Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  And yet, even while the emperor imposed his vision on Paris, a number of Parisians, especially the young, refused to comply with the restrictions that the empire imposed. Young artists such as Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet, as well as young writers such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, resisted the constraints imposed by government censorship and entrenched institutional taste, even while politicized students and teachers such as Georges Clemenceau and Louise Michel linked up with a growing number of Parisians who were anxious to end imperial rule. And while Eugène Viollet-le-Duc staunchly resisted the stultifying influence of the all-powerful Ecole des Beaux Arts as he restored Notre-Dame de Paris to its former glory, the rising young photographer Nadar discreetly thumbed his nose at the palace—although not at those clients it provided.

  Nadar had risen to prominence after a lengthy stint among the poor young artists, writers, and musicians of the Latin Quarter, who now became known as bohemians, after Henry Murger’s publication of Scenes from Bohemian Life. Murger based his stories on his own hard experience as a starving writer in a Paris garret, and his book bestowed the name “Bohemian” on those who similarly eked out an existence dedicated to the creative arts. Yet not all young artists of this time were inclined to suffer, and even while resisting the rules, young Sarah Bernhardt did what was necessary to ensure her own comfort as she began what would turn out to be a long and glittering career, embracing an acting and life style that was distinctly her own.

  While young Parisians were at the forefront of resistance to Napoleon III’s empire, defiance was not limited to the young. From his exile outside of France, Victor Hugo continued to fire literary broadsides at Louis-Napoleon, scathingly labeling him as “Napoléon le Petit,” while Hugo’s longtime friend Alexandre Dumas kept just shy of the censors at home and dove into the fight for Italian unification abroad.

  It was a time of vast change—a change that was not limited to the enormous physical transformation occurring in Paris. Supported by the emperor, a network of railways grew during these years to encompass the nation, while back in Paris—the vortex of all this upheaval—innovative forms of banking and money-lending were buoying an upsurge in industry, creating new wealth even while attracting a growing number of poverty-stricken workers to the city in search of jobs.

  Even more deeply, change was occurring in the very way people looked at and understood the world around them, as railroads revolutionized mobility, the telegraph and rotary press modernized communications, and photography transformed ways of viewing people and places. What would soon be known as Impressionism in art and Naturalism and Realism in literature would create their own cultural revolutions, leading the way into the era of the Belle Epoque. But first, a devastating war had to be fought, a siege endured, and an uprising of Paris’s workers overcome. Napoleon III’s empire began in bloodshed and ended with more bloodshed. But the Third Republic that rose from the empire’s ashes would endure, sometimes shakily, for seventy years.

  As for the man who claimed the title of Napoleon III, he has been forgotten, in the way that embarrassments in history are largely forgotten. He led France into a devastating defeat against a newly unified Germany, and therefore there is no memorial to him in Paris save for the small (and easily overlooked) area in front of the Gare du Nord called the “Place Napoléon III.”

  Yet this was the man who created the Paris that is so beloved today. Paris, that city of dreams, has survived Napoleon III into the twenty-first century, and perhaps it can be said that this Paris, the Paris he created, is his lasting memorial.

  Barricade at the Rue Saint-Martin in Paris, French Revolution of February 1848. © SZ Photo / Bridgeman Images

  CHAPTER ONE

  From Barricades to Bonaparte

  (1848–1851)

  The barricades went up the night of February 23–24, 1848. Victor Hugo, on one of his regular tramps through Paris’s streets, asserted that there were some 1,574 of them, made up of 4,013 trees and more than fifteen million paving stones. His friend Alexandre Dumas, who was similarly drawn to turmoil, had already concluded that “the Prince protects us, it is true, but our real protector is the people. Within three days there will still be a great people, and there won’t be any small princes.”1

  He was right. The king, Louis-Philippe, fled Paris for London on the morning of February 24 disguised as “Mister Smith,” leaving his palace and kingdom to the mob. Eighteen years before, in July 1830, a similar mob had exuberantly ushered out the last of the unpopular Bourbon monarchs and ushered in this same Louis-Philippe, the Bourbons’ Orléanist cousin, whose personal history and even appearance promised a change toward comforting moderation and prosperity. This stout bourgeois king, or Citizen-King as he was known, maintained happy relations with his subjects until the 1840s, when the economy began to sour.

  Bad harvests, food shortages, rising prices, and growing unemployment now heightened the absence of liberty that the king’s subjects had hitherto been willing to tolerate. But no longer. It was in fact the specific curtailment of freedom of association (and its close relation, freedom of speech) that provided the spark that set off February’s 1848 revolution. Cleverly working around the regime’s restrictions on meetings, which were banned, reformers had settled on holding large-scale banquets, during which toasts served as a vehicle for political speeches. The regime failed to appreciate this distinction and banned one especially large banquet scheduled during January 1848. The organizers moved the date to February 22, charged an admission fee, and encountered similar opposition from the authorities. But now the small shopkeepers and craftsmen who had subscribed to the banquet were irate. They had paid their money and—having seen their voting rights recently curtailed, even while they suffered from a worsening economy—were determined to gain admission to the now-forbidden banquet.

