Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

Arriving at the Gare du Nord in 1873, George Moore was shocked by the “haggard city” which greeted him, and the “peculiar bleakness in the streets.” Writing of the same quartier a few years later in his uncompromising L’Assommoir, Zola observed that “chests were hollow just from inhaling this air, where even gnats could not live, for lack of food.” But by the early years of the new century such was the general level of prosperity in the country at large that even the poor of Paris were able to benefit. During the Belle Epoque, life in France was wonderfully, unmistakably good. The phrase la vie douce could hardly convey what this meant—though the Germans’ envious expression “as content as a god in France” perhaps came closest. Never had there been so much for so many. It was an epoch seething with ideas and creativity. The bicycle and le football introduced new pleasures; the Orient Express and wagons-lits brought new and stranger places within range of Parisians. As Paris assumed once more her eminence as the world’s centre of culture and pleasure, with every passing year it seemed increasingly impossible that the humiliation of 1870, let alone the Commune, had ever happened. National pride was further inflated by Louis Blériot’s feat in 1909 of hopping across the Channel in an aeroplane.

  In the country at large, the peasants were better clothed and fed than they had ever been; there was an abundance of good bread; consumption of wine and potatoes had increased by 50 per cent in the second half of the nineteenth century; consumption of meat, beer and cider by 100 per cent. Whereas the Third Republic had found a France in which French was a foreign language to half of its citizens, by 1913 a combination of communications such as roads, books, the press, posts and the telephone had welded together a remarkably united nation. In the realm of economics, marvels had been wrought, making France almost overnight, so it seemed, a great industrial power. After the British, French financiers were the bankers of the world. By 1913, France was producing 45,000 automobiles a year, making her the world leader. Between 1875 and 1913 a massive increase in state expenditure signified a proportionately large increase in social services. Her huge empire was flourishing and expanding. Yet, worryingly, France now had barely half the population of the new, vigorous German Empire, while in terms of overall commerce she had slipped behind both Britain and Germany.

  By the summer of 1900, however, Paris was keen to give a party, celebrating the national resurrection and putting aside worries about Dreyfus, Germany and Alsace-Lorraine. Expo 1900 was to outshine even the exhibitions of 1867 and 1889. As they crossed the bridge which Louis XVI had begun and the Revolution had completed with stones from the demolished Bastille, visitors arriving on the Place de la Concorde were greeted by a welcoming arch topped by an imposing Porte Monumentale, oriental in its exoticism, more than a little over the top. At its summit, instead of the conventional goddess of Progress or Enlightenment, stood a five-metre plaster-cast of La Parisienne by Paul Moreau-Vauthier, with a massive bosom and a gown specially designed by Paquin, welcoming the world with outstretched arms. Some thought it represented the new influence that had been achieved by women under the Third Republic. What was unmistakable, however, was its assertion once more of the city’s gender.

  As a symbol of Expo 1900 much more imposing, as well as significant in terms of contemporary political history, was the resplendent new bridge, Pont Alexandre III, which linked the exhibition grounds on both sides of the Seine. Today still the most dramatically magnificent bridge in Paris, its cornerstone had been laid four years previously by President Félix Faure and young Tsar Nicholas II in honour of the latter’s tyrannical father. Much more than just a bridge, its unique single span across the river of over a hundred metres marked the new alliance so recently forged (in 1894) between Republican France and a thoroughly repressive Russia, which would bring with it fateful consequences before a decade and a half of water had passed under it. At its inception, however, visitors admired the decorations depicting the past glories of France on each of its four monumental columns: on the Right Bank, France of the Middle Ages faced modern France; while, on the Left Bank, France of the Renaissance was paired with France of Louis XIV.

  It was here, at one end of the bridge, that, on 14 April 1900, President Loubet opened the exhibition. The site, on either bank of the Seine, was so vast that it had to be linked by a trottoir roulant, in itself a wonder of the modern world, powered by electricity, whose ever expanding usage was an underlying feature of the whole exhibition. The Palace of Electricity, granted an appropriately dominant position and studded with a galaxy of light bulbs, housed a mighty 3,000-horsepower steam generator produced by Germany’s Siemens which, belching out smoke, lit and powered the whole. (Climbing up the Eiffel Tower, Emile Zola took a remarkable photograph of it, framed by the girders of that triumphant edifice.) In contrast to previous exhibitions, offerings from the colossus across the Rhine were pacific—great dynamos instead of monster cannon. It was left to the host nation to show off her latest weapon, a long-range gun by Schneider-Creusot. But Germany had to have the last word: her model Hanseatic town boasted the highest spire in the exhibition in its re-creation of a gothic town hall.

