Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  Present-day view of the courtyard of the Hôtel-Dieu, Ile de la Cité. © J. McAuliffe

  By the late 1860s, when Haussmann had finished with the Ile de la Cité, its population had shrunk by 75 percent, from around twenty thousand to five thousand, and the island itself had become a virtual administrative center.

  In addition to all his other activities, in 1858, Georges Haussmann condemned the River Bièvre to death.

  Until this time, the Seine had not been the only river in Paris. While the Seine bisected Paris from east to west, the little Bièvre entered Paris from the south, winding its way through the Left Bank before depositing its waters in the Seine.

  Once a bucolic stream where, according to legend, beaver thrived (possibly giving the watercourse its name), for centuries the Bièvre had meandered through a countryside dotted with ancient watermills and rustic villages. Within Paris, its waters—by now split into two arms, to better serve the watermills along the way—flowed past mills and gardens, its tree-lined banks providing shade and beauty.

  But then, attracted to the Bièvre by its minerals, suitable for fixing dyes, the dyer Jean Gobelin set up shop in what now is the thirteenth arrondissement. By the seventeenth century, his small venture had become the renowned Gobelins tapestry workshops, attracting a plethora of tanners and dyers to the area. By the eighteenth century, Paris’s Bièvre had grown dark and polluted, and even its upstream waters suffered from considerable contamination after Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf began to manufacture his famed toile print fabrics in the little riverside village of Jouy-en-Josas.

  Industrialization completed what the early polluters began, and by the nineteenth century, the Bièvre had become little more than a fetid sewer that coursed its way through some of the most poverty-stricken parts of Paris. Two decades before Haussmann, efforts were made to construct an open-air canal along part of the river’s path, but even this did not clean up the stinking mess, and so Haussmann—who was not inclined to tolerate messes—determined to relegate it underground, as a sewer. “The vile stream of the Bièvre,” he announced, “will no longer pour its filthy waters into the Seine.”9

  His edict would arouse much opposition, especially in the industrial quarters through which the river passed. But by the end of the century, the city of Paris had dealt conclusively with the polluted and unhappy river, which now ran underground, in pipes.10

  While Baron Haussmann was creating a massive construction zone throughout much of Paris, Berthe and Edma Morisot’s quiet lives continued. Their copying sessions at the Louvre began, and there, for the first time, they met other pupils and friends of their teacher, including Félix Bracquemond and Henri Fantin-Latour.

  This was at first exciting for the otherwise cloistered upper-class young women. But after two years, Berthe Morisot realized that she had gotten all she could from Guichard’s teaching. Perhaps more importantly, she realized that she wanted to pursue her desire to work out of doors, in direct contradiction to the edicts of Guichard, who considered painting en plein air as “the negation of art.”

  And so in this way Berthe and Edma Morisot moved to yet another teacher—this time the master landscape and portrait painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, whose work anticipated the Impressionism to come.

  Not far away, on the Left Bank, eighteen-year-old Emile Zola was also seeking what course his life should take but with far more despair than hope.

  Although born in Paris, Zola had spent his formative years in southern France, in Aix-en-Provence, where he spent an idyllic boyhood with young Paul Cézanne, exploring the sun-washed Provençal countryside. His move back to the dark and dismal streets of Paris had followed the death of his engineer father, an imaginative but impractical man of Italian and Greek descent who had left the family virtually penniless. Still, among the father’s belongings were stocks in a defunct company, which led to years of false hopes and legal wrangling on the part of Monsieur Zola’s forlorn widow.

  Madame Zola, the daughter of a poor Parisian tradesman, had returned to Paris in 1857 while pursuing her case through the courts, and now her son joined her, in grinding poverty, in a series of ever-more-decrepit Left Bank apartments. Friends tried to help, including a friend of Zola’s father who managed to get a scholarship for the boy at the prestigious Lycée Saint-Louis, but there, Emile was totally out of his depth and miserable. “Being twentieth of sixty after being among the first in my class hurt me deeply,” he wrote. “I lost heart and became a very mediocre student.”11

  Lonely and bored, Emile turned from his classical studies and submerged himself in the romantic literature of the period—Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset. He knew that a baccalaureate would at least make it possible for him to enter law school, but what did it matter? He didn’t really want to enter law school, even though it seemed the only option. Instead, the idea of becoming a writer increasingly enticed him, even though he despaired of ever making a living at it. And this did matter, especially since his mother’s frantic appeals from one legal recourse to another had met with nothing but deaf ears and dead ends.

  As their resources dwindled, he and his mother moved to ever smaller and more dismal quarters. Young Emile Zola, looking out on the dark and damp tenements lining the Left Bank streets where he lived, steadily dreamed of Provence and sunshine. It was the only thing that now made his life bearable.

  While Baron Haussmann was busy decimating and re-creating Paris, the outside world, especially that trouble spot, the Italian peninsula, kept pressing its claims on imperial attention.

