Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  At the same Salon where Manet had made such an unfavorable impact, Claude Monet’s first submissions were hung, alphabetically, near Manet’s (at least, until Manet’s offending contributions were moved). Monet had submitted two seascapes, and they attracted a respectable amount of attention. They also caused some confusion between the painters’ names, irritating Manet, who already was exasperated by the reception given his Olympia. It did not help that he found himself being complimented for paintings by another artist. “Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?” he demanded.14 Friends hoping to introduce the two artists decided to wait for a better time.

  Soon Manet departed for Spain and Monet left Paris for nearby Chailly, where he was intent on producing a masterpiece, a Luncheon on the Grass of his own, with life-size figures in contemporary dress seated in the midst of a sun-filtered woods. Although there is no record of Monet’s verbal response to Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, which he undoubtedly saw when visiting the 1863 Salon, the huge painting that Monet now envisioned can reasonably be believed to have been inspired by, or to have been a response to, Manet’s work. Yet this would be a response with a significant difference: in Monet’s Luncheon on the Grass, there would be no nudity—nothing racy or unrefined.

  “Sometimes I am afraid of what I am getting myself into,” Monet wrote Bazille in early May, summoning him to Chailly to pose. Bazille’s height was essential to Monet’s painting—he would serve as a model for at least four of the figures. Later that summer, still hard at work on his preliminary studies, Monet summoned Bazille once again to pose. “You promised to help me with my picture,” he wrote testily. “You were supposed to come and pose for some figures and my picture depends on it.” All of his studies for the painting were progressing well, Monet told Bazille, and “it’s only the men that are missing now.” The artist was worried and insistent: “I think only of my painting,” he told Bazille, “and if I were to drop it, I think I’d go crazy.”15

  Not surprisingly, relations between the two men were becoming chilly, especially after Monet returned to Paris that autumn and found that Bazille was late in sending in his share of the rent. In the midst of financial worries, Monet nonetheless plugged on, transforming his final four-by-six-foot oil sketch to an immense canvas—fifteen feet high and twenty feet wide. Visitors crowded into the studio to admire the work, talking about the success it would bring Monet at the coming Salon.

  But Monet did not submit the painting to the 1866 Salon, nor to the one that followed. Instead, the huge work remained unfinished. Possibly this was because it had become too difficult to complete; possibly it had also become too expensive. Certainly it had become excessively unwieldy, especially after Monet and Bazille were evicted from their spacious studio on Rue de Furstemberg: Monet’s new abode (on the Right Bank’s Rue Pigalle) was far smaller. In addition, there are accounts of how Gustave Courbet, whom Monet much admired, discouraged the young artist, essentially telling him that he had undertaken far more than he—or anyone—could possibly complete within a reasonable length of time.

  Daniel Wildenstein suggests that, in addition to these concerns, Monet abandoned the project because “he had mastered the painting’s real subject, the effects of light filtering through the foliage and playing on persons and objects.”16 Instead of striving to paint within the Academic tradition approved by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Monet and his colleagues now would move in a new direction, one that they had only begun to glimpse.

  As for his Luncheon on the Grass, Monet rolled up his enormous painting and left it in his landlord’s basement, as security for unpaid rent. Years later, when he could afford to reclaim it, it had become moldy. He then cut it up and kept three fragments, of which only two have survived.17

  Both Berthe and Edma Morisot submitted paintings to the 1865 Salon, and much as the year before, these were accepted. The sisters were in Chartres at the time, visiting an uncle, and it was their mother who first viewed the works in situ. “I had to go to a great deal of trouble to find Berthe’s and Edma’s pictures,” she wrote their elder sister, Yves. “Berthe’s Chaudron is all the less conspicuous because it is not hung in the hall of the M’s [a reference to the alphabetical arrangement of the paintings].” Edma’s Pot de fleurs “can barely be detected,” she added. As for Berthe’s other submission, Femme, her mother thought it was not well lighted, “at least in the mornings,” but otherwise, it “does not look bad at all; I saw people point it out to one another.”

