Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  Still, the Revue was indisputably in danger. “It should not be forgotten,” Du Camp went on, “that we were living in 1856, and that the periodical press existed, or rather expired, under despotic rule.” The long arm of the Police Correctionnelle soon reached out, indicting Flaubert, Laurent-Pichat (representing the Revue), and the printer on grounds of “outrage to public morality.” In January 1857, the case went to trial in the Sixth Chamber, where Flaubert, son of a prominent surgeon, sat on the bench “usually set apart for thieves, cheats, rowdies, and disreputable women.” Du Camp, who had not been named in the indictment and was in the audience, listened as the prosecutor argued that, while the book may have had literary merit, it was morally repugnant. Even though Flaubert had not described any actual eroticism, which took place beyond the reader’s gaze, the prosecutor argued that adultery itself, undeniably front and center in Madame Bovary, undermined the family and the social order.

  The defense began by describing Flaubert’s most estimable family and then turned the court’s attention to the serious character of the author, a man who—far from indulging in cheap eroticism—had spent years of somber study on the book in question. Rather than writing a salacious novel that undermined family life, it most powerfully portrayed the hazards that threatened it.

  In the end, after acknowledging that Flaubert was duly respectful of propriety and religious morality and that his book had not been written to pander to sensationalism, the tribunal ruled in Flaubert’s favor and acquitted the defendants of all charges and without costs. “The Revue de Paris had won a victory,” Du Camp wrote, “Flaubert a triumph.” Thanks to the trial and the publicity it generated, Flaubert became famous and Madame Bovary “had a prodigious success.”6

  Flaubert now was proclaimed by his literary colleagues as the leader of the Realist school of literature. This term, however, offended him, and according to Du Camp, “he never accepted it.” As Flaubert later told George Sand: “I despise what is usually called Realism, and yet I have been made one of its high priests.”7

  Flaubert’s friend Baudelaire had a similar aversion to the term “Realist” and, like Flaubert, believed that Realism’s great failing was that it lacked the beauty that was critical to great art. In his October 1857 review of Madame Bovary, Baudelaire defined Realism as “a repulsive insult flung in the face of every analyst, a vague and elastic word which . . . signifies not a new means of creation, but a minute description of minor details.”8

  Only a few months after Flaubert, Baudelaire also ran afoul of the official guardians of morality, who attacked as obscene his volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), published in June 1857. In July, when he realized that prosecution was likely, he wrote his editor, “Quickly, hide the whole edition and hide it carefully.”9 In late August, the poet appeared before the same court as Flaubert, facing the same charges from the same prosecutor. Six of the poems in particular had drawn the prosecutor’s attention, and unlike Flaubert, Baudelaire was convicted and fined.

  These six poems would not be restored to the book for almost a century.

  “There has never been an age so full of humbug,” the Goncourt brothers wrote in early January 1857, as the Flaubert case was coming to trial. They, too, had been hauled up before the same court in 1853, and although they had been admonished, they had been acquitted. Still, their literary journal had been shut down, and this still rankled.

  As they discussed this latest travesty with Théophile Gautier, who now was editor of the influential review L’Artiste, Gautier remarked that he was embarrassed for what his profession had become. “For the paltry sums which I have to earn because otherwise I should starve to death,” he told them, “I say only half or a quarter of what I think—and even then I risk being hauled into court with every sentence I write.”

  Rumblings on censorship were by now a favored topic among Parisian writers, especially this year, which had seen both Flaubert and Baudelaire brought before the police court. In October, after Baudelaire was fined and six of his poems suppressed, the Goncourts had supper at the table next to him at the Café Riche. “He was without cravat,” they noted disapprovingly, “his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be guillotined.” But they talked, as was expected with café dining, during which Baudelaire denied, “with some obstinacy and a certain harsh anger, that he has offended morality with his verse.”10

  Repression was rampant throughout Paris and throughout all of France, linked inextricably with the police and with the Roman Catholic Church. According to the prominent philosopher Victor Cousin, “No one dares to speak in the provinces or to write in Paris. The bourgeoisie . . . thinks only of making money.”11

  While the Church stood firm in protecting the moral order, the regime in turn was careful to stay in the good graces of the Church. Napoleon III and Haussmann not only carved out roads and arteries through Paris, they also built or rebuilt churches, temples, and synagogues—the most notable being the complete renovation of Notre-Dame, but also including the restoration of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the construction of more than a dozen other churches, including Saint-Augustin and the completion of Sainte Clotilde.

