by Ross King
With the Emperor ill and infirm, the events of the next fortnight unfolded with astonishing speed and a dreadful implacability. On July 2, the day following the examination, the Spanish Prime Minister, Juan Prim, announced that he had found a replacement for the unpopular Queen Isabella II, deposed in the "September Revolution" of 1868. After scouring the royal houses of Europe, Prim had decided to offer the Spanish crown to a Hohenzollern prince named Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, brother of the King of Romania and a distant relative of King Wilhelm of Prussia. The choice did not sit well with Louis-Napoléon. Though he too was distantly related to Prince Leopold, who was the grandson of Napoléon Bonaparte's niece, Stéphanie de Beauharnais, he was worried that the Prussians, with a Hohenzollern ensconced on the Spanish throne, together with their recent territorial advances in Central Europe, would in effect have France surrounded. As the French Foreign Minister, the Due de Gramont, phrased it, the coronation would "disturb the European equilibrium to our disadvantage."6
On July 9, therefore, the French ambassador to Prussia, Comte Vincent Benedetti, met four times with King Wilhelm, who was taking the waters at the resort town of Ems, near Koblenz. Prince Leopold could not accept the throne without first asking permission from the head of the Hohenzollern family—namely, King Wilhelm—and Louis-Napoléon made it clear, through Benedetti, that he wished the King to withhold his consent. When Wilhelm politely acceded to his wishes, Prince Leopold withdrew his candidature on July 12, a move hailed by Ollivier as a triumph for France and a humiliation for Prussia. Yet not everyone in France was delighted at this peaceful outcome, in large part because of the way Otto von Bismarck had affronted the French by refusing to hand over territories along the Rhine as payment for French neutrality in the war that Prussia fought against Austria in 1866. "The country will be disappointed," Louis-Napoléon cabled Ollivier, "but what can we do?"7 The Emperor was correct. The press, the public, the politicians, even the Empress Eugénie (who had supposedly exclaimed "This is my war")—all were not a little disgruntled that there would be no war to check the territorial advance of what Alexandre Dumas père had called the "Prussian Terror." Almost the only person in France who did not desire a war with Prussia was, it seems, the Emperor himself.8
Louis-Napoléon nevertheless agreed with the decision taken by Ollivier and his Cabinet to have Benedetti—in a deliberately provocative move—press the King of Prussia for a further guarantee. On July 13, accordingly, Benedetti approached the seventy-three-year-old Wilhelm on the promenade at Ems, asking him to repudiate forever the possibility of a Hohenzollern accepting the Spanish crown. Wilhelm sternly refused, then gave instructions for a telegram recounting this latest twist—the famous "Ems Telegram"—to be sent to Bismarck, his Minister-President. Bismarck was as eager for a war with France as the French were for a war with Prussia. Having over the past four years given a burly embrace to most of Germany's thirty-eight disparate duchies, princedoms and city-states, he believed a crisis such as a Franco-Prussian conflict would unite the remaining states, including Bavaria and Württemberg, into a single power under the leadership of Prussia. He therefore seized on the strategy of editing the telegram to make the King's words seem more defiant and insulting than in the original, then publishing the doctored text in the newspapers. Wilhelm's original telegram had stated that he had nothing further to say to Benedetti because word had arrived in Ems that Prince Leopold was withdrawing his candidature. Bismarck cunningly omitted this reference to news of Leopold's withdrawal, thus making the King's refusal to grant a further audience to Benedetti look like a direct result of Benedetti's request—and an insult to France. Bismarck predicted that the amended telegram would serve as "a red rag to the Gallic bull."9 He could not have judged his prospective enemy more astutely. "Everyone wants to eat Prussians," Théophile Gautier observed of the jingoistic crowds in Paris following the telegram's publication. "If anyone spoke in favor of peace, he would be killed on the spot."10 Within days the Due de Gramont was announcing that a state of war existed between France and Prussia.
