After this, Viollet-le-Duc did not attempt to lecture to the students, who in any case refused to hear him: “Messieurs,” was the only word he was able to utter to the students before the uproar began. But he continued his career in restoration, which reached a pinnacle on May 31, 1864, with the dedication of the completely restored Notre-Dame de Paris—an elaborate ceremony presided over by the archbishop of Paris.
That September brought the opening of Georges Bizet’s first produced opera, Les Pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers), which took place just before his twenty-fifth birthday. It should have been a triumph, and indeed, for a brief moment—as Bizet was brought before the curtain to take his bow—it appeared to be so. But then the critics weighed in, including disparagement of his orchestration as “noisy” and “too colorful”—opprobrium that future aficionados of this work and Bizet’s Carmen would find laughable. No less a figure than Hector Berlioz tried to come to the rescue, stating that the score for this opera “does M. Bizet great honor,” but the public wasn’t listening to Berlioz. Les Pêcheurs de perles closed after eighteen performances.
That same year, another brilliant young musician and composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, defied expectations by failing to win the Prix de Rome on his second try. By this time, Saint-Saëns had distinguished himself as a composer, as a pianist, and as one of the finest organists in Paris (at the churches of Saint-Merri and La Madeleine). “He knows everything, but lacks inexperience,” Berlioz remarked dryly.4
Not only young strivers found Paris a tough place to make their mark. The month of August brought the death of Eugène Delacroix, a painter who, like Manet, had pushed the boundaries and who had remained much misunderstood by the general public throughout his life. From early in his career, Delacroix was criticized for not being able to draw, but increasingly his reputation grew as a master of color. In Maxime Du Camp’s estimation, Delacroix’s process of artistic creation “was more musical than plastic, and some of his works are symphonies rather than pictures.”5
Yet this “chief of the revolutionary [Romantic] school of painting” seemed hardly a revolutionary in appearance or bearing. Elegant and reserved, aristocratic and un-bohemian, Delacroix lived in a different universe from the stereotypical renegade painter. The rumor had even taken hold that he was the illegitimate son of none other than Prince Talleyrand, and the patronage that Delacroix received from Talleyrand and Talleyrand’s grandson, the Duke de Morny, seemed to bear this out—although Maxime Du Camp took issue with the rumor, claiming that there was no physical resemblance whatever between the men.
Those in lofty government circles made little effort to pay tribute to the deceased, but Manet, Baudelaire, and Henri Fantin-Latour were among those who did deeply value him and walked in his funeral procession. Baudelaire regarded the unsentimental and vividly realistic Delacroix as the first truly great modern painter, and in time, many others, including Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso, would agree. Soon Fantin-Latour would paint a tribute to him, his 1864 Homage to Delacroix—a large painting with the admirers of Delacroix grouped around his portrait. These included Fantin-Latour, James Whistler, Edouard Manet, and Baudelaire.
Beaten down by years of criticism, Delacroix had once remarked to Du Camp: “What would I not give to come back in a hundred years and to know what is thought of me.”6 Future generations would validate him, but already the painters of a newly emerging way of looking at the world had found their hero.
By spring of 1863, young Claude Monet was back in Paris and enrolled in the Montparnasse atelier of Charles Gleyre, on Rue Notre-Dame des Champs. There (unless the weather was too frigid, as it often was that winter of 1862–1863), the students worked from eight o’clock in the morning until around noon, when they partook of a gruel-covered chop and bread. This meager fare was cheap, costing fifteen sous, or less than one franc—a major consideration, since most of Gleyre’s students were as impoverished as Monet. Afternoons they continued to work, with the goal of mastering drawing before they were allowed to launch into color.
Gleyre was a quiet and modest man, who emphasized the classical tradition but who nonetheless gave his students a good deal of freedom. Monet seemed to settle in here and soon became friends with several other young painters—Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and especially Frédéric Bazille, a well-to-do young man who yearned to be an artist but whose parents wanted him to become a doctor. Monet was especially close to Bazille, and by the Easter holidays the two were vacationing and painting together in the nearby forest of Fontainebleau.
From Fontainebleau, Monet wrote another friend that he was staying on longer than he intended, as “it’s so beautiful in spring, with everything turned green, the fine weather came and I couldn’t resist the temptation of staying on longer”—even after the Salon had opened, drawing the others back to Paris. He had just received a letter from a friend of the painter Toulmouche, “who asked her to tell me that on no account should I stay any longer in the country, and above all that it was a grave mistake to have left the studio so soon.” Monet had not abandoned the studio, he insisted, “but I found a thousand things to charm me here which I just could not resist.”7
Bazille had described Monet as “pretty good at landscapes.” This, however, was not an especially ringing compliment, given the low esteem in which landscape painting was then held. Landscape painting offered little in the way of a future to a young painter, as both Bazille and Monet knew. Still, landscapes and painting out-of-doors irresistibly attracted Monet, and despite his recent stint of good behavior, it was evident that he was about to break out and go his own way.
