Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  Many, however, were opposed, especially those living in these in-between districts, or suburban communes, who resisted the higher taxes and cost of living that incorporation into Paris would bring. Many Parisians also had concerns, especially about the high costs they anticipated from incorporation, including the need to provide these largely rural areas with facilities such as lighted sidewalks, gas and water pipes, and drains and sewers. In addition, many pointed to the high proportion of poverty among this area’s inhabitants, who would be added to the city’s already burgeoning mass of poor.

  Haussmann, however, was insistent about incorporation, seeing it as a way to deal with the poor who surrounded Paris, profiting from its schools and hospitals without paying any duties or bearing any of the costs. The emperor needed persuading: he had not considered extending Paris’s city limits on his original color-coded map, and this was a new idea. Back in 1856, he had appointed a commission (at Haussmann’s prodding) to consider the question, which it did not satisfactorily resolve. But now, in 1859, Louis-Napoleon finally asked his minister of the interior to settle the question. This minister so enthusiastically endorsed the idea of incorporation that the emperor was won over.

  Prompted by imperial resolve, the Council of State adopted the draft law on incorporation in April, passing it along to the Legislature, which enacted it by an overwhelming majority. The Senate then voted unanimously in its favor. This being in the midst of Napoleon III’s Italian campaign, the empress rather than the emperor signed the law in June, and it was put into effect late in the year. City taxes were levied on the new areas starting on January 1, 1860.

  Paris grew enormously by this incorporation: its population increased by one-third (from 1.2 to 1.6 million), while its area more than doubled. This required an addition to its twelve arrondissements, or administrative units, to make a new total of twenty arrondissements. This resulted in a complete reordering, reshaping, and renumbering of the arrondissements themselves. Instead of the haphazard pattern that had grown up over the years, Haussmann now imposed a more logical order, which unfurled like a snail from the dense city center. The first arrondissement now encompassed the Louvre and Les Halles, while the twentieth, containing the ever-expanding cemetery of Père-Lachaise, completed the outer ring to the east.

  Haussmann and, by now, the emperor had their sights on an even larger incorporation, extending Paris city limits to communes beyond the Thiers fortifications. But at this, Haussmann’s enemies dug in their heels. Any further aggrandizement of Paris, they feared, would only further empower the prefect.

  As the decade came to a close, and as Paris was expanding its city limits to encompass the surrounding countryside, France was expanding its influence in Italy and throughout the world.

  By the decade’s end, Louis-Napoleon had encouraged the development of a French colony in Senegal and had intervened to protect the local Christian community in the Syrian Levant—a move to curb Turkish power there that initiated France’s presence in the Middle East. He also was looking with interest at the Far East, where in 1859, French sailors occupied Saigon, ostensibly to protect Catholic missionaries but leading to French expansion into Cochin-China (Vietnam), Cambodia, and Laos, where the French established colonies and protectorates throughout.

  France under Napoleon III also put down the last of the uprisings in Algeria and now undertook to introduce modernity there, whether through irrigation or railroads. But the emperor had not yet thought through what he envisioned for Algeria’s relationship to France, and for the time being, the military was fully in control.

  Perhaps most interesting of all these worldwide developments were the activities of a former French diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who in 1859—despite considerable opposition, especially from Britain—began to realize his dream of linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea by a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. Few were willing to help him with this formidable undertaking, and not surprisingly, the Baron de Rothschild’s offer of financial assistance came at a hefty price—5 percent interest, a figure that appalled de Lesseps. “Five per cent!” he had cried, adding, “But for 200,000,000 [francs] that means 10,000,000 [francs]! Ten million francs of my shareholders’ money for your devious channels! Thank you very much. . . . Our issue will be made without you.”5

  Rothschild had merely smiled and told de Lesseps that he would not succeed, but he was wrong. Of the 400,000 shares offered in de Lesseps’s private company, more than half were quickly taken up, almost entirely by small French investors. For despite de Lesseps’s efforts to make this an international endeavor, neither the English, the Americans, the Russians, nor the Austrians followed through and subscribed. In the end, it was French investors who carried his venture forward, giving the French control of the equity. The London Globe scoffed that “the principal shareholders are hotel waiters who have been deceived by the papers they have read, and petty grocery employees who have been beguiled by puffs.”6 Little people, it was true, but French people, buoyed by a surge of patriotism: as a result, the canal would be French.