  On the Right Bank, at the foot of the Trocadéro, the emphasis was on colonization, a demonstration of whither France had diverted her energies since the loss of Alsace-Lorraine (at a time when Bismarck was murmuring pointedly, “My map of Africa lies in Europe”). Opposite each other on the newly opened Avenue Alexandre III were the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais, specially run up for the exhibition, but as enduringly built as the Eiffel Tower, impressive marriages of glass and steel. Both Palais were dominated by French art, exhibiting more than 1,000 artists. “Paris,” one critic proclaimed, “has replaced Rome. The Foreigner, wherever his place of birth … comes to Paris to seek his art training, and is content merely to visit Italy and its admirable ‘Past,’ now suffering the kiss of death.” Klimt, Picasso, Rouault and Rodin were all assembled in the same cross-section as Burne-Jones, mirroring the juxtapositions of medieval Paris and the Palais de l’Electricité, and presaging Cubism, Surrealism and Abstractionism. Monumental French sculptures filled the great hall of the Grand Palais, while larger-than-life Rodin proclaimed his pre-eminence by both exhibiting in the Decennial Exhibition and presenting a retrospective of 150 of his works in his own pavilion at the Place de l’Alma. (Monet remained aloof, holding a one-man show at Durand-Ruel ten days after the exhibition closed.)

  That figure of La Parisienne which dominated the entrance to the 1900 Exposition was suggestive of just how far women had come in the Brave New Age. As Edith Wharton, embarking on a new life in the Rue de Varenne in 1906, observed with a touch of envy, “as soon as a woman [of Paris] has personality, social circumstances permit her to make it felt.” But then Paris was eternally the woman’s city. Even so the new century did seem to bring fresh horizons for women. There were women lawyers and women tennis players; there was Marie Laurencin with her soft pastel colours, perhaps the first woman to paint wholly as a woman; there was Marie Curie, the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, sharing both work and love in an idyllic marriage with Pierre, until he was killed in a senseless street accident, run over by a horse-drawn wagon. There was Misia with a plurality of husbands and lovers. And there was Colette, unhappily wed to the rascally Willy, who grabbed all the credit for her “Claudine” novels—she revenged herself in the arms of other women (notably the Marquise de Belboeuf, whose cocu husband came to blows with Willy during a pantomime in which Colette was performing). In the 1890s, the discovery of the poems of Sappho, coupled with publication of Pierre Loüys’s Songs of Bilitis (one of the great literary hoaxes of the time), demonstrated—to the advantage of many an appreciative Parisienne—that lesbianism had been respectable in classical times.

  In 1904 women’s daily working hours were reduced from eleven to ten; in 1907, a married woman was granted sole right to her earnings; in 1910, she was allowed eight weeks’ unpaid maternity leave; and in 1913 a minimum salary was established for women working at home. Yet, curious
ly, the Parisienne pushed much less hard than her English sister to get the vote. There were perhaps better ways in which she could influence the political scene.

  With all these changes and new openings inevitably came a dramatic change in dress. Women had to be physically mobile, to be able to clamber into a bus, or get into the new Métro, or into a teuf-teuf. The cumbersome bustle disappeared, and between 1900 and 1908 the “Swan Bend” took over, based on a tight corset and a prominent bust and behind. Long tight-fitting skirts and leg-of-mutton sleeves entered the scene. Then the new designer Paul Poiret, operating from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, launched into something like a resuscitated “Empire” line—high waist, almost no bust, and no corset, straight and simple. The traditional S became an exclamation mark. The only concession to the extravagance of the past was the large, wide-brimmed hat topped with one huge plume. Nineteen-ten brought the hobble skirt, in which a woman could walk only by taking tiny steps—eventually made more practical with the addition of discreet pleats or slits at the side. Between 1908 and 1914 fashions, most inconsiderately, speeded up so that a girl could no longer get away with last summer’s frock; and many a Parisienne would change five times a day. With Poiret’s new fashions came the first scent produced by a couturier: Le Fruit Défendu, smelling of peaches. And with the new fashions also came new, daring dances—the cakewalk and the tango, the latter forbidden to officers in uniform in Germany, but thriving in Proustian Paris.