  Despite the official code of morality, which the police enforced for everyone else, Louis-Napoleon was free to enjoy his mistresses, while his guests and court were free to disport themselves however they wished—whether at the Tuileries (for the winter) or at Saint-Cloud (for the summer), with residences at Fontainebleau or Biarritz in between. It was a glittering, vulgar, and frequently debauched life, but without a free press to report it, the truth about the emperor and those around him never appeared. The emperor, empress, and their young son often posed for official photographs looking like a proper bourgeois family, but the reality was starkly different. And while the French bourgeoisie, whether Protestant or Catholic, held staunchly to their morality, for many others, adultery was a way of life.

  At midcentury, life for the Parisian bourgeoisie—especially for bourgeois women—consisted of a predictable set of rules staunchly adhered to. Certainly the haute bourgeoisie family of Berthe Morisot, although more inclined toward the artistic than were other families of their station, had a conventional middle-class attitude toward what they regarded as the essentials of life, including property, occupation, social status, manners, and—most especially—morality.

  Monsieur Morisot had harbored artistic inclinations as a youth and had hoped to become an architect, but yielding to bourgeois practicality, he had instead entered government service. There, he served as a prefect in several French cities, including Bourges, where Berthe was born in 1841. By 1857, he had become councilor of the Cour des Comptes (that is, the Court of Audits, which audited most public institutions), located in Paris. The family, which included Berthe; her sisters, Yves and Edma; and their young brother, Tiburce, moved to what then were the western outskirts of Paris, in Passy.

  There, when Berthe was sixteen, Madame Morisot brought her three daughters to the painter Paul Charles Chocarne-Moreau for lessons. Their brother, Tiburce, afterward wrote about this unfortunate introduction to art. To begin with, the portrait in the place of honor at the room’s center featured a young woman with elegant hairstyle who was, as the sisters noted, most surprisingly nude to the waist. Sitting on a patch of grass dotted with immaculate daisies, her arms were raised “in a gesture of supplication,” and her gaze “was fixed tearfully on a superlatively blue sky dotted with superlatively white clouds.” This masterwork was titled Invocation, and whether or not that year’s Salon’s visitors had found it as unintentionally humorous as did the Morisots, it had not found a buyer there—much to Chocarne’s dismay.

  In any case, Chocarne set the three Morisot sisters to work with lessons in crosshatching—calling to mind (this is Tiburce again) “the dreadful landscapes in the showcases of shops that sell funerary articles.” What a wretched time they had in Chocarne’s studio, and how gloomy their trip was back to Passy, escorted by t
heir father, who led the three sisters, “in cloaks, long skirts, and bonnets tied under the chin, a little flock reduced to a stupor by the Chocarne instruction.” From the Rue de Lille on the Left Bank, they would walk to the Place de la Concorde, where they boarded a horse-drawn omnibus that ran on rails between Paris and Saint-Cloud. Debarking at the foot of the hill of Trocadéro (or of Chaillot), they climbed to their residence on what now is Rue Scheffer.

  And that is the way it went, until Yves, the oldest sister, announced that if this was drawing, she would rather be a dressmaker.

