The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  The statue of Napoléon after the toppling of the Vendôme Column, May 16, 1871

  One witness to the events of May 16 claimed the toppling caused "no concussion on the ground" since the pavement of the Place Vendôme had been prepared with a bed of sand, branches and manure.40 In the world of French art, however, the fall of the Vendôme Column would reverberate for many years to come.

  Adolphe Thiers was known to his enemies as "Père Transnonain." The nickname alluded to how in 1834, as King Louis-Philippe's Minister of the Interior, he had ordered the brutal suppression of a working-class insurrection in Paris, an act leading to a bloody massacre in the Rue Transnonain. Almost forty years later, his determination to annihilate the Paris Commune was every bit as strong. To that end, since the beginning of April 130,000 government troops had been preparing at secret camps for a second siege of Paris. Thiers was confident of the outcome. "A few buildings will be damaged," he predicted, "a few people killed, but the law will prevail."41 His friend Meissonier was much less optimistic. For the man who had painted Remembrance of Civil War twenty years earlier, the spectacle of the French fighting among themselves in the streets of Paris did not bear contemplation. "If the battle is engaged," he wrote gloomily, "whatever the result, it will be disastrous. Torrents of blood will be spilled and our wounds will be so great that they will be mortal."42

  Meissonier's worst fears were realized soon enough. The carnival of blood—or, as it came to be known, La Semaine Sanglante ("Bloody Week")—began on a Sunday, May 21, as government troops surged through the undefended Porte de Saint-Cloud, less than four miles southwest of the center of Paris. The Communards had prepared themselves for the inevitable onslaught by raising barricades throughout the city, hacking at Haussmann's new boulevards with pickaxes and prizing free the stones. Sandbags, upturned omnibuses, pieces of furniture, empty casks and piles of books were also used to build barricades. One at the Porte de la Chapelle, north of Montmartre, was even built—very much against his wishes—from the lumber out of which Courbet's 1867 pavilion had been constructed. But these barriers did little to check the inexorable advance of the government troops under the command of Marshal MacMahon, anxious to redeem himself for the disaster at Sedan.

  Thiers's prediction that "a few buildings will be damaged" proved, in the days that followed, a spectacular understatement. On May 23 the Palais des Tuileries, the former residence of Napoléon III, was set alight by the Communards as both a smoke screen and a rebuke to French imperial power. As the palace exploded and burned, the central cupola collapsed inward—an even more shocking symbol of destruction than the toppling of the Vendôme Column one week earlier. A wing of the Louvre also went up in flames, with the loss of 100,000 books; and over the next few days ever more buildings were torched: the Palais-Royal, the Palais de Justice, the Cour des Comptes, the Prefecture of Police (where only the accident of a burst waterpipe saved the Venus de Milo from incineration), and the Hôtel de Ville, where murals by Ingres, Delacroix and Cabanel were turned to ash. Strong winds whipped the flames higher, sweeping them along the Rue de Rivoli and the Boulevard de Sebastopol; dozens of houses were burned. Edmond de Goncourt could see from his home in the suburb of Auteuil "a fire which, against the night sky, looked like one of those Neapolitan gouaches of an eruption of Vesuvius."43

  Thiers's forecast of "a few people killed" was even more grotesquely understated. On the evening of May 24 the Archbishop of Paris was executed by firing squad in the prison where he had been held hostage for almost two months. His death was soon afterward followed by those of the ten Dominican monks who had been held with him, all of whom were shot, along with thirty-six gendarmes, in reprisal for the execution by government soldiers of Communard prisoners. From Rome, Pope Pius IX denounced the Communards as "men escaped from Hell," while Thiers solemnly announced to the National Assembly in Versailles: "I shall be pitiless. The expiation will be complete."44 He was true to his word. On May 27, the last Communard forces were defeated in their stronghold inside the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. From there, only thirty yards from Delacroix's tomb, they had been firing on the Versailles troops from a gun emplacement before the grandiose tomb of the Due de Morny, which had been converted into a munitions depot. The government soldiers lined up against a wall in the southeast corner of the cemetery 147 of the surrendering Communards and, in a foretaste of Thiers's pitiless method of expiation, turned on them a mitrailleuse that fired 150 rounds per minute. One day later, Marshal MacMahon announced that Paris had been delivered.

