Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  A last-ditch effort on the part of the left came in the spring 1850 by-elections, as the left put up the writer Eugène Sue for one of the Paris districts. Sue, raised in wealth, had wandered extensively in Paris’s slums and, in the early 1840s, had conveyed his appalled reaction in a wildly popular series of novels, Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris). It was Sue who introduced readers to the horrors of the tapis-franc, a word that—“in the slang of theft and murder,” as Sue put it—signified “a drinking shop of the lowest class.”19 These foul dens were in turn run by degraded beings called “ogres” or “ogresses,” depending on their sex, and attracted the lowest of the low. Sue’s readers descended with him into the depths of these places where in real life they would never, ever dream to go and cried out for reform—as he meant them to.

  It was as a reformer that Sue took his seat in the Assembly in 1850, after an overwhelming victory. But his victory—and that of Sue’s left-wing Paris colleagues—signaled a still-resilient element of resistance among Paris workers that alarmed the thoroughly bourgeois party of order. These now determined to do something about the dangers of universal suffrage and set to work to restrict the number of those eligible to vote. The outcome, a law of May 31, 1850, did the job nicely, establishing numerous requirements, including the necessity of having paid a personal tax; of having committed no offense, no matter how trivial; and of having stayed at one address throughout the prior three years—the latter being an impossibility for those in search of work. This law easily passed, and the result was exactly what the political right desired: it reduced the electoral body by almost one third. Although no one knew for sure that all of these votes would have gone to the left, it was generally accepted that the left now had no chance of winning the 1852 elections.

  The atmosphere of revolution was rapidly disappearing in Paris, as streets were repaved and houses rebuilt. Even the trees of liberty, planted with much ceremony during the revolution’s early days, were now uprooted. Social life resumed, with elegant receptions for those in high society and crowded cafés along the boulevards for lesser mortals.

  Louis-Napoleon, still a bachelor at forty, enjoyed his pleasures, and Lizzie Howard—the maȋtresse en titre, or official mistress, as some snidely called her—was only one of a bevy of women with whom he dallied. The Palais de l’Elysée, where he lived (making a point of not moving into the Tuileries, where his uncle Bonaparte had resided) now glittered with splendid balls and receptions. Louis-Napoleon was creating a court around him, and he was looking more and more like an emperor-in-waiting. He flooded army leaders with flattering attention, made regular appearances throughout the country (where he said the right things in the right places), and began to encourage revision of the constitution—in particular, that bothersome section limiting his presidency to one term.

  Royalists as well as liberals became increasingly alarmed, especially when, in early 1851, Louis-Napoleon formally requested that the Assembly revise the constitution so he could be elected for another term—on the grounds that this was of the utmost importance, to allow him to continue his mission of doing good and improving the lot of the people. A constitutional revision needed a three-quarters majority to pass, and as Louis–Napoleon toured the provinces, trying to drum up support outside of Paris, Victor Hugo did his utmost to prevent passage, giving an especially thrilling July speech to the Assembly that introduced his famous slam: “Just because we had Napoléon le Grand,” he demanded, “do we have to have Napoléon le Petit?!”20

  Hugo turned back the tide—Louis-Napoleon just missed getting the 75 percent vote he needed to change the constitution. Although the president could do nothing about Hugo, who as a legislator was legally immune, he could and did take other steps of petty revenge, going after Hugo’s son Charles, who edited the influential and by now strongly anti-Bonaparte newspaper, L’Evénement. Charles, although dramatically defended in court by his father, was convicted of contempt and sentenced to six months in the bleak Conciergerie. Soon after, Hugo’s other son, François-Victor, was sentenced to nine months for having urged the government (in L’Evénement) to extend political asylum to foreigners, and L’Evénement itself was shut down.

