Saumur may have been an ornate and beautiful area, but the reality of life was very different for those in the lower classes. The sweeping poor laws of the previous century had produced exploitative and harsh workhouses, also known as poorhouses, in an effort to provide accommodation and provisions for the poor. The workhouse wasn’t a pleasant place for a child to grow-up. If you weren’t a highborn individual, then you could look forward to a life of poverty and hard work. The able-bodied women were put to work doing a variety of domestic jobs like sewing, cleaning, cooking, gardening or laundry. Gabrielle’s mother worked as a laundrywoman for the charity hospital run by the Sisters of Providence.
Life in the poorhouse was a difficult one. The toilet facilities in the workhouses were used by well over one hundred inmates and would also often include a communal chamber pot. The men and women were kept separate to avoid indiscretions. The children would also often be housed separately, at least when it came to sleeping quarters, and were subject to bed sharing to save space. The pre-set diet in the workhouse consisted primarily of bread, gruel and cheese. If you were lucky you might get a small serving of meat up to twice a week. The set restrictions could provide, for example, a meagre supper that included 5oz of bread and 1.5oz of cheese for an adult woman. The children in the workhouse were typically afforded the same diet as an adult woman, as long as they were over the age of 9; if you were under 9 it was up to the discretion of the staff. Meals were eaten in a large communal hall that often included the reading of biblical texts out loud to remind the inmates of the gratitude that they should be feeling for the charity that was being bestowed upon them.
Chanel would find herself in an orphanage by the time she was 12 years old. Her mother had died of bronchitis and her father had sent her and her two sisters away to live at the convent of Aubazine, where she would remain until the age of 18. Her time with the nuns in the convent would provide her with the groundwork that would come to build her entire empire – and change her fate forever – the ability to sew. This loss at a young age and lack of familial attachment would help mould her into an independent person who had little conflict putting her own needs first.
Coco Chanel faced a special amount of difficulty as a woman in French society. We all know that life was far more difficult for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the role of a woman in French culture was especially bleak, especially if you had any ambitions outside of marriage and motherhood. French women wouldn’t even gain their right to vote until the tail end of the Second World War, the first election that allowed women to vote in France was on 29 April 1945. It was only under the Provincial French Committee of National Liberation, headed by now legendary General Charles de Gaulle, that the right was provided to the women of France. French society has been isolationist over the years and the rights and roles of women in politics and society alike have grown at a slower pace than similarly developed nations. Germany, by contrast, has allowed women to vote since 1918, and America since 1920. The suffragette movement encountered a great deal of difficulty in piercing the thick, misogynistic cloud that loomed over French culture.
It wasn’t uncommon in French culture at the time for married men to live a nomadic and unreliable lifestyle, often travelling for work and leaving their families back at home. The duties of caring for the children, the home, and often even working on the side to help support the family, would fall upon the shoulders of the woman. Life in France was so laced with misogyny that it wasn’t until 1965 that a married woman could obtain the right to work without her husband’s consent. In the case of Gabrielle Chanel, her mother was an unmarried woman who lived with Gabrielle and her four siblings in a workhouse. A paradox of Victorian France is that an unmarried woman would be granted more rights than a married one. A single woman could own property and pay her own taxes to the state; she had more advantages and opportunities than a married woman, though even then they were limited by society. Albert did eventually marry Chanel’s mother, but only after her family paid him to do so.
When Chanel’s mother died, the reality faced by the children was bleak, at best. A girl of only 12, Gabrielle was at a tender age to lose her mother. The existence she had faced with her mother alive was destined to be difficult enough, but to lose her had to be devastating to her young psyche. This was likely only compounded by the actions of her father, Albert. A travelling street vendor wasn’t about to take on the task of raising five children. Gabrielle’s brothers were given to a peasant family and she, along with her two sisters, were brought to the convent in Aubazine by their father and abandoned. It was this harsh and painful action that would shape Gabrielle and her future, changing her fate forever.
The only hope that Gabrielle had to become the designer and woman that she truly wanted to be was to remain free, and to remain free in France she would have to stay single. This fact presented her with a new problem: it wasn’t easy for a woman to gain funding or support for opening her own business, so she would have to rely on private funding.
Gabrielle eventually began a small singing career in French nightclubs, where she went by the moniker ‘Coco’. There is a lot of misinformation out there about the life of Coco Chanel, most of which was spread by Coco herself. Over time, she was found to have provided several conflicting stories about her childhood and early life to various reporters and friends. For example, she once told editor-in-chief of Marie-Claire, Marcel Haedrich, that the origins of her nickname were from her father. ‘My father used to call me ‘Little Coco’ until something better should come along. He didn’t like ‘Gabrielle’ at all; it hadn’t been his choice.’ In an interview with The Atlantic however, Gabrielle claimed that her nickname was a shortened version of the French term coquette, which refers to a kept woman, or a woman of loose morals. Although, it has been noted that during her time as a singer in the La Rotunde club in Vichy she sang the songs ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ and ‘Who’s seen Coco in the Trocadero?’
Coco wasn’t shy about her sexuality and took many lovers throughout her lifetime. The life of a cabaret singer wasn’t exactly the culmination of a dream for Coco and she soon found herself a kept woman, the coquette lover of Etienne Balsan, a handsome young French socialite and the son of wealthy industrialists providing uniforms to the military. Chanel was just one of Balsan’s mistresses, but this wasn’t an uncommon part of French upper crust society.
Balsan would assist Chanel in opening her first boutique selling hats and dresses, a venture to keep her occupied while he was away tending to other interests. Balsan also introduced Chanel to Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, who would soon become another of Chanel’s lovers. Coming from a financially troubled background, Chanel was intoxicated by what the cultural tradition of being a mistress could provide her with. The entire affair was often treated more like a business transaction than a passionate love affair, a stipulation that fit Chanel’s personality quite well. Coco could quite possibly have lived out her life in comfort jumping from lover to lover, but she had her own ideas about her journey. Coco would use the financial benefits of her relationships to launch her own fashion empire.