Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  The ranks of exiles swelled as it became clear that the new regime was introducing a compulsory oath of loyalty for those holding public office—something that the Second Republic had abolished as monarchical and adverse to liberty. Those university professors with republican sympathies who had not yet been banished now fled the country, while those who remained—such as the revered historian Jules Michelet—suffered the consequences. Michelet, who had previously been deprived of his chair at the Collège de France, was now relieved of his position as director of the National Archives. Henceforth, he would have to earn his living entirely by writing. Fortunately, he was prolific.

  In addition, the regime rounded up a huge number of suspects, assuming that any republican could be arrested on the grounds of having been a potential insurgent, an accomplice of insurgents, or even a source of inspiration for insurgency. With prisons overflowing, justice was summarily dispatched, without allowing evidence for the defense or any appeals. Repression and abolition of rule of law were the order of the day. Looking back, Maxime Du Camp simply commented, “Revolutions produce despotism and despotism produces revolutions. In France,” he added, “the oscillations of the political pendulum are excessive; scarcely ever does it pause in the middle where safety and strength are only to be found.”8

  Charles Merruau, who became general secretary of the Seine prefecture after the coup (and thus was among those whom Victor Hugo labeled as “shipmates of a pirate”), later wrote: “Up to the present, since 1789, France, by the weight of its habits and customs, has not been able to raise itself above Caesarism; institutions, such as they are, seem of little consequence for the French; instead, men [charismatic leaders] are everything in their eyes.”9

  Louis-Napoleon, the man of the hour, now took the title “Prince-President” and immediately submitted a new constitution to a vote by universal male suffrage. To prevent any mischance, the voting—by open ballot for the military, by paper ballot for civilians—was done under considerable surveillance. Although resistance persisted in Paris and other large towns (in Paris, out of some 300,000 registered voters, only 133,000 voted in favor, while 80,000 opposed and 80,000 abstained), the result was overwhelmingly in favor of the new constitution. Consequently, with the plebiscite’s blessing, Louis-Napoleon could now claim the presidency for a ten-year term, with ministers who depended upon him alone and with other governmental bodies, including a legislature, that now served essentially as rubber stamps. The new prince-president announced the results with much pomp, maintaining the he had “only departed from legality in order to return to the law.” And then, perhaps admitting some discomfort with his methods, he added, “More than seven million votes have just absolved me.”10

  Louis-Napoleon quickly made use of the full powers he had been granted, promulgating the constitution and establishing what amounted to an autocracy, even while paying lip service to democracy. In addition to demanding oaths of loyalty for those holding public office, he introduced a wide range of measures to reinforce his position, including repression of the press. His touch was deft: he saw no need for censorship per se, which was unpopular. Instead, the system he imposed consisted merely of a series of warnings. An article considered offensive would draw a warning; after a limited number of warnings, the newspaper would be suspended. Maxime Du Camp, who soon ran afoul of the system, later wrote that it effectively operated as self-censorship: “The pen had to be held suspended over the paper before one dared write a word.” He added that, while the system technically applied only to political journalism, it indirectly “reached and ruined many writers who wrote artistic and dramatic criticism, novels, or scientific articles for newspapers,” especially as the number of newspapers became limited. The result was that editors, fearful of reporting on politics or anything of any substance whatever, resorted to reporting gossip and scandal—and, of course, finance.11

  In addition to muzzling the press, Louis-Napoleon subjected taverns and public houses to licensing, on the grounds that they could become hotbeds of opposition politics. He also took stringent measures to ensure that universal suffrage produced only the correct results, by providing voters with official candidates. This meant that after the public was notified of an official candidate, the government would openly campaign for this individual, provide him with public speaking facilities, and issue publicity on his behalf. Any opponent who dared to run could expect considerable harassment—including subtle and no-so-subtle threats to the well-being of the offending party and his family.

