UCLA

In 1864, Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), Nathalie Micas (1824–1889), Isidore Bonheur (1827–1901), and Paul Chardin (1833–1918) collaborated on The Passy Cravat, a multi-media work of gouache, ink, and black pencil on canvas. They assembled human and non-human figures who frequented Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas’ château in By-Thomery, a small town in north-central France. This paper argues that The Passy Cravat is a layered and multitudinous space that simultaneously operates as a map of the By domicile and France’s Second Empire (1852–1870), a patterned cravat, a Légion d’honneur, house walls for By’s human inhabitants, cages for its non-human population, and a group portrait. In this representation of the By built environment, overlapping subjectivities construct a seemingly queer home composed of humans, non-human animals, and the Fontainebleau landscape. In actuality, the group of friends constructed a homophilic environment that displayed anti-queer orientations. They violently ordered non-human animal forms through liberal imperialist attitudes informed by Saint-Simonianism and Napoléon III’s (1808–1873) 1860s colonial agenda in Algeria.