Paris and Mexico, March-June 1863
THE WOMAN WHO took off her clothes was handsome rather than beautiful. Although the painting for which she was to pose depicted a picnic in a park, the woman undressed indoors, in the studio; the artist to whom she was to sit would not undertake his first experiments in pleinairisme until the end of the decade. When Victorine Meurent stood completely naked, it was evident that her body was well formed; her legs in particular were finely shaped. She sat down and, resting her right arm on her knee, clutched her chin thoughtfully.
According to one tradition, preserved by the novelist Émile Zola, Mademoiselle Meurent had at first been unwilling to pose for Edouard Manet. The artist was at work on Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,18 a painting which depicts, in a manner reminiscent of Goya and Velásquez, two men and two women enjoying a picnic lunch. The men are clothed, after the fashion of Parisian Bohemians. In the background, one of the women, a brunette, stoops to pick flowers; she is loosely draped in a chemise. The other woman, who sits beside the two men amid various articles of discarded clothing, is nude.
In Zola’s fictional retelling, the artist was in despair as the picture progressed. Only a certain model would do for the nude study, and she hesitated to strip in a studio and expose herself to the scrutiny of a painter. One day, however, she acceded to the prayer in the artist’s eyes. “Without any hurry,” Zola wrote in his fictional re-creation of the episode, “she took off her hat and coat, as usual. Then she simply went on with the same tranquil movements: unfastened her bodice, dropped her petticoats, stepped out of her corset, unbuttoned the chemise that now slipped down over her hips. She had not spoken a word; she seemed to be somewhere else, as on those evenings when, lost in a dream, she would undress automatically, without paying any attention to what she was doing. . . . Still without speaking, now entirely naked, she lay down on the divan and took the pose, one arm beneath her head, her eyes closed.”
Zola’s account is fanciful. Victorine Meurent, nineteen years old in 1863, was a professional artist’s model, accustomed to the immodesty of the studio. For all the primness of the Victorian age, the nude flourished as a form of art. Nevertheless, Manet’s depiction of his naked model in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe caused a sensation in the spring of 1863. The painting was immediately adjudged scandalous. The jurors of the Salon, the annual exhibition of contemporary art in Paris, refused to allow the work to be exhibited.
It was not the nudity alone of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe that shocked. The Salon jurors had that very year accepted a far more provocatively posed nude by the painter Alexandre Cabanel. Cabanel’s painting depicted a full-figured blonde in a posture of voluptuous abandon. Cabanel, however, prudently gave his painting the title The Birth of Venus. He threw over its eroticism the veil of the antique. Manet’s nude, by contrast, was not a mythical goddess but a contemporary Frenchwoman. “She is the sort of girl you might have met any day of the week hurrying up la rue Blanche,” the critic Clive Bell said, “and she has unmistakably been taken out for a picnic by two young gentlemen whom you might have met any day in the quartier des Batignolles.”
In the Second Empire such controversies eventually reached the throne. On a spring morning in 1863 the French Emperor, Napoleon III, went to the Palais de l’Industrie to see the painting with his own eyes. The Emperor possessed an aesthetic sense, or at any rate an appreciation of feminine form. His exertions as a lover no less than as a politician had been strenuous. But Louis-Napoleon, who now suffered acutely from a urinary complaint, was unequal to the rigors of the seraglio. The flesh was a burden to him, and in something like terror he complained to his cousin, Princess Mathilde, that he found himself pursued by lascivious maenads in the galleries of the Tuileries.
He walked the graveled paths and cast-iron mezzanines of the Palais de l’Industrie inspecting works of art. He came to Manet’s painting. He studied it. The picture, he said, offended his “pudeur,” his modesty. The judgment might have been nothing more than the expression of a conventional taste. It might, again, have been ironical—the phlegmatic wit of an old roué. Most likely it betrayed fatigue; the Emperor was too weary to attempt a more penetrating bon mot. However, he wished to be just. He commanded that those artists who, like Manet, had been refused permission to exhibit their works in the Salon should be permitted to display their rejected art elsewhere in the building.