  The Hôtel de Ville after it was burned during the suppression of the Commune

  Though the Commune was at an end, the carnival of blood continued. The carnage was horrific even for a city that had witnessed the murderous excesses of the French Revolution. "The French," wrote a shocked correspondent from England, "are filling up the darkest page in the book of their own or the world's history."45 The Seine literally ran red with blood—a long red streak could be seen in the current beside the blackened shell of the Tuileries—as soldiers acting on orders from Thiers executed, in the days that followed, as many as 25,000 Communards.46 The prisoners were marched into parks, cemeteries and railway stations, where the mitrailleuses mercilessly dispatched them. By this point, many of the Communard leaders were already dead, including Rigault, who was shot in the head while defiantly shouting "Vive la Commune/" at the advancing troops. Courbet, too, was reported dead, supposedly having swallowed poison to escape falling into Thiers's clutches. When word of his death reached Ornans, his mother died of a heart attack. In fact, rumors of Courbet's death were greatly exaggerated. He was arrested, alive and well, on June 7, three days shy of his fifty-second birthday, and escorted to Versailles to face a military court.

  *The legislating body from the Second Empire, the Corps Législatif (Legislative Assembly), was renamed the Assemblee Nationale (National Assembly) by the Third Republic.

  *Since one of the bullets that killed General Clément-Thomas was fired by a chassepot, with which the government troops (but not the National Guard) were armed, there is good reason to suspect that elements in the French army were involved in the Montmartre uprising against the government.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Days of Hardship

  MEISSONIER RETURNED TO Paris a few days after the fighting had ceased. The stench of bodies was everywhere. As another visitor noted, there were "corpses in the streets, corpses in doorways, corpses everywhere."1 Yet, incredibly, the city was already starting to return to normal as the many residents who had fled after the events of March 18 returned in the first weeks of June. All were staggered by the sight of so many famous landmarks in ruin, but many found themselves moved, despite everything, by the eerie beauty of the devastation. Théophile Gautier was "saturated with horror" at so much death and destruction, yet confessed himself "struck, most of all, by the beauty of these ruins." His friend Edmond de Goncourt, a virulent anti-Communard, waxed poetical over the sight of the Hôtel de Ville, "a splendid, a magnificent ruin" that reminded him of "a magic palace, bathed in the theatrical glow of electric light." Jules Clarétie was equally impressed. "Ruined, burned and devastated, the Hôtel de Ville remains," he wrote, "the most superb of the Parisian ruins. Its primitive harmony has given way to a picturesque and funerary disorder which wrings one's heart, while offering to one's eyes one of those horribly beautiful spectacles that comes from such destruction."2 Within a fortnight of Bloody Week an English travel agency, Thomas Cook, was organizing special tours of the ruins. Photographers did a brisk trade, their stark images of the charred landmarks appearing in the windows of shops and even embarking on tours of cities as far afield as London and Liverpool.3