  DEEPENING THE DIVISIONS

  On the whole Paris’s salute to the new century was voted a triumph. Staying open until November, Expo 1900 attracted 50,860,801 visitors—fewer than expected, but still more than the entire population of the host nation. More fundamentally, it seemed to have launched the twentieth century with a new mood of hope, indeed a positive quest for joy, turning its back on what the Catholic polemicist Léon Bloy called “the painful and abject nineteenth century.” In Paris, beyond the exhibition grounds, there were many signs of material progress. That July the first Métro opened, cutting the journey from Maillot to Vincennes from ninety minutes to twenty-five, and enlivening the Paris scene with its station entrances of pure Art Nouveau. Cars thronged the streets, many driven by chic, emancipated women in beekeeper-style veils to keep out the dust. Meanwhile, to demonstrate their own faith in the kind of future they were determined to obtain, including peace among all men, in October the Socialists held two huge congresses in the Salle Wagram under the aegis of the great Jean Jaurès.

  Yet, if to France and her well-wishers Expo 1900 seemed to herald a century of human progress, to the Kaiser and the nervy sabre-rattlers of Berlin the magnificent Pont Alexandre III represented the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, which in turn meant the encirclement of Germany—Berlin’s great fear. Amid all the razzmatazz, one manifestation Germans would not have missed that summer was the sombre procession of men in black velvet suits, carrying flags of black crêpe through the Concorde, as they did every 14 July. Before the stone female figure of Strasbourg they made emotive speeches, followed by several minutes’ silence, and then moved off chanting, “Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine!”

  If there was one aspect that changed immeasurably during the Belle Epoque, and in changing had changed life in Paris, it was the press. From the handful of journals under the Second Empire, numbers had multiplied. Opening in 1886, one new review, La Vogue, lasted only nine months, but in that time it managed to build up a circulation of 15,000. This expansion was good news for writers and artists, assured of a receptacle for their writings and of critiques for their oeuvres, but at the same time cut-throat competition led to a pursuit of sensation, coûte que coûte. A shortage of sensation at home led to virulence in foreign affairs, fuelling the flames of populist nationalism, with the consequences too horribly predictable as memories of the actual horrors of war faded with every passing year.

  In the political arena, the years 1900–14 offered much for the Paris press to get its teeth into. First of all, the triumph of the Dreyfusards signalled a reaction back to militant anti-clericalism, hovering in the background ever since 1789. L’affaire brought the Radicals to the fore, with the right (which was seen closely to embrace both the Church and the army) as the enemy. In 1902, Emile Combes, a sixty-nine-year-old anti-clerical politican, came to power in Paris determined to complete the separation of Church and state in France. Possessed of all the prejudices of the small-town provincial, Combes legislated against “unauthorized” religious orders (some of which had admittedly intervened in a most rashly improper fashion during the Dreyfus affair). Schools were closed, religious processions stopped. In the expropriations of nunneries and monasteries, wanton pillaging occurred. The army was finally called in to effect the expropriations, thereby confronting its officers with a grave issue of conscience. Typical was the case of a lieutenant-colonel who, on asking what his superior was going to do, was told “I have ’flu,” whereupon, in a rage transcending rank, he seized his regimental commander fiercely, shouting, “I suppose when the war comes you will have ’flu too!”

  Combes’s law exacerbated divisions within the army, to a large extent widening the same chasm dug by l’affaire. Worse still, as a consequence of Dreyfus, the responsibility for promotions had been transferred from the army commission to the Minister of War. The newly appointed, anti-clerical General André abused his power deplorably. Officers were set to spying on each other; the Grand Orient Lodge of the freemasons was used as an intelligence service to establish dossiers on their religious persuasions; promotion became more a matter of an officer’s political views, and particularly to which church he went on Sundays, and how often, than of merit. Able officers like Foch, whose brother was a Jesuit, and de Castelnau—accompanied to the front in 1914 by his own private chaplain—would always be at a disadvantage. It was no coincidence that in 1911 the office of the new Chief of the General Staff fell to a general who ostentatiously ate meat on Good Friday.

