Mexico had undergone decades of upheaval and corruption since its independence in 1821, until in 1858 Benito Juárez—a native Mexican lawyer and a reform-minded leader—became the constitutionally mandated president of Mexico. Prominent wealthy conservatives roundly opposed Juárez and his reforms, and their wild stories of Church property confiscated, large estates seized, nuns raped, and priests killed made the needed impression on the French emperor and his impressionable wife. Later, defending the whole debacle, Eugenie protested that “we were assured that the Mexican people hated the Republic and would hail with enthusiasm the proclamation of the monarchy” and that a Catholic prince with great allure such as Maximilian would be welcomed everywhere with open arms.5
Evidently neither Eugenie nor Louis-Napoleon knew that among those who had substantial financial interests at stake in Mexico was the Duke de Morny, Louis’s half-brother, who had a lot of money to lose now that Juárez had suspended payments of foreign debts (the period was for two years, but many feared a far worse scenario).6 And so, plunging ahead, France, along with Great Britain and Spain, signed an agreement aimed at forcing Mexico to pay all its foreign debts, now. Late in 1861, the three nations sent a joint naval force to seize the Mexican port of Veracruz, with the intent of scooping up incoming customs. The British and Spanish troops did not last long in Veracruz, departing in early 1862, but the two thousand French forces remained and, unaccountably, began to march (without reinforcements) to Mexico City.
This was taking place even as Maximilian, the would-be emperor, was still making up his mind on whether or not to accept the proposed imperial crown.
In the meantime, Baron Haussmann continued to rebuild Paris. Already, the church tower of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois (which many confuse with its bell tower, of Saint-Bartholomew’s Day infamy) was being completed, alongside a new mairie (town hall) in the Gothic mode, to complement the ancient church.7
To the northwest, Boulevard Malesherbes was inaugurated that summer, having already created considerable consternation since, in addition to razing the slums of La Petite Pologne, nicer homes close to the Madeleine were for the first time sacrificed to make way for progress. To the northeast, work continued on the Place du Château-d’Eau (today’s Place de la République) and those streets radiating out from it, including Boulevard de Magenta, Rue de Turbigo, and Boulevard du Prince Eugène (today’s Boulevard Voltaire)—the latter now one of the longest streets in the city and one that sliced through the impoverished eastern section of Paris.
Boulevard de Magenta linked the Place du Château-d’Eau with the Gare du Nord, and construction similarly ploughed on around another railroad station, the Gare Saint-Lazare, to provide it with a new square (the Place de l’Europe) and link it, by new boulevards (the Rue de Rome and the Rue Saint-Lazare) as well as by other streets, to central Paris.
Portions of the Orléans family’s stamping grounds in Monceau were being turned into a landscape garden, while—thanks to the Pereire brothers—new luxury housing was going up on the rest. Not far away, the avenues radiating from l’Etoile were beginning to take shape around the Arc de Triomphe, as Avenue Kléber, Avenue de Bezons (now Avenue Wagram), Avenue Josephine (now Avenue Marceau), Avenue Prince-Jerome (now Avenue Mac-Mahon and its continuation into Avenue Niel), Avenue Essling (now Avenue Carnot), and Avenue de Saint-Cloud (which would become, much to his gratification, Avenue Victor-Hugo) were beginning to emerge. These were all in addition to the Champs-Elysées, the newly carved Avenue de l’Impératrice (now Avenue Foch), and the widened Boulevard de Neuilly (today’s Avenue de la Grand Armée). Altogether, it made for quite an impressive dig.
On the Left Bank, the eastern portion of the Boulevard Saint-Germain was now completed all the way to the Quai de la Tournelle and the Seine, while a tussle over the route for the Boulevard Saint-Michel as it traveled southward was finally resolved. The problem with the route as planned was that it cut off a corner of the Luxembourg estate, whose palace held the Senate and whose grounds accommodated various Senate officers, some of whom would have been directly affected by the loss of several outbuildings, stables, and service buildings. At length, May 1861 brought a compromise by which one official’s stables and another’s house would be rebuilt elsewhere, while the Médicis fountain would be moved a bit and turned to face the gardens—a solution that generations of subsequent visitors to the gardens have appreciated.