The Salon des Refusés was born. Yet the Emperor could not resist a gesture that revealed where his personal sympathies lay. He purchased Monsieur Cabanel’s Birth of Venus for 15,000 francs.
Louis-Napoleon’s acts were characteristic of the equivocal policy of his régime. The Second Empire of the Bonapartes was founded on a contradiction. It was an assertion of Napoleonic will, the majesty of a dynasty. Yet it was also grounded in the suffrages of the people, and consecrated to the liberation of nations. The Emperor himself was simultaneously a dictator and an emancipator. The confusion was evident in his title. He styled himself Emperor “par la grâce de Dieu et la volonté nationale”—by the grace of God and the national will. Despotic though his government was in form, its beau ideal was freedom. He had, ever since his accession, championed the right of nations to determine their destinies for themselves. In 1859 he passed the Alps, defeated the Austrians at Magenta and Solferino, and banished the black-and-yellow banners of the Habsburgs from Lombardy. A short time later Italy was free. A Parliament met at Turin, and a constitutional monarch, Victor Emmanuel, took his seat on the throne of a new nation. When, in 1863, Polish patriots rose up against their Russian masters, Louis-Napoleon championed their cause. But his own subjects grumbled. The Italians were free, and if the Emperor had his way the Poles would be too. Yet the French were not.
Louis-Napoleon attempted to appease the popular clamors by granting his people rudimentary rights. But the taste of freedom only whetted the appetites of his subjects, and by degrees the spirit of opposition revived. The imperial régime became unpopular and, what was more distressing, it became unfashionable. Englishmen and Americans expect their governments to be unfashionable. It is otherwise in France, where by a long tradition the government that governs best governs glamorously. The French state exists to make manifest the formal and exquisite qualities of the French civilization. The court of Louis XIV embodied the inspirations of the Grand Siècle; the Versailles of the Sun King was cast in the same classic mold as the art of Poussin and Racine. A dozen decades later the court of Napoleon the Great exhibited all the splendors of a civilization passing from its classic to its romantic phase. But what éclat the great Napoleon’s nephew still possessed was remote from the temper of his time. Mademoiselle Meurent, sitting naked on the canvas of Manet’s Déjeuner sur I’herbe, made a mockery of the Emperor’s recycled Golden Eagles, the superstitious talismans of the Bonapartes.
Constrained in his quest for mastery in Europe, Louis-Napoleon turned his eyes toward the Americas. When the Mexican President, Benito Juárez, suspended payment on foreign debts, the French Emperor affected outrage, and under the pretense of protecting creditors he sent a French army to Vera Cruz. The French force, penetrating into the interior of the country, sought to subdue Mexico City, but on May 5, 1862, it was repulsed by Mexican troops before the walls of Puebla. Louis-Napoleon dispatched fresh troops and a new commander to the scene. In July 1862, General François-Achille Bazaine was made commander of the 1st Division of Infantry, Corps expéditionnaire du Mexique, and the following month he sailed from the French naval base at Toulon. Bazaine resembled a prosperous shopkeeper more than he did a future marshal of France; only his eyes, which were cunning and narrow, hinted at the intelligence which lay concealed behind the façade of complacency, and offered a clue to the enigmatic character of one who would play a memorable, though not an enviable, part in the crisis in which the decade culminated.
Louis-Napoleon’s mood brightened when he learned that Bazaine had avenged the French arms and taken Puebla. A short time later the Emperor rejoiced in the tidings
that the commander had entered Mexico City unopposed. Six decades after his uncle sold Louisiana to President Jefferson, Louis-Napoleon had established a new French imperium in the Americas. But it was a precarious one. Much hinged on the fate of Lincoln’s revolution. Four decades before Lincoln came to power, President Monroe, on the advice of his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, had acted on one of Alexander Hamilton’s old counsels: he had warned the European powers against interfering in the affairs of “any portion” of the New World. Should the Confederacy fall, Washington would lose little time in working to expel the French from Mexico. Louis-Napoleon affected amity towards the government of Lincoln, but he quietly did what he could to further the cause of the Confederacy.