  The year had begun with yet another assassination attempt on Louis-Napoleon, this time a carefully constructed plot to bomb the imperial carriage as the emperor and empress were arriving at the Opera (then on Rue Le Peletier). Louis-Napoleon, his face grazed by glass shards but otherwise unhurt, remained calm and, offering his arm to the empress, walked to their box—only pausing to tell Haussmann in a low voice to take care of the wounded. Haussmann immediately came to the rescue, making sure that all of the wounded were taken to the hospital or treated on the spot. Two already were dead, and six more would die, while the total of wounded would reach almost one hundred fifty.

  The fomenter of the plot was Felice Orsini, of Romagna. Some say that he had hoped that killing the emperor would spark a revolution in France that would spread to Italy. Others argue that he wanted to punish Louis-Napoleon for forgetting and neglecting the Italian cause that he had so ardently supported in his youth. After all, in 1849, Louis-Napoleon as president of the Republic had sent French troops to overthrow the newborn Roman Republic and restore the pope (henceforth aided by a permanent garrison of French troops). This may well have been contrary to Louis-Napoleon’s own personal preferences, but he had done it to keep the powerful Roman Catholic Church in France behind him as he navigated France’s roiling internal politics.

  Whatever the stew of causes that had impelled Orsini, the entire incident set off a furor at the highest levels, as officials realized how fragile was the thread—the life of the emperor—that held the Second Empire together. Reacting with fear-induced authoritarianism, the regime announced new repressive measures for public safety, with punishable offenses that included inciting others to oppose the emperor or his government. Clearly, these measures were intended to suppress the regime’s small but fervent republican opposition. Under a new law, anyone who had been sentenced since 1848 for political activities could now be arrested, deported, and exiled without trial. Moreover, all candidates for office, even those not elected, were now required to take the oath of loyalty to the emperor.

  This now led to by-elections that April, to fill the seats of those who refused to take this oath, and Paris took the opportunity to return two more republicans to the Legislature. These, along with three others (one from Lyons), would form the “Five” that led the anti-imperial republican opposition. They swallowed hard and took the oath of loyalty but were determined to oppose the emperor with all possible constitutional means
.

  Still, it remained a dangerous time for any opposition to the regime. Maxime Du Camp’s Revue de Paris was now suppressed by imperial decree for preparing to publish an account of a duel (Le Coup de Jarnac) from a portion of Jules Michelet’s history of France. The minister of the interior had reasoned that this account could only be an allusion to Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup and promptly shut down the Revue de Paris. Outraged, Du Camp could only write in later years that “to possess supreme authority, to be responsible to none, and to be able to destroy an enemy with a word, these are dangerous and tempting powers in the hands of mediocre men.”12

  Orsini was captured, sentenced to death, and went to the guillotine that March. And Louis-Napoleon—whether encouraged by Orsini’s final courtroom plea (that the emperor remember his long-ago support of Italian liberation) or simply out of fear of further assassination attempts by Italian extremists—now showed renewed interest in Italian independence, especially if France received something in return. That July, the emperor met secretly with Piedmont’s Cavour and promised to help liberate northern Italy from Austrian rule in return for Savoy and possibly Nice.

  That December, Napoleon III concluded a defensive treaty with Piedmont-Sardinia. This had a hidden agenda, for Cavour, as Machiavellian as ever, secretly assured King Victor Emmanuel that, “not only shall we make war at the first opportunity, but we will seek a pretext.”13

  In the meantime, Baron Haussmann had been moving briskly ahead with his Second System, which he foresaw would require a new and very special fund in order to proceed with the kind of speed he wanted through the complexities of compensation payments to landowners and tenants. By late 1858 (thanks to the 180-million-franc agreement), he was able to persuade the emperor to create a special public works fund, the Caisse des Travaux de Paris, to permit expenditures for the Second System that would be offset by income at a later date.

  But even this special fund had its constraints, which Haussmann would duly ignore. “Necessity knows no law” was his argument, and he had no intention of allowing anything to halt the transformation of Paris.

  The emperor understood and continued to give his support. And for the time being—despite growing public opposition to Haussmann and his grands travaux—that was all the approval that Haussmann needed.

  But for how much longer?

  Napoleon III hands the decree to Baron Haussmann allowing the annexation of the suburban communes of Paris, June 1859. Painting by Adolphe Yvon. © Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dreams of Glory

  (1859)

  Louis-Napoleon of course was no less inclined to plot than was Cavour, having spent his entire life at it, and the two together agreed on a plan to bait Austria into opening hostilities.

  It worked rather well. Louis-Napoleon, who knew the importance of preparing public opinion, saw to it that a brochure (L’Empereur Napoléon III et l’Italie) circulated widely explaining that, while Napoleon I had conquered other nations in order to free them, Napoleon III intended to free other nations without conquering them. And that May, after Austria had taken the bait and attacked Piedmont-Sardinia, the emperor sent a message to his nation declaring that the war was one of liberation, “to give Italy back to itself.” Wary of losing Catholic support, he also made sure to underscore that France now was heading for Italy, not to weaken the pope’s power, but to protect it from foreign pressures.