In comparison with the residents of the Ile de la Cité, though, the grandees of the Luxembourg clearly resided in a privileged world. While Haussmann and his associates ran hither and thither to accommodate the dignitaries, no one thought much about the thousands of the Cité’s residents who were being driven from their homes, however decrepit, during the vast upheaval accompanying the destruction and construction that then was forever changing the island.
The 1860 incorporation of the outer communes now presented a full range of problems and challenges for Haussmann, as it clearly required an entirely new system of development, a Third System, on Paris’s outskirts—to provide new roads and public works within these areas and to link them with the railroads as well as with central Paris. Not coincidentally, these new byways, wide and straight, would continue Haussmann’s imposition of order, whether artistic or military. After all, these were roads on which troops could easily march, giving the emperor control over what had previously been inaccessible strongholds in the heart of poverty-stricken Paris.
Up in the already construction-heavy zone of the Place du Château d’Eau, a new avenue (Avenue des Amandiers, now the Avenue de la République) would link the Place to the east with Ménilmontant at Père-Lachaise cemetery, while Avenue Parmentier would run parallel to the Canal Saint-Martin, crossing the Avenue des Amandiers and linking the Hôpital Saint-Louis (founded by Henri IV) with Boulevard Voltaire at what now is Place Léon Blum.
To the east, Haussmann now planned to complete the Place du Trône(today’s Place de la Nation)—the destination of that all-important east-west artery, the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine—with a starburst of roads from the Place’s center. To the north and northwest, the prefect began to extend roads linking the Gare du Nord and the Gare Saint-Lazare with the new arrondissements and linked these railway stations with each other as well as with the Gare de l’Est.
Haussmann had plans as well for western Paris, especially around the Place du Trocadéro, in the Chaillot quarter, where developers were already hard at work, as well as with the future Place Victor-Hugo, from which he sent an array of new roads in yet another starburst pattern. In an adjoining western neighborhood, he took special interest in the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées, where he once again established symmetry as well as connection by extending the Avenue d’Antin (now the Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt) northward.
As for the Left Bank, Haussmann planned to open the Boulevard Saint-Germain’s western section from the Rue du Bac all the way to the Pont de la Concorde, as well as to extend the Rue de Rennes northward to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, linking this western portion of the Left Bank with the Gare Montparnasse.
Perhaps most stunning of Haussmann’s planned Third System, however, would be the quarter rising up around the new Opéra, a quarter whose shape was already beginning to emerge during the works of Haussmann’s Second System.8 The star of this new and ultimately glamorous quarter would be the opera house itself, which in turn bestowed renown on Charles Garnier when, in June 1861, he won the competition to become its architect.
It was a startling decision, as Garnier was young and relatively unknown, and he had beaten out far better-known candidates such as Viollet-le-Duc. Garnier, born in the rough Left Bank quarter of Rue Mouffetard, where his father pounded out a living as a blacksmith and wheelwright, had embarked on his artistic career at Paris’s Ecole Gratuite de Dessin, a free school meant for the sons of workmen hoping for careers as craftsmen. From there, Garnier had progressed to the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he ultimately carried off the Prix de Rome. It was a brillian
t beginning to a career that began to sag in the middle, until Garnier unexpectedly won the competition to design Paris’s new opera house.
Garnier beat out 170 other architects based on his frank recognition of this opera house’s basic purpose. Rather than directing attention to the stage and what went on there, Garnier’s Opéra would showcase the audience, providing a glittering backdrop for the social encounters that constituted the true heart of a night at the Paris opera.
Excavation began that August and continued into the next year. The cornerstone would be laid in July 1862, but—as has gone down in legend—excavation had by this time become mired in technical difficulties, most especially the discovery of a subterranean tributary of the Seine that ran directly beneath the building.
Still, no one was about to give up. After all, the old opera house had burned, and everyone who had any say in the matter—and many of those who did not—agreed that Paris was not and could not be Paris without an opera house.
