Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  BREAD AND CIRCUSES

  For all the grimness of Restoration Paris, there was much to make life worthwhile and attractive—for most of the populace. The city began to throb with the new innovations which science and the industrial revolution had to offer. Apart from the new invention of the bicycle, there was a new light vehicle called the fiacre, as one way of dealing with the problems of transport, and soon there were steamboats plying the Seine. There were medical advances like the first successful cataract operation (though it would have taken a brave man to risk it), performed by Dupuytren, chief surgeon in the Hôtel Dieu. The state of medicine was reflected in increasing longevity (for the better off): Victor Hugo, Thiers and that veteran of revolutions, Lafayette, all lived into their eighties or late seventies. Then there was Jacques Daguerre with the novelty of his pivoted “Diorama”—and, in 1838, the first photographs, or daguerréotypes. The first horse-drawn omnibus made its clip-clopping appearance on the clogged streets. And at last there was gas lighting (though a French invention, it was pioneered in London), accompanied in 1822 by the marvel of the vast gasometer in the Poissonnière district. As it gradually replaced flickering oil lamps the gentle glow of the gas-lighting excitingly threw up the outline of a new city by night. It was also soft enough to mask most of the horrors of crime, poverty and filth, cladding the terrors of the night with a certain romantic charm.

  Among the unchanging distractions that Paris life habitually offered, there was always the theatre—now returned to its old unfettered, unbridled rowdiness of pre-revolutionary days. In 1817, at the Comédie Française, where Mlle. Mars, alias Anne Boutet, resumed its great tradition, there was a reminder of the uninhibited days of Louis XIV when Ultras and leftists came to serious blows over a piece which, lampooning one faction, was cheered by the other. In the ensuing rumpus, a number of prominent citizens were injured. Thereafter theatre managers insisted that canes, umbrellas and other weapons be deposited at the door, giving rise to the present-day theatre cloakroom. Up on the unchic Boulevard du Temple the Théâtre des Funambules (literally, “tightrope-walkers”), founded in 1816, achieved enormous popularity with its performances of mime, vaudeville and melodrama, playing to even noisier audiences, and with an always more financially precarious company. Here the great tragic clown Jean Deburau held sway as the lovelorn and pathetic Pierrot, ever hopeful but always disappointed. Deburau died in 1846 as tragically as he had lived, falling during a performance and dying of his injuries. But he and the Funambules were to live for ever in Carné’s immortal black-and-white film of a century later, Les Enfants du paradis, starring Jean-Louis Barrault.

  Once more the comic opera, called the Italien after the adjacent boulevard, also thrived—home of the new Romantic music. It was an epoch when concert-goers could hear Luigi Cherubini (Director of the Conservatoire de Paris), Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz perform their works. Berlioz, who wrote his magical Symphonie fantastique for his Irish paramour while he was still only thirty—its lilting Romanticism offset by sombre reminders of the guillotine that seemed to typify the age—remained unacknowledged. He died in 1869, crushed by the critics at the apogee of the Second Empire, while lesser musicians like Offenbach carried off the laurels.

  Parisians, declared Prefect Rambuteau, with just a touch of condescension:

  are like children; one constantly has to fill their imagination, and if one cannot give them a victory in battle every month, or a new constitution every year, then one has to offer them daily some new building sites to visit, projects that serve to beautify the city.

  If Rambuteau was not up to the job of providing sufficient embellissement projects in the capital, neither were the variety of distractions and the great cultural efflorescence that had been offered by the Restoration sufficient to avert a renewal of that age-old Parisian disease, ennui, now apostrophized by the Romantic poet Lamartine. Not for the first time nor for the last, French regimes sought to divert dissatisfaction at home—growing by the year—by the pursuit of la Gloire abroad. Once it had been Italy, now it was Algeria.

  In 1827, the Dey of Algiers lost his temper with the French Consul, Deval, struck him in the face with a fly-whisk and called him a “wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal.” Here was a perfect pretext for the increasingly unpopular government of Charles X to launch a foreign adventure. Though they waited for three years before avenging the terrible insult, in May 1830 a French expeditionary force landed on a beach at Sidi Ferruch, thirty kilometres west of Algiers, and began the annexation of the world’s tenth biggest nation, several times the size of France. It was under the liberal regime of Louis-Philippe rather than of Charles X that the often savage pacification of Algeria took place, but the adventure would not suffice to preserve the thrones of either.

