The Fall of Paris

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The Fall of Paris Page 4

by Alistair Horne


  Despite all this, the Exhibition with all its accompanying revelry carried on insouciantly throughout the summer and into the autumn. Towards the end, Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria paid a belated visit, though grieving a dead brother and with a sister-in-law driven insane by the tragedy, and too injured by France ever to offer either the friendship or alliance that Louis-Napoleon so badly needed. At the beginning of September Baudelaire, paralysed by syphilis, died aged forty-six in a madhouse; two months later workers began the dreary task of dismantling the Great Exhibition and a long line of Seine barges queued to remove the debris, the unrecognizable papier-mâché fragments of the gaudy pavilions and ephemeral kiosks. Soon the Champ-de-Mars was once again an empty field. With the departure of his last guests, Louis-Napoleon, as the shadows mounted round him once again, began to suffer pain from the stone for which the past excitement had acted as a distracting opiate. An atmosphere of after-the-ball-is-over descended on the city at large. Some sensed that the Exhibition had been the last rocket of the imperial fete, and that all there was left now was the smell of powder. Sober heads began to tot up the accounts. On the surface, there was no gainsaying the spectacular triumph of the Exhibition; even the Assistant Secretary at the American Legation, Wickham Hoffman, had to admit grudgingly that it was ‘the most successful ever held except our own at Philadelphia’. A staggering total of fifteen million people had visited it, three times as many as its predecessor in 1855. But had it done as much for the unemployed as it had for industrial progress? Would it bring France new prosperity at home, and above all had it brought her any new friends? Or had the foreigners who came simply departed more aware of France’s weaknesses and resentful at her triumphs? Certainly no one would challenge Comte Fleury’s famous remark, ‘In any case, we had a devilish good time’, which seemed to apply to the Exhibition as much as to the Second Empire as a whole. But there was also something in a nostalgic reflection made by Gautier as he mused on the Champ-de-Mars in sadder days three years later, when it seemed to him as if whole centuries had passed since 1867.

  ‘C’était trop beau!’

  The Tuileries Ball, 1867

  2. Empire in Decline

  C’était trop beau!

  THE words may have been spoken in partial hindsight, but who during those féerique months of 1867, when the Empire seemed to have reached a peak of splendour, could have foreseen then what tragic reversal of fortune lay ahead for France, and particularly for Paris herself, within a passage of less than four years time? Who could have imagined that the scene of that glittering triumph, the Tuileries Ball, would be reduced to ashes, together with so much of central Paris; the Emperor disgraced and in exile; the Empire already little more than a dim memory? History knows of perhaps no more startling instance of what the Greek tragedians called peripeteia, the terrible fall from hubristic, prideful heights. Certainly no nation in modern times, so replete with apparent grandeur and opulent in material achievement, has ever been subjected to a worse humiliation in so short a time. Within just three years of the closing-down of the Great Exhibition, badly beaten French soldiers would be encamped upon the Champ-de-Mars; la ville lumière besieged by that amiable, courteous King of Prussia, her lights extinguished through lack of fuel, her epicurean populace reduced to a diet of rats. A few months more, and that same king would be crowned emperor over the prostrate body of his former host’s fallen Empire; his coronation followed by one of the harshest peace settlements ever imposed by one European state upon another.

  Who, in 1867, could have predicted all this? Yet there was still worse to come. Less than two months after the war against the Prussian invader had ended, and the first Siege of Paris had been lifted, there would occur in March 1871 the savage civil war for ever to be associated with the name of the Commune de Paris. Before this new conflict was over, during the last desperate days of May 1871 some twenty thousand men, women, and children would be massacred in the streets of Paris by their own countrymen; a blood-bath which made the Terror of 1793–4 with its twenty-five hundred executions protracted over fifteen months seem restrained by comparison, and which exceeded by far in numbers those killed by enemy action during the four months of Prussian siege. Out of the Commune’s brief revolutionary reign in Paris, and above all out of its brutal repression, would grow a deep-rooted bitterness that still gnaws at the heart of French politics today.

  The Commune poses a set of problems rather different from those of the Siege. In order of importance, essentially military issues become replaced by social and ideological themes. Without the lessons and legends derived from the Commune, there would probably have been no successful Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and its influence behind another French military disaster—that of 1940—cannot be obscured. In the light of all that has transpired since, the Commune appears as the more historically significant of the two events; certainly it is still regarded as such in the Communist world today. Even though the Siege and the Commune seemingly constitute two quite separate subjects, about each of which a flood of literature has been written, they should not in fact be treated in isolation. The Commune emerged directly from the Siege; without the Siege, the Commune of 1871 could never have happened; without an account of the Commune, the story of the Siege is incomplete. Many of the dramatis personœ are the same in both events, and, above all, Paris herself remains the grandly tragic heroine, common to each act.

  And yet, however clearly the sparks which ignited the Commune may be traced to the Siege, there exist factors in the background, unconnected with the Siege, which contributed fundamentally to the explosive content of proletarian Paris. For an understanding of this, one has to turn back to examine the diseases concealed by the alluring façade of the Second Empire; as indeed one also must in order to find an explanation of why Louis-Napoleon’s Army which had presented so brave and glittering a spectacle at the Great Exhibition should perform so dismally only three years later.