  Madame Morisot may not have been satisfied, but Berthe and Edma were doing reasonably well with their Salon submissions, at least in comparison with Manet—possibly because their entries were of subjects suitable for the Salon’s staid audience. Yet the sisters were hardly free from criticism, in their case, from their mother. “It looks as though your paintings, particularly the flowers, are not varnished,” Madame Morisot scolded Edma, soon after visiting the Salon. This, she said, was unacceptable: “This is being too careless of the appearance of a painting when the aim is to please untrained eyes susceptible to a first impression.” In the future, she added, “you should show less contempt for ordinary people, even if they can make themselves heard only through your father or mother.”18

  The sisters, well knowing their mother, seemed undisturbed by her criticism. Madame Morisot indeed was proud of her daughters’ paintings, even if she did not understand them.

  That year another woman with a dream arrived in Paris. Louise Michel had come once before, in 1851, intending to teach, but her stay had been cut short by her mother’s illness. Now she was going to try once more to live and work in the city of her dreams.

  Born at the Château de Vroncourt in the Haute-Marne, to the northeast of Paris, Michel was the illegitimate daughter of one of the château’s maids and, most probably, the landowner’s son. We know little about the father, but Michel grew up regarding the landowner and his wife as her grandparents, and they in turn took it upon themselves to educate this precocious child by providing her with the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau and by encouraging her to question. Such a liberal education was uncommon during these years, especially for a female, and Michel blossomed under it, growing into a sensitive, observant, and caring young woman.

  It is not clear whether Michel actually met Victor Hugo during her first stay in Paris, but in any case, she wrote to him throughout his exile. “Allow me to open my soul to you,” she wrote, soon after her return to the Haute-Marne, as she was about to take the examination that would allow her to teach. “Please give me a word of hope.”19 Hugo replied and in time would write a moving tribute to her, in which he wrote of Michel’s “forgetting of yourself to aid others” and his conviction that she was “incapable of all that is not heroism and virtue.”20

  But now, in 1865, Victor Hugo still was in exile, and Louise Michel once again had arrived in Paris, after spending the intervening years teaching at small schools in the Haute-Marne. During those years, she had experimented (as she would throughout her life) with teaching methods well in advance of their time, such as composing plays for her students to perform or bringing animals and birds into class for children to observe closely and to touch. It took her many years to save enough money to come back to Paris, but by 1865, a small bequest from her grandparents allowed her to return to the capital, where she taught in a day school in Montmartre.

  Since childhood, Michel had ardently sympathized with the downtrodden, whether people or animals, but until this time she had not been actively involved in politics—although her memoirs record that, while in the Haute-Marne, she and a friend had placed mysterious marks on the doors of those who were bullying republicans, causing “the self-proclaimed defenders of law and order” to call her a “red,” meaning a republican. She had by this time become a forthright opponent of Napoleon III and dreamed of going to Paris, where she would be “at the heart of affairs.” But once there, she immersed herself in her teaching rather than in
politics and dealt as best she could with her own poverty as well as that of the impoverished Parisians around her. She and her colleagues “knew quite well that teaching paid almost nothing,” she later wrote, “but any other trade open to women offered less fulfillment.”

  She continued her reading, including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and had a bad habit (as she was quick to admit) of buying books, even when she had little or no money. After all, as she put it, “It was hard to resist, for there were so many that tempted me and to me books were everything.” But men, and marriage, offered no similar temptation: “There are enough tortured women in the world,” she wrote, “without my becoming another one.” She firmly retained this position, although she did concede that she was influenced by the fact that “those people who asked to marry me, although they are as dear to me as brothers, would be equally impossible as husbands.”

  Instead, a life of teaching and charity coupled with radical political activity called her, starting that autumn of 1865. For it was then that Louise Michel realized that, at that very moment, “the struggle against the Empire was intensifying.”21

  Not everyone was as taken with Victor Hugo as was Louise Michel. Charles Baudelaire in fact went to considerable effort during his stay in Brussels to avoid Hugo and his family, who were in residence there.