  And now, on April 25, 1859, Ferdinand de Lesseps struck the first ceremonial blow of the pickaxe, to begin work at Port Said. All in all, despite continued repression and the close watch of the police, the Second Empire of Napoleon III had reached what some already were calling its golden age.

  In the spring of 1859, several years after leaving Thomas Couture’s studio, twenty-seven-year-old Edouard Manet was ready to make his Salon début. The Salon was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and Manet’s submission was a painting he called Absinthe Drinker, a study of one of the Parisian characters he had met in the course of his strolls around the city—a ragpicker who existed, like so many others, on the margins of society.

  Manet spoke of the painting’s “naïveté, originality, sincerity,” which he placed squarely in the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. But he was far more of a bomb-thrower than he was willing to admit, since he was in fact attempting to turn on its head the Salon’s (and the Académie’s) established hierarchy of acceptable and admired subjects. According to this, the historical, the mythical, and the religious were worthy of esteem, but everyday subjects most definitely were not. Manet’s former art teacher, Couture, gave him due warning of what he was about to encounter and strongly criticized the painting. Much as Couture predicted, the Salon most emphatically turned down the painting, on the grounds that its subject matter was vulgar.

  Manet was devastated—and furious. “I heard [the verdict] three days ago,” he wrote his friend Antonin Proust. “I didn’t want to tell you.” But he had one comforting thought: “I’ve definitely been told that Delacroix liked it.” Delacroix, who by now was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and was thereby allowed to serve on the Salon jury, had not expected to make much of an impact there, and evidently he had not. Still, Delacroix’s opinion mattered to Manet. “He’s a horse of a different color from Couture,” Manet told Proust. “I don’t care for his technique. But he knows what he wants and gets it.”7

  Manet was not alone in his disappointment, for Henri Fantin-Latour and the American painter James Whistler had also been rejected from that year’s Salon—along with a sufficient number of other young artists that a crowd of disappointed and angry rejectees soon gathered outside the Institut de France to protest. They at length dispersed under police persuasion, but artistic outsiders were clearly becoming less willing to bend to the will of the establishment.

  By now Manet had met Baudelaire, who was eleven years older and by this time a well-entrenched rebel. Baudelaire had long advocated painting subjects other than the usual public and official ones, including “the thousands of floating existences—criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of a great city.” Baudelaire also stressed the essential role that imagination played in painting: “A good picture,” he wrote in his review of the 1859 Salon, “which is a faithful equivalent of the dream which has begott
en it, should be brought into being like a world”—that is, in a series of superimposed pictures.8 Manet’s practice of layering one version of a painting upon another followed closely Baudelaire’s conception of the creative process. Whether it was a question of Baudelaire influencing Manet or Manet enjoying the friendship of someone with whom he had much in common, the friendship became a close one, which remained so until Baudelaire’s untimely death.9

  In the spring of 1859, young Oscar-Claude Monet arrived in Paris. He had been born there, in 1840, in the area of northern Paris near Notre-Dame de Lorette. But then his parents moved to Le Havre to work for his uncle, who ran a successful business selling ships’ supplies.

