Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  Still, although neither party appears to have regarded it as an affair to remember, the two remained friends until Haas’s death.

  As the year and decade drew to a close, life and death continued to coexist in the usual way, while on the larger scale, the empire’s own decline was moving toward center stage. It had been a long run—almost two decades—but perhaps inevitably, the empire that Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had created was losing its energy, even as Louis-Napoleon himself was succumbing to illness and perhaps death.

  He had seen much of his vision realized during his two decades of imperial rule, not the least being the completion of all of the major routes of France’s modern railway network. But chief of all, there was Paris, the city of dreams—undeniably, he and Haussmann together had transformed the city, a legacy in which he took the greatest pride.

  Yet much remained to be done, and as the new decade approached, neither Napoleon III nor Haussmann retained the political power nor the will to move and shake people and landscapes as they had before. Now, other forces both at home and abroad would determine the destiny of Paris and of France.

  Meeting of Napoleon III with Bismarck, 2 September 1870, following the Battle of Sedan (photograph). © SZ Photo / Bridgeman Images

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Finale

  (1870)

  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte did not casually abandon Georges Haussmann. Instead, as the new year opened, it became clear that the emperor had few options remaining—whether in governing his empire or in retaining Haussmann as prefect of the Seine.

  The spring 1869 elections had given the emperor little choice. Despite his foot-dragging and general unwillingness to acknowledge that his position as absolute ruler of France no longer was viable, Louis-Napoleon now faced the political realities of a potent opposition. Eugenie had already glimpsed his limitations, and as she sailed that autumn to the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal, she had written him: “I do not believe that one can carry out two coups d’état in one reign.”1

  And so on January 1, 1870, at the traditional New Year’s Day reception, Napoleon III at long last told members of the Legislature that, although the nation had bestowed on him and him alone the power of government, he now was willing to share this power with them. He then followed through by asking the moderate liberal, Emile Ollivier, to head up a new government.

  It should have come as no surprise when one of Ollivier’s first actions was to push Haussmann out the door. “The emperor wanted to keep Haussmann,” Ollivier later wrote. “But it was quite impossible to keep him on. His administration, to which justice was not yet done, had caused too much of an outcry.”2

  Unfortunately for those who preferred it otherwise, Haussmann refused to go quietly. He would not resign, as the emperor wished, and adamantly held out for dismissal. Therefore, on January 6, 1870, an official decree was published relieving Haussmann of his duties. The emperor met personally with Haussmann and apologized at length. The empress (who saw in Haussmann’s exit a welcome safety valve for popular discontent) conveyed her heartfelt condolences, while members of the municipal council expressed their deepest sympathy. According to the record of their last meeting with the former prefect, the council members attested to Haussmann’s “high intelligence and tireless activity” and declared the honor they felt in having for so many years assisted this eminent administrator in the work of transforming Paris.3

  Officials may have been duly proper in their accolades as they showed Haussmann the door, but throughout Paris, people responded with rejoicing—and disbelief. As the journalist and publisher Emile de Girardin put it, “History will not believe that the author of the transformation of Paris could have been dismissed.”4

  Haussmann himself presided over his departure ceremony with typical hauteur as well as with considerable dignity, telling the council members that he would always retain the memory of the “bonds of profound esteem, of reciprocal trust, that united us, rendering our immense task far easier.” He concluded that he had the satisfaction of hoping that they would not forget this.

  At that, the still-formidable Baron Georges Haussmann stiffly bowed and left—“with head high and heart firm,” as he later put it.5

  Years later, Jules Simon—one of Haussmann’s foremost critics during the 1860s—wrote, “It is of little importance to us today that the accounts of Monsieur Haussmann were fantastic. He had undertaken to make Paris a magnificent city, and in this he completely succeeded.” Haussmann was so taken with this unexpected compliment that he reproduced it in full in his memoirs.6

  But at the time, Haussmann’s ouster did not quench the simmering public unrest. For too many, overwhelming poverty was still an everyday presence, even though the average wage for workers had risen during the Second Empire, when work for the most part was plentiful. This was due to the unhappy fact that prices had also risen during these years, wiping out any gains in wages. In addition, the scale of capitalism had rapidly escalated, encouraging concentration, squeezing out small and medium-sized enterprises, and leaving workers well behind. By 1870, wages had not even begun to keep up with profits, and the gap between the rich and the poor had dramatically widened.

