Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The painter Auguste Renoir, who himself had narrowly escaped death at Communard hands, offered an eloquent epitaph to those terrible days: “They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame which never dies.”

  At the end of May 1871, Paris presented a dreadful sight. In the Place de la Concorde, the Tritons in the fountains were contorted into hideous shapes, the candelabras twisted, the statue of Lille headless. Théophile Gautier noted the city’s oppressive silence, and was particularly struck by the Rue de Lille, on the Left Bank, where his fellow author Prosper Mérimée had once lived: “it seemed to be deserted throughout its length, like a street of Pompeii.” Of Mérimée’s old house, only the walls still stood, his famous library reduced to ashes.

  A silence of death reigned over these ruins; in the necropolises of Thebes or in the shafts of the Pyramids it was no more profound. No clatter of vehicles, no shouts of children, not even the song of a bird … an incurable sadness invaded our souls.

  Reaching Belleville, he was confronted by “Empty streets. People drinking in cabarets, mute in a sinister fashion. The appearance of a quarter conquered, but not subjected.”

  Even so, more of the city had survived than people might have imagined. The Venus de Milo was lifted reverently from the storage “coffin” within the incendiarized Prefecture of Police, where she had been preserved since before the first siege. Gautier recorded how “everybody leaned forward avidly to contemplate her. She still smiled, lying there so softly … this vague and tender smile, her lips slightly apart as if all the better to breathe in life.” As she returned to the Louvre, it was like a symbol of the return of life to Paris herself. Indeed, normality seemed to be restored with remarkable speed. As early as 2 June, Elihu Washburne wrote of “a marvellous change … the smouldering fires have been extinguished and the tottering walls pulled down.” The couturier Worth purchased some of the rubble from the Tuileries to construct sham ruins in his garden, and the work of rebuilding Paris was soon under way. On 12 June Edwin Child wrote to his father, “in about 6 months … we shall wonder where all the fires took place.”

  Once again France—and Paris—showed her extraordinary resilience. That summer omnibuses and fiacres were crowding the capital’s streets again, bateaux-mouches were chugging up and down the Seine. The enterprising Thomas Cook was despatching hordes of English tourists to ogle at the “ruins” of Paris. But some observers claimed that for a long time Parisians preferred to walk in the road rather than on the pavements—to avoid giving rise to the suspicion that they were pétroleuses intent on popping their incendiary packets through basement windows.

  Age Six

  1871–1940

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  THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

  Haussmann’s Paris, 1851–1914

  Click here to see a larger image.

  SIXTEEN

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  Belle Epoque

  A great city is … a work of art. It is a collective and complex art, it is true, but this makes it an even higher form of art.

  GUILLAUME CHASTENET TO THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES, IN 1909

  RECOVERY AND REVANCHISM

  In November 1871, Edmond Goncourt recalled Flaubert repeating to him an observation that had been passed to him by a Chinese envoy in Paris: “You are young, you Westerners, you have hardly any history to speak of … It has always been like this … The Siege and the Commune are everyday events for the human race.” To Goncourt this Mandarin vista helped place the inexplicable horrors of the past year in a sensible perspective. Once Paris had recovered, France herself was not far behind. After sketching dead Communards at the barricades, Manet was back at Boulogne painting La Partie de croquet. Renoir and Degas came back to find studios in Paris; Monet and Pissarro returned from refuge in dank and foggy London. Suddenly, as if in reaction against the drabness and the horrors of the siege and the Commune, the Impressionists burst forth into a passionate blaze of colour, redolent with the love of simple, ordinary existence. They would be immortalizing with new life places like Courbevoie, Asnières, Gennevilliers, once front-line names during the two sieges, pleasant riverside villages which, in the coming century, would be swallowed up in industrial suburbs. Seurat would be painting his masterpiece of summer reveries on the Grande Jatte, the sand bar in the Seine which had so recently seen Trochu’s National Guard charge across the river in its last, hopeless attempt to break the Prussian ring round Paris. The somnolent riverside villages of the Seine and Marne where Sisley had painted his early works, many within weekend-walking distance of the city, with their comfortable houses in ochre-coloured stone and fitted with green shutters—Champigny, Joinville, Epinay-sur-Orge, Bougival, Rueil, Issy—swiftly repaired the gaping holes left by war in roofs and walls, welcoming back the painters and the ambience of cheerfulness and leisure they brought with them. It all seemed like a symbolic regeneration comparable to the resurgence of literature that followed the cataclysm of 1815.

  On the quatorze juillet 1873, the newly elected President, Marshal MacMahon, wounded and captured in the débâcle at Sedan only three years previously, reviewed a magnificent parade of the resurrected army on Longchamp racecourse. Eighteen months later, with all the pomp and circumstance of the fallen Empire, he would be opening Garnier’s unfinished opera house, with its famous chandelier weighing six tonnes and its 2,156 seats. Together the two ceremonies proclaimed that France had come back to life again. Her industry blossomed in a new renaissance, this time based on firmer foundations than had existed under Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire. Out of the ruins of Paris, the Hôtel de Ville was rebuilt with tremendous speed, a faithful image of its old, medieval self. Napoleon I took his place once more atop a resurrected Vendôme Column. Marking the final demise of the French monarchy, the all-too-evocative, blackened skeleton of the Tuileries Palace was obliterated, its singed debris sold off by auction. Sir Richard Wallace, that great British benefactor of Paris, presented the grateful city with eighty new drinking fountains. In 1874, Somerset Maugham was born at the British Embassy on Faubourg Saint-Honoré—part of the Embassy having been turned into a maternity ward after 1871, so as to enable British subjects born on French territory to evade conscription into a new French army eager to acquire fresh recruits.

