen always quick to analyze reality in the light of the class struggle and the misery in which the people were plunged, pacifist as much as patriot, nicknamed the revolutionary patriot, he was one of those artists who, placing himself in the background, sang by putting himself in the place of others and effaced himself before their work.
The author of La grève des mères sadly remains somewhat forgotten today, despite the renewed interest in committed song, of which he was certainly one of the precursors.Despite facing censorship and persecution from the authorities, Montéhus remained steadfast in his commitment to advocating for a more equitable and just society, leaving a lasting legacy as a symbol of resistance and solidarity in French political history.