  As for the emperor’s liberal reforms, they did not touch the urban masses, nor had they been intended to do so. Rather, Louis-Napoleon had aimed at satisfying the bourgeoisie, especially its conservative businessmen and clerics. Left behind in the scramble for wealth and profits, the poor simmered and the nascent labor movement took strength, expressed in a growing number of strikes. Early in 1870, the most massive one to date erupted after the death of a republican journalist, Victor Noir, who was killed in a duel with the emperor’s cousin, Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The journalist had challenged the prince, but nonetheless, duels were supposed to let off steam, not result in serious injury let alone death. The republican opposition quickly compared Noir’s death with the death of the Republic in 1851. Henri Rochefort editorialized that “for eighteen years France has been in the bloodstained hands of these ruffians who, not content with gunning down republicans in the street, draw them into vile traps in order to slit their throats at home.” He concluded, “People of France, do you really not think there has been enough of it?”7

  The government arrested the prince (who was no favorite of the emperor’s) but also prosecuted and jailed Rochefort and impounded the newspaper in which he had published. None of this had any impact on the popular outcry. On the day of the funeral, huge demonstrations—as many as one hundred thousand people—showed up, alarming the emperor and the forces of law and order. Ollivier sent out the troops, and the regime hunkered down, under verbal assault from republicans and revolutionaries alike.

  Yet despite facing a growing opposition on the streets and a diminution of his imperial power as the bicameral parliamentary system began to take shape, Louis-Napoleon was not about to give up his empire without a fight, however charming he might be about it. Reform there might be, but it must be understood as coming from his gracious dispensation. That spring, he went over the heads of his ministers and deputies to his old standby, the people of France—including, most importantly, those rural areas where his support had always been strongest—and asked them to vote on whether they approved of “the liberal reforms in the Constitution carried out since 1860 by the Emperor with the cooperation of the great bodies of the State.” Further, he asked voters whether they wished to ratify the decree of April 1870 that henceforth divided power between the emperor and a bicameral parliament.

  It was a deft ploy, since the voters could not accept the liberal reforms the emperor offered without endorsing the emperor. Victor Hugo irately responded that the true question was “Can arsenic be rendered edible?”8 His comment appeared in Paris in Le Rappel and other papers, leading to a warrant for his arrest and yet another prison sentence for his sons.

  But despite consternation on the left, the response—powered by the rural vote—was an overwhelming Yes.9 This represented a victory not only
for the emperor’s model of a more liberal empire, but also—and most importantly—for the emperor himself and for the continuation of his line. As Louis-Napoleon reportedly told his young son: “My child, your coronation is assured with this plebiscite. More than ever we can look to the future without fear.” Others reported that the emperor gleefully remarked, “I’m back to my old score.”10

  Others were just as confident of France’s future under the present regime. As Emile Ollivier announced in late June, “At no epoch has the peace of Europe been more assured.”11

  Charges against Haussmann appeared to have been forgotten, and the former prefect exited into comfortable retirement in the south of France. Back in Paris, Edouard Manet managed to get himself into a duel with his friend Louis Edmond Duranty, a writer and art critic who had temporarily enraged Manet with a review that Manet considered insultingly unenthusiastic. Manet’s mother begged Fantin-Latour to help keep Manet away from the Café Guerbois, where the ruckus had taken place, but Manet had by then recovered his usual urbanity. As he told his friend Antonin Proust, he and Duranty “have wondered ever since how we could have been silly enough to want to run each other through.”12