  Nonetheless, this most blatant example of “bread and circuses” would help gain France 124 years of prosperity and power, but would end in eight years of hell that would bring down the Fourth Republic. The immediate benefits of the Algerian annexation were swift to arrive in the mother country: there were glamorous silk cloths, reaching even to provincial Rouen to help assuage the desperate ennui suffered by poor Emma Bovary; in Paris there was the can-can, the bizarre and shocking new dance first seen in the cholera year of 1832, and said to be based on something discovered in barbaric Algeria.

  THE JULY MONARCHY

  “La France s’ennuie!” In fact, most of France and most Frenchmen were reasonably contented with life under the restored monarchy. It was, once more, turbulent Paris where the trouble lay. There the reactionary Charles X had become progressively more unpopular, especially after he had expressed his intention of scrapping the Charter, to which the Bourbon monarchy had pledged itself on returning to power. By the summer of 1830, this decision—added to economic recession and to an agricultural crisis on the scale of 1811—was to prove catastrophic. In Paris there were once again soaring bread prices, wage cuts and unemployment; some 64,000 Parisians had no stable employment, signifying that they were dependent either on charity or on crime; while foreigners were horrified to discover four-year-olds working long hours in the mills. Soup kitchens reappeared on the streets, as they had in the early years of the Great Revolution. The warning signs were there, but no one noticed them.

  In June Charles X issued four unconstitutional decrees which inter alia dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and suspended freedom of the press. Suddenly, on 26 July, a stiflingly hot day in Paris, the storm broke. A group of young people started a demonstration outside the Palais Royal. Within an hour a dense crowd had assembled in the gardens of the Palais. But they were driven away by the police, and by midnight all seemed calm. This calm, with its suggestion that the authorities were in control, proved fatal to the government. Charles X, relaxing out at Saint-Cloud, put Napoleon’s veteran commander Marshal Marmont in charge. It was a foolish choice, because Parisians remembered him as the man who had surrendered the city to the enemy in 1814. On the 27th, the crowds were out again on the streets, this time setting up barricades near the Rue Saint-Honoré and around the Bourse. Several rioters were killed. Among the dead was a young woman shot down in the Rue Saint-Honoré with a stray bullet in the forehead. When a butcher’s boy carried the corpse into the Place des Victoires, the spectacle aroused the crowd to calls for vengeance.

  During the night fresh barricades were run up—this time in the eastern districts, the traditional haunts of revolution. Trees were felled, and workers from Saint-Antoine plundered gunsmiths for weapons and seized the Arsenal. On the morning of the 28th, headed by students of the Ecole Polytechnique, demonstrators peacefully occupied the Hôtel de Ville, unfurling the tricolore flag from its towers. Soon there were ominous indications that troops had begun to fraternize with the rebels. Elsewhere, on the Place de Grève and in the Rue Saint-Antoine, there was bitter fighting with numerous casualties. What had started as a minor revolt had exploded into a full-scale insurrection. Realizing that his troops were at a serious disadva
ntage fighting in the narrow streets, and receiving no clear instructions from Saint-Cloud, Marmont gave the order to withdraw from the inner city. The game was lost. But the fighting continued savagely on the 29th. Its centre moved westwards to the Louvre. A Swiss unit defending the Tuileries fled in panic, escaping from Paris via the Champs-Elysées. As it had done in 1792, the mob entered and sacked the Tuileries, getting hopelessly drunk in its copious cellars. The Archbishop’s palace was also occupied, its furniture and rare books hurled into the Seine.