On June 18, the Emperor received the Confederate emissary John Slidell in the Tuileries. Louis-Napoleon was gracious to the Louisianan. He expatiated on the bravery of the Southern troops, the skill of the Southern generals, and the devotion of the Southern people. He expressed his “great regret at the death of Stonewall Jackson,” whom he “considered as one of the most remarkable men of the age.” He was, he said, “more fully convinced than ever of the propriety of the general recognition by European powers of the Confederate States.” But he regretted to say that the success of his Mexican expedition would be jeopardized by a rupture with President Lincoln. Of course, Louis-Napoleon said, it would be something else altogether were the British to join him in recognizing the South, for in the event such a step led to war with the United States, he would have the Royal Navy on his side. Might the British be persuaded to intervene? He was, he said, prepared to go to Lord Palmerston with “a direct proposition to England for joint recognition” of the Confederacy. The Emperor was as good as his word; and at his direction instructions were telegraphed to Baron Gros, the French Ambassador in London, desiring him to “inform Lord Palmerston that should Great Britain be willing to recognize the South the Emperor would be ready to follow her in that way.”
Slidell emerged from the Tuileries in a state of elation. The Cause of the South had, an hour before, seemed desperate. But if Louis-Napoleon could persuade Palmerston to recognize the South, a delicious prospect would burst upon the view. Recognition would lead to intervention, and intervention would put a stop to Lincoln’s revolution. The Confederacy would be saved.
Chapter 16
“THIS HORRIBLE MASSACRE OF MEN”
Siberia, January 1863-August 1864
PRINCE KROPOTKIN went to Siberia full of hope. He was posted to Irkutsk, where he was made aide-de-camp to General Kukel, a young officer zealous for reform. Kropotkin threw himself into the work of remaking Siberia. One day Kukel said to him, “It is a great epoch we live in; work, my dear friend.” Kropotkin redoubled his efforts.
But the Prince soon discovered how formidable were the obstacles to reform. Even a strong mind might lose its tone in the depths of a Siberian winter. Gaming, lewdness, and vodka broke down the forms of civility. Kropotkin learned of one police official who during the course of a Siberian magistracy progressed from the arts of peculation to those of cruelty: he had women flogged in contravention to the law. Kropotkin’s indignation was roused, but he found it by no means easy to prove the man’s crimes. The poorer people upon whom he preyed hesitated to give evidence against a man who might exact from them a fearful retribution. Nevertheless Kropotkin persevered, and he succeeded in gaining, first the trust, and afterwards the testimony of the victims. The official was duly cashiered—only to be rewarded, a short time later, with a more lucrative post in Kamchatka. He had, it transpired, influential connections in Saint Petersburg. “And thus it went on in all directions,” Kropotkin wrote, “beginning with the Winter Palace at Saint Petersburg, and ending with Usuri and Kamchatka.”
The Prince, intent on doing good, sailed down the Amur, a river in whose waters two civilizations touched. To the north lay the frigid tundra of Siberia. To the south lay the dusty plateaus of China. Count Muraviev had, not long before, claimed the Amur for Russia, and along its banks he had planted a string of settlements, populated with men and women released from the Tsarist labor camps. Kropotkin kept his wits about him as he navigated the river and succeeded in averting a famine in the region. He afterwards made a thorough study of the problem and wrote a lengthy report. His recommendations were adopted without hesitation by the authorities, and he rejoiced in having contributed to the melioration of conditions in Siberia. But his elation soon faded. The task of implementing the proposed reforms was confided to a notorious drunkard, and nothing was done.