  On January 1, 1852, evidently pleased with developments, the newly minted prince-president departed from the Elysée Palace for the Tuileries Palace, the residence of the first Bonaparte. It was not difficult to see what was coming.

  Despite the winds of political oppression, France and the French were not inclined to object so long as the economy was going strong. Louis-Napoleon had in fact already put considerable pep into a sluggish economy through his enthusiastic backing of economic expansion, in which his vision for a reconstructed Paris played a central role. “I want to be a second Augustus,” he had written in 1842, from his prison fortress of Ham, “because Augustus . . . made Rome a city of marble.”12 By opening up the dark and narrow tangle of streets of central Paris and replacing aged and sinister tenements with attractive housing blocks, he intended to create a city that was far more welcoming to commerce as well as a pleasanter place in which to live. This meant, to his way of thinking, the necessity of creating unimpeded east-west arteries on both the Right and the Left Banks as well as a central route leading directly from the northern to the southern gates of the city. It also meant connecting the warehouses and passenger stations of the new railroads—not only with each other, but with the city’s vital center. In that era of booming new industrialization, the magic word was “railroads.”

  Already Paris had a scattering of embarkation points and stations around its outskirts, marking the end points of several different railway lines. Unfortunately, these were not connected, nor were they linked in any meaningful way with the center of Paris. Predecessors of the Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est, Gare de Lyon, Gare d’Austerlitz (originally the Gare d’Orléans), Gare Montparnasse, and the Gare Saint Lazare existed but remained awkwardly unconnected and difficult to reach, whether for freight or passengers.

  Complicating matters, in the 1850s, Paris was still a walled city. Its innermost wall, the Farmers-General wall, was merely a tax barrier, built to collect customs for incoming goods (Métro lines 2 and 6 now follow its original course around the Right and Left Banks). But the city’s outermost wall, the massive Thiers fortifications—named after then–prime minister Adolphe Thiers—was a bristling defensive wall that had just been completed shortly before the outburst of the 1848 revolution (the ring road, the Périphérique, follows its course around Paris’s current city limits). The Thiers fortifications included sixteen forts built outside the wall’s perimeter, and there was some concern in higher echelons that in time of war, it might be difficult to connect and supply these. As a result, the idea for a chemin de ceinture, or circular railway, began to win support.

  By 1851, it had also become clear that it would be a good idea to link the various warehouses of the railway lines then entering Paris. And so in 1851, responding to military need as well as commercial opportunity, Louis-Napoleon signed a decree authorizing the creation of a seventeen-kilometer Right Bank chemin de ceinture, which was to run along the interior of the Thiers fortifications and link several important railway lines. This little railway would for the time being carry only freight, but within a decade, it would carry passengers as well.

  Piece by piece the little circular railway expanded, soon completing the circuit around the city and extending spurs to major commercial ventures such as the slaughterhouses of La Villette. By the 1860s, its glory days as a passenger railway began, and by the turn of the century, it would carry almost forty million passengers a year. Familiarly known as the Petite Ceinture, or Little Belt, its
demise only came with the twentieth century’s construction of the Métro system. But in its heyday, the Petite Ceinture was a necessary—and beloved—part of the fabric of Paris.13

  Railroads had become all-important, and entrepreneurs and investors flocked to the opportunity they offered. Among these up-and-coming businessmen, some of the most colorful were the Pereire brothers, who rose from obscurity to challenge the mighty House of Rothschild.

  Born in Bordeaux, into a family of Jewish Portuguese immigrants, the older Pereire brother, Emile, decided in 1822 to pursue his fortunes in the far bigger metropolis of Paris. Soon Emile’s younger brother, Isaac, joined him, and the two proceeded to work closely together throughout their careers—with the exception of a brief period of chilliness after Isaac (then a widower) fell in love with and proposed to Emile’s sixteen-year-old daughter, who of course was Isaac’s niece. Under the Napoleonic Code, Emile’s consent was requisite for such a marriage, and Emile was uncomfortable with the close relationship. But the marriage took place and seems to have been happy as well as fruitful, producing three children. In any case, the brothers soon decided to let bygones be bygones and resumed working together.