  Despite the upheaval of the lost war and the internecine violence of the Commune, it was soon evident that, in Paris, the rich had returned to being rich, and the poor remained poor—as ever. On the evenings of pay-day many would be found flocking to the nearest Mont de Piété to redeem their mattresses—the standard pledge of those below the poverty line. With the passing of Victor Hugo in 1885, the Parisian underclass found a new champion in Emile Zola, who in L’Assommoir portrayed deprivation and misery in terms of even darker realism.

  Meanwhile, in the other, affluent Paris, the ever watchful Goncourt, passing by the Rue de la Paix in January 1872, noticed “A blockage of private carriages.” He wondered “who was the great personage whose door was beset by so many important people when I looked up above the carriage entrance and saw the name: Worth. Paris has not changed.” Just two years later, he would be recording a historic first encounter with an unknown fellow artist:

  Yesterday I spent the whole day in the studio of a strange painter called Degas … Out of all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet-dancers. When you come to think of it, it is not a bad choice … An original fellow, this Degas, sickly, neurotic … Among all the artists I have met so far, he is the one who has best been able, in representing modern life, to catch the spirit of that life.

  A short while later he would be recording conversations at the Café Riche with Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev and Daudet: “We began with a long discussion on the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhoea …” Manifestly the priority of topics in literary circles had barely changed either.

  To the astonishment of the world, the first half-billion of the five billion francs in reparations that France had to pay Germany we
re handed over just one month after the collapse of the Commune. The rest followed with a rapidity no European banker would have predicted. As early as September 1873 the crushing bill had been paid off and the last German soldier removed from French soil. In 1872 the new Republican Assembly passed the first of the laws designed to restore the efficiency of France’s humiliated army, and with it went a new spirit. Already by 15 June 1871, less than a month after the collapse of the Commune, the Rev. W. Gibson, an English Methodist clergyman who had spent ten years before the war trying to “convert” the Parisians, was writing with gloomy foresight:

  … I regret to find that the determination to seek to take their revenge sooner or later on Prussia is again manifesting itself among the Parisians … Alas for France, and alas for the hope of the peace of Europe! … Germany, when within the next few years she again encounters France in arms, will find her a very different foe from the France of 1870; and who knows but that before the end of this century there may be a similar triumph in Paris to that which is now being celebrated in Berlin? I vainly hoped that France would feel herself fairly beaten and be willing to accept her inferior position.

  For the next forty-three years Frenchmen would ponder in silence Deputy Edgar Quinet’s remark at the time of the debate on Bismarck’s peace terms: “the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war to perpetuity under the mask of peace.” This was approximately what Thiers had warned greedy Bismarck at the time. As long as Prussian soldiers stood guard on the wrong side of Metz, not much more than 300 kilometres by straight, flat road from the capital, Paris would grieve and dream dangerously of la revanche—the dream that was “never spoken, but never forgotten.”

  In the summer of 1878, seven short years after the expiry of the Commune, Paris once more was host to the world at an international exhibition. Compared with the flamboyance of Louis Napoleon’s Great Exposition of 1867, it was a rather muted affair, but it revealed a possibly more solid industrial achievement, showing to the world that la ville lumière was alive again, that France once more was an influence to be reckoned with on the international scene. Its main feature, facing the Champ-de-Mars where the exhibition was laid out, was an exotic oriental palace, of no particular relevance: the Trocadéro, constructed on the heights of Chaillot, where Napoleon I had once projected that Brobdingnagian residence for his heir, the little King of Rome. The structure somehow managed to combine the functions of theatre, concert hall and water tower. But few Parisians had anything good to say about it; Goncourt was more interested in describing a dinner chez Zola, where they were offered “Some grouse whose scented flesh Daudet compared to an old courtesan’s flesh marinated in a bidet.”

  Yet the national holiday, 30 June, marking the new Exposition Universelle turned into a spontaneous demonstration of French pride in Paris. For the first time since the Commune it was legal to fly the tricolore, and the brilliant display of flags lining the thronged streets persuaded both Manet and his younger colleague, the thirty-eight-year-old Monet, to paint the exhilarating scene from their studios (Monet rented a room off the Rue Saint-Denis just for the occasion).

  The next spectacle to distract Paris was the funeral of Victor Hugo. There had already been a dummy-run, in 1881, when Paris went wild over the eightieth birthday of the old titan, now become the idol of the “people.” An estimated 600,000 Parisians had marched down the Avenue d’Eylau past his house, while with his grandchildren he spent the whole day at the open window, greeting the endless lines of well-wishers, and revelling in the mounds of flowers laid below in the street—thenceforth to be Avenue Victor Hugo.

