Whether or not Crédit Mobilier was intended as a direct challenge to Rothschild financial power, it certainly was a response to James Rothschild’s alliance with the Pereires’ competitor, Paulin Talabot, together with Rothschild’s moves to freeze out the Pereires from financial support for their own railway ventures. The Pereires now found a ready ally in Louis-Napoleon, who faced considerable opposition from the highly conservative French banking sector, which had no interest whatever in his Saint-Simonian goals. The prince-president viewed Crédit Mobilier as a welcome promoter of the kind of business expansion and infrastructure development that he so keenly wanted and did not even bother to consult the Banque de France on the subject. He was also unmoved by Rothschild’s warnings of the dangers of joint stock companies in general and one run by the Pereires in particular. Louis-Napoleon, who was well aware of the Rothschilds’ preference for the previous Orléanist monarchy, merely shrugged at their warnings, leaving relations icy between him and James de Rothschild for years.
Crédit Mobilier opened brilliantly, with its 500-franc shares immediately soaring in value. At their peak, in early 1856, they were trading at close to 2,000 francs. Crédit Mobilier soon was financing railways, coal mines, and gas companies, among its many large-scale enterprises, most especially including the rebuilding of Paris, which it undertook through its Compagnie Immobilière. It would not be long before Crédit Mobilier would be in a position to threaten the Rothschilds not only in France but throughout Europe and beyond.
The Pereires found an ally in Louis-Napoleon, but Louis-Napoleon found a valuable ally in the Pereires as well. As Louis-Napoleon’s longtime right-hand man, the Count de Persigny, later remarked, it was necessary to find “an instrument that would free the new regime of the domination that financiers usually exercised over governments,” especially since established financial interests were so hostile toward Louis-Napoleon and his goals. Without Crédit Mobilier, he added, Louis-Napoleon’s policies “would not have been as bold and free from restrictions as they were.”16
These bold policies centered on the prince-president’s long-desired goals for Paris, which he continued to push ahead. Already started on the Bois de Boulogne and the eastward extension of the Rue de Rivoli, in early 1852, he took up the challenge of creating a north-south route through the city, beginning at the current Gare de l’Est and bringing this new route, called the Boulevard de Strasbourg, as far as the Grands Boulevards, where they became the Boulevard Saint-Denis. And this was only the beginning. There was so much more he wanted to do! Yet most unfortunately, he was running out of money.
It was Persigny, now minister of the interior, who came up with the idea that these huge public works should be regarded as an investment, as “productive expenditure.” As he put it, the enormous expenditures on public works necessary to transform Paris “would certainly help the city’s finances by producing a huge movement of business and wealth into the capital.” In not too many more months a new face at Louis-Napoleon’s side, Georges Haussmann, would make the same argument, taking the credit for this discovery, which laid the basis for the glory and the opulence of the Second Empire.
But in the meantime, Louis-Napoleon’s current prefect for the Seine, Jean-Jacques Berger, was of a far more conservative bent and was unwilling to proceed without the cash in hand. Louis-Napoleon needed money for the great remodeling of Paris that he had only just begun, and it was to the Pereire brothers that he soon turned.
Now comfortably ensconced in Brussels, Victor Hugo kept up his opposition to Louis-Napoleon. In March 1852, he went to war on the prince-president’s plan to pull down the ancient church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois to make way for the extension of Rue de Rivoli to the Hôtel de Ville and beyond. Hugo promptly published an outraged article in the Revue des Deux Mondes titled “Guerre aux Démolisseurs!” (War on the Wreckers). The church, which stood across from the Palais du Louvre and had served for centuries as its parish church, entered history in 1572 when its bell tolled the signal for the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. More concerned with opening a perspective on the Louvre colonnade than with history, Louis-Napoleon had not anticipated the amount of opposition that Hugo could and did stir up. At last, the prince-president gave in and altered his plans, and the church was saved.