  * * *

  As memories of the Great Exhibition faded away and the Empire rushed on towards its extinction, in the three years of life remaining to it the sounds of revelry still lingered on, the masked balls continued. Just as in England the Victorian code became inseparable from the name of the sovereign, so from its very origins Second Empire society had never shown itself more loyal than in its eagerness to follow the paths indicated by its pleasure-loving Emperor. During the early days of the reign, the haut monde escaping from the bourgeois virtuousness of Louis-Philippe’s regime had sought consciously to recapture the paradise of Louis XV. In the Forest of Fontainebleau courtesans went hunting with their lovers, attired in the plumed hats and lace of that period. In Paris nothing set the tone of the epoch nor typified it more than those masked balls which so impassioned Louis-Napoleon, and at which he loved to appear as a Venetian noble of the seventeenth century. While the masks permitted their wearers to escape into a Walter Mitty world of fantasy, so the peacock extravagance of the occasions themselves bedazzled and distracted the eye from the more unpleasant realities that lay just beneath the surface. Each ball was more luxurious than the last, and throughout the reign those at the Tuileries occurred with such regularity as almost to resemble a non-stop carnival.

  Few were more memorable than the one held at the Ministère de la Marine in 1866 where the guests were required to form tableaux vivants of the four continents. A procession of four crocodiles and ten ravishing Oriental handmaidens covered in jewels preceded a chariot. ‘in which was seated Princess Korsakow en sauvage’, noted an English guest. ‘The fair diplomate gratified us by the sight of one of the best-shaped legs it has been my good fortune to see for many a day; we could judge of its proportions above the knee, as the flesh-tinted maillot which covered while it did not conceal the limb, was of the most zephyr-like texture.’ Next came Africa, Mademoiselle de Sèvres, mounted on a camel fresh from the deserts of the Jardin des Plantes, and accompanied by attendants in enormous black woolly wigs; finally America, ‘a lovely blonde, reclined in a hamm
ock swung between banana trees, each carried by negroes and escorted by Red Indians and their squaws’. Three thousand guests came, and the cost of this one ball alone was put at four million francs.1

  As the prevailing styles decreed, the women at these balls emphasized their bosoms to the limits of decency (sometimes beyond): they were magnificent, outrageous, and predatory animals. There was the Marquise de Gallifet (whose husband was to play so sinister a role in Paris during the last days of the Commune), sometimes clad as a great white swan, at others as Archangel Michael, her breast sheathed in golden armour. And there was the nineteen-year-old Comtesse de Castiglione, Louis-Napoleon’s most ravishing and dangerous mistress, who once appeared at the Tuileries as a provocative Queen of Hearts; which drew from the Empress the deadly shaft that ‘her heart is a little low’. What went on in the antechambers to these entertainments the rest of Paris suspected, without needing to hear about Madame X, who had once returned to the ballroom with the Duke de Morny’s Légion d’Honneur imprinted upon her cheek.1 To the prudish or the uninvited, these balls seemed thinly veiled orgies, and indeed the scene more often resembled Rubens than Watteau.

  A Victorian visitor to Paris in 1870, Lady Amberley,2 wrote to her mother: ‘We have been each night to the play and are much disgusted with the badness of the morals they exhibit. I hope real life is not as bad.’ A curious film of hypocrisy slicked over the surface of the Second Empire; Flaubert was prosecuted in 1857 for offending public morals by Madame Bovary, Manet was subjected to most virulent Press attacks for the ‘immorality’ of his Olympia and the Déjeuner sur l’herbe; and women smoking in the Tuileries Gardens were as liable to arrest as were young men bathing without a top at Trouville. But underneath, in fact, the morals of the Second Empire were every bit as bad as Lady Amberley feared, and probably worse. Nana was its ikon, and its motto the rhetorical question from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène that required no answer:

  Dis-moi, Vénus, quel plaisir trouves-tu

  À faire ainsi cascader ma vertu?3

  From top to bottom Paris was obsessed with love in all its forms as perhaps never before. In 1858 the Goncourts confided to their journal, almost with a note of surprised discovery: ‘Everybody talks about it all the time. It is something which seems to be extremely important and extremely absorbing.’ Even in their own circle, where some of the greatest intellects of the times gathered, few evenings went by without Sainte-Beuve or another holding forth on sex on an almost schoolboy plane. According to Paris police records, during one month in 1866, 2,344 wives left their husbands, and 4,427 husbands left their wives; there were some five thousand prostitutes registered at the Prefecture, and another thirty thousand ‘free lances’.

