The Rothschilds may not have trusted Louis-Napoleon, but they were not about to be left out in the cold.
While small signs were beginning to appear that Napoleon III’s empire in 1862 was not quite as blessed by fortune as it had been the decade before, Baron Haussmann was undeterred in his determination to continue the re-making of Paris.
Late in the year, he oversaw the inauguration of Boulevard du Prince Eugène (now Boulevard Voltaire), which took place with great ceremony. This long and important thoroughfare linked today’s Place de la République with the Place de la Nation (then the Place du Trône), cutting a ramrod straight diagonal through the volatile eastern part of Paris. To commemorate the great event, an Arc de Triomphe was raised in the Place du Trône, along with other major architectural statements, including a monument to Napoleon III’s victorious armies.6
Haussmann also continued to create parks in places where parks had never been before, and he now cast his eyes northward, to the heights of Belleville, where a shantytown stretched through a huge garbage dump that had risen around former gypsum quarries. Despite enormous obstacles, the sixty-two-acre park of Buttes-Chaumont would emerge within five years, turning a major eyesore into one of the city’s greatest beauty spots.
Baron Haussmann continued to reap accolades for his public works, and even though the emperor may not have seen his way clear to making Haussmann a minister of the empire, he did award him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and named the major new roadway linking the Monceau area with the Grands Boulevards as Boulevard Haussmann—the name that it has kept.
But Haussmann was not satisfied. He remained bitter about the treatment he received from some of the emperor’s closest advisers and carped about the difference in rank between him and them. With the passing years, this bitterness had become corrosive, and Haussmann was widely disliked for his arrogance and authoritarianism, especially for his inclination to take petty revenge wherever possible. Widely unpopular, Baron Haussmann would not find many friends in his corner, should he ever need them.
While Baron Haussmann was continuing to reshape and modernize Paris, other forces were simultaneously at work, bringing the city and its inhabitants into the modern world. The adoption of the rotary press was making large print runs possible, providing a powerful means for communicating the news of the day as well as for directing public opinion, even while the spread of the telegraph was shrinking distances and making the world a far smaller place.
The telegraph had at first been reserved for use by the state but from 1850 was available for private use, powered by a new electrical system that assured its uninterrupted functioning in any weather. By 1862, one journalist could write that the telegraph had revolutionized modern life, much as had the railways: “At present,” he wrote, “one hour is enough for the prices in every stock exchange in Europe to become known in Paris and London.”7
Streetlamps were spreading throughout Paris, making it truly the City of Light,8 while Haussmann’s efforts to create a new omnibus system continued to flourish, effectively linking residents throughout the city with one another. And Paris’s “Little Railroad,” the Petite Ceinture, continued to expand, while now moving passengers as well as freight around the city’s circumference.
Paris was on the move, and Napoleon III’s Second Empire had provided the impetus. But Second Empire Paris and France seemed less impressive to some, especially to Otto von Bismarck, whom King Wilhelm of Prussia had just appointed as his minister-president. Bismarck previously had been Wilhelm’s minister to Paris, where he had taken it upon himself to understand the city and the country under Louis-Napoleon’s rule. Parisians in particular he considered pleasure-loving and dissolute, no match for Prussia or Prussians.
“Viewed from a distance,” Bismarck remarked of Louis-Napoleon’s France, “it seems very impressive. Close at hand,” he added, “you realize it is nothing.”9
Already, Louis-Napoleon’s France was showing surprising ineptness in its much-vaunted Mexican expedition. The young archduke, Maximilian, may have been a picture-book illustration of an emperor, but he was not born to rule, and he knew it. Still, his wife, Charlotte, loved the idea of being an empress and—along with Eugenie—continued to push the reluctant Maximilian to accept the role.