But Hugo was not through with Louis-Napoleon. That July he published Napoléon-le-Petit (Napoleon the Little), a scathing attack on the prince-president and the authoritarian government he had established. “Ever since the second of December, 1851,” Hugo wrote, “a successful ambush, a crime, odious, repulsive, infamous, unprecedented, considering the age in which it was committed, has triumphed and held sway.” Before that date, Hugo continued, leaders of the right had openly said of Louis-Napoleon, “He is an idiot.” But, Hugo added ominously, “they were mistaken.” Indeed, this man “knows what he wants, and he goes straight to it; through justice, through law, through reason, through honor, through humanity, it may be, but straight none the less.”
Characterizing Louis-Napoleon as someone who “lies as other men breathe,” Hugo condemned him as one who would do anything to achieve his ends. Yet Hugo refused to make a great man of the prince-president, even if an evil one: “Though he has committed enormous crimes,” Hugo concluded, “he will remain paltry. He will never be other than the nocturnal strangler of liberty.”17
Paltry, Louis-Napoleon may have been, in Hugo’s eyes and in those of others, but the prince-president was still dangerous, and Hugo knew it. Anticipating trouble as soon as the book was published, Hugo left Brussels for the Channel Island of Jersey, where he brought his family (and his mistress) to safety around him. There, he did everything in his power to smuggle a tiny edition of Napoléon-le-Petit into France, where it arrived by the thousands, whether in bales of hay, fishing boats, hollowed-out blocks of wood, or trunks with false bottoms. Even balloons were used to float the tiny book-bomb into Louis-Napoleon’s France. Helpful tourists came up with numerous ploys to bring the banned book into the country, but customs officers became alert to the problem, leading to long lines, interrogations, and even the occasional strip search at the border.
Hugo regarded all this with satisfaction. “My function,” he said, “is somehow sacerdotal. I have taken the place of the magistracy and the clergy. Unlike the judges, I judge, and unlike the priests, I excommunicate.”18
Despite the repression, by late March 1852, life as usual had resumed in Paris, where the state of siege was lifted and railway speculation now enthralled. Louis-Napoleon entertained thousands at magnificent balls in the Tuileries and the Ecole Militaire and provided glitter for the masses with a magnificent fireworks display on August 15, the date of his imperial uncle’s birth. As the prince-president shrewdly noted, “The future belongs to apathetic people.”19
Those prepared to work hard and harness the winds of change on their own behalf were already thriving in Louis-Napoleon’s Paris. One of these was Aristide Boucicaut, son of a Norman hatter, who had made his way to Paris and worked his way into a position of some responsibility at a small store there. In 1852, having saved or borrowed 50,000 francs, he joined with another willing businessman to open the Left Bank shop the Bon Marché, which at first sold only linens and notions and had a total of twelve employees. Boucicaut soon made fundamental changes, introducing fixed prices as well as a policy of exchanges and refunds—novel practices that appealed to the practical side of the ladies who shopped there. He also invested heavily in newspaper advertising and introduced seasonal sales. Yet as Emile Zola later recognized, in Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), female shoppers were especially enchanted with the delightful ambiance that Boucicaut’s Le Bon Marché offered. For in this agreeable place, they could browse amid a wide range of tempting merchandise, displayed in an appealing manner. Immersed in this pleasantly seductive atmosphere, goods that one didn’t really need suddenly became irresistible, and Le Bon Marché quickly profited. By 1860, Boucicaut had increased the store’s annual
income from 500,000 francs to five million.
Boucicaut’s timing was impeccable, for in 1852 the great boom period of the Second Empire was just beginning, and consumerism—a novel concept for the newly affluent bourgeoisie—was on the rise. So was the inclination to be entertained, and for some time long lines had been forming to see La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady with the Camellias), which opened at Paris’s Vaudeville theater in early February.
The play’s author, Alexandre Dumas fils, had hurried back to Paris soon after depositing his famous father in Brussels, since he was anxious to attend rehearsals for La Dame aux Camélias. After all, it was his first play, which he had adapted from his novel of the same name, and the story was dear to his heart. Dumas fils, who was every bit as romantic as his father, although far less flamboyant and self-indulgent, wrote La Dame aux Camélias in memory of the beautiful courtesan Marie Duplessis, who had inspired the great tragic love affair of his youth.