By now the Pereire brothers were especially busy in the new Opera quarter, where they had made massive purchases before it even began to take shape. As early as 1853 they had begun their land purchases there, expanding these dramatically as the decade came to a close. In early 1861, envisioning a hotel even larger and more luxurious than their Hôtel du Louvre, they began work on their Grand Hôtel de la Paix, which occupied the entire block across from the new Opéra and was so huge that its central courtyard could accommodate six hundred people seated at tables beneath the courtyard’s glass canopy. Many of its eight hundred rooms had private bathrooms, and other luxuries included a smoking room, a reading room with a wide selection of international newspapers, a telephone and telegraph equipped with translators, doctors available day and night, and electric as well as gas lighting. Within a year, Nadar would be installed there in a his own photography salon, and the renowned Café de la Paix would open on the hotel’s ground floor. Despite the size and complexity of this project, the hotel opened fifteen months after its cornerstone was laid.
It was, of course, a great success. The Pereires had accurately—and, many said, suspiciously—determined that a major center of Paris was going to develop here and put their claim in early. But the brothers had begun to encounter signs of trouble, among them the arrest earlier that year of one of their closest colleagues, Jules Mirès, who was sentenced to five years of prison for swindling. Mirès had already created a significant scandal when the General Railways Fund, of which he was the director, went bankrupt, and although he managed to get his sentence set aside, he would continue to skate close to the line, and the Pereires with him.
Haussmann’s close connection to the Pereires did not help his reputation, which already suffered from his high-handedness as well as the mounting costs of his grands travaux. He was a close associate of entrepreneurs mired in corruption, and the smell of speculation and graft surrounded him. Despite Haussmann’s insistence on his probity, his enemies had begun to circle. They had already prevented him from achieving a ministry; their attacks would now only escalate.
Even as the face of Paris continued to change, more seekers of fame and fortune continued to pour into the city, among them Emile Zola’s boyhood friend, young Paul Cézanne, who arrived torn by doubts but lured by the possibility of studying art in this most remarkable of all cities. “Come, you’ll see,” Zola promised him, and Cézanne, accompanied by his irate father (who wanted his son to become a lawyer or a banker), arrived in April. Once the father left, Cézanne enrolled at the Atelier Suisse, where he learned little but at least did not have to fight any of the teachings of the traditional schools, to which he was deeply hostile. Much to Zola’s delight, Cézanne also came equipped with a small but regular allowance from his worried parents. But he was not happy in Paris and soon returned to Aix. Zola was flummoxed by Cézanne’s behavior, especially by his sudden rages and despair. “Paul may have the genius of a great painter,” he wrote a mutual friend, “but he will never have the genius to become one.”9
A future prime minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, also arrived in Paris that year, accompanied by his father. Born and raised in the remote reaches of the Vendée, near Nantes, Clemenceau, now twenty years old, was following in his well-born father’s footsteps, both in his medical studies and in his ardent republicanism. His father immediately took him to see Henri Lefort, one of those who had tried to organize resistance in the streets of Paris following Louis-Napoleon’s December 1851 coup. “My father was more concerned that I spend my time with Lefort than at the [medical] faculty,” Clemenceau later recalled. “For through Lefort, who had known Victor Hugo, all doors opened.”10
Doors did indeed open for Clemenceau, and soon the young man became a well-known habitué of the drawing-rooms of the liberal opposition as well as in the cafés and artists’ ateliers of the Latin Quarter. He was an attractive as well as an ardent young man, and he managed a busy social life in addition to his medical studies and political activities, which included founding a weekly newssheet, Le Travail, with a group of other students. It took careful footwork to avoid the censors, and Clemenceau soon learned how to write reviews that only indirectly alluded to political subjects—although he sometimes came quite close to the line, as in an article he titled “The Martyrs of History,” which began with Socrates and ended by praising the revolutionary leaders of 1793, including the Terror.