  In their early Paris years, Isaac first worked as a journalist, while Emile became a broker at the Bourse, the French stock exchange. During this time, they became followers of Count de Saint-Simon, whose doctrines reflected the buoyant optimism of the age. Saint-Simonians were enthusiastic about the emerging Industrial Revolution, seeing in it the potential for a new social order. This, they agreed, would be achieved rationally, through science and industry, and would benefit all humanity, especially the poor. Saint-Simon’s promised land was utopian, but it was so firmly based on logic, method, and rationality that it appealed to a number of scientists as well as industrialists. These followers of Saint-Simon did not aspire to sainthood: the businessmen and industrialists in particular had every expectation of becoming rich, even very rich; they simply thought that it was possible to do so and benefit humanity at the same time.

  The Pereire brothers were especially attracted to what Saint-Simonians had to say on the need to develop new and better forms of transportation, whether to increase people’s mobility or to foster better circulation of goods. By the 1830s, the newest of the new in transportation was the railroad, aided by the invention of the steam engine. The French had been slow to follow the English with their railroads, but by the 1830s, the Pereire brothers were among the first in France to sense the possibilities, especially given the climate favorable to major business enterprises once Louis-Philippe was on the throne. After visiting England to study the technical problems of construction, the Pereires decided to build a short railroad line (nineteen kilometers) from Paris to Saint-Germain, which would be the first passenger line in France.

  Before proceeding, it was necessary to persuade the government to grant a railway concession. Isaac undertook what amounted to a major public relations campaign, overcoming objections from powerful political figures such as Adolphe Thiers, whom Félix Nadar later lampooned for proclaiming to all and sundry that “the wheels will slip without ever advancing”—and when the wheels did not slip, Thiers refused to back down, affirming just as strongly that this newfangled mode of transportation could only be used for short distances.14 In addition to benighted politicians, another major hurdle was those whose land was threatened by expropriation. Fortunately for the Pereires, a recent (1833) law had facilitated expropriations in the public interest, and the Pereires got what they wanted—a concession for ninety-nine years. Then came the challenge of convincing the bankers, especially Baron James de Rothschild, to invest in their project. Rothschild, who for a time had employed Emile, was at first hesitant. After all, the Pereires were relative youngsters (Emile in 1835 was thirty-five and Isaac was in his twenties), while Rothschild, although still in his forties, was a king in his extensive and powerful realm of banking and finance.

  Of course, it had not always been that way. The Rothschilds, like the Pereires, were Jewish but originated in the heavily circumscribed ghetto of Frankfurt. From there, the Rothschild patriarch, Mayer, had seen business opportunities when the French invaded Germany during the 1790s, and Britain’s subsequent wars with France created even more financing opportunities for Mayer Rothschild and his five sons. “It is better to deal with a government in difficulties than with one that has luck on its side,” Mayer advised his sons, and he also told them that “if you can’t make yourself loved, make yourself feared.”15 By 1825, the five Rothschild brothers were well established in Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples, as well as in London and Paris, and although each son had his own bailiwick, the family stuck together to create a single multinational entity. With riches came status, and Jacob Rothschild became the Baron James de Rothschild, Austrian consul general in Paris, chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, and, after his elder brother’s death, leader of the Rothschild clan—a formidable figure in French as well as international finance.

  In 1835, James de Rothschild came on board with the Pereires, along with two other investors, and continued his support when the Pereires increased their ambitions and lengthened their railway line, first to Versailles, then to Rouen and Le Havre. Soon the Pereires embarked with Rothschild on their Chemin de Fer du Nord, linking Paris with Lille and Brussels, which became France’s first grand line—inaugurated in 1846 with a fine ceremony from the new Gare du Nord. Attending the festivities was an impressive sprinkling of dukes and celebrities, including Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, while in Lille, there was a banquet for two thousand and a performance of Chant des chemins de fer (Song of the Railroads), a cantata for tenor and six-part chorus written for the occasion (and conducted by) the renowned composer Hector Berlioz.