When Dumas fils met her, Marie Duplessis was young and lovely, emanating the sort of fragility that virtually demanded protection. She had taken to reckless expenditure and drinking to combat her boredom and unhappiness, which her admirers did everything to alleviate. Her demands grew in proportion to their willingness to fulfill them, yet she remained unhappy. Even their roses left her cold. Perhaps she was allergic to roses, or perhaps not, but they made her dizzy. Only camellias, which are odorless, would do.
Dumas, who was but twenty at the time, fell helplessly in love with Marie Duplessis and became eager to provide the protection she needed. But most unfortunately, he did not possess the requisite fortune, and Duplessis was accustomed to going through fortunes. Of course Dumas’s father was one of the century’s most successful playwrights and novelists, with an income to match, but Dumas père was in his own way as irresponsible with money as was Marie Duplessis. No matter how much money Dumas père made (and it was a lot), he always managed to outspend his income. An epic womanizer (much like his friend Victor Hugo), he spent freely, was an easy target for loans, and supported not only his current mistresses but also those who had come before.
Dumas fils possessed neither his father’s taste for adventure nor his gargantuan appetite for life. But he did have this one love, and he desperately wanted to keep her for himself. It was not to be. Not only was Marie Duplessis a devourer of fortunes, but she suffered from a disease of the lungs, which the nineteenth century viewed with romantically infused trepidation. If pretty young girls had to die in nineteenth-century novels, this was the way to do it, and by the time young Dumas met her, Marie Duplessis was in an advanced state of consumption.
Tender and compassionate in his love, young Dumas won her over and seems to have dreamed of reforming her. Yet reform proved impossible. Even worse, as Dumas’s debts began to mount, he came to realize that Duplessis was being false to him. Finally, the wounded young man left the beautiful courtesan. Months later, hearing that she was very ill, he wrote to beg her forgiveness, but she never replied. Although by now a pale ghost of her former self, she continued to make the rounds of all the stylish places as her illness progressed. After a long and difficult decline, Marie Duplessis finally died.
Young Dumas was devastated by the news, and upon learning of her death, wrote his novel about her, La Dame aux Camélias. In it, he portrayed the Lady of the Camellias as he would have liked her to have been. Marie Duplessis never would have recognized herself as a penitent who renounces her degrading life for the man she loves. But the story was heartrendingly romantic, and it was an enormous hit. It became an even bigger hit when Dumas turned it into a play.
Soon after, Giuseppe Verdi turned the story into La Traviata (The Fallen Woman), which debuted at Venice’s La Fenice opera house in March 1853.
By this time, pitiful deaths of beautiful young girls had become a staple of romantic literature, gobbled up by a public avid for comfortable tears. A related theme, first popularized by Henry Murger in his Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes from Bohemian Life), was any tale involving the romantic suffering of impoverished artists, preferably ones who eked out their existences in the garrets of Paris’s Latin Quarter. In time, Giacomo Puccini would turn Murger’s stories into his opera La Bohème, but by the 1850s Scènes de la vie de bohème had already reached an enthusiastic audience, first in the form of stories, then as a play, and finally as a book that appeared in 1851. In the process, the term “bohemian” became shorthand for a particular lifestyle, one dedicated to the creative arts. Although this lifestyle was reputed to be lively, romantic, and carefree, Murger made it plain that, despite moments of humor, hope, and bravado, it was a bleak life, threaded with sadness and crushing poverty.
Murger based his stories, and his book, on his own hard experience as a starving writer in a Paris garret, where he and fellow writers, musicians, and artists (and the women who lived with them) eased the troubles of their day-to-day existence with good-natured camaraderie, sharing what little they had just to get by. The “water drinkers,” they joshingly called themselves, since they barely had enough money to buy wine. Love, devotion, and sex played a pivotal role in this difficult existence, but dreams of creative achievement were what pulled these artists and intellectuals forward, along with a determination not to betray their particular vision for mere money. Art for Art’s Sake was their creed.
