Monet spent the summer and autumn painting in Normandy and then returned to Paris, where for the first time he painted winter ice floes on the Seine, in the western suburb of Bougival. But he and his mistress plus the baby were still living hand to mouth, and he continued to bombard Bazille with demands for money and accounts of their misery.
By now, Monet had unilaterally refashioned their agreement to one hundred francs per month, in addition to other sums he claimed that Bazille had promised him, but Bazille still did not desert his difficult friend. Instead, he invited him to share in the new studio he was moving to and persuaded a colleague to buy a Monet still life.
Bougival’s ice floes attracted Monet in the winter, but it was summertime when this little pleasure spot along the Seine was at its popular best, drawing those who wanted to take a dip in the river or drink and dance in its guinguette (as Renoir would later commemorate, in Dance at Bougival). Nearby recreational spots had by this time sprouted up west of Paris, as the railroad made it easier for folks of even modest means to escape their urban confines. Already, La Grenouillère, the famed floating café on the Seine’s banks at Croissy-sur-Seine, and the Maison Fournaise on the Ile de Chatou were drawing pleasure-seekers.
These were not the sorts of people that a proper bourgeois woman such as Madame Morisot approved of. Writing to her daughter Berthe that August, Madame Morisot told her that Berthe’s brother, Tiburce, had recently “gone to bathe [swim] at Bougival,” where he encountered Jules Ferry. “They merely met and passed on,” Madame Morisot added, “a little embarrassed no doubt at finding themselves at that place.” And what sort of place was it? “It is said to be a very rustic little place,” she went on, “used for rendezvous by a very frivolous society.” Not only that, she added with a disapproving sniff, “if a man goes there alone, he returns in company of at least one other person.”
Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro were about to launch into a new style of painting at La Grenouillère, and in time, Berthe Morisot would make a summer home for herself and her family at Bougival. But for the moment, only women of dubious reputation, or at least not of the upright bourgeoisie, could enjoy themselves at the guinguettes of Bougival and Croissy-sur-Seine.
Madame Morisot, despite herself, was a little envious. “Men indeed have all the advantages, and make life comfortable for themselves,” she continued in her letter to Berthe. “I am not spiteful, but I hope there will be a compensation.”14
A more suitable destination for bourgeois enjoyment was that year’s Exposition Universelle, or World’s Fair, the first in Paris since 1855. As before, the emperor was intent on displaying his regime at its best, an empire still shining in glory. By the time the fair ended in November, ten million people had pushed through its entrance gates at the Champ de Mars to enter a massive iron-and-glass structure covering almost thirty-six acres, with gardens dispersed among galleries linked by walkways to the main building. Each gallery illustrated one aspect of industrial production, from raw materials to clothing, furniture, and the decorative arts, in which a bevy of objects, from rocking chairs to cannon, crowded displays of workers’ homes and the latest in wallpaper. Gustave Eiffel, not yet a prominent name, was limited to relatively minor work on the Galerie des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, but he also designed the main arch-girders for the Galerie des Machines, an enormous iron-framed ellipse. It was during this latter project that he—along with the director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers—worked out calculations that Eiffel would use in his future wrought-iron constructions, including his famous tower.15
The exposition’s gardens blossomed with restaurants and refreshment kiosks reflecting a world of gastronomy, whether beer from Strasbourg, Italian pasta, or Russian caviar, while in the surrounding park, visitors could revel in scenes of supposed lifestyles from far-off places (Arabs in a tent, Chinese women in a pagoda). Photographic studios did big business, while Nadar’s Le Géant balloon flew for the last time, its owner—now deeply in debt—having had to sell it.