  At this time, James de Rothschild was still heavily involved in financing the Pereires’ projects, but tensions between the two parties were beginning to emerge. Rothschild had a way of taking credit for their mutual success as his own personal triumph, the result of his foresight, while for their part, the Pereires were not shy about their own accomplishments. Relations between Rothschild and the Pereires continued to deteriorate, in part because the Pereires, whom Rothschild viewed as parvenus, had the temerity to buy an estate near his own country château. But more fundamentally, strain between the parties grew because they embraced different goals: Rothschild wanted to avoid risk, while the Pereires continued to push for growth.

  As 1848 approached, James de Rothschild worried about the possibility of turmoil ahead, although he did not foresee the magnitude of what was coming. A stagnant economy and a seething mass of unhappy people meant trouble, and this kind of trouble signaled danger for the Rothschilds—largely because revolutions cause government bonds to plummet in value, and the Rothschilds held a large proportion of their immense wealth in the form of bonds. The Rothschilds did in fact suffer financially from the tsunami of revolution in France and throughout Europe in 1848–1849 but managed to survive, mainly by pulling together, as they always had. Still, they (and James in particular, as head of the “firm”) emerged with an increased preference for risk avoidance, even if it meant lower profitability. In the long run, according to James, it made sense.

  Not only did France’s 1848 revolution pummel the value of bonds, but the emergence of joint-stock and limited-liability companies now weakened some of the Rothschilds’ financial hegemony. The Pereires, in particular, who had once been dependent on the Rothschilds for financing, now had other opportunities for raising money, and they were about to use them.

  The Pereires could not have picked a better time to embark on expansion. Louis-Napoleon had, like them, a long history of interest in the theories of Saint-Simon, which promised a rising tide of prosperity for all in return for industrial investment—a happy outcome that most certainly would reinforce Louis-Napoleon’s own rule. Accordingly, promptly after his coup, the prince-president took steps to encourage industrial expansion, especially on behalf of those fearless buccaneers who were em
barked on railway building throughout France.

  Louis-Napoleon did not have to start from scratch. For a decade during the railroads’ pioneer days, the state had assumed the role of handling railroad infrastructure, while private companies received the responsibility for installing track, stations, and other components of superstructure. Since that time, the state had also maintained the right to control concessions and operating leases. Louis-Napoleon, realizing that he had in hand the proverbial goose with the golden eggs, was liberal in handing out these concessions: in early 1852, soon after his coup, he freely dispensed concessions for new lines, including the Lyon-Mediterranean and the Paris-Lyon, granting companies generous (usually ninety-nine-year) operating leases in order to allow them to spread their initial costs over time. By 1857, he had awarded twenty-five railroad concessions, with thirty more to follow during his remaining years of rule.

  Not surprisingly, after a period of stagnation between 1848 and 1851, figures for railway investment now boomed, increasing fivefold in the next five years. And the Pereire brothers were positioned to take advantage of it. Instead of relying on Rothschild money, they now devised a new source of income to rival the wealth of the Rothschilds themselves.

  In November 1852, Louis-Napoleon (in his last days as prince-president of the Second Republic) signed the decree authorizing the creation of Crédit Mobilier, a new form of financial institution promoted by the ever-inventive Pereire brothers. Originally called the Banque des grands travaux, until the finance minister objected to the word “bank” in its title, this institution—a joint stock venture—was formed to lend money not only to governments but to new or developing industrial companies as well as to businesses engaged in trade or public works. Furthermore, it would receive its capital, not from bankers such as Rothschild, but through a large volume of bonds issued to the general public. It was a brilliant idea and one which, given the shares’ face value of only 500 francs, was calculated to appeal to a broad spectrum of investors. The Pereires would not have to supply a cent.