In 1806 the French under Napoléon had defeated the Prussians in a six-week campaign, trouncing them with such aplomb at the Battle of Jena that the philosopher Hegel had been moved to celebrate Napoléon as the "world soul." In 1870 all signs indicated that the outcome would be otherwise. The French military attaché in Berlin had recently made a chilling observation: "Prussia is not a country which has an army. Prussia is an army which has a country."11 King Wilhelm, a professional soldier who spent his adolescence fighting the Grande Armée, was able to field an army of 500,000 men with 160,000 reserves, numbers that could virtually be doubled when he called on the other German states in the Confederation.12 Louis-Napoléon, on the other hand, had at his disposal only 3 50,000 men, 60,000 of whom were occupied in Algeria with 6,000 more protecting the pope in Rome.13 Yet despite the size and strength of the Prussian war machine, the French were strangely confident of victory. Their soldiers were equipped with the chassepôt, the most advanced rifle of the day, a weapon unveiled at the Universal Exposition in 1867. They also had a more secret—and deadly—invention called the mitrailleuse, a machine gun with twenty-five rotating barrels that could fire 150 rounds a minute.
Ollivier had announced in the Legislative Assembly that he was declaring war "with a light heart."14 The Minister of War, Marshal Edmond Leboeuf, assured his countrymen that the war against the Prussians would be a "mere stroll, walking stick in hand."15 In the days following the announcement, Parisians marched along the boulevards chanting "Vive la guerre." A soprano named Madame Sasse sang the Marseillaise in the streets dressed in the costume of the "Goddess of France," while another singer, Mademoiselle Therese, belted it out in the Théâtre-Gaieté in the costume of a waitress. Crowds besieged the enlisting offices, and a troop of soldiers paraded with a parrot trained to squawk "To Berlin!"
"It is in this frivolous spirit," an English newspaper reported, "that the nation which pretends to consider itself the most civilized in the world enters upon a war the terrible consequences of which few dare trust themselves to contemplate."16 One of the few who dared was Gautier. "Who knows," he asked nervously, "what measureless conflagration will devour Europe?"17
The French headquarters for the war against the Prussians became Metz, a city on the River Moselle that lay within striking distance of the Rhineland. Its attractions included a Roman aqueduct and a Gothic cathedral. More to the point, it had thick defensive walls and a powerful fortress known, because it had never been captured, as La Pucelle ("The Virgin"). Metz had not been taken by the enemy, in fact, since it was plundered in the middle of the fifth century by the forces of Attila the Hun. In the summer of 1870 its residents prepared themselves for battle with the modern-day Huns led by Otto von Bismarck.
Ernest Meissonier arrived in Metz at the end of July, within a fortnight of the declaration of war. He had abandoned both Friedland—which he believed himself close to finishing at last—as well as his studio in Poissy and, in a repeat of his expedition to the Italian front in 1859, set off on Lady Coningham, his beloved mare, for the 175-mile journey In his luggage was a supply of sketching materials as well as official papers impressively announcing him as "Monsieur Meissonier, on special service."18 He was hoping to record a French victory such as Solferino or, better yet, Jena or Friedland. Emma had been very much against the enterprise, attempting to dissuade her husband, by then a fifty-five-year-old grandfather, from risking his neck for the sake of a painting. But Meissonier was adamant. "Don't worry that I will let myself get intoxicated by the smell of powder," he wrote home to her. "It isn't the horrible things of war that I want to paint, it's the life of the soldier, the strange and picturesque behavior of which one cannot have any idea when one hasn't seen it."19
Otto von Bismarck
Meissonier was received by the staff at the Emperor's headquarters in Metz "almost as a herald of victory,"20 but very soon he became aware that French preparations were not everything they might
have been. The 200,000 troops gathered in the region—Meissonier's students Maurice Courant and Lucien Gros among them—were dismally provisioned. The trains carrying them to the front had been overcrowded and running late, and when they finally arrived in Metz the men found themselves short of tents, kettles, sugar, coffee and cooking pots, as well as maps and ammunition. Even horses were in short supply because Marshal Leboeuf, in a staggering display of shortsightedness and sheer stupidity, had sold many of them due to the lack of fodder caused by the summer's drought.21 The soldiers did manage to find alcohol, however, and many quickly became insensible and, as a natural matter of course, undisciplined and indisposed—drunken antics that were not quite the "strange and picturesque behavior" Meissonier had been hoping to capture on canvas. He also discovered, to his own inconvenience, a shortage of billets. He had been expecting to stay with "a friend of friends of mine," an engineer named Prooch, but due to some oversight Prooch had no quarters to offer him. The most eminent painter in France thereby found himself occupying "a humble room" in the riverside home of a family of "poor but decent people."22