  Meissonier toured the ruins with a friend, the architect Hector Lefuel. A favorite of Napoléon III, the sixty-one-year-old Lefuel had built, among other things, the new Baroque-style addition to the Louvre that opened in 1857—and that would have become one more scorched tourist attraction had not rains fallen on May 26, extingu
ishing the fires that had consumed the Louvre's library. As the two men walked past the fire-gutted Tuileries, Meissonier's attention was caught by an arresting sight. Facing eastward, looking through the rubble of the Tuileries toward the Louvre, he could see, framed in the wreckage, the bronze sculptural group on top of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. This sixty-three-foot-high triumphal arch had been built at the same time as the Vendôme Column and, like the column, was intended to commemorate Napoléon's military victories. Originally it had been crowned with the four bronze horses looted by Napoléon from the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, but after the horses were returned to Venice in 1815 the sculptor François-Joseph Bosio was commissioned to make a replacement—the triumphal chariot that Meissonier could glimpse through the burned-out wreckage. Below this chariot, in the remains of the Tuileries, he could see a poignant but inspiring sight in the Salle des Maréchaux, the grand room that one of the Empress Eugénie's ladies-in-waiting had called "the finest in the palace."4 It had been the venue for the balls held each winter in the Tuileries during the Second Empire, and included among its lavish decorations were a series of shields bearing the names of Napoléon's victories. Two of these had survived the incineration that destroyed much of the rest of the palace. "I was suddenly struck," wrote Meissonier, "by the sight of the words, Marengo and Austerlitz, the names of two incontestable victories, which appeared, shining and intact. In an instant, I saw my picture."5

  Meissonier promptly installed himself in a nearby sentry box and went to work on a watercolor sketch of this symbolically charged scene. On a piece of paper sixteen inches wide he painted the piles of rubble, the precarious walls, the distant chariot and, at the very top, the two shields commemorating resplendent French victories. This plein-air work took a week, during which he also found time to indulge his passion for doodling on walls, sketching the figure of a horseman onto the side of the sentry box. A passing souvenir-hunter then helped himself to a genuine Meissonier, since the graffito "was cut out by someone," he later complained, "and taken I know not where." The sentry box had also served another purpose, that of protecting the painter from falling debris. He returned to the site one morning to have the watchman tell him: "Ah, Monsieur Meissonier! You had a narrow escape. You had scarcely left the place yesterday when this stone fell down, just where you had been standing." The stone, Meissonier observed, was "a huge fragment of the cornice, which would certainly have killed me."6

  Returning to his studio in Poissy, Meissonier turned his watercolor sketch into an oil painting entitled The Ruins of the Tuileries. At the bottom of the work he painted a foundation stone on which he inscribed the words GLORIA MAJORUM PER FLAMMAS USQUE SUPERSTES ("The glory of our forefathers survives the flames"). The meaning of the work was abundantly clear.7 It was not, like Remembrance of Civil War, a frank record of the bloody horrors of civil strife, displaying broken barricades and heaps of bodies. Meissonier wished to show, instead, that the glories of French history were undimmed and the potency of its symbols and monuments unsullied by these same sort of bloody horrors—and by events such as the felling of the Vendôme Column and the torching of the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville. The spirit of Napoléon, and of the French people, had survived Bloody Week, a survival epitomized by the words "Marengo" and "Austerlitz" emblazoned across the ruins and the triumphal chariot rising above them. This might have been wishful thinking in the dark aftermath of the Commune; but the vision, together with a passionate hatred of Gustave Courbet, was one that would guide and console Meissonier in the months to come.

  Édouard Manet returned to Paris at the end of May or beginning of June, after some fifteen weeks away from the capital.8 He arrived with Suzanne, Léon and his mother by train from Tours, in the Loire Valley, following a leisurely progress up the Atlantic coast that included stops in La Rochelle, Nantes and Saint-Nazaire. He had clearly been dallying along the coast, reluctant to return to Paris while the Communards were still in power. "I'm not looking forward to the return to Paris at all," he had written to Bracquemond from Arcachon a few days after the events of March 18.9 Upon his return, he was profoundly distressed by everything he saw. "What terrible events," he wrote to Berthe Morisot, who had left Paris for Cherbourg. "Will we ever recover from them? Everyone blames his neighbor, but the fact is that we're all responsible for what has happened."10

  Manet discovered that his studio in the Rue Guyot had been badly damaged during Bloody Week, though all his canvases, both in Théodore Duret's cellar and in the apartment in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg, remained intact. He immediately transported all of them to a new studio next door to his mother's apartment and, in the weeks that followed, began work on a lithograph entitled Civil War and a watercolor called The Barricade.