While Maximilian continued to vacillate, the French army kept moving toward Mexico City. En route, Juárez’s troops decisively vanquished the French at Puebla, a defeat that should have alerted Louis-Napoleon to the dangers ahead. But Eugenie refused to acknowledge any setback, and Louis-Napoleon at length relented, sending almost twenty-five thousand troops to reinforce those already there. His hope was that sheer numbers alone would decide the future of Mexico in Maximilian’s (and France’s) favor.
While the French were being humiliated in Mexico, young Claude Monet had become ill with typhoid in Algeria and was sent back to France to recuperate. There, he was allowed a six-month leave, which he spent in his aunt’s house in Le Havre. He still had five and one-half years of service left, but by the end of his leave, his aunt decided that a return to the army would be detrimental to his future. She was hesitant to give the young man his freedom, knowing how he had used and abused it in the past. Nonetheless, “I didn’t want to reproach myself,” she wrote a friend, “with either having stood in the way of his artistic career or leaving him too long in a bad school”—the latter being a reference to the army, which she feared would completely demoralize him.
The outcome was favorable: Monet’s aunt bought out the remainder of his service (at a considerable sum), and the young man promptly returned to Paris, with his father’s warning still ringing in his ears: “Get it into your head that you are going to work, seriously this time. . . . If you decide to be independent again, I shall cut off your allowance without a word. Am I making myself clear?”10
Back in Paris, Monet (at his family’s urging) paid a visit to the successful society painter Auguste Toulmouche, who now was a relative, having married Monet’s cousin. Later, Monet recalled that Toulmouche told him that he had talent but needed the discipline of studio work and recommended the studio of Charles Gleyre. Monet, having little choice in the matter, promptly followed this advice and entered the Gleyre Academy.
He was twenty-two years old.
That summer, Berthe and Edma Morisot vacationed in the Pyrenees, where they delighted in traveling by horseback and mule. Upon their return, they resumed work with Corot, and according to Berthe’s grandson, Denis Rouart, “painting occupied them unremittingly in the year that followed.”11
Another art form, etching, currently occupied James Whistler, who displayed his Thames etchings in Paris that summer. Baudelaire praised these for being as “subtle and as lively as improvisation . . . a chaos of fog, furnaces, and spiraling smoke; the profound and complex poetry of a vast city.” Whistler, who was frustrated by the critics’ unceasing resistance to his work, was unimpressed with the review and merely commented that Baudelaire had “said many poetic things about the Thames and nothing about the etchings themselves.”12
Sarah Bernhardt was also experiencing disappointment. The year before, she had won only a second prize for tragedy and an honorable mention for comedy at the Conservatoire. Despite this, the Duke de Morny’s influence won her an engagement at the Comédie-Franҫaise, where she experienced a true disaster in her debut in Racine’s Iphigénie. Suffering from stage fright, which would stalk her throughout her career, she froze. Her performance did not improve in two subsequent roles, and the critics were unimpressed. One in particular trashed her performances. A close friend recalled that a humbled Bernhardt regretted mainly that she had not “swallowed her pride and allowed herself to be seduced by one or two of the critics”—a capitulation that “would have assured rave reviews and launched her career.”13
That August, the Goncourt brothers were shocked to discover that their devoted housekeeper, Rose Malingre—who had died after serving them and their mother for a quarter of a century—had been
living a double life. At first, their response to her death had been “What a loss, what a gap in our lives!” And then they discovered that she had regularly lied to them and robbed them, indulging in “a secret life of dreadful orgies, nights out, sensual frenzies.” After concluding that she had become an alcoholic “in order to escape from herself,” they were compassionate: “Poor woman,” they wrote. “We forgive her.” Yet they remained bitter at the duplicity and determined that “suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives.”14
Still, despite the swirl of fast living and degeneracy that has characterized these years, happy and loving relationships did take root and endure during the Second Empire. That summer, for example, Gustave Eiffel married Marie Gaudelet, a young woman from his hometown of Dijon. Although Eiffel conceded that seventeen-year-old Marie was far from stunning and possessed only a modest dowry, he loved her for her “great kindness, a steady humor and simple tastes.”15 Adding to his well-being, Eiffel received a promotion soon after his marriage, raising him to the position of director of the company’s workshops in Clichy, on the northwest border of Paris.