The Emperor had been accommodated in a more befitting style. His headquarters in Metz, to which he had come to assume personal command of the forces, was a private train appointed with oak paneling, Aubusson tapestries and Louis XV furniture. But he too felt his spirits sink at the sight of his ill-provisioned and ill-disciplined troops. "Nothing is ready," he wrote to Empress Eugénie soon after arriving. "We do not have sufficient troops. I regard us already as lost."23 This pessimism was born of his superstition as much as his growing awareness of the idiocy and incompetence of his various generals. Before departing from Paris he had paid a visit to his most recent mistress, a golden-haired Belgian countess named Louise de Mercy-Argenteau, who was surprised to see him extract from his pocketbook a scrap of paper covered in mysterious hieroglyphics. It was a horoscope, he told her, that had been discovered among his mother's possessions after her death, and that predicted the entire course of his life. "So my reign is to finish," Louis-Napoléon had informed the startled countess on the eve of his departure for Metz, "and the Prussians are to be victorious."24
The Emperor's horoscope swiftly assumed a grim air of infallibility. As battle was joined at the beginning of August, the dash of the French officers and their gorgeous uniforms—the bearskin shakos, the gold braid, the tasseled turbans and stylish cutaway tunics—proved themselves no match for ruthless Prussian steel, especially the fifty-ton cannon manufactured by Alfred Krupp and menacingly displayed at the Universal Exposition three years earlier. The French troops were defeated on August 4 at Wissembourg and then two days later at battles in Forbach and Worth; at the latter battle, in Alsace, the legendary cuirassiers showed themselves dismally ineffective against the awesome long-range Prussian firepower. "Farewell forever to military pictures!" sighed a disconsolate Meissonier, packing away his paints and brushes.25
The Emperor too despaired at these defeats. He began making plans for a hasty return to Paris, but Eugénie, sensing the hostile mood of the capital, informed him he could not show his face without a victory. Already angry crowds were encircling the Palais Bourbon, which housed the Legislative Assembly, and noisily demanding a republic. On the twelfth, the Emperor handed command of the army to François-Achille Bazaine, a general who had the dubious distinction of having led the French exodus from Mexico in 1867. He then retreated in a third-class railway carriage to Chalons-sur-Marne, midway between Paris and Metz. Bazaine and his troops were promptly defeated at the Battle of Vionville and then a few days later at Gravelotte-Saint-Privat, a few miles west of Metz. Cowardice as well as incompetence had by then infected the French ranks, since several cavalry regiments were reported to have wheeled and taken flight at the cry "The Prussians are coming!"26 Clearly French military valor had wilted since the days when Napoléon's Gros Frères bestrode the continent. Otto von Bismarck, in the Prussian camp, gleefully wrote home to his wife Johanna that the war was "as good as ended, unless God should manifestly intervene for France, which I trust will not happen."27
Soon after the defeats of August 6, Meissonier retreated from Metz, "with my heart like lead." On the morning following the disaster at Worth, he had come across Marshal Leboeuf, the man who had claimed the war would be a "mere stroll, walking stick in hand." His obvious dejection and defeatism left Meissonier "overflowing with sadness and despair" and determined to get out of Metz while he still could. "How right you were to try to prevent my starting!" he wrote despondently to Emma. He set forth at three o'clock in the morning, encountering only a column of defeated soldiers making for the safety of the city's fortress. "I was dressed in the queerest fashion," he later wrote. Leaving all his luggage in the care of the unreliable Prooch, he had set off on Lady Coningham wearing a gray cloak, a straw hat and a pair of holsters into which, for want of weapons, he had thrust several bars of soap. His Cross of the Legion of Honor was around his neck. "In this strange getup," he wrote, "I might easily, in the disturbed state of men's minds, have been taken for a spy." In fact, a day later, halting at an inn near Gravelotte, he was subjected to the "distrustful eyes" and suspicious murmurs of the other patrons. A sergeant of gendarmes was promptly summoned, and Meissonier escaped arrest, or worse, only when he produced his "on special service" papers. Thirty miles from Metz, at the citadel in Verdun, he met an old friend, Colonel Dupressoir, who had since been promoted to the rank of general. Dupressoir promptly arranged for his evacuation from the theater of war on a cattle train. Meissonier's war was thereby ended, along with any aspirations to paint a heroic French victory.28
On August 30 the French met with yet another defeat, this time at Beaumont-sur-Meuse. The Emperor, who had returned to the front, was forced to fall back on Sedan, a small citadel town on the right bank of the River Meuse. With him were Marshal Patrice MacMahon, a hero of the Crimean War, and 100,000 troops.* MacMahon was promptly wounded in the leg by Prussian gunfire. He turned over his command to Général Ducrot, who, realizing that the hills surrounding Sedan would make excellent emplacements for the deadly Prussian cannons, uttered the memorable words: "We're in a chamberpot and about to be shat upon."29 It was a statement displaying a foresight thitherto alien to the French military command.