  By the afternoon of the 29th, the insurgents—bewildered by the completeness of their success—found themselves in control of the whole city. Taking advantage of their momentary confusion, frightened liberal deputies began to react. Led by the young radical journalist Adolphe Thiers, they called for the abdication of Charles X. They eschewed the call of the left for a republic on the ground that it would expose France to “terrible divisions.” Then they nominated Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, to assume the throne. Charles tried to save the dynasty by putting forward his grandson, the Duc de Bordeaux—as Henri V. But Paris would have none of it. Constitutional monarchy held no attractions for Charles. “I would rather hew wood than be a king like the King of England!” he declared, before turning to the ever-at-hand Talleyrand and adding, “I see no middle way between the throne and the scaffold.” The old cynic, who had seen it all, replied, “Your Majesty forgets the post-chaise!” Charles took Talleyrand’s advice, and the post-chaise—to dreaded England. He ended up in Gorizia (in Austrian-occupied northern Italy), where he died of cholera in 1836. “Still another government,” was Chateaubriand’s acid comment, “hurling itself down from the towers of Notre-Dame.”

  As the last of the Bourbons took the road into exile, his departure was marked by one final note of absurdity. Charles’s daughter-in-law, widow of the Duc de Berry, assassinated in Paris just after the Restoration, tried to regain the crown for her son; but it transpired that the virtuous widow, imprisoned in the citadel of Blaye, was in fact pregnant by an unknown lover. Her gambit ended in scandal and disrepute—and with it the long line of kings initiated by Henri IV 240 years previously.

  Aged fifty-seven, Louis-Philippe was the great-great-grandson of the Regent to Louis XV, and his acceptability to both sides in 1830 stemmed largely from the fact that his father had been the duplicitous regicide Philippe Egalité—though apostasy had not sufficed to save his neck during the Terror. Louis-Philippe had been nominated for the post of Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom by both Charles X and the Commune* of Paris, and for the remainder of his eighteen-year rule between revolutions he would do his utmost to be all things to all sides. It was symbolic that the last King of France, the very antithesis of Louis XIV, accepted the crown not at Rheims but in the Palais Bourbon, as the politically elected ruler of “the people.” Shorn of all mystical or inherited droits, the People’s King had little more power than a British constitutional monarch.

  From the first, Louis-Philippe played the role. He made his home in the Palais Royal—where his ancestor, the Regent, had once reigned—with a total absence of the pomp-and-circumstance of Versailles. He addressed workmen as “my friends” and the National Guard as “my comrades,” and liked to stroll through the streets with a green umbrella under his arm, shaking hands promiscuously; at the least encouragement, he would appear on the balcony, obligingly brandishing the tricolore and lustily singing the Marseillaise. Heinrich Heine was somewhat shocked to learn that the King had two pairs of gloves for each occasion. When he shook hands “with every spice merchant and artisan … he wore a special dirty glove for that purpose, which he always took off and exchanged for a cleaner kid glove when he kept more elevated company and went to see the old aristocrats, his banker-ministers.”

  As sumptuous carriages disappeared off the streets, Paris emulated the new royal family. The bourgeois at first revelled in their new monarch, in the peace and prosperity he signalled, and delightedly took up Guizot’s exhortation of enrichissez-vous. Meanwhile the classes laborieuses of Paris had no such cause to celebrate; they—the poor and the revolutionaries of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—felt that the bourgeois had once more cheated them out of their birthright, the rewards of insurrection, as indeed they had after the Great Revolution itself. The son of a regicide and regarded as a usurper by the legitimists, Louis-Philippe would always be highly vulnerable, for all his good intentions.

  Within a year there was fresh trouble on the streets of Paris. In February 1831 riots broke out; in October there were further riots over Louis-Philippe’s desire to drop the death penalty. The following year the cholera epidemic struck Paris, and fresh riots provoked in June by the funeral of a cholera victim, General Lamarque, a revanchist demagogue. It was Lamarque’s last words—“I die regretting not having avenged France for the infamous treaties of 1815”—that unleashed the mobs. Half of Paris was taken over by some two or three thousand young insurgents, of whom one in ten were killed by cannonfire. Windows of the Foreigners’ Club were broken, amid cries of “Down with Louis-Philippe!” and “He’ll die on the scaffold like his father!” In April 1834 more riots brought about a shocking butchery by nervous troops of innocent civilians in the Marais’s Rue Transnonain—to be fixed for ever in Parisian minds by Daumier’s immortal cartoon of a man lying at the foot of his bed in nothing but nightcap and shirt.