  But Louis-Napoleon still did not have the constitutional amendment he wanted, and in lieu of this, he began to consider stronger measures. “The President wanted to suppress the Assemblée, the Assemblée to suppress the President,” wrote Maxime Du Camp. “No one knew when the crisis would occur, but all were sure that it was inevitable.”21 Rumors of conspiracy flooded Paris, even as Louis-Napoleon considered a September coup but was discouraged by advisers who reminded him that all the leftist representatives in the Assembly would be away from Paris at the time, having gone to their districts for their parliamentary recess. Wait, they advised him, until these representatives returned to Paris in November, so they could be more easily rounded up.

  Louis-Napoleon, in his best friend-of-the-people mode, now proposed the repeal of the repressive May 1850 election law. The party of order was appalled, while the republicans were in a flurry, not knowing which way to turn. In the end, most on the left were persuaded that the principal danger remained with the party of order. As Victor Hugo observed in his notebook: “I am not particularly alarmed by the Elysée [Louis-Napoléon], but I am worried about the [conservative] majority.”22 The president’s proposal was roundly defeated, doing him no harm whatever but adding significantly to confusion and unrest among the legislators.

  One night in late November, the Count de Morny invited Maxime Du Camp to show the president the photographs he had recently taken while in Egypt. Du Camp was an early and enthusiastic amateur photographer, and—as he put it—“at that time [my photographs] were an object of interest, for I was the first to reproduce in this manner the different architectural monuments of Cairo, the ruined temples on the banks of the Nile, the various points of view at Jerusalem.”23 At that time, the Count de Morny himself was also an object of considerable interest, being no less than Louis-Napoleon’s illegitimate half-brother.

  De Morny, whose illegitimacy was both uncontested and unregretted, was the love child of Louis-Napoleon’s mother, Hortense, and the Count de Flahaut. He was three years younger than Louis-Napoleon, and the two had never met until 1849, although Louis-Napoleon learned of his half-brother’s existence soon after their mother’s death. Described as both “ruthless and charming,” de Morny had fought “with great distinction” in North Africa before exchanging his military career for an equally successful (and undeniably ruthless) one in business, making a huge fortune through a series of lucrative but arguably unscrupulous speculations. Although a loyal supporter of the former monarch, Louis-Philippe, Morny had never confused loyalty with his best interests, and after Louis-Philippe’s ouster, he quickly navigated to his half-brother’s side. Their first meeting was not warm, as the two brothers figuratively paced around one another, sizing each other up. But it ended with Louis-Napoleon observing, “You have a great future to play in the future of France. . . . I will have need of you.” Morny in turn declared his devotion, and the pact between them was sealed.24 Morny quickly became one of Louis-Napoleon’s closest advisers.

  And so when the Count de Morny asked Maxime Du Camp to show his collection of photographs to the president, whom he thought they might interest, Du Camp promptly appeared on the agreed evening in late November at Morny’s Champs-Elysées residence. There, President Louis-Napoleon graciously received him and several others and questioned Du Camp knowledgably about the history surrounding some of the photographs. As the president was leaving, he told Du Camp: “I am at home always on Mondays; I shall hope to see you.”

  Soon after, Du Camp dined in town with Morny and several others, and in the course of the evening, Morny asked him, “Shall you go to the Elysée on Monday?” Although flattered, Du Camp replied with some hesitation and a shrug. But Morny pressed him. “Do come,” he told him. “It will interest you.”

  Accordingly, on Monday, De
cember 1, 1851, Maxime Du Camp went to the Elysée Palace at about nine in the evening. Noting that there were not many present at the reception, he was interested to see one of Louis-Napoleon’s most loyal officers approach the president, who advanced toward him and held him by the button of his coat while speaking with him in low tones for nearly twenty minutes. When the officer left the room, someone joked that the fellow had gone out “as if he was the bearer of a State secret.”

  As Du Camp soon realized, this was the absolute truth. Louis-Napoleon had confided his project to the man, “and that very night the blow was to be struck.”25

  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, future Emperor Napoleon III, here as president of the Second French Republic. Photograph by Gustave Le Gray, 1852. © PVDE / Bridgeman Images

  CHAPTER TWO

  Blood and Empire

  (1852)

  After leaving the Elysée Palace at about half-past ten, Maxime Du Camp headed for the Opéra Comique, where he arrived just in time for the second act. “The house was thronged,” he noted, “and ladies in full dress displayed their neck and shoulders under the light of the chandeliers.” In one of the boxes, he could see the Count de Morny, a notorious womanizer, “engaged in fixing a fair young girl with his opera glasses.” She, in turn, was “doing her best to attract attention in the balcony.”