Soon he and his new wife set up housekeeping in a large home on the Right Bank. Their marriage would be long and happy, and the family would eventually embrace three daughters and two sons.
Not all, of course, were happy or even moderately well-to-do in Second Empire Paris, and Edouard Manet—although himself well-off—was keenly aware of those who were less fortunate. In his 1862 lithograph, The Balloon, he depicted a giant balloon raised at the Fête de l’Empereur, held annually in honor of Louis-Napoleon’s uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. On this occasion, Louis-Napoleon distributed aid to the poor, and by his order, prizes dangled from the tops of poles, which the needy fought to climb. Unfortunately, these poles were soaped, making the ascent as difficult as possible, and in his lithograph, Manet depicted the dense crowds and the eager climbers as well as a lame person seated in the crowd’s midst, unable to partake of the climb or prizes. The balloon, positioned in the lithograph’s center, depicts the era’s progress as well as its delight in display, but Manet—who placed his disabled man directly beneath the balloon—was more interested in portraying the downside of this progress.
Young Georges Clemenceau, who still was a full-time medical student, was also dismayed by the crushing poverty he saw around him. In a gesture of revolt against the Second Empire’s neglect as well as its authoritarianism, he organized one of the few protest demonstrations of the period, held in the Place de la Bastille on February 24, the anniversary of the 1848 revolution. As it happened, he and his fellow students were unable to arouse the populace, and the demonstration fizzled as the police moved in.
Georges Clemenceau, 1869. © Tallandier / Bridgeman Images
Clemenceau escaped, but the police found him two days later in his lodgings, where they arrested him.
Despite his father’s attempts to intervene, Clemenceau received a fine and a sentence of more than two months in the bleak Mazas prison. Once released, he visited friends in the more hospitable Sainte-Pélagie prison, the usual destination for political prisoners. There he became acquainted with the ardent republican Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, who—many years later—would play a key role with Clemenceau in the Dreyfus Affair. Clemenceau also, for a time, came under the spell of another Sainte-Pélagie inmate, the ardent revolutionary Louis Blanqui, whom he briefly assisted in Blanqui’s sub-rosa activities.
In time, Clemenceau would also become an staunch ally of Emile Zola in their fight to defend Alfred Dreyfus, but this lay well in the future. In 1862, Clemenceau and Zola had only a passing acquaintance, linked by their common interest in the weekly newssheet Le Travail, to which Zola contributed. Le Travail did not survive the failed protest of February 24.
That autumn, Emile Zola’s young friend from Aix, Paul Cézanne, gathered up his courage and returned to Paris, where he again enrolled in the Atelier Suisse and became friends with Camille Pissarro. Cézanne also encountered a number of other painters during this second Paris stay, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Frédéric Bazille, and (upon his return to Paris) Claude Monet—acquaintances among the artistic avant-garde that bolstered Cézanne’s confidence in his own decidedly avant-garde vision. Zola accompanied Cézanne in his visits to artists’ studios throughout Paris, becoming acquainted with many of the city’s young artists and, in the process, acquiring an artistic vocabulary as well as an appreciation for the newest of the new.
By 1862, Zola’s horizons were widening on many fronts. Even before Cézanne’s reappearance in Paris, he had acquired a job—best of all, a job in publishing. Thanks to the intervention of a family friend, he was accepted by Hachette and Company, which had already become a major force among French publishers. Zola began humbly enough in the packing department, but he was ecstatic.
“Saved from Bohemia!” he cried, and he never looked back.
Edouard Manet, 1850s. Private collection. © Roger-Viollet, Paris / Bridgeman Images
CHAPTER TWELVE
Scandal
(1863–1864)
The Salon, held annually after 1863 in May and June, was unquestionably the most important artistic event on the Paris calendar. Well aware of its significance, Edouard Manet had come to regard admission into the Salon as a personal crusade.