  Baudelaire had come to Brussels in 1864 to give several lectures and to find a publisher for his works. After more than a year, though, things were not going well, and Baudelaire was feeling dismal. He hated Brussels, envied Hugo the fame that had eluded him, and found the very idea of Victor Hugo and Hugo’s family more than he could stomach—even though Hugo himself was in Guernsey for much of Baudelaire’s lengthy stay. But in May 1865, Baudelaire found himself with an invitation from Madame Hugo that he could not reasonably refuse: to dine with her and her sons, even though Madame struck him as “half-idiotic” and the two sons as “complete fools.”

  This dinner led to other invitations, some of which included Hugo, who irritated and bored Baudelaire with his godlike views of himself and his endless pontificating. But despite everything, Baudelaire came to like Madame Hugo, calling her a “decidedly a good woman.”22 For her part, Madame Hugo began to like and pity Baudelaire, who by now was suffering from ill health as well as from discouragement.

  Manet, writing to Baudelaire in October, after his return from Spain, seems to have been trying to boost his friend’s morale when he wrote that he was “delighted to hear that Victor Hugo can’t do without you now” and added that he was not surprised: “He’s bound to find the company of someone like you more attractive than that of his usual crowd of lionizers.” Manet then hesitantly touched a sore spot: “Couldn’t he put you in touch with his publishers?”23

  But Hugo did not offer, and Baudelaire was not about to ask. It would have been too demeaning. Yet Baudelaire kept up the pretense of flattering Hugo, and Hugo continued to flatter Baudelaire, even though he was more honest with Charles Asselineau, a friend and future biographer of Baudelaire. “I met Baudelaire rather than knew him,” Hugo frankly wrote Asselineau. “He often offended me and I must often have annoyed him. . . . I agree with all your praise, but with some reservations.”24

  While Nadar was embellishing his Boulevard des Capucines studio with a huge facsimile of his signature in ten-foot-high gaslit red glass tubing stretching fifty feet in length, a staunch opponent of Napoleon III was contemplating giving a huge statue representing liberty to the United States, as a potent symbol for the ideas that the Second Empire had suppressed.

  The man was Edouard de Laboulaye, an esteemed French jurist, historian, and professor at the Collège de France, who had published a three-volume history of the United States and was considered an expert on America and its Constitution. Although firmly opposed to Napoleon III, Laboulaye had kept his opinions under wraps until the first signs of liberalization in the early 1860s, when he resumed teaching American history, using his lectures to criticize France’s Second Empire and giving public lectures as well. Entering politics seemed a logical outgrowth, and although Laboulaye was unsuccessful in his bid for a seat in the Legislature, his platform of “Democracy and Liberty” marked him as a leader among the Empire’s liberal opposition.

  One evening in 1865, Laboulaye invited French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to join him and a number of liberal politicians and intellectuals for dinner at Laboulaye’s Normandy estate. There, the talk soon turned to recent events in the United States, including the Civil War, the abolition of slavery, and the assassination of President Lincoln. How, the various members of this select group wondered, could this young American nation maintain democracy in the face of the many obstacles it had encountered, while France, which had embraced so many of the same principles during its great revolution, had strayed so badly?

  Laboulaye had a ready answer to this: Americans, he noted, were practical, while Frenchmen tended to become theoreticians, especially when drawing up constitutions. Conversation then turned to the friendship established between the two nations during the American Revolution, when France had given the American colonies essential financial and military aid. Evidently inspired by the discussion, Laboulaye offered an idea: that this friendship should be celebrated with some kind of symbolism, something that could be presented as a gift from the people of France to the American people. What about, he wondered, a statue representing liberty? This would serve not only as a tribute to the United States but also as a symbol for the ideas suppressed under France’s Second Empire.