  The greatest of the grandes horizontales, ‘La Païva’, once asked Ponsard the playwright to compose some verses in honour of her sumptuous new staircase (in what is now the Travellers’ Club on the Champs Elysées), and he replied with a single line adapted from Phèdre: ‘Ainsi que la vertu, le vice a ses degrés.’1 Certainly this was true of the Second Empire, where all was meticulously, one might almost say decorously, organized. There was a place, a step on the staircase, for everyone. A married woman, driven from her home on account of some revealed indiscretion, could establish herself at one of several levels within the demi-monde before the barrier of actual prostitution was crossed. At the top of the social staircase, immense fortunes passed through their hands. Even Egyptian beys could be ruined in a matter of weeks. Louis-Napoleon supposedly gave the Comtesse de Castiglione a pearl necklace costing 422,000 francs, plus 50,000 a month pin-money; while Lord Hertford, by reputation the meanest man in Paris, gave her a million for the pleasures of one night in which she promised to abandon herself to every known volupté (afterwards, it was said, she was confined to bed for three days). La Païva, who adopted the splendidly suitable motto of qui paye y va, herself spent half a million francs a year on her table. Among the other grandes horizontales were Cora Pearl, an English demi-mondaine, born Emma Crouch and seduced at fourteen, and Giulia Barucci, a favourite of the Prince of Wales. Typical of her profession, she was described as having the manner of a patrician, ‘but of education, of pudicity, of any concern for convention, not a shadow’. Her whole talent lay in the art of the courtesan.

  For clients the grandes horizontales drew from the idle rich dandies like Feuillet’s ‘Monsieur de Camors’, who described his day as follows: ‘I generally rise in the morning…. I go to the Bois, then to the club, and then to the Bois, and afterwards I return to the club…. In the evening if there’s a first night anywhere I fly to it.’ Everything in the Second Empire seemed designed for their greater convenience; there was even a newspaper, the Naïade, made of rubber—so that it could be read while wallowing in the bath. Later, as the fortunes of the rich dandies poured away into the same bottomless chasms, they became known as petits crevés, to whom, in their debauched tastes, there was no more diverting spectacle than watching a turkey dance on a white-hot metal plate. For their delectation, as well as for those lower down the social scale, there were the semi-amateurs: the comédiennes (whom it was said the Bois de Boulogne ‘devoured in quantity’), the lorettes with their apprentices called biches, the grisettes, and the cocodettes. All could be picked up by the bushel at ‘Mabille’s’, or at the circus which on opening night reminded the Goncourts of ‘a stock exchange dealing in women’s nights’. For the Bohemians there were the grenouillères; unattached, easy-going young women who hopped from garret to garret, like the English art student who declared she was for ‘free love and Courbet!’ Still lower down the scale, there were the pathetic children such as the little girl recorded by the Goncourts who had offered her fourteen-year-old-sister, while ‘her job was to breathe on the windows of the carriage so that the police could not see inside’. Finally, below the stairs, for the working men of Paris there were innumerable cabarets where his pitifully few sous could find him a low woman, or—more usually—make him obliviously drunk on raw spirit.

  To this picture of unrestrained libertinism under the Second Empire, there was a grim reverse side. The brilliant masked balls would soon be no more than a memory as ephemeral as that of an Offenbach first night, the beauties would vanish across the stage with only a vaguely seductive scent to mark their passage. But something infinitely more sinister lingered on. Syphilis was rampant, and still virtually incurable. Many of the great men of the age were to die of it; among them de Maupassant, Jules Goncourt, Dumas fils, Baudelaire, and Manet. Renoir once remarked, almost regretfully, that he could not be a true genius because he alone had not caught syphilis. This terrible disease was symptomatic of the whole Second Empire; on the surface, all gaiety and light; below, sombre purulence, decay, and ultimately death.

  With that peculiar ease the French have for unloading upon an individual the shortcomings of the nation at large, blame for all that was wrong with the Second Empire, all that was corrupt in it, was sooner or later to be heaped upon the man at the top. As far as its morals were concerned, the Second Empire was perhaps justified in pointing an accusing finger. ‘The example’, as the Goncourts heard someone complain at Princesse Mathilde’s, ‘comes from high up.’ One of the few traits Louis-Napoleon shared with his illustrious uncle was the remarkable sexual potency of the Bonapartes. The incessant string of mistresses and paramours, which so shocked the virtuous Eugénie, lasted as long as his health. Even his marriage has been attributed to the fact that, in an endeavour to seize the impregnable fortress by guile, Louis-Napoleon entered Eugénie’s bedroom one night by a secret door, unannounced, but was so frustrated in his desires as to be left no alternative but the marital bed. The power of the Emperor’s gallantry was indeed attested by no less a person than Queen Victoria. ‘With such a man,’ she wrote in 1852, ‘one can never for a moment feel safe’, but when, three years later, during a drive through the Bois, her host appears to have flirted with the thirty-five-year-old queen as no one ever had before, her views were quite changed: ‘I felt
—I do not know how to express it—safe with him.’

  It was not in matters of morality alone that the Emperor could be held responsible for setting the tone of the epoch. For only in kind was Louis XIV’s ‘L’État, c’est moi!’ less true of Louis-Napoleon. Upon his shoulders rested the whole weighty fabric of the Empire that he had re-established. As the years passed it became more and more evident that, should this main pillar ever be removed, the structure it supported would instantaneously collapse. And the pillar was crumbling.

 

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