  Monet’s mother reportedly was a talented artist as well as musician, and his older brother, Léon, was disciplined and studious. But young Claude was quite unlike his brother: according to their father, “he likes to sow disorder, does not listen to his professors, does not do his homework, instead fills his notebooks with grotesque caricature.” Young Monet may have been, as friends reported, a happy and gregarious soul, but in later years, he agreed that he was “naturally undisciplined. Even in my childhood, I could never be got to obey rules.”10

  School felt like a prison to the youngster, and when he was not outdoors, he spent his time drawing fantastical ornaments and (influenced by what he saw of Nadar’s work in Le Journal amusant) caricatures of his teachers and other local notables. Some of these made their way to a Le Havre picture-dealer, who exhibited and sold them. Finding that he could earn good money with his caricatures, young Monet left school in 1857, probably without getting his baccalaureate. By this time his mother and uncle had both died, his father had taken over the firm, and his aunt—a woman with a private income and a deep interest in the arts—was now devoting increasing attention to her nephew.

  Claude Monet, 1861. Photograph by Carjat

  Others as well took an interest in the lad, including the local landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who invited him to come along on outdoors sketching trips. Later, Monet recalled that this experience was a revelation to him. “I watched more attentively,” he recalled, “and then it was if a veil had been torn aside. . . . I grasped what painting could be.” His revelation may not have been quite so sudden as this, since on another occasion Monet recalled that “Boudin, with untiring kindness, set about educating me. Eventually my eyes were opened, I understood nature; I learned to love it at the same time.”11

  However long the process, Monet learned Boudin’s lessons well, and by 1859, he felt ready to apply for a state-supported scholarship to study in Paris. His father, who may have expected his son to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was for the moment swayed by his son’s enthusiasm. But the municipal council (deciding that despite Monet’s evident talent he was insufficiently serious) rejected the young man’s application. Despite this, he decided to head for Paris, equipped with letters of introduction to several painters whom he expected would give him advice. His father, for the moment mollified, agreed to provide a monthly allowance.

  And so Claude Monet arrived in Paris in the spring of 1859, where he moved around from place to place and tried to focus on his career. This meant visiting the Salon and paying calls on the artists to whom he had letters of introduction—in the expectation that he would find good advice as well as a suitable artist’s studio in which to enroll, en route to success in the Salon.

  Writing Boudin, he told him that he had visited the Salon (“some nice Corots and . . . some awful Diaz,” he noted, adding that “Monsieur Lhuillier’s [sic] picture is way off the mark”). He also visited several painters, including Constant Troyon, who looked at two still lifes Monet brought him and judged that the color was “all right” and “the effect is correct,” but that it all came too easily to him. “If you want my advice,” he told Monet, “and want to go in for art seriously, begin by joining a studio which specializes in figure painting”—in other words, “learn to draw.” At the same time, Troyon encouraged Monet to “do some copying at the Louvre” and “go to the country from time to time and make studies.” First then, in the order of priorities, would be some work in Paris (Troyon recommended Thomas Couture’s atelier, where Manet had gone), then a return to Le Havre to study landscape, followed by a permanent move to Paris. Kindly, Troyon told the young man to “come and see me often: show me what you’re doing and with enough courage you’ll make it.”12

  Based on this response, Monet’s father and aunt agreed to more financial support. The idea was to enter Thomas Couture’s atelier, who would prepare the young man for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But Monet’s interview with Couture went badly—possibly because the master offered criticism to which the young man objected. In any case, not long after, Monet referred to Couture as “that bad-tempered fellow.”13

  Instead, Monet chose the Académie Suisse (named after its founder, Charles Suisse), whose pupils had included Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet. Located on the Ile de la Cité near the Pont Saint-Michel, this particular academy was known for its lack of regimentation and restrictions. It was quite unlike traditional ateliers, where the students began by drawing first from engravings and then progressing to drawing from plaster casts before being allowed access to life classes—that is, with live models. Permission to paint came only after complete mastery over drawing. Instead, for a fixed monthly sum, the Académie Suisse allowed each student to use whatever medium he wished to depict a male model (for three weeks) and a female model (for one week).