Although many thousands of people visited the Salon each year, where they viewed multitudes of paintings and sculptures crammed floor-to-ceiling into a Right Bank building near the Seine, these viewers—much to Manet’s dismay—saw little of his output. Most of his major works were meant to be hung on the Salon’s walls, but although he regularly submitted his best, most were rejected. Not until 1863 did he truly make his mark, and not even in the Salon itself, but in what was widely considered to be a sideshow—the Salon des Refusés.
How this happened was an unexpected result of the jury’s decisions for the 1863 Salon, which had been even more severe than usual, rejecting more than half of the five thousand works submitted. These included Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) as well as his Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada (matador) and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo (matador).1 Despite an uproar of protests, these refusés (rejects) were set aside, ready to be returned to their owners, when Napoleon III—who had learned of the brouhaha—visited the Salon and glimpsed some of the rejected works. Being politically if not culturally attuned, he noted that he could see little difference between what was accepted and what was not and decided to let the public make up its own mind. As a consequence, the rejected works now had a forum of their own, in another part of the huge building housing the Salon. This portion soon became known as the Salon des Refusés.
Admission to the Salon des Refusés was open to all those whose works had been refused, and almost eight hundred works now went up on these newly available walls. One enthusiast wrote that it was “a grand day, a day of supreme justice [when] the public was admitted to judge the judges.”2 Unfortunately, the public largely came to gape and gawk, and no painting drew more gasps and laughter than Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which quickly became the succès de scandale of the exhibition. After all, central to the painting is a completely unclothed young woman, while two completely clothed young men surround her (and the luncheon in question). Not only are the young men clothed, but they are clothed in modern dress rather than in Grecian togas—which would have been far more acceptable to this largely bourgeois and prudish audience, which found Manet’s subject matter indecent and shocking, a sure sign of the decline of civilization.
Manet had intentionally painted contemporary Parisians rather than mythical nudes with flowing tresses and fluttering Cupids, and his bathing and lunching Parisians look natural, even matter-of-fact, rather than romantically or heroically posed. The public, made uncomfortable by this unheard-of nonchalance, jeered; and although not all the critics were hostile (and some chose to criticize Manet’s
technique rather than his subject), many either refused to review the refusés or joined in the attack. “One has to be doubly strong,” commented Manet’s friend Zacharie Astruc, “to keep erect beneath the tempest of fools, who rain down here by the million and scoff at everything outrageously.”3
By contrast, Alfred Stevens’s painting, Palm Sunday, which depicted a demurely dressed young woman placing sprigs of boxwood above the portraits of her parents, won rave reviews from one and all. Oddly enough, Stevens and Manet were good friends. Even odder, the probable model for Stevens’s painting, his mistress Victorine Meurent, served as the nude model for Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
Controversy continued to surround Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, despite his formidable reputation as a restorer of ancient and decaying buildings, especially his decades-long work on restoring Notre-Dame de Paris. Criticism of both his methods and his results had dogged him throughout his career, especially the accusation that he had too frequently sacrificed historical accuracy to the spirit of an imagined past. Yet the scandal that erupted around him in the autumn of 1863 was especially virulent. Of course it should not have been unexpected: from the outset of his career Viollet-le-Duc had rebelled against the neoclassicism and lack of imagination at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, as a young man, had refused to attend this traditional destination for would-be architects. It was therefore all the more astonishing when, in 1863, Viollet-le-Duc was appointed as a professor at the very Ecole des Beaux-Arts that he had refused to attend.
Not surprisingly, the faculty there—led by Ingres—resisted this development, but word had it that Prosper Mérimée, a key figure in architectural restoration and a firm supporter of Viollet-le-Duc, had used his influence with the emperor to win the appointment. The outcome—according to Maxime Du Camp—was a major scandal. Prompted by the faculty, the students sent in a complaint; when this was disregarded, they erupted into major protests in the lecture hall and then outside, along Rue Bonaparte and the Pont des Arts.
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