  But Berthe and Edma persisted in prompting their mother to find a better teacher, and soon Madame Morisot removed them from the tutelage of Monsieur Chocarne and took them to the painter Joseph Guichard, who quickly realized his pupils’ talent. Indeed, not only did he recognize it, he was alarmed by it. According to brother Tiburce, Guichard took Madame Morisot aside and warned her that, given her daughters’ talent, his teaching would not simply give Berthe and Edma the amateur drawing-room accomplishments so admired of young ladies in that era; in fact, the sisters would become painters. “Do you realize what this means?” he demanded, sounding more than a little distraught. “In the upper-class milieu to which you belong, this will be revolutionary, I might almost say catastrophic.” In fact, he added, it would do no less than disrupt the “respectable and peaceful” Morisot home.12

  Madame Morisot seemed to find him overly alarmist and, regardless of these warnings, told him to proceed. In that case, Guichard replied, he would apply for permission for the Morisot sisters to work in the Louvre, where he would give them lessons face-to-face with the masters.

  While Berthe and Edma Morisot were embarking on their artistic training at the Louvre, Edouard Manet was traveling in Italy, accompanied by a sculptor friend, and Eugène Delacroix was at long last elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the Institut de France. This considerable honor allowed Delacroix to serve on the prestigious Salon jury, but he was dismissive of the honor. He merely commented that he flattered himself that he could be of use there “because I shall be nearly alone in my opinion.”13

  In any case, neither he nor Ingres were represented in that year’s Salon, leaving the field wide open for whatever was coming—most likely Realism, as many expected, given the increasingly heated debate over its merits.

  In another part of town, eighteen-year-old composer Georges Bizet, by all accounts a brilliant student at the Conservatoire de Paris, won the prestigious Prix de Rome, allowing him three years of study in Rome. Unfortunately, his splendid beginning would not ensure an equally splendid career—as he would discover upon his return to Paris.

  And as Bizet left for Rome, thirty-five-year-old Louis Pasteur moved to Paris, to head scientific studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure—a move that enhanced his already-remarkable career but did not endear him to the school’s students, who would stoutly resist his efforts to tighten up procedures and discipline.

  In the midst of such to-ing and fro-ing, and the frequently frantic business of profit-making, Napoleon III decided to call an election for June 1857—dissolving the Legislature in April and shortening its life by nearly a year. Although the prospects for reelection of a Bonaparte majority were favorable, due to the prosperity that continued to buck the world monetary crisis and due as well to fond remembrances of the war’s glorious outcome, the stakes still were high. Louis-Napoleon could not afford to show that he lost any support among the masses, which had turned out in his favor in 1852.

  And so the government put the pressure on, especially on opposition candidates—as one of the opposition candidates, the poet François Ponsard, colorfully but privately described. “Mayors, police commissioners and rural policemen made the rustic herd vote as they wished,” he complained in his private correspondence. “Those who carried my ballots were arrested and my posters torn up; my ballots were seized in voters’ hands and even in peasants’ houses, after their occupants were subjected to threats of all kinds.” In addition, mayors were promised all sorts of desirable public assistance.14

  Ponsard was a candidate in the Vienne, but opposition candidates ran the same gauntlet throughout France. Still, the republican opposition made inroads in some of the major towns, especially in central and eastern Paris, where it won five of the ten seats. Altogether, the opposition won 15 percent of the vote throughout France, indicating a growing malaise—largely from workers in large-scale industry. The government claimed great satisfaction with the outcome, although the rate of absenteeism was high, and the interior minister warned that “the whole point now is to find ways of reducing the number of malcontents from Paris to Lyons.”

  Unquestionably, the workers in Paris and other large towns remained hostile to the regime, and every year they showed a growing geographical split within the capital, with a republican working-class Paris demanding bread and a bourgeois Paris seeking order. Even Georges Haussmann could see that, despite the grands travaux and the benefits they brought workers, “a two-toned map representing how the majority of electors voted in each quartier would show Paris divided into two almost equal parts, as in the time of the barricades.”15

  And that was before the financial crisis of 1857 hit.