  L’affaire, Combes and André were followed by the most intense bout of Socialist-led anti-militarism that France had experienced since 1870. All politicians distrusted the General Staff. The repute of the army sank to its lowest ebb. In 1905, a new Act reduced military service to two years, and army effectives declined from 615,000 to 540,000. In Germany the new Kaiser with his bellicose moustaches noted all this, and waited.

  THE ARTS

  To muster and market the great burst of painting that followed on from the Impressionists, three years after the Exposition of 1900 closed its doors there opened in the basement of the Petit Palais the first of the Salons d’Automne. There was also the Salon des Indépendants, founded in 1884 by breakaways like Seurat, Signac and Redon. This had no selection committee, which explained how an unclassifiable primitive like the sweetly ingenuous “Douanier” Rousseau found space on its walls. Rousseau was so loved by his eminent colleagues they gave him a special banquet in 1908, in the midst of which he engagingly fell asleep while a candle dripped wax unnoticed on his recumbent head. In contrast to Monet, Renoir and Cézanne, Vuillard and Bonnard took Impressionism indoors, as often as not to paint the comforts of an increasingly affluent bourgeois world.

  This was not, however, the habitat which most of their colleagues knew. Matisse’s miserable studio was so cold he had to work in overcoat and hat; Picasso’s early lodgings in Montmartre, as described by his then mistress Fernande Olivier, consisted mainly of “a mattress on four legs in one corner. A little rusty cast-iron stove with a yellow earthenware bowl on it which was used for washing …” As late as 1907 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of a new breed of keen-eyed private dealers, could record, “Nobody can imagine the poverty, the deplorable misery of those studios in the Rue Ravignan … The wallpaper hung in tatters from the unplastered walls.” Yet it was then that he set eyes on the huge Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the first examples of Cubism, and later to be worth several kings’ ransoms.

  In 1903, James Joyce wrote to thank his mother for a postal order of three shill
ings and fourpence, “as I had been without food for 42 hours.” The previous year Trotsky had found an exiled Lenin living in straitened circumstances near the Parc Montsouris; Trotsky thought that Paris was “like Odessa—but Odessa is better!” Among the painters up at Montmartre, Vlaminck played gypsy music on the violin to live; Derain worked as a professional boxer; while Van Dongen unloaded vegetables and sold newspapers. Picasso was saved from the gutter when a Catalan dealer, his first, paid him 150 francs a month—just enough to live on. Then, in 1906, Ambroise Vollard paid him 2,000 francs for thirty canvases. Two years later Matisse was saved by a wealthy Russian entrepreneur, Sergei Schukine, who commissioned two large panels of dancers for his Moscow mansion, and subsequently bought no fewer than thirty-seven other canvases. It was fortunate for Matisse and others that such wealthy and discerning patrons existed—one of the more lastingly beneficial spin-offs of the highly questionable Franco-Russian alliance.

  In the wake of the miraculous richesse of the Impressionists, Paris continued to be the epicentre of modern art. The immortal Cézanne died senselessly of hypothermia after being caught in a storm in 1906, aged sixty-seven, but close on the heels of his great legacy came the Nabis (derived from the Jewish word for prophet) movement of Sérusier, Bonnard and Vuillard. Then there was the scandalizing new group led by Matisse, which proudly assumed the pejorative nickname of Fauves: entering this world of flamboyant colour at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, a critic had exclaimed that it was “Donatello au milieu des fauves” (Donatello in the wild beasts’ den). Matisse, son of a grain-dealer from Flanders, Dufy, Vlaminck and Van Dongen were all northerners seeking refuge from greyness in the exuberant colours of the south, influenced by a Picasso just emerging from his exquisitely colourful Pink Period. To a romantic like Apollinaire, Matisse represented “Instinct regained!” At all these exhibitions of the early 1900s, in sharpest contrast to the sedate vernissages of London and New York, viewers would give vent to the most powerful emotions, sometimes almost coming to blows in a manner more comparable to the Paris theatre through the ages.