  The crowds grew, as workers demanding both work and bread joined in. Even the National Guard, largely made up of petty bourgeoisie with grudges to spare, went over to the reformers. A bad situation rapidly spiraled out of control when soldiers began shooting into the crowd. The dead were loaded onto carts and pushed through the streets of Paris to spectacular effect. By February 24, Paris was in open revolt, and the king fled.

  What was left was a provisional government, whose attempts to mollify the workers quickly led to a number of concessions, including the right to work, the right to organize in unions, a ten-hour day (much shorter than the usual), and abolition of debtors’ prisons—in addition to establishing universal adult male suffrage and, of course, proclaiming a Republic, the second one since France’s great Revolution of the 1790s.

  It was at this point that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on the scene.

  Louis-Napoleon, born in 1808—the son of Hortense de Beauharnais (daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife Josephine, by Josephine’s first marriage) and Louis Bonaparte, younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte—was the product of a scheme to provide Napoleon and the now-infertile Josephine with an heir. This scheme was successful, in that Hortense and Louis produced two sons, but the couple had a dismal marriage. Louis-Napoleon’s detractors have contended that in fact his father was Hortense’s lover, the dashing Charles-Joseph, Count of Flahaut, who in turn was the illegitimate son of Prince Talleyrand. Those defending Louis-Napoleon have carefully tabulated calendar dates and locations of the parties concerned and concluded in favor of his legitimacy, which now seems to be widely accepted among those still interested in the question. Unaware, however, of parentage problems until later in life, little Louis-Napoleon enjoyed a childhood ensconced in imperial splendor at the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, and Fontainebleau, thoroughly cosseted and spoiled by his mother and his maternal grandmother, Josephine.

  Like both Hortense and Josephine, young Louis-Napoleon was a charmer, and he maintained his ability to captivate throughout his life. Certainly he was not a warrior leader in the image of his uncle: Louis-Napoleon’s military exploits were embarrassin
gly slight and came to unfortunate ends, although everyone who knew him insisted that he looked good on a horse. Instead, exiled (along with the rest of the Bonapartes) from France after Waterloo, he focused on seducing women, spending money, and enjoying himself. At the same time, this playboy-prince took considerable pride in his name and never ceased to dream that someday he would rule France.

  This dream, as well as a longing for a dashing military role, led Louis-Napoleon into two abortive coup attempts, the second of which landed him in a French military prison where he studied, wrote, and consorted with a mistress, with whom he had two children before he eventually escaped for London. But his prison stay had not been without benefit, for during those long years he had widely published his political ideas—including a growing concern for the poor—in numerous articles and pamphlets. His L’Extinction du paupérisme, a study of the causes of poverty in France, was especially popular, going into multiple editions and drawing numerous reformers and workers to his cause.

  His cause became ever clearer with the deaths, first, of his older brother; then of Napoleon Bonaparte’s only son, the young Duke of Reichstadt; and, last, of Louis-Napoleon’s father. These deaths left Louis-Napoleon as the foremost Bonaparte claimant to France’s imperial throne. By the 1840s, this had become markedly more significant, for Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had surged back into popularity in France, signaled by the 1840 return of his ashes to Paris, where he was interred with great ceremony in the Invalides. The Bonaparte name was now one that Louis-Napoleon could flaunt with pride in his native land.

  This opportunity presented itself in February 1848, as revolution toppled yet another French monarch. Returning to Paris two days after Louis-Philippe fled France, Louis-Napoleon met with members of the Provisional Government and assured them that he was devoted to their cause. These leaders were, however, understandably wary and urged him to return to England as soon as possible, reminding him that the law of exile was still in effect. Louis-Napoleon gracefully acceded to their wishes and returned to London. There, he wrote his ardent supporter, the self-styled Count de Persigny, that “at present the people believe in all the fine words they hear. . . . There must be an end of these illusions before a man who can bring order . . . can make himself heard.”

  Even more to the point, he told a friend, “I have wagered the Princess Mathilde [Bonaparte] that I shall sign myself Emperor of the French in four years.”2

  Louis-Napoleon was right. Very quickly, conflict began to appear between the revolutionary workers and the far more conservative bourgeoisie. National Workshops, the provisional government’s solution to the unemployment problem, were proving unsatisfactory to everyone: government-sponsored public works did not supply enough jobs, leaving too many workers unemployed, hungry, and angry, while the bourgeoisie complained of handouts to lazy workers.

  Street demonstrations from both sides provided an uneasy background to the April elections for a Constituent Assembly. Louis-Napoleon did not run. “So long as the social condition of France remains unsettled,” he wrote a friend, “I feel my position in France must be very difficult, tiresome and even dangerous.”3 The electoral turnout was huge (making use of printed voting slips for the first time in French history) and resulted in a victory for a liberal Republic—a middle way between social revolution and monarchical reaction. The deputies now reproclaimed the Republic, making May 4, 1848, the official birth of the Second Republic.