  Crédit Mobilier’s star had already begun to wane, due to the slowdown that had sapped economies throughout Europe in the wake of the Crimean War. But the slowdown, and its impact on industry, was not the worst of it, for in August 1857, the crash came, originating in a financial panic in North America that triggered a domino effect of bank failures and stock market declines. Because of the increasing interconnectedness of the world economy, this financial panic quickly spread to Europe and beyond, penetrating even Second Empire France’s booming prosperity.

  The Pereire-Rothschild rivalry, always strong, had by now grown even more intense, with efforts to expand Crédit Mobilier–style banks internationally going hand-in-hand with efforts to grab railway concessions. This railway competition reached its peak in mid-1857, when the Pereires failed to block the fusion of their Grand-Central line with the Rothschild-controlled Paris-Orléans line—amounting to a major setback. The Pereires alleged that there had been a conspiracy against them, but from now on they would yield preeminence to the Rothschilds in the great European-wide race for railway concessions.

  At the heart of this increasingly uneven struggle was the Pereires’ chronic shortage of funds. While Rothschild was always certain of having sufficient capital of his own (or certainly of his family’s), the Crédit Mobilier was not. This in turn would give Rothschild the advantage in this “duel of titans,” which continued to play out throughout the remaining years of the Second Empire.

  Financial uncertainty made any talk of another loan for Haussmann’s projects for the moment unthinkable. And yet construction continued unabated on what Haussmann considered but the first step of his development of Paris.

  As always, the prefect of the Seine was in a hurry. The Louvre-Tuileries complex, including the Place du Carrousel—now laid out as gardens—was officially inaugurated in August 1857, while on the Left Bank, the Boulevard Saint-Germain plowed eastward toward the Quai de la Tournelle, with its crossing of Boulevard Saint-Michel completed this same year.

  On the Right Bank, another green space—the Square du Temple—opened in 1857, while Haussmann began to make inroads into the heart of the workers’ quarters, in the eastern part of Paris, with the construction of Avenue Parmentier, beginning at Place Voltaire (now Place Léon Blum). Haussmann always protested that the wide boulevards he was carving through Paris did not have a military purpose, but it was indisputable that it would be far more difficult for the workers of Paris to construct barricades on broad avenues such as this and that such avenues would be far less hazardous for troops to march.

  Crowning Haussmann’s efforts this year was the opening of the Long-champ racetrack in April, after only eighteen months from start to finish. It was an instant success, drawing Parisians not only to the new racetra
ck but to the lovely paths, lakes, and woods of the Bois de Boulogne itself.

  Haussmann’s reward came in June of this same year, when the emperor made him a member of the Senate. From then on, Haussmann took the title of baron, from his maternal grandfather, who had been created a baron under the First Empire and whose only son had died without a male heir.

  Georges Haussmann’s enemies—and by now he had many—could only seethe in silence, for he was now Baron Haussmann and an imperial senator as well.

  Demolition of Rue de la Barillerie for the piercing of Boulevard de Sébastopol. Engraving in Le Monde Illustrée, 10 September 1859. © Bridgeman Images

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  More and More

  (1858)

  Whatever else the regime of Napoleon III could be accused of, it certainly wasn’t lethargy.

  Shrugging off the financial crisis of the year before, the government did not hesitate to intervene in support of railway construction, taking potentially risky steps such as guaranteeing the interest on companies’ bonds. In addition, Georges (now Baron) Haussmann confronted the Council of State in what became an unfriendly wrangle to wrest more funds for yet another surge of public works in Paris.

  The official end to what would be called the “First System” of redevelopment throughout the city had been marked that spring by the official opening of what by now was called the Boulevard de Sébastopol. Haussmann fully intended that a “Second System” would follow hard on the heels of the first, despite rising expenses—due in large part to the soaring prices of land purchases and the upward push of construction costs. Haussmann of course did get his way, as he usually did, resulting in a new agreement in March between the government and the city of Paris authorizing the staggering total of 180 million francs for the project. Under this arrangement, the city of Paris agreed, among other items, to build eighteen miles of new intra-city roads within ten years.1