  According to legend, these two works were based on scenes he had personally witnessed after his return to Paris. Civil War depicted, in a scene reminiscent of Meissonier's Remembrance of Civil War, an overrun barricade beneath which a kepi-wearing National Guardsman lay dead, while The Barricade featured a firing squad blasting away at several captured Communards. Duret claimed this first work was based on a corpse Manet had seen sprawled at the corner of the Rue de 1'Arcade and the Boulevard Malesherbes. "He made an on-the-spot sketch of it," declared Duret.11 However, Duret was in America at the time and so could hardly have known firsthand what Manet did or did not see or sketch. His claim is highly dubious unless one can believe the corpse somehow arranged itself, through an astonishing coincidence, into exactly the pose Manet had used for his Dead Toreador, the figure excised seven years earlier from Incident in a Bull Ring. Rather than being an "authentic" piece of artistic reportage, Manet's Civil War was an obvious reworking of this earlier scene. Exactly the same can be said of The Barricade, an even more blatant revamping of The Execution of Maximilian. Manet clearly used artistic license rather than eyewitness observation or on-the-spot sketches in order to depict the horrors of Bloody Week and condemn political violence.12

  The Barricade (Édouard Manet)

  These were disillusioning days for Manet. Émile Zola, who had returned to Paris to find his apartment blessedly intact, wrote at this time to Cézanne: "Paris is being reborn. As I have often told you, our reign has begun!"13 But Manet could feel no such optimism. Even before the Commune he had complained to Bracquemond that there were "no disinterested people around, no great citizens, no true republicans, only party hacks and ambitious types."14 The civil strife brought on by the Commune and its brutal suppression made him even more angry and depressed about the state of French politics. His hatred of Adolphe Thiers—"a demented old man"15—was unbounded. The only politician in whom he put any store was Léon Gambetta, the lawyer and populist orator who had heroically organized the resistance against the Prussians following his white-knuckle balloon ride out of Paris. After resigning in March over the terms of the peace treaty negotiated by Thiers and then spending the weeks of the Commune in Spain, Gambetta returned to the National Assembly in a July by-election.

  Manet took to riding the train with Gambetta each morning to Versailles, where the National Assembly was still sitting. The two men had known one another for a number of years, since Gambetta, a thirty-three-year-old bachelor and dedicated bohemian, was no less than Manet an enthusiastic habitué of café society. In 1871 he was a radical revolutionary in the process of mellowing into a moderate and articulate spokesman for social equality. He was opposed to what he called "intriguers, adventurers, dictators, ruffians"—that is, the class of swashbuckling bankers, aristocrats and Bonapartists that, in his opinion, had ruled France for the years of the Second Empire. But he was equally against what he called "something even more grave, the unforeseen explosion of the inflamed masses, who suddenly obey their blind fury."16

  Gambetta's moderate political opinions, with their suspicion of both the radical left and the authoritarian right, no doubt reflected Manet's own convictions at this time. Manet made sketches of him on the train, trying to persuade him to sit for a portrait; bu
t Gambetta politely declined the offer. Notoriously ugly and unkempt, he was known as "Cyclops" after his right eye, injured in an accident in 1849, was surgically removed in 1867 and replaced with a glass one. He may have felt that a portrait of him executed by Manet would almost have been guaranteed to draw gibes from the critics and gleeful squirts of ink from the caricaturists.

  When not traveling with Gambetta to Versailles, Manet spent the summer of 1871 wandering aimlessly from one café to another. Gradually friends such as Degas and Éva Gonzales had returned to Paris, though Berthe Morisot, whose health suffered badly during the siege, remained in Cherbourg. Manet continued to see her mother, who found his behavior and opinions "insane" but, following a soirée at the Manet home, was able to report the good news to Berthe that "Mademoiselle Gonzales has grown ugly."17