  After he died, on 22 May 1885, his body lay exposed to view under the Arc de Triomphe in a vast catafalque, upon a double platform clad in purple velvet that reached almost to the top of the arch, and guarded by twelve young poets, all through the night of the 31st. The next day the humble black hearse (which Hugo had specified), drawn by two horses, trundled through Paris before the eyes of two million Parisians, every head uncovered. The cortège halted at the Panthéon—Soufflot’s great church, built on Louis XV’s orders in 1764 in thanksgiving to Sainte Geneviève for his recovery from illness. Completed just in time for the Revolution to turn it into a mausoleum for famous men with the old Roman title of Panthéon, under the Restoration and Second Empire it had reverted to being a church, but on the occasion of Hugo’s funeral the Third Republic once more returned it, now all draped in black, to its revolutionary function.

  There was no doubting that Paris, still suffering from the terrible traumas of 1870–1, with no grand homme at the helm of government in the drably respectable Third Republic, needed a hero. But did Hugo—master of bombastic silliness during the siege, a champagne socialist of his time—quite deserve to lie among the best and greatest in the land? What about Balzac, Molière, Racine? Goncourt, in his treatment of the “nation’s sorrowful wake,” was perhaps more realistic when reporting how, the night before, it had been:

  celebrated by a wholesale copulation, a priapic orgy, with all the prostitutes of Paris, on holiday from their brothels, coupling with all and sundry on the lawns of the Champs-Elysées—Republican marriages which the good-natured police treated with becoming respect!

  The old roué himself would probably not have disapproved.

  THREATS TO POLITICAL STABILITY

  For the next three decades there would be at least a semblance of political stability—with three or four major blips, all of which had their focus on Paris. First there was the affaire Boulanger. In a momentary outburst of jingoism, it looked—in 1887—alarmingly as if Paris might have found a new hero in the shape of General Georges Boulanger. When the dashing forty-nine-year-old Minister of War appeared, martially magnificent, at the quatorze juillet review at Longchamp, Parisians went mad with delight. Songs were heard in the street that seemed all too evocative of the summer of 1870:

  Regardez-le là bas! Il nous sourit et passe:

  Il vient de délivrer la Lorraine et l’Alsace!

  In Berlin, Bismarck’s finger tightened on the trigger. Momentarily, the inflammatory Boulanger could have made himself master of Paris; but, fortunately for the peace of Europe, he lost his opportunity and—two years later—committed suicide on his mistress’s grave. In Clemenceau’s savage epitaph, he died “as he had lived, like a subaltern.” The episode said something about the fragility of the Third Republic, the underlying power of revanchism and the continuing volatility of Paris—a time when there was Bonapartism without a Bonaparte.

  Meanwhile, rumbling away in the background of French politics was the Panama Canal scandal, finally to explode in 1892. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the brilliant engineer and hero who had dug the Suez Canal, underestimated the costs of digging a similar canal across the Isthmus of Panama. To muzzle criticism, the Panama Company had paid money to newspapers and bought votes in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1892, the right-wing press—notably a wildly anti-Semitic paper, La Libre Parole—saw a political weapon and exploded a bombshell under the government. Baron Reinach, an eminent Jew who had acted as intermediary between the company and government Deputies, killed himself. In the ensuing investigations, only one politician (a former minister who confessed to having accepted 375,000 francs) was found guilty, but the mud bespattered a whole generation of French politicians. Even Clemenceau was compromised, and had to spend long years in the wilderness—years when France most needed his leadership.

  Next to plague Paris came the apparently irrational Anarchist outrages. In the twenty years leading up to 1914, six heads of state were assassinated, culminating with Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1898), King Umberto I of Italy (1900) and U.S. President McKinley (1901). Describing the pointlessness of the Anarchist cause, Barbara Tuchman says of their victims that “not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea.” The first ruler to die (in 1881) was Tsar Alexander II. Here his narodniki assassins struck the wrong target, since of all the Russi
an autocrats he had done most to liberate the serfs, and his death was followed by a campaign of brutal repression.

  In Paris the Anarchist scourge began (in the middle of the Panama scandal) with the bombings of houses of public figures by one Ravachol, alias François Claudius Königstein. Then a bomb was deposited, to coincide with a miners’ strike in November 1892, in the mine company’s office on the Avenue de l’Opéra. It exploded as an unfortunate flic was carrying it into the nearby police station, blowing him to pieces as well as five other agents in the room at the time. The following December, Auguste Vaillant exploded a bomb inside the Chamber of Deputies; it was intended to be a non-lethal protest, but in fact wounded several Deputies and led Vaillant to the guillotine. The week after his execution, another bomb exploded in the Café Terminus of the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one and maiming twenty. The culprit, one Emile Henry, also proved to be the perpetrator of the bomb in the Avenue de l’Opéra, and was duly guillotined. Then, a month after Henry’s execution (in May 1894), the Anarchists en revanche claimed their most eminent French victim when President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death in Dijon by a young Italian worker.