  In July 1835 a Corsican immigrant and extreme republican called Fieschi fired an infernal machine consisting of twenty-five musket barrels lashed together like organ tubes at Louis-Philippe’s cortège as it rode slowly up the Boulevard du Temple. Fieschi’s device exploded like the concentrated fire of a whole infantry platoon. The Minister of War, Napoleon I’s veteran Marshal Mortier, dropped with a bullet through the head; thirteen others died, including a fourteen-year-old girl, and twenty-two were wounded. The King’s horse was also hit, but he himself was untouched. He returned courageously to review the troops for two hours that afternoon, declaring “C’est moi qui mène le fiacre!” Fieschi, horribly wounded by his own device, went to the guillotine—though he was the first French would-be regicide to be spared torture.

  The King’s courage under fire gained him some respite. In 1840, he sought new favour from the increasingly vocal Bonapartists by having the dead Emperor brought back to Paris and reinterred with great ceremony under Louis XIV’s dome of the Invalides. Yet even this dramatic measure was not enough to save Louis-Philippe when the next storm came—in 1848.

  * An improvised city assembly created in July 1789 after the fall of the Bastille, but deprived of most of its power under Napoleon’s administrative reforms. Its name was to be borrowed for the insurrection of 1871 (see Chapter 15).

  YEAR OF REVOLUTION

  Like that of 1968, the year 1848 was one of revolt and revolution across the board. In Europe, old political structures collapsed like houses of cards. Given the paucity of communications, what was remarkable was how swiftly revolution spread across Europe. “There was,” wrote a British historian, “a sound of breaking glass in every continental capital west of the Russian frontier.” In Vienna even the seemingly immortal Metternich—who had given Europe its past three decades of peace—was deposed. By the end of 1848, except for Britain—where Prince Albert was able to sigh, “we had our revolution yesterday, and it ended in rain”—there were to be dictators established in almost every country of Europe. The world had truly shifted on its axis.

  It had all begun in Paris, in the last week of February. Once again, as during the last years of the Napoleonic era, there had been a prelude of poor harvests in 1846–7. On 22 February, a mass banquet, planned by the Opposition to give expression to Parisian discontent over government resistance to reform, was abruptly cancelled. The following afternoon fighting broke out at the Porte Saint-Martin and a number of people were killed. There were shouts of “Down with Guizot!”—who, as successively Louis-Philippe’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister, had been the virtual ruler of France for the past eigh
t years. Stones were thrown at the Quai d’Orsay, railings ripped out at the Chamber of Deputies, and a highly reluctant Thiers seized and carried shoulder-high by demonstrators. Barricades began to appear on the Rue de Rivoli. Worst of all, there were cries of “Vive la Réforme!” and “Down with Guizot!” from the ranks of the National Guard, formed of middle-class Praetorians.

  In alarm, the King jettisoned Guizot, but it was already too late. Near the elegant Boulevard des Capucines, the progress of “a decidedly villainous-looking mob” singing revolutionary songs was blocked by the loyally Royalist 14th Battalion. When one of the rioters thrust his torch in the face of its commanding officer, a trigger-happy Corsican sergeant shot him dead. That single shot changed the course of French history. On hearing the shot, and thinking their chief threatened, the nervous soldiers fired a ragged volley into the crowd. Count Rodolphe Apponyi, an attaché at the Austrian Embassy, saw “a hundred or more people laid low, stretched out, or rolling over another, shrieking and groaning.” News of the shooting raced through Paris. On his way back to his Embassy Apponyi observed an angry mob heading for the Tuileries.

  There Louis-Philippe, horrified by events, had been advised by Thiers to retire to Saint-Cloud and assemble a force for retaking Paris. (It was advice Thiers would himself pursue twenty-three years later, when his time came in 1871.) The King refused; instead he called upon the unpopular Marshal Bugeaud, pacifier of Algeria, to take over command, only to order him to cease fire. The National Guard (on whose bourgeois units the government so crucially depended) went over to the insurgents, and as the sound of nearby firing reached the Tuileries on 24 February the old King abdicated in favour of his son, the Comte de Paris. He and Queen Amélie then left hurriedly through a side door in the Tuileries terrace. He who had once declared bravely, “C’est moi qui mène le fiacre!” now left in one, just like his predecessor, for exile in England. With him, the last King of France, departed the thousand-year-old French monarchy.