  For the moment, nothing in Paris seemed to have changed. After the Opéra, Du Camp accompanied the poet and critic Théophile Gautier home, walking slowly along the boulevard. “A few cabs drove past us, the ground floor rooms of the great restaurants were brilliant with light, and some few belated pedestrians walked along near us smoking cigars or humming.” When the two parted, it was just past one o’clock in the morning, and no soldiers or policemen were in sight.

  Du Camp was therefore astonished when he reached home to find his friend Louis de Cormenin waiting for him. The Viscount de Cormenin, a leading republican jurist and political figure, had played a major role in drawing up the Second Republic’s constitution. Ardently opposed to tyranny and committed to freedom of religion and universal suffrage, Cormenin nonetheless had defended Louis-Napoleon after the latter’s ill-fated 1836 coup attempt in Strasbourg. Now he told Du Camp, “Something extraordinary is going on.”

  “Just now,” Cormenin went on, “at about 12 o’clock, as I passed through the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, I saw that the public printing offices were guarded by a company of the Garde Municipale.” He tried to get an explanation but was brushed off. “You will see that tomorrow they will be firing in the streets of Paris,” he told Du Camp, who thought he was exaggerating. But the next morning, Du Camp’s servant breathlessly informed him that during the night the walls of Paris had been covered with posters, the National Assembly had been dissolved, and several generals had been arrested; regiments of soldiers were marching through the streets.1

  Similarly, that same morning, Victor Hugo was awakened by his servant, who burst in with the news that sixteen representatives had been arrested in their beds and sent to prison. Not only that, troops now occupied the National Assembly, guards were established in the bell towers, unknown persons had punctured the municipal drums, and the walls of Paris were covered with posters. These proclaimed that the Assembly was plotting a coup d’état and that, in response, President Louis-Napoleon vowed to protect all of France’s citizens from such skullduggery and restore universal suffrage. In the meantime, Paris was under a state of siege.

  The coup d’état had taken place.

  Louis-Napoleon picked December 2 (or the night of December 1–2) for the coup because it was the anniversary of Napoleon I’s coronation. It was also the anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s greatest victory, the Battle of Austerlitz. Louis-Napoleon chose this date as a sign of Bonaparte destiny.

  His planning was precise and began with what amounted to a vast propaganda operation, starting with the huge number of posters plastered everywhere on the walls of Paris (Cormenin was right about the secrecy at the public printing offices). These posters announced the dissolution of the Assembly and the preparation of a new constitution. They also announced that the new constitution would be ratified by a plebiscite re-endowed with universal suffrage. Louis-Napoleon had thus been careful to outflank his republican opponents on the left and now was just as careful to arrest leading republicans as well as any other significant opponents, all of whom were taken by surprise, many in bed. Those republican members of the Assembly who remained for the moment at liberty protested this gross infringement on the constitution (members of the Assembly were legally protected from arrest) but to no avail: Louis-Napoleon had the support of the army, and the constitution of the Second Republic was now just a piece of paper.

  The response was at first subdued but soon became violent. On the first day, Parisians seemed stunned, but by the day after, resistance began. It was on the third day that popular resistance exploded, urged on by republican leaders, including Victor Hugo and Victor Schoelcher, who formed a small resistance committee that urged the people to the barricades. It was now that Louis-Napoleon struck. “The repressive measures—or shall I say aggressive measures?—were brutal,” wrote Du Camp. “The soldiers let loose upon the boulevard fired at random, and did not spare their ammunition.” Victor Hugo was even more explicit, quoting a bystander who “had not taken three steps on the sidewalk, when the troops, who were marching past, suddenly halted, faced about towards the south, leveled their muskets, and, by an instantaneous movement, fired upon the affrighted crowd.” Appalled, the man threw himself facedown on the pavement as “the firing continued uninterruptedly for twenty minutes, drowned from time to time by a cannon shot.”2

  Young Edward Manet and his friend Antonin Proust were among the crowds rioting on the streets and were arrested. They spent the night in the police station. Two days later, they visited Montmartre Cemetery, where the bodies of some of the rioters were buried in a common plot, heads gruesomely above the dirt so that family members could identify them.