Back in Paris, young Sarah Bernhardt was encountering difficulties. Earlier in the year, during the Comédie-Franҫaise’s annual celebration in Molière’s honor, Sarah’s little sister had caused a scene, and during the ensuing ruckus, Sarah slapped a leading lady. Sarah had refused to apologize, and after that, the Comédie-Franҫaise declined to give Sarah any further roles, terminating her contract. She would not return to the Comédie-Franҫaise for ten years.
With doors slammed on her in every direction, and her mother tired of supporting her, Sarah Bernhardt now turned to her mother’s trade, as a courtesan. She was good at it, and soon she acquired a handsome young lover, an officer and leader of a group of fashionable men about town. He remained her lover for several months, until he was sent on military duty to Mexico.
But Bernhardt’s true passion remained the theater, and soon she won some small parts at the Gymnase, a distinct step down from the Comédie-Franҫaise but still a fashionable-enough Paris theater. It was an opportunity for her to learn her craft as an actress, away from the unfriendly spotlight she had encountered at the Comédie-Franҫaise.
Yet the roles that Bernhardt played at the Gymnase did not satisfy her—these were comic or lightly dramatic, not tragic. And already, Sarah Bernhardt had decided that tragedy was where she was going to shine.
That May brought elections, which despite the requirement that all candidates take the loyalty oath, included many opposition candidates, especially republican opponents of the regime. These were not all of one accord, and the three hundred opposition candidates were often at odds with one another, not only between republicans and those who longed for a return to monarchy but also among the republicans themselves, who differed widely, from working-class rebels to those bourgeois who were willing to accept a reform-minded empire, so long as the reforms were what they had in mind.
Persigny, who had been successfully running elections for Louis-Napoleon ever since the Bonaparte heir had emerged on the electoral scene, was again in charge of this one, especially in composing the list of official candidates. This all-important stage, however, had become increasingly challenging, since there no longer were enough die-hard loyalists to fill the slots, and Persigny was resigned to having to accept more moderates. Yet once the lists were filled, he did his utmost to see that his candidates were elected, using the by-now time-tested methods of
clamping down on the opposition press and urging the nation’s prefects and local officials to do everything they could to dampen the opposition’s ardor, including constituency gerrymandering and wholesale bribery.
Still, what was remarkable about this election was the diffidence with which many officials enforced their duties in supporting the government’s candidates. The outcome was a surprising, if modest, defeat for Napoleon III’s imperial rule. The opposition won in nearly all the major cities, including Marseille, Lyon, and Paris, and while the Legislature remained stuffed with official candidates, many of these were reliant on voters who were not as reliably pro-emperor as before. In addition, the working class had shown new strength, which it displayed not in support of the emperor—who despite his fine talk had done little for them—but on behalf of their own candidates.
Morny took a close look at the election results and decided that Louis-Napoleon should make further concessions, including greater freedom of speech and a program of social reforms. Instead, Louis-Napoleon merely carried out a cabinet reshuffle and, possibly at Eugenie’s instigation, sacked Persigny, who in turn accused the emperor of being dominated by his wife. Eugenie may well have prompted Persigny’s departure, since she had long resented his opposition to her, which had begun years before, when Persigny had summarily dismissed her as a bridal prospect on the grounds that she was not royal. Eugenie acknowledged the long-standing acrimony between them but attributed it to Persigny’s jealousy: “He could not bear anybody between the Emperor and him.”8
Morny, however, was looking at the bigger picture and concluded that something had to be done to deal with an unmistakably rising anti-imperial tide. The forces supporting democracy would only continue to grow, he observed, adding that “it is urgent to satisfy [democracy] if we do not want to be swept away by it.”9
May 1863 saw authorization for a northward extension of Boulevard de Magenta (later renamed Boulevard Barbès), while drilling for artesian wells began in the Chapelle and Butte-aux-Cailles quarters10 and work continued on the Opéra, whose masonry shell was rising steadily and now reached the first story.
In far-off Mexico, the French were buoyed by victory at the second battle of Puebla, which opened the road to Mexico City. French troops entered the city that June, where the residents received them unenthusiastically, while Juárez was forced to move to the countryside, where fighting turned to guerrilla resistance. Soon after, a so-called Assembly of Notables voted to offer the imperial crown to Maximilian and sent a delegation to convey the good news. But Maximilian still hesitated and at last asked that the Mexicans themselves vote on the question.
Maximilian, who naively thought that the outcome of such a vote would represent the will of the people, was not informed of the vote-rigging and bribery that brought in the necessary nationwide vote of approval. But even this was not enough to persuade the young man, who continued to agonize.
While Maximilian struggled over this decision, a number of financiers, most especially the Duke de Morny, looked on with considerable impatience. After all, there was a lot of money at stake.
That year, the left-wing journalist Georges Duchêne drew up a list of the richest and the most powerful French of the time and came up with 183 families—probably the origin of the so-called “200 families,” a conspiracy theory originally referring to the 200 largest shareholders, largely Jewish and Protestant, of the Banque de France. In years to come, the “200 families” would be castigated by both the anti-oligarchic Communist and trade unionist left as well as by the anti-Semitic and anti-Freemason right for virtually all the ills of the times. Duchêne in fact was interested in illustrating the wide disparities between France’s haves and have-nots, and of these 183 families, he singled out around thirty names of the “super rich,” who included the Duke de Morny and the Pereires as well as the Rothschilds.