Louis-Napoleon was especially gratified by the number of crowned heads who showed up to enjoy the festivities, from the emperors of Russia and Austria to the kings of Prussia, Belgium, Sweden, Greece, and Portugal. Queen Victoria, still devastated by the death of Prince Albert several years earlier, did not attend this exposition, but her son and heir, Prince Albert, did not hesitate to partake of the delights of Paris. Throughout, Empress Eugenie presided with suitable brilliance, and Baron Haussmann provided a series of gala receptions at the Hôtel de Ville to honor the various members of royalty who trooped through. His reception of June 8, honoring King Wilhelm of Prussia and Czar Alexander of Russia, was especially dazzling, with eight thousand guests illuminated by seas of twinkling lights. “Before the queen that is Paris,” the czar graciously observed, “we are no longer more than bourgeois.”16
But all was not well in Louis-Napoleon’s empire. For one thing, the emperor’s health was not what it should have been, and he suffered yet another bad attack that summer. The Goncourts reported that when Louis-Napoleon asked Emile Ollivier—a moderate republican—to tell him frankly what the people were saying about him, Ollivier told him that “people thought his faculties were declining.” At this, the emperor merely remarked impassively, “That is consistent with all the reports I have received.”17
And then there was the trouble with Crédit Mobilier. Continuing to hemorrhage losses, by spring this huge financial institution was sufficiently foundering that the Pereires had to demean themselves by requesting a huge loan from their longtime foe, the Banque de France. There, they faced Alphonse de Rothschild, who as regent was implacably opposed to granting their request. After all, for years he and his father, James, had denounced the Pereires’ taste for adventure and their appetite for risk, in comparison with the Rothschilds’ own steady prudence. In the end, pushed by Eugène Rouher (now minister of finance, who in turn was likely urged by the emperor), the Banque reluctantly agreed to a loan, but only on the condition that the Pereires and their friends resign.
Some felt sorry for the Pereires, including Rouher, who remarked that “they did not deserve the ferocious hatred with which they are being pursued.” But many, especially the Rothschilds, were unsympathetic to their plight, and the Rothschilds—along with a number of disappointed shareholders—may have been responsible for the vehemence of the press coverage of the Pereires’ financial failure, especially the persistent claims that the brothers were still able to pay, and should pay, their debts. Their former colleague Jules Mirès—himself under a considerable cloud for swindling—was especially scathing: “The Pereires,” he wrote in 1868, “have indulged in an extraordinary game with the shares of Crédit Mobilier. . . . They have used and abused fictitious dividends, and . . . their shareholders have been ruined by their personal speculations.”18
The Pereires rejected these charges, but the stain remained, even as the Rothschilds, among others, now ruthlessly proceeded to buy up the brothers’ personal assets (including their mansion on Rue de Monceau, which the Rothschilds purchased for about one-third less than the Pereires had paid for it). Although the Pereires’ Crédit Mobilier had played a decisive role in funding Napoleon III’s vision for Paris and in shaping the city’s financial institutions, its glory days were over. The Second Empire truly was a dog-eat-dog world, and the Pereires now were the ones being eaten.19
Georges Haussmann was also encountering trouble. That year, Haussmann found himself under attack, not only for having forced enormous numbers of families to leave their homes during the course of his rebuilding projects but also for violating the resting places of the dead. Opposition raged over his plans for cemeteries, from the move of several hundred tombs in Montmartre Cemetery (to provide a bridge for Rue Caulaincourt) to the need to find more burial space outside of Paris’s new city limits. Soon the whole thing became such a hot potato that it would not be resolved until after Haussmann left office.
But it was finances where Haussmann’s
troubles were becoming especially fraught. Not only had his Second System incurred huge cost overruns, but his Third System now was encountering significant financial difficulties. Haussmann as always refused to consider tax increases, even though Louis-Napoleon was beginning to entertain thoughts of raising taxes on the rich while lowering duties on basic articles of consumption. Aghast, Haussmann talked him out of it, arguing that any raise in taxes would not even begin to make up the amounts required to continue and complete the grands travaux.