Although the term “bohemian” had already come to describe the unconventional lifestyles of an earlier era’s young Romantics, and also referred to gypsies and nomadic peoples, it was Murger who permanently stamped the word “bohemian” with the meaning of an artistic subculture that thrived, or at least persisted, in dense urban settings—especially in Paris. As he put it, “Today, as in the past, any man who enters the path of Art, with his art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of Bohemia.” And bohemia, for Murger as for so many others, could only exist in Paris, the Paris of the Latin Quarter: “Bohemia,” he stated, “neither exists nor can exist anywhere but in Paris.”
Yet Murger was not enamored with bohemian life. “Bohemia is a stage of the artist’s career,” he wrote; “it is the preface to the Academy, the Hospital or the Morgue.”20 He knew whereof he spoke. Murger, the son of a concierge, had lived the life of a starving writer and indeed used himself as the model for Rodolphe in Scènes de la vie de bohème. His life had been replete with hardship but not because he wanted it so. His novel—unlike Puccini’s opera—ends not with Mimi’s death but with the characters renouncing their bohemian ways and entering bourgeois society, finding acceptance in official circles and learning to pay their debts. By this time, rather than return to their old haunts, they are quite prepared to reject their former principles and threadbare past for warm lodgings and a good meal.
“I no longer care for anything but what is good and comfortable,” one of the characters declares.21 Bohemia may have been fine for a moment but not for a lifetime.
Paris’s Left Bank bohemia rubbed side by side with the poorest of the working or nonworking poor. And islanded in the midst of all this deprivation was the Sorbonne.
Founded in 1257 by a high-ranking clergyman, Robert de Sorbon, its original purpose was to provide a small college to lodge poor students at the University of Paris. The university itself, founded in 1200, owed its existence to town-and-gown tensions, student protests, and the monarch’s decision to grant the students certain rights and protections. These relied heavily on enforcement by the powerful Roman Catholic Church, under whose jurisdiction the students now came. This bothered few, as the concept of the separation of church and state was yet a long way off. Indeed, to be a student in those days was to be a cleric, albeit a lowly one. For years this jumble of religiously affiliated but dismaying worldly students trooped through Paris, annoying their teachers and creating havoc in the local taverns. But in the end, everyone usually managed to sort things out.
And then, in the thirteenth century, members of the newly formed Dominican and Franciscan orders showed up. These newcomers, who
had originated as mendicant, or begging, orders, had little in common either with those destined to become priests or those who would become members of monastic orders. The Dominican and Franciscans friars were teaching orders, and they brought with them some of the most brilliant teachers of the age, including young Thomas Aquinas. Conflict soon erupted between them and the University’s theology faculty (then located at Notre-Dame), and the University attempted to expel the newcomers. Before long, the fracas reached the Vatican, leading to excommunication and a temporary shutdown of the University.
It was then that Robert de Sorbon began looking at real estate on the Left Bank. He purchased several properties, intent on turning them into endowed lodgings for poor students—specifically for those who were not Dominican or Franciscan friars. Sorbon, not coincidentally, was chaplain to the king, Louis IX (known to history as St. Louis), who supported this project. After all, the Dominicans and Franciscans came under the direct authority of the pope, and despite his saintliness, Louis was no pushover when it came to protecting his royal prerogatives. Sorbon’s project offered a way of quietly opposing the friars without direct confrontation.
Given this royal seal of approval, the College de Sorbon, or the Sorbonne, prospered. Instead of competing with the Theology Faculty, it supported it by providing room and board for its poorest students. In time, Sorbon’s college replaced the cloister of Notre-Dame as the official seat of the Faculty of Theology, and by the seventeenth century, the Sorbonne had become an established power in theological circles. It had also clearly outgrown its by-now shabby facilities, and Cardinal Richelieu—Louis XIII’s powerful prime minister, who was also Chancellor of the Sorbonne—replaced the Sorbonne’s medieval structures with a far larger and grander arrangement, whose centerpiece was an impressive Baroque chapel that would eventually house Richelieu’s own magnificent tomb.
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