Without invoking the hyperbole of the so-called “200 families,” it still was true that by now, certain wealthy and powerful families had come to hold an extraordinary degree of influence over France’s economy—an influence that extended into other realms as well. By 1863, Emile Pereire sat on nineteen boards of directors, while Isaac sat on twelve, and their son and nephew Eugène on nine. For their part, the Rothschilds held twenty-seven seats on a variety of company boards.
One area where big financiers extended their sway was over the press, which gave them a powerful weapon for directing public opinion. The Second Empire had seen a boom in newspaper sales, especially at railway stations, and the introduction of the rotary press—complementing the extension of the railway network—made large print runs possible. In 1863, the wealthy banker Moïse Polydore Millaud founded Le Petit Journal, a cheap nonpolitical daily, which quickly became France’s leading newspaper. Millaud’s Le Journal illustré and Le Soleil soon followed, while other financiers owned leading imperialist papers, and the Rothschilds were said to be the financial backers of a newspaper with Orléanist leanings. Financial groups controlled the financial or stock market papers, and these newspapers regularly promoted the sale of these groups’ securities. By the decade’s end, Duchêne was able to document his assertion that “since 1852 the press has always been masterminded by certain financial powers.”11
Publicity had always been Nadar’s forte, and that autumn he made newspaper headlines with his new love, ballooning. In a publicity-garnering display in early October, he charged tickets of one franc apiece to watch his giant balloon go up from the Champ de Mars. Even though not as many people as he had anticipated showed up to watch the great event, the crowd nonetheless was substantial. After all, the balloon—designed by Louis and Jules Godard, part of balloonist Eugène Godard’s family—was quite a spectacle. Twenty-two thousand yards of silk had been used to make its inner and outer envelopes, and when inflated, it was nearly as high as Notre-Dame and contained more than 200,000 cubic feet of gas (Nadar had persuaded the municipal gas company to lay a pipe to supply gas to the Champ de Mars). It carried a double-decker wicker cabin with six separate compartments, including a kitchen, a lavatory, bunk beds, a darkroom, and a wine cellar, and its observation deck was large enough for twenty.
Nadar had been drawn to ballooning by the possibilities for aerial photography as well as by the adventure and romance of air travel, and this first flight went smoothly enough, despite a rough landing twenty-five miles east of Paris. But his next flight, just weeks later, was a different matter. After some sixteen hours, during which the crew and passengers ate dinner on the upper deck, they decided to make a landing rather than risk being pushed out to sea. Unfortunately this attempted landing was a disaster. Encountering a gale, the balloon bounced and spun for almost thirty miles, just missed an oncoming train, and at last crashed into a forest. All nine passengers were injured, one of them seriously, but miraculously no one was killed.
Nadar, who knew a good publicity prospect when he saw one, commissioned a drawing of his giant balloon in the train’s path—a vivid illustration that attracted headlines throughout Europe and even in North America. His balloon would fly again at various expositions, including the 1867 Paris exposition, and his own fame rose with it: not only did he become a widely known public figure, but he even served as model for a character in a Jules Verne fantasy, From the Earth to the Moon.
But eventually the costs became prohibitive—and in any case, Nadar’s wife told him to stop. He had learned the hard way about balloons’ limitations, but he nonetheless would find other uses for them, especially in wartime. That, however, lay in the future.
The weather that winter of 1863–1864 was severe, affecting everything from Gleyre’s academy, where the master was ill, to the Opéra, where construction came to a halt.
By February, though, the Opéra resumed its rise, with a surprisingly extensive, although hidden, use of iron to support its floors, vaults, and roofs—an unconventional departure in an otherwise conventional albeit opulent structure. Decorative stone for the building was now arriving, including rose a
nd red granite, rose and red Jura stone, green porphyry, and an array of rose, yellow, and white limestone, in addition to marble shafts and blocks in an array of colors.
February also brought by-elections, in which labor began to flex its muscle. Earlier in the year, Adolph Thiers—a former prime minister under King Louis-Philippe and by now a staunch opponent of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte—had made a major speech in which he demanded five “necessary freedoms,” which he named as personal liberties, freedom of the press, free elections, legislative rights, and “ministerial responsibility.” Thiers was no ally of the working classes, but his speech signaled a fresh push for reform. Labor militants in particular responded by fielding their own candidates for the by-elections, as they had the year before, and by issuing a manifesto proclaiming that the workers formed “a special class of citizens requiring direct representation.”
This year’s workers’ candidates, although showing strength, still represented a distinct minority, but in the elections’ aftermath, militant workers pushed Louis-Napoleon to make good on his earlier promise to permit nonviolent strikes. This became law that spring with large support, despite conservative opposition. In addition, that September the emperor allowed three representatives of the five-hundred-member strong French workers’ movement to attend the inaugural meeting of the first Labor International.
But as many conservatives had feared, concessions now led to a wave of strikes, leading to clashes and worker demands for additional concessions, especially for their rights of association and assembly.
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