So where to get the money? Borrowing no longer was possible, with the Legislature and Council of State as well as Louis-Napoleon’s finance minister and a newly influential James de Rothschild against it. The Société Générale, founded several years earlier by a group of financiers and industrialists in which James de Rothschild was quietly involved, now became a major player in Haussmann’s schemes, enabling the prefect to find contractors to carry out the required work at a fixed (and high) price. Firms under contract operated under a complex and usually lucrative system involving compulsory purchase and eviction compensation as well as the purchase of surplus land, but payment from the city came with a job’s completion—which of course could take years.
Haussmann was counting upon the length of time he had between the start and finish of these long-term projects to come up with the money. But still, the terms of these agreements created significant cash-flow problems. This in turn inspired Haussmann to authorize credit certificates against the final payment. These credit certificates amounted to loans without calling themselves such and gave Haussmann the kind of time he needed before payment was due. It was important that they not be called “loans,” since the city could only legally borrow money with the Legislature’s approval. Nonetheless, they were what they were, and adding to their essential illegality, these certificates were payable by Haussmann’s invention, the Caisse des Travaux de Paris—the special public works fund created earlier to aid in inevitable cash-flow problems—which now was obligated for far more than its rules allowed.
The irregularities or even illegalities were massive, and despite Haussmann’s efforts in December to present his request for a real loan to the Legislature, his public finances were coming unraveled. Adding to his woes, in December, Jules Ferry began to run a series of articles in Le Temps titled Les Comptes fantastiques d’Haussmann (The Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann), a play of words on Offenbach’s popular Les Contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann (The Fantastic Tales of Hoffmann). Whether or not Ferry’s dinners at the Morisots had given Ferry special ammunition, thanks to Berthe Morisot’s well-informed father, these articles, and the pamphlet that Ferry made of them, would play a major role in destroying Haussmann’s career, even as it assisted Ferry’s own.
In any case, by year’s end, Haussmann was in the unhappy position of wishing that he had retired soon after the World’s Fair was over, in November, as he had wanted. Most unfortunately for him, the emperor had persuaded him to remain on.
Despite these obstacles, Haussmann soldiered on, intent on completing the vision he had for a new Paris. In the process, the old Paris that Manet loved was disappearing, and with it, the kinds of characters who occupied the derelict housing that Haussmann was so effectively destroying. Most of the street singers and ragpickers who captivated Manet in his strolls around the city had by now been forced outside the city limits, to exist in the wasteland of the Zone—a process that the 1867 World’s Fair had accelerated, in the name of making the city a welcoming place for visitors. Paris, to Manet’s mind, may have become a cleaner and more modern city, but in the course of its modernization, it had lost a considerable amount of what he considered to be its essence and its appeal.
In this, Manet was to some degree in agreement with both Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, although Manet never romanticized his Paris. Rather, Manet painted in what Emile Zola termed a “Naturalist” style—differentiating him from Courbet, whose painting Zola and others termed “Realist.” Naturalism, according to Zola, who early on embraced the term, was anti-Romantic to its core and drew its inspiration from exact observation and science, rejecting idealization or mythology to depict real people in real activities. How this differed from Realism was not always clear, but Manet appreciated Zola’s positive publicity, and by year’s end, he had begun to paint Zola’s portrait as an expression of his thanks.
Zola in the meantime had published his first major novel, Thérèse Raquin, in which he depicted not the new and buzzing Paris of Georges Haussmann but the Paris of dirt, poverty, and darkness that he had come to know only too well. In this city of loneliness and degradation, he set his story of three misfits, genetically dictated psychological types whose actions were governed by their inherited temperaments. He, as the novelist, then probed these human beings and the society in which they lived, in much the same way that he believed a scientist probes experiments in a laboratory. “I have simply done on two living bodies,” he observed, “the work which surgeons do on corpses.”20 Nature, in other words, governed his novel’s action—here, leading directly and inevitably to death and destruction.