  Manet by now was recognized as leader of the group of younger artists whom Fantin-Latour depicted in his group portrait that included Renoir, Bazille, and Monet as well as Zola, all surrounding Manet at work in his studio. Fantin exhibited A Studio in the Batignolles at that year’s Salon, while Manet showed a portrait of his promising new student, Eva Gonzalès, as well as a joint portrait of his friend Zacharie Astruc and Astruc’s wife that he called The Music Lesson. “Manet is in despair about where he is placed,” Berthe Morisot wrote her sister Edma that May. “However, his two paintings look well,” she commented, adding, “As usual, they attract much attention.”13 Not all of the attention was positive, as Morisot was well aware.

  Morisot herself endured considerable doubt and consternation in the run-up to the 1870 Salon. She was coming to realize that she possessed an ability and need for expression that far outstripped the conventional amateurism that her social standing and gender permitted. Although the Salon had opened its prestigious doors to her earlier and most conservative paintings, she now was developing a far more unconventional way of painting—attempting with ever quicker and looser brushstrokes to capture the fleeting moments of everyday life, many of them radically out-of-doors.

  Much to Morisot’s dismay, even Edouard Manet did not quite grasp what she was after and criticized her most recent work as being “unfinished.” This included her recent landscape, The Harbor at Lorient, which Morisot planned to submit to that year’s Salon, along with her Portrait of the Artist’s Mother and Sister. Manet praised The Harbor at Lorient, albeit with reservations. But the Portrait of the Artist’s Mother and Sister was entirely a different matter.

  Edma Morisot Pontillon, married and pregnant, had returned to Paris the previous winter for the birth of her first child, where Berthe Morisot had painted her, along with their mother. By the time Manet saw the painting, Puvis de Chavannes had already seen and critiqued it, telling Morisot that “the head [of Madame Morisot] was not done and could not be done.” Given this, Morisot wrote her sister, “I took it out; I did it over again.”

  And then came Edouard Manet’s critique. He liked the painting, thought it very good except for a few places, and promptly took up the brushes to put in a couple of accents. But “once started,” Morisot mourned, “nothing could stop him; from the skirt he went to the bust, from the bust to the head, from the head to the background.” He joked, laughed, and kept at it until late that afternoon, when the mover was waiting to take it to the Salon. Much to Morisot’s despair, Manet had turned her painting into “the prettiest caricature that was ever seen,” leaving her to hope that it would be rejected.14

  It was not rejected, and despite her mother’s efforts to calm the waters by recalling the offending painting (prompted by Morisot’s insistence that “she would rather be at the bottom of the river than learn that her picture had been accepted”), Morisot went ahead and showed it. “Having got over my first emotion,” she wrote Edma, “I find that one always derives benefit from exhibiting one’s work, however mediocre it may be.” But Morisot’s health was suffering from tension and anxiety as well as from overwork. She wasn’t eating properly, her mother reported, adding that, in fact, she wasn’t eating much at all: “It disgusts her to swallow anything.” For her part, Morisot told her sister that “I feel a great weight on my stomach, and I am disgusted for all time with painters and with friendship.”

  Morisot would continue to have what may have been an eating disorder for much of her life, and in contrast to the fulsome hourglass figures admired at the time, she was considered by some to be unpleasantly thin. The twenty-first century would take issue with this assessment, and Edouard Manet certainly disagreed, painting her again and again, but her mother was worried. “I have meat juice made for her every day,” Madame Morisot told Edma and then gave the written equivalent of a sigh. “Oh, well! . . . ”15

  Sarah Bernhardt was another who was considered to be thin to the point of skinniness. Her portraits show what the twenty-first century would view as a pleasingly slim and elegant woman, but her detractors (of whom there were many) could be downright nasty about it. Cartoonists portrayed her as a scrawny-legged chicken or, as one acquaintance put it, a “little stick with the sponge on the top”16—this being a reference to her curly red hair, which tended to frizz.