It was among the Bohemian society of the Left Bank that Clemenceau first met Claude Monet, who would become a lifelong friend. Clemenceau recalled that Monet “impressed me as a man of fervent enthusiasm, something of a bohemian.” In particular, Clemenceau was struck by Monet’s “large, passionate eyes, the slightly Arab curve of his nose, and a black beard in wild disorder.”
As it happened, Clemenceau would not have much chance that year to become better acquainted with Monet, for Monet was about to leave Paris, courtesy of the army. That March he had drawn a number in the lottery for the National Service that determined his fate for the next seven years, although he was given his choice of where to serve. Deciding on the colorful Chasseurs d’Afrique, he soon was en route to Algeria.
His family had been willing to pay for his discharge, but on terms that Monet had flatly rejected: that he leave Paris and his dream of a career in art and return to Le Havre, to enter the family business. In addition to this negative propulsion, the romance of Algeria appealed to him. Years later, he would tell Gustave Geffroy that his time in the army “did me a great deal of good in every way; it made me less harum-scarum.” In addition, the light there had a significant impact on him: “My vision gained so much,” Monet later recalled. “It took a long time for the impressions of light and color that I received to sort themselves out; but the seeds of my future experiments were there.”11
While Claude Monet was sorting out his life, Edouard Manet was still fighting the Salon and all it represented. After having had one painting rejected by the Salon in 1859, he submitted two in 1861 (skipping 1860, when there was no Salon): these were his Spanish Singer and a double portrait of his parents, both of which attracted a good deal of positive comment. The Spanish Singer even won an honorable mention—the only official recognition that Manet would receive until the end of his life, when he received a second-class medal at the 1881 Salon.
In the meantime, Berthe Morisot and her sister Edma were delighted with their new teacher, Corot, and persuaded their parents to spend that summer of 1861 at a villa near his to the west of Paris. Back in Paris, Corot dined frequently with the Morisots, where he became almost one of the family.
In another part of town, the Goncourts, still despondent over their lack of success as novelists, continued to make biting and gossipy entries into the journal that in time would become their chief claim to fame. The untimely 1861 death of Henry Murger, the author who had given Bohemia its place in song and story, brought almost two thousand mourners to his funeral, including his old friend Nadar and an array of officialdom, but the Goncourts were not impresse
d. They had disparaged the fame Murger received with La Vie de Bohème, calling it the product of “the world of petty journalism, the freemasonry of publicity.” And following the funeral, where they found much to mock, they denigrated the tributes Murger received in the press: “They have idealized everything about him,” they wrote. “They have spoken not only of his talent, but also of his virtues, his heart, his dog. . . . Come now, to hell with this nonsense, this sentimentality, this publicity!”12
Still, the Goncourts’ biting wit had its attractions, and conversation at the Goncourts’ was predictably colorful. Early in January, for example, one friend regaled the brothers with a description of his recent encounter with Dumas père, just back from Italy. Dumas, radiating his usual bonhomie, had boasted with a chuckle that “if you locked me in my bedroom with five women, pens, paper, ink, and a play to be written, by the end of the hour I’d have written the five acts and had the five women.”
Gustave Flaubert was a frequent visitor to the Goncourt residence, in the heart of what had become the ninth arrondissement—a quarter so teeming with artists, writers, and musicians that it was known as the “New Athens.” Flaubert was no Dumas, and he had no intention of becoming one. “The story, the plot of a novel is of no interest to me,” he told the Goncourts in March. “When I write a novel I aim at rendering a color, a shade.” What color, then, did he have in mind for Madame Bovary? “Grey,” he answered, “the moldy color of a wood-louse’s existence.”
Serious discussion such as this was valued, but wit and cutting remarks were the currency in which the Goncourts typically traded. The impressions of their mutual friend Théophile Gautier following an imperial house-party at Compiègne were typical. According to Gautier, everyone but the servants had behaved awkwardly. The bourgeoisie (among whom he classed the emperor and empress) do not “know quite how to behave.” But the servants, who were remnants from the reigns of Charles X and Louis-Philippe, “are the only people who look as if they knew what a court was like.”
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