The Battle of Sedan commenced on the first of September, with the Prussian artillery blasting the city as the French cavalry, heroically but suicidally redeeming itself, charged to its inevitable destruction. "Ah! The brave fellows!" exclaimed King Wilhelm as he witnessed the carnage.30 Among them was the Emperor himself, who spent five hours in the saddle. He was suffering excruciating pain not only from his bladder stone but also (like his uncle at Waterloo) from hemorrhoids. Towels had to be stuffed into his breeches to sop up the blood. "The agony must have been constant," one of his doctors later claimed. "I cannot understand how he would have borne it."31 Realizing that all was lost, the Emperor repeatedly exposed himself to the fire of enemy guns, doing his best to die in the battle. When even that tactic failed—he lamented bitterly that he was "not even able to get himself killed"32—he ordered the white flag of surrender to be raised above the citadel at three fifteen in the afternoon.
The Second Empire of Napoléon III had reached its inglorious end. A day later, Louis-Napoléon turned over his sword to King Wilhelm at the Château de Bellevue and then, escorted by a troop of black-caped Death's Head Hussars, went as a prisoner to Wilhelmshohe, a Château near Cassel that was once owned—in an ironic twist of fate—by one of his uncles, King Jerome of Westphalia. "Poor Emperor!" wrote Théophile Gautier. "What a lamentable end to a dazzling dream!"33
*The Celtic surname of Marshal MacMahon (1808—1893) is explained by the fact that he was descended from an Irish Catholic family from County Clare that went into French exile with King James II of England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. MacMahon was given his marshal's baton and created Due de Magenta by Napoléon III for distinguished service in the war against Austria in 1859.
C
HAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Last Days of Paris
THREE DAYS AFTER the defeat at Sedan, Ernest Meissonier visited a friend who lived in the Rue de Rome, Louis-Joseph-Ernest Cézanne, an engineer who until recently had served as Director of the Ottoman Railway. "We were broken down," wrote Meissonier, "completely demoralized by the terrible news of the surrender of the whole army at Sedan." The news was terrible indeed: 83,000 French soldiers were in Prussian hands at Sedan, while another 17,000 lay dead or wounded on the battlefield. Meanwhile the Army of the Rhine was pinned down at Metz and the city of Strasbourg was under siege.
Meissonier was therefore surprised, on leaving the house with Cézanne, to find crowds marching through the streets around the Gare Saint-Lazare showing their "enthusiasm" and "wild delight." "The contrast with our own state of mind," he wrote of this blithe company, "astounded us at first." But Meissonier's republican instincts were rapidly stirred as he heard the mobs chanting "Vive la République!1For on that day, a new republic—the so-called Third Republic—had been declared at the Hôtel de Ville.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," an English visitor to France, William Wordsworth, had written about the birth of the First Republic.2 Some eighty years later, republican bliss in Paris was undimmed. Crowds gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville had cheered wildly as Léon Gambetta, the new Minister of the Interior, declared from the window that "Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and his dynasty have forever ceased to reign in France."3 That evening, a throng of 200,000 people surrounded the Tuileries to sing the Marseillaise. The city received a republican revamp as lampposts along the boulevards were decked with red crepe and statues of the Emperor were vandalized and tossed into the Seine. The name of the Avenue de I'Empereur was changed, with the help of placards and a bucket of paint, to "Avenue Victor Noir" and a stretch of the Boulevard Haussmann to "Boulevard Victor Hugo." Hugo himself appeared in Paris on September 5, following a nineteen-year exile and a seven-hour train ride from Belgium. At the Gare du Nord he shook thousands of hands, delivered speeches to the cheering multitudes, and issued defiant proclamations to the Prussians. He then installed his mistress, Juliette, in the Hôtel Rohan in the Rue de Rivoli and moved himself into the house of the dramatist Paul Meurice, where he began democratically entertaining compliant young females of all social classes and harboring dreams of hearing himself acclaimed incontestable head of the republic.4