  But the workers still had grievances and revolted, first in Rouen, then in Paris, where they invaded the Assembly chamber itself. As the earlier spirit of reconciliation faded, attitudes became increasingly polarized. By-elections in early June brought a troubled Victor Hugo into the Constituent Assembly, backed by a committee of moderates.4 Hugo’s politics thus far had favored the monarchy—although after being elevated to the peerage in 1845 and entering the Senate, he had spoken out against the death penalty and social injustice. During the February 1848 riots, he had supported a regency for Louis-Philippe’s grandson. But now what? He did not like what he saw emerging from the political right.

  The June by-elections also brought Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte into the Assembly, although with becoming modesty. Claiming that his friends had announced his candidacy without his approval, he won in all four departments (including Paris) in which his name was placed, without so much as waging a campaign. Although some strongly urged that he be disqualified (on the grounds that the law banning him from France was still in effect), the majority admitted him to the Assembly. But then, on his own initiative, Louis-Napoleon sent a letter of resignation, prompting many later to wonder whether this was genuine hesitation or whether he was simply waiting for a better moment.

  The ax was now about to fall on the National Workshops. A June decree gave workers a choice between enlisting in the army or departure for hard labor in the provinces. Workers rose up in a massive revolt (later called the “June Days”), with barricades going up, bullets whistling, and intense fighting between the army—under a relentless General Cavaignac, joined by a heavily bourgeois National Guard—and the increasingly desperate workers.

  The young poet Charles Baudelaire took part in the street fighting, siding with the workers and using his own rifle to fire at government troops. Shooting from the government’s side was Gustave Flaubert, also in his twenties. According to his friend, the writer Maxime Du Camp, Flaubert “shouldered a fowling piece [and] joined the ranks of my company [in the National Guard].” Baudelaire and Flaubert escaped injury, but Du Camp was wounded and had a long convalescence.5

  Victor Hugo, who at the time lived in the once-elegant but increasingly decrepit Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges) in the heart of the insurrection, unsuccessfully attempted to return to his family before learning that they had escaped unharmed. Sent with other representatives to inform the insurgents that their cause was a lost one and that General Cavaignac was in control, he ended up leading a contingent of the Republican Guard against a series of barricades, directing cannon fire, taking prisoners, and contributing to the deaths of countless insurgents, whom he considered heroic but tragically misguided.

  Hugo told himself that he was engaged in nothing less than “saving civilization.” Yet what he saw on those June days and nights seared itself into the unforgettable memory that he recorded in Les Misérables—a vision of one of the largest barricades of this 1848 insurrection, “the biggest street-war in history.” This barricade was not to be confused with his own story’s far smaller barricade of 1832, but was instead the gargantuan one that stretched across the main road leading into the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the sight of which “conveyed a sense of intolerable distress which had reached the point where suffering becomes disaster.” Distress ennobled it, for this monstrosity was both “a pile of garbage, and it was Sinai.”

  Conflicted about the role he had played in this tragedy, Hugo added, “These are popular upheavals which must be suppressed. The man of probity stands firm, and from very love of the people opposes them.” Well, in any case, he had done so, and a bitter memory lingered. With a sigh, he concluded, “Duty is burdened with a heavy heart.”6

  “For two days,” Maxime Du Camp later wrote, “the contest was a doubtful one, but finally the cause of civilization carried off the victory, and General Cavaignac was proclaimed the savior of the country.”7

  Order was quickly reestablished, and the reprisals began. Executions proceeded smartly, and about fifteen thousand men were arrested, piled into improvised prisons, and deported to Algeria, France’s recent colonial conquest. At the Assembly’s insistence, the National Workshops were completely dissolved, and General Cavaignac—a republican, albeit a stern one—became leader of the Republic, at least until a president could be elected.

  The young scholar Ernest Renan, then studying in Paris, wrote to his sister after touring the worst affected areas: “In Rue Saint-Martin, Rue Saint-Antoine, and the part of Rue Saint-Jacques stretching from the Pantheon to the docks, there was not one hous
e that had not been lacerated by cannon fire. Some you could literally see through.” Maxime Du Camp noted proposals “to take up all the paving-stones of Paris, macadamize the streets so as to close the era of revolution forever.”8 He was specifically referring to certain quarters of the city, for by now, the contrast was clear between eastern Paris, where the insurgency had erupted, and the more bourgeois neighborhoods in the city’s west.

  Order was returning, and with it, suppression. Leftists Adolphe Blanqui and François-Vincent Raspail were already in jail, and others, including Louis Blanc, now escaped to London. A new law abolished the recent reform that had established a ten-hour working day in Paris, now lengthening it to twelve hours, and a series of regulations served to muzzle the press—“silencing the poor,” as one irate lawmaker called it.9 In addition, Paris—where the position of mayor had been briefly restored after its disappearance during the long years of postrevolutionary monarchy—once again lost its mayor and its autonomy, and the prefect of the Seine again became the capital’s chief executive.