  Nineteen-year-old Gustave Eiffel, who had arrived in Paris from Dijon two years before to continue his education (at the Latin Quarter’s Collège Sainte-Barbe), wrote his mother that “from two till five o’clock we heard the sound of roaring cannon-fire; that was truly sinister. At a given signal everybody stopped and listened and in the general silence we could hear the distant muted sound of cannon-fire; it was frightening.” Even though there was little activity in his district, “all the streets are occupied by soldiers.”3

  The brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, residing on the other side of town (on Rue Saint-George, in what is now the 9th arrondissement), watched soldiers fire at people in windows, police “kicking men in the chest, [and] cuirassiers making terrifying charges, pistol in hand, at any cry of ‘The Republic for ever!’” The Goncourts’ response, while swallowing their anger “with a lot of shame,” was to remain “as silent as a carp.” After all, it was the safest thing to do.

  “On the Day of Last Judgment,” they wrote soon after (as always, in the singular voice), “when God the Father . . . questions me about everything to which I have lent the complicity of my eyes, he will doubtless ask me: ‘Creature whom I made human and good, have you by any chance seen the bullfight at the Barrière du Combat with five great famished bulldogs tearing to pieces some poor, thin old donkey incapable of defending itself?’ To which I will reply, ‘Alas, no, Lord, I have seen something worse than that: I have seen a coup d’état.’”4

  By December 4, the resistance was crushed.

  The Goncourts, who began their famous journal on December 2, 1851, were especially dismayed by the coup’s impact on their first novel, which was due for publication that very day. With Paris under martial law, their literary debut—which they had greatly anticipated—went almost completely unnoticed. In part, this was the result of their title, En 18 . . . , which their terrified printer thought could refer to 18 Brumaire, the date of Napoleon I’s coup d’état. The frightened man threw all of the Goncourts’ promot
ional posters in the fire and made unapproved cuts of a political nature. According to him, “we had made the most dangerous allusions, six months before, to the events which had just taken place.”5 In any case, with soldiers on the streets, few buyers were to be found, and the book sold only sixty copies—much to the Goncourts’ despair.

  Alexandre Dumas, who was surprised by the coup, decided that—despite his republican sympathies—it was not worth dying for the cause. But he did make an attempt to defend those in danger. On December 3, responding to rumors that were circulating about a price placed on Victor Hugo’s head, he wrote a mutual friend: “Today at six o’clock 25,000 francs have been promised to the person who arrests or kills Hugo. You know where he is. Under no circumstances must he go out.”6

  Despite the danger, Hugo had remained in hiding in Paris, reluctant to abandon his sons, who still were imprisoned in the Conciergerie. But his friends insisted that he get out and had arranged an escape route. Hugo finally agreed, departing from the Gare du Nord for Brussels on the evening of December 11, disguised with a heavy beard, a cloak with upturned collar, and a cap pulled down over his eyes. Befitting his impoverished look, he rode in a second-class carriage and brought with him merely an orange and a ham sandwich.

  Alexandre Dumas shortly followed him out of the country, accompanied by his son and pursued not by police but by debt collectors, in the wake of a December 11 judgment of bankruptcy against him. Dumas fils dearly loved his father, who had managed to go through several fortunes without a thought to the future, assuming that yet another hit play or serialized novel, like his The Three Musketeers or Count of Monte Cristo, would save the day. Dumas’s lucrative literary production continued to be amazing, but so did his inability to regulate his life. As the son put it, “My father is a great big child whom I had when I was a little boy.”7