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as well as the Goncourt brothers’ Germinie Lacerteux greatly impressed Zola, and he did not shy from the controversy, the scandal—and the attendant publicity—that might await his newest offering, much as it had enveloped Flaubert and the Goncourts. “The work is very dramatic, very poignant,” he wrote the publisher Albert Lacroix of Brussels in September, whom he hoped would publish the book in its entirety now that the review L’Artiste was printing it in serial form. Upping his selling points, he added: “I am counting on a success d’horreur [a success based on horror].”21 Lacroix, who specialized in publishing those authors, including Victor Hugo, who had been banned in Louis-Napoleon’s France, agreed to take on this sizzling story of murder and self-destruction, and it appeared that autumn. Zola’s sensational depiction of his characters, their setting, and their fate drew down criticism that the novel was bestial, putrid, and pornographic; but the ultimate endorsement, government prosecution, eluded him.
The government made no move to prosecute him.
Late that August, Victor Hugo’s long-suffering wife, Adèle, died. Four days later, Charles Baudelaire breathed his last and was eloquently eulogized by Nadar, who had been faithful to him throughout the poet’s long last illness.
“You spoke most eloquently in defense of our poor friend Baudelaire yesterday,” Manet wrote Nadar, the day after the funeral. “I had already been touched by the loving care shown him in your home by you and your family.”22
Manet seems to have been unmoved, however, by Zola’s latest literary effort. “I’ve just finished Thérèse Raquin,” he wrote Zola late in the year. After graciously extending his warmest congratulations, Manet offered the following faint praise: “It’s a very well-constructed and very interesting novel.”23
Praise was something that Georges Haussmann was also finding elusive. His extraordinary park of Buttes-Chaumont had opened earlier that year in northeastern Paris, having transformed the land around a massive played-out quarry to create a lake, a towering island topped by a small temple, several waterfalls, two dramatic bridges (one designed by Eiffel), and panoramic views where only shanties and a garbage dump had been. Haussmann brought Wilhelm of Prussia to visit the newly opened park when the king visited the World Exposition, only to see the monarch gaze in the distance and hear him remark thoughtfully: “It was through that gate that we entered in 1815.” A somewhat disconcerted Haussmann could only reply, “Yes, but we have built some forts since then.”24
The idea behind such a park in such a location was to provide Parisians of this part of the city, primarily workers, with a pleasant destination of their own. Louis-Napoleon had been wholeheartedly in support of the project, much as he was of yet another attempt at creating decent workers’ housing—a large structure of contiguous housing on Avenue Daumesnil, deep in the twelfth arrondissement (a structure that the emperor was said to have had
a personal hand in designing).25
Yet neither this nor the glorious park of Buttes-Chaumont made much of an impact on those they were meant to gratify, and Louis-Napoleon was disappointed by his failure to win over the working classes, especially since a poor wheat harvest that year led to bread shortages as winter approached. Worried about the ever-greater gains made by republicans in Paris and other towns throughout France, the emperor responded by making new concessions for the Legislature. The following year he would also abolish some of his restrictions on the press as well as the requirement for preliminary authorization for meetings, so long as they were neither political nor religious. But these were small gestures, and republicans and reformers perceived them as such.
As 1868 began, Lord Lyons, the new British ambassador, reported back to London that Emperor Napoleon’s difficulties at home were growing. “The discontent is great,” he wrote, “and the distress amongst the working classes severe.” Unlike the opening years of Napoleon III’s empire, “there is no glitter at home or abroad to divert public attention.”26
As the sun began to set on his empire, the emperor was ill, tired, and bored.
The Rothschild country estate, the Château de Ferrières, 1855 (engraving). © Bridgeman Images
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Twenty Years Later
(1868)
In July 1868, Austria’s ambassador to France, Prince Metternich, reported that he had “never found the Emperor better, both in health and spirits, or more forthcoming, as he was during the short visit I have just paid.” But during the same month, Britain’s Lord Cowley reported that he had found Napoleon “aged and much depressed” and even considering abdication.1
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