  Britain offered mediation, and worried sounds reverberated throughout Europe. But none of the participants were interested in calling the whole thing off, and—having secured Russia’s promise not to intervene—Louis-Napoleon ignored Prussian growls to the east and went ahead, departing amid cheering crowds from the Gare de Lyon for points south.

  Despite Louis-Napoleon’s care to prepare public opinion, rather less care had been taken in preparing French troops for actual battle. Fortunately the Austrians were even less prepared, and the French won two bloody battles, at Magenta and Solferino, allowing the emperor to make yet another triumphal entry, this time into Milan alongside Piedmont-Sardinia’s king, Victor Emmanuel. But by now Prussian growls had become disturbingly louder, as the well-armed German state threatened to mobilize along the Rhine. At the same time, Louis-Napoleon discovered that he did not much care for war—or at least not for its bloody results. Viewing the wounded and the dead proved distressing for him, and he was now inclined to grab the spoils due him and go home.

  Sensing Louis-Napoleon’s desire to pack up and leave, the Austrians did quite well for themselves, despite their battlefield losses. Piedmont-Sardinia, to its disappointment, ended up with only Lombardy, while France received its prize of Nice and Savoy. But Austria kept its iron hand on the Venetia, while the duchies in central Italy were left to decide which way to go. The Papal States remained under the pope’s control, although still protected by French troops.

  Cavour was furious, regarding this as a betrayal of the first order, and promptly resigned. Realist as he was, he just as promptly returned to office, deciding to make the best of things and ensure that as much of Italy as possible went with Piedmont-Sardinia. Within two years, Piedmont-Sardinia would draw the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States into what now had become the Kingdom of Italy, leaving Rome as a small separate state.

  As for Emperor Napoleon III, he had had quite enough of war, but he thoroughly enjoyed the fruits of victory—especially the part where he led his triumphant army in a magnificent parade down the Champs-Elysées.

  Back in Paris, military victories bestowed new names throughout the city—including Pont Solferino and, eventually, Boulevard de Magenta and Rue Magenta—while the emperor discovered that, in his absence, his wife had acquitted herself as regent rather more strongly than he had expected. According to Louis-Napoleon’s uncle, Jerome Bonaparte, “[The Empress] shows in every instance and on every question a judgment that is clear, solid and nobly French.”1 Eugenie later recalled that this was her first intervention in the machinery of government, which she exercised “very seriously, with full consciousness of my responsibilities as well as of the powers of initiative that belonged to me.” Louis-Napoleon seems not to have been entirely pleased by this development, which he would find difficult to reconcile with his own ideas of a woman’s proper place—especially since, from now on, Eugenie, in her own words, “never ceased to take part in the general direction of public affairs.”2

  Baron Haussmann had also used the time of the emperor’s absence to his advantage, especially in establishing his idea of what the Champs-Elysées should look like. Here, in the extended space between the Place de la Concorde and Rond-Point, he once again was at loggerheads with his rival, Hittorff, who had been architect for this portion of the promenade ever since the reign of Louis-Philippe. Hittorff had made the Champs-Elysées into a popular destination, but by the late 1850s, its lawns and trees had become a bit tired and in need of rejuvenation.

  Haussmann now decided to smarten up the promenade, while at the same time giving the back of his hand to Hittorff. “I took it upon myself,” he later wrote, “to authorize the removal of the withering trees remaining in those unfortunate damp rows.” Taking advantage of the newly cleared ground, he then created enticing bowers of “choice trees and shrubs, and circular beds of plants and flowers.” In addition, he put in fountains “to freshen the air with their gushing water.”3 None of this, he made clear, was Hittorff’s doing.

  Haussmann was pleased to note the emperor’s surprise at “this unexpected change in the scenery.” But in fact the emperor seems to have been more than a little annoyed by Haussmann’s high-handed treatment of Hittorff, whom the emperor had chosen to supervise this work. Haussmann’s behavior in general had become increasingly arrogant, and the emperor seems to have taken note of this.

  Haussmann may have done a beautiful job of renovating the forty-six-acre strip of the Champs-Elysées, complete with theaters, cafés, and restaurants,
but the emperor did not comment on it. His silence alone sent a clear message of disapproval.

  Haussmann frequently was at odds with one official or another as he steamrolled ahead with what he wanted. By this time, he had benefited from a redistribution of powers that profited his prefecture at the expense of his Paris administrative rival, the prefect of police (which oddly enough had previously been responsible for road and sewer cleaning, street lighting, and the calculation and collection of municipal taxes).4 But he also had encountered opposition from the Council of State, this time over the question of extending Paris’s city limits.

  Ever since the last wall around Paris—the Thiers fortifications—had been built in the early 1840s, the question had arisen of whether or not to incorporate into Paris those communes, or parts of communes, located between this new wall and the older Farmers-General wall within. After all, the Farmers-General wall, although not a bristling fortification like the Thiers defenses, nonetheless defined Paris city limits and controlled access to and from the city through its numerous toll gates, all of which were under military guard. Why not simply move the tollhouses out to the new wall, incorporate everything between the walls into the City of Paris, and be done with it?