  Monet, who entered the academy in early 1860, seems to have enjoyed the freedom, and it was now that he probably met and became friends with Camille Pissarro, who arrived at the Académie Suisse that spring. It was also clear that Monet enjoyed partying, especially at the Bavarian-style Brasserie des Martyrs, which was located all too conveniently near his most recent lodging, on the seventh floor of an apartment on Rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Later in life, Monet told the art critic Gustave Geffroy, “I used to go to the notorious Brasserie in the Rue des Martyrs, where I wasted a lot of time; it did me the greatest harm.”14

  In any case, Monet’s output during his first stay in Paris was neither sizable nor remarkable.

  That year, Nadar—whose caricatures Monet had admired—exhibited sixty of his photographic portraits of notable Parisians, thus staking his claim for photography on turf hitherto owned by portrait painters. The show was a great success, with one critic writing that “the whole constellation, literary, artistic, dramatic, political . . . of our era has filed through his studio.” This, the critic continued, made this extraordinary series of portraits “the Pantheon . . . of our generation.”15

  At the other end of the spectrum, young Emile Zola was having one of the worst years of his life. He twice failed the baccalaureate examination, including a second try in Marseilles (after a month of convalescence in Aix), which he failed even more miserably than the first. After his return to Paris in November, he had no plans or possibilities—only a dismal future ahead.

  Fifteen-year-old Sarah Bernhardt was also having a difficult year. She had become so ill after an attention-getting escapade that she had been sent home from her convent school. There she endured the machinations of her mother, Youle, who had worked her way via the bedposts into financial security and who now had similar plans for her daughters. Youle had taken due note of the fact that Sarah was growing up, and this meant openly encouraging the men who regularly flocked to the Bernhardt abode in their decidedly nonmarital interest in the girl. As the Goncourt brothers waspishly pointed out in their journal: “Overheard in Brabant’s restaurant,” they noted: “The Sarah Bernhardt family, now there’s a family! The mother made whores of her daughters as soon as they turned thirteen.”16

  Was Bernhardt beautiful? Although her eyes were described as “flashing” and “unforgettable,” she was also considered thin—ridiculously so, in fact, according to the well-upholstered standards of the day. Still, she was undeniably attractive, not the least because of the intens
ity of her gaze, the grace of her bearing, and her air of reckless gaiety. The Duke de Morny, the emperor’s powerful and wealthy half-brother, who was one of Youle’s protectors, had no doubt about Sarah’s future: she should be an actress, he declared. But Sarah was having none of it. Attracted by the emotional intensity and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, she had decided to become a nun.

  Morny thought that Sarah might change her mind if she could experience an evening at the Comédie-Française and recommended that she and her mother share a box with a mutual friend, Alexandre Dumas père. Sarah was willing, and as the curtain went up, she experienced a moment of almost religious intensity. Even as a child she had realized that she “could not exist . . . without a passion of some kind,” and now, as the curtain was raised, she thought that she might faint—“It was as though the curtain of my future life were being raised.” The play reduced her to tears (which annoyed her mother), and eventually she became so caught up in the drama that she burst into loud sobs, attracting the attention of much of the audience. “This,” she concluded, “was the début of my artistic life!”17

  According to one account, on the way home she fell asleep in Dumas’s carriage. He carried her to her room, where she heard him tell her, “Bonsoir, petite étoile.”18

  Sarah had indeed been converted, and Dumas, in saying good night to his “little star,” may have anticipated her star-studded future. But this future still remained a long way off, even with the assistance of the Duke de Morny, who used his influence to ensure Sarah’s entrance into the Conservatoire de Musique et de Déclamation—Paris’s Conservatory of Music and Drama.

  By now, her dreams of the convent were completely forgotten.

  Demolition of the barriers of the Farmers-General wall for the construction of the Place de l’Etoile (today’s Place Charles de Gaulle), with the Arc de Triomphe in the background. Engraving in Le Monde Illustrée, 18 February 1860. © Bridgeman Images