After a few months in Siberia, Kropotkin was more than ever convinced of the futility of the Tsar’s program of reform. Alexander described his work as a revolution “from above.” But a liberal revolution, Kropotkin concluded, cannot be directed autocratically. “I soon realized,” he wrote, “the absolute impossibility of doing anything really useful for the mass of the people by means of administrative machinery.” Elaborate reforms set forth in the decrees of a remote government were, he believed, doomed to failure. Administrators in the bureaus of Saint Petersburg could not possibly know as much about the conditions that prevailed in the distant provinces of the Empire as the inhabitants of those provinces themselves, who had a most intimate knowledge of their own problems. At the same time, Kropotkin came to see how much people could do for themselves, if only they possessed sufficient liberty of action; and he marveled at “the complex forms of social organization” which ordinary men and women had evolved on their own, “far away from the influence of any civilization.”
Such discoveries might have led the Prince to advocate a more thoroughly liberating revolution than the one Tsar Alexander was prepared to make; but they did not. On the contrary, he drew farther away from the ideal of the free state. The snares of power are subtle; and Kropotkin, like the rest of his class, had been bred to authority. His love of dominion assumed that ostensibly altruistic form which has not seldom proved to be the most cruel and tyrannical. He wanted passionately to raise up the masses; he longed for a new form of noblesse oblige. It seems never to have occurred to him that his soul might be laying a trap for itself. The man who desires most fervently to emancipate the people—is it not he who often enslaves them most completely?
Pennsylvania, June-July 1863
IF LEE AND JACKSON had not existed, the South should have had to invent them. No figure in the decade embodied more fully the romance of aristocratic paternalism than Lee, the graceful Cavalier; and none incarnated the fierce spirit of militant nationalism more completely than Jackson, the brilliant and fanatical soldier.
But Jackson was in his grave when, on June 29, Lee woke, in Pennsylvania, to a rain-soaked morning. His mood was as gloomy as the weather. He was uncharacteristically agitated and restless. A spy had, a short time before, brought news that the Army of the Potomac, now commanded by General George Gordon Meade (Hooker’s replacement), had crossed the Potomac and was marching towards Pennsylvania. A great battle, Lee knew, would soon be fought. If “God grants us the victory,” he said, “the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence.”
The next day Lee learned that General Pettigrew had encountered, at Gettysburg, a strong body of Union cavalry. By the time Lee himself reached the outskirts of the town, on the afternoon of July 1, thousands of troops were hotly engaged. Lee took up his field glasses, and saw before him a long ridge, one that terminated, in its northern extremity, in a commanding eminence. The names of the heights were not auspicious. The ridge was Cemetery Ridge; the hill was Cemetery Hill.
A short time before, Lee would have turned, at such a moment, to Stonewall Jackson. But R. S. Ewell now commanded Jackson’s II Corps. Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to “push those people” off Cemetery Hill. Ewell, however, failed to do so. Night fell on an already bloody field. The next day opened with a fierce Confederate cannonade. Amid the hiss and roar of shells the 26th North Carolina Regimental Band played polkas and waltzes. The veterans of “Pete” Long
street’s I Corps were to deliver the principal blow; but Longstreet, who had no faith in Lee’s plan, was dilatory.
Savage fighting now took place in the shadow of Cemetery Ridge, in Devil’s Den and the Peach Orchard; and Longstreet’s men moved to take the position of mastery in that part of the battlefield, Little Round Top, which lay at the southern end of Cemetery Ridge. A quick-witted Union officer perceived the importance of the hill and interposed. Colonel Strong Vincent, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer from Erie, Pennsylvania, who commanded a brigade in the Army of the Potomac’s V Corps, raised his colors on Little Round Top. “Don’t give an inch!” he cried as Confederate troops commanded by John Bell Hood went forward. A short time later Vincent was struck by a bullet and mortally wounded. Nevertheless, his 3rd Brigade saved Little Round Top for the United States.
On the third day, more than 12,000 Confederate troops made a final attempt to break the Union line and with it the Union itself. Thirty-eight-year-old General George Pickett sallied forth on a black charger. He was descended from an old Virginia family, and had been graduated from West Point, where he was the “goat”—the lowest-ranked cadet—of his class. (His classmate George McClellan ranked second.) Pickett’s long hair flowed in ringlets almost to his shoulders, like that of the seventeenth-century Cavaliers whom Van Dyke painted. “Up, men,” he cried, “and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia!”
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