  Bernhardt responded by making fun of herself. On one occasion, she laughingly declined an umbrella by proclaiming, “Oh, I am so thin I cannot get wet! I pass between the drops.” But her best response to her critics was her success. This had become ever more evident when, early in 1870, she was given the lead in George Sand’s new play, L’Autre. Sand, too, had acerbic comments about Bernhardt, remarking in her journal that Bernhardt was “stupid, but she has a charming nature” and “interprets her role like the great tart she is.”17 But Bernhardt, who would not have known about Sand’s journal, in any case had no need to worry about such slights. She was a triumph in L’Autre and was ready to move on to other triumphs when history suddenly intervened.

  All was quiet when, on July 3, startling news broke that the recently vacant throne of Spain had been offered to, and accepted by, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The most riveting element of this long name was “Hohenzollern,” for the king of Prussia was head of the ancient House of Hohenzollern—a family that in times past had produced a noteworthy number of princes, monarchs, and emperors. The French were properly alarmed: Bismarck clearly was behind the offer to Leopold, and it was even clearer that a German prince ruling Spain would mean trouble. As Louis-Napoleon later put it to an interviewer, “The proud blood of Spain would have accepted no foreign masters, and the difficulties of the situation confronting Prince Leopold in a few years would have induced Germany itself to assume the supreme power in order to support him.”

  Whether or not others in France were alert to the dangers of proud Spanish blood (with which Louis-Napoleon, wed to a Spaniard, was well accustomed), France’s leaders were alert to the dangers of Germanic encirclement. The French government immediately demanded, and obtained, the withdrawal of Leopold’s candidacy. In addition to official diplomatic channels, Louis-Napoleon had quietly worked behind the scenes, urging those with access to the young prince’s ear to tell him that world peace depended upon his renunciation of the Spanish throne.

  Peace was the outcome, for the moment. But it was difficult to quench the strong feelings that had emerged on both sides. Bismarck reportedly felt humiliated by the withdrawal and contemplated resignation, while at the height of the confrontation, the deputies in France’s Legislature had erupted with “Vive la France! Vive l’Empereur!” and even “À Berlin!” Public opinion strongly supported this belligerent bluster, to the extent that when Ollivier announced the news of Prince Leopold’s withdrawal, it was met with a collective shrug. Af
ter all, most of the deputies (along with much of France) believed that it was only what could be expected, given the superiority of France’s army over all others. Indeed, when the emperor asked his war minister whether the French army was prepared for war, the war minister (Marshal Edmond Le Boeuf) replied: “If the war were to last for a year, we would not need to buy a gaiter-button!”18

  Unfortunately, his reply became public and only increased the level of bellicosity in the Legislature, whose deputies pushed for iron-clad guarantees, in writing, from Prussia’s King Wilhelm. The French ambassador pressed Wilhelm, who was surprised and taken aback. The king then telegrammed Bismarck, in Ems, with a detailed description of the meeting. Bismarck in turn edited the telegram in ways calculated to insult the French and released it. The Ems telegram, as it became known, served as a deliberate affront to Gallic pride.

  On July 19, as a wave of patriotism swept Paris, France declared war on Prussia.

  By this time, Claude Monet was a married man, having married his mistress, Camille Doncieux. Opinion differs on whether he married for money (a small dowry in his wife’s future) or to escape military service in the coming war. The dowry was indeed small and for the most part remained out of Monet’s reach until the death of Camille Monet’s father. But it could well have figured in Monet’s calculations, for he still was in severe financial straits. This situation was only worsened by the Salon’s rejection, once again, of his entries—all the more galling since it had accepted entries from Bazille, Renoir, Manet, and Pissarro. As for military service, Monet was unable to produce the proper papers showing that he had satisfied its requirements. His marriage provided a certain amount of protection, although not complete, against being called up.