  Bartholdi was intrigued. He was drawn to the idea of creating colossal statues and would soon propose the idea of a gigantic female figure holding a lamp for the entrance of the Suez Canal. But it would be several years before the idea of a Statue of Liberty would blossom.

  In the meantime, Laboulaye and his republican friends would continue, to the best of their abilities, to try to uphold the light of liberty in Napoleon III’s France.

  Emile Zola, c.1865. Photograph by A. Pinsard. © Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France / Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Crisis

  (1866)

  The year got off to a bad start with unmistakable signs of financial trouble ahead. The Pereires’ glittering creation, Crédit Mobilier, had been experiencing uncertainties for some time, and now, in 1866, worrisome cracks were beginning to show through its faҫade. As the once-booming institution now cast about for capital, it was difficult not to perceive an uncharacteristic element of panic among its directors. Their alarm was justified: by the year’s end, Crédit Mobilier would hardly be able to pay a dividend.

  The Pereires were quick to blame the Rothschilds for their predicament, but the brothers seem to have brought much of the trouble upon themselves, whether through the activities of yet another of their creations, the Crédit Immobilier, or through their unsuccessful attempts to expand into the financial activities of several other foreign governments.

  At the same time, evidence of worker discontent was growing, from strikes to the burgeoning membership of labor societies—especially the International Working Men’s Association, founded only two years before and now rapidly expanding in France. The Duke de Morny may have disappeared from the scene, but a worried emperor was still inclined to offer concessions. That February, the minister of the interior advised prefects throughout the country to display more tolerance for strikers’ meetings, while a law several months later revoked the article in the Code Civil that established the inequality of master and worker in the eyes of the law.

  Yet despite such concessions, workers failed to gravitate to the regime. Living conditions remained harsh and wages low, prompting members of these labor societies, and especially of the International, to strongly support the republican opposition.

  And then there was Mexico, where matters could hardly have been worse. With bloody massacres of French troops on the rise, the French press in early 1866 began to push strongly for with
drawal. Louis-Napoleon was inclined to agree and in January announced that, since Maximilian’s regime was secure, he was about to order a phased withdrawal of the French expeditionary force there. In actuality, Maximilian’s regime was anything but secure, but the emperor was taking the time-honored approach of declaring victory before leaving the scene of a disaster. Unfortunately, Louis-Napoleon was disinclined to commit himself irrevocably and dawdled for several months before actually giving the order to withdraw (10,000 men to leave in November, with another 10,000 the following March, and the remaining 14,000 the November after). Still, the commander of the French forces in Mexico advised Maximilian to get out as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Maximilian was adamant and refused. Instead, the beleaguered emperor sent his wife, Charlotte, to plead in person with Louis to delay the troop withdrawal and continue French support of the imperial Mexican regime.

  Charlotte arrived at the French court in July, when Mexico was the last thing that Louis-Napoleon wanted to think about. He was ill again, and he was facing what amounted to an earthquake in international affairs: the mighty Prussian army had just defeated the Austrians in the battle of Sadowa, elevating Prussia to supremacy in Central Europe.

  Even before becoming minister-president of Prussia in 1862, Otto von Bismarck had determined exactly how he wanted to proceed en route to establishing German unity under Prussia. Austria, although a declining state, was still wrapped in glory and still the major power in Central Europe. The previous autumn Bismarck had obtained Louis-Napoleon’s tacit approval and agreement to French neutrality during what already was Bismarck’s well-established plan for an upcoming Prussian war on Austria.

  War broke out in June 1866, with the newly united Kingdom of Italy joining Prussia in the hope of receiving Venetia from a defeated Austria as its reward. Italian troops did not do well against their enemy, suffering a humiliating defeat in battle, but in the end it did not matter. Prussia’s well-equipped and thoroughly modernized army, led by Count Helmuth von Moltke, annihilated the Austrian army in the Battle of Sadowa on July 3. Austria sued for peace and handed over Venetia to Italy, with France serving as an intermediary in the exchange.