Seven Ages of Paris (44 page)

For the Bohemians there were the grenouillères—free-spirited young women who flitted from garret to garret, such as the English art student who announced her attachment to “free love and Courbet.” Still lower down the scale, there were the desperate children such as the little girl described 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 stairs, for the working man of Paris there were innumerable cabarets where his handful of sous could buy him a low woman, or—more likely—render him blind drunk on raw spirit.

This depiction of rampant hedonism under the Second Empire had its unsavoury underside. Syphilis was rife, and still more or less incurable. Many of the great men of the age were to die of it, among them Maupassant, Jules Goncourt, Dumas fils, Baudelaire and Manet. Renoir once lamented that he could not be a true genius because he alone among his friends had not caught syphilis. This dreadful disease was symptomatic of the whole Second Empire: on the surface, all brightness and high spirits; beneath, darkness, decay and ultimately death.

With that facility the French sometimes have for attributing to an individual the failings of the nation at large, blame for the deficiencies and venality of the Second Empire was before very long laid upon the man at the top. In terms of morality, the Second Empire no doubt had a case. “The example,” as the Goncourts heard a guest declare at the salon of Princesse Mathilde (a cousin of the Emperor), “comes from high up.” Almost the only characteristic Louis Napoleon shared with his exalted uncle was the notable sexual puissance of the Bonapartes. The interminable sequence of mistresses and paramours, which the chaste Eugénie found so hard to take, lasted as long as his health. The gossipy Princesse Mathilde claimed derisively, “He chases the first petticoat he sees!”

Louis Napoleon most deserved the title of “the Well-Meaning” for his attempts to improve the miserable lot of the Parisian working man. Here was perhaps the unhappiest paradox of his reign. It was the sector for which he strove hardest, yet when the crunch came the working class provided his most violent enemies. His far-reaching social reforms included establishing institutions of maternal welfare, societies of mutual assistance, workers’ cities and homes for injured workers; he proposed shorter working hours and health legislation; and he got rid of the degrading prison hulks and granted the right to strike. The Emperor’s personal contribution to charitable works was substantial, and in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the workers he even decreed that a new boulevard over the covered-in Saint-Martin Canal should be named after a worker called Richard Lenoir. Many of Louis Napoleon’s more progressive ideas, however, were stymied by the selfishness of the new bourgeoisie and the conservatism of the provinces (as so often in past and future Paris), circumstances which did not escape the attention of the classes laborieuses in the capital.

As much as anyone else Louis Napoleon was aware of the problems and the dangers. As he told the English politician Richard Cobden ominously, “It is very difficult in France to make reforms; we make revolutions in France, not reforms.” Both economic and political problems had sharpened the workers’ discontent. They alone, it seemed, had been excluded from the general prosperity. In Paris the average daily wage rose only 30 per cent during the Second Empire, while the cost of living rose 45 per cent and more. An unintended consequence of Haussmann’s projects was that the rents of Parisian workers doubled over these years, so that by 1870 they swallowed one-third of the wage packet. Food could absorb another 60 per cent. Bourgeois chroniclers claimed that these workers did not like meat, but the reality is that it was too expensive for them. That is why in 1866 butchers started to sell cheap horsemeat, thus introducing a taste which four years later would be forced upon many more Parisians.

What life was actually like for a great many Parisians was powerfully evoked by the Goncourts. Jules’s former mistress, a midwife called Maria, had gone to deliver a child at the upper end of the new Boulevard Magenta. There she found:

a room where the planks that form the walls are coming apart and the floor is full of holes, through which rats are constantly appearing, rats which also come in whenever the door is opened, impudent poor men’s rats which climb on to the table, carrying away whole hunks of bread, and worry the feet of the sleeping occupants … The man, a costermonger, who has known better days, dead-drunk during his wife’s labour. The woman, as drunk as her husband, lying on a straw mattress … And during the delivery in this shanty, the wretched shanty of civilization, an organ-grinder’s monkey, imitating and parodying the cries and angry oaths of the shrew in the throes of childbirth, piddling through a crack in the roof on to the snoring husband’s back …

It was not just the workers’ physical conditions that made relations between the classes increasingly fraught. After all, in the industrial nineteenth century most workers still expected lives of poverty and misery. There were other sources of discontent under the Second Empire, philosophical and political, that at the time were harder to analyse. Workers began to fear that not only was employees’ relative prosperity declining, but so was their ability to influence the development of the new industrial system, which was turning out increasingly to their disadvantage. Behind Parisian frustrations lay a particular, dangerous legacy. As already noted, after each of the three major uprisings within the past century—the Great Revolution of 1789, the July Days of 1830 and the February and June uprisings of 1848, the classes laborieuses of Paris had seen in retrospect that they had been swindled. It was their own blood that had flowed at the barricades, but each time it was the bourgeoisie who stole the advantage. So, seething out of sight in the ghettos created by Haussmann was an alarming build-up of hatred and resentment against the bourgeois men of property. Only three ingredients were required to spark off a new and more terrible explosion: weapons, organization and a diminution of the vigilant police state.

By 1870–1, all three would be in place, with the most appalling consequences for Paris.

* Tell me, Venus, what pleasure do you find

In robbing me thus of my virtue?

APOGEE

Meanwhile, as Louis Napoleon’s popularity ebbed away, discontent grew, and things were progressively going wrong abroad. In general the shadows were pressing in upon the Second Empire; so in 1867 Louis Napoleon threw its last and greatest party, what was to prove the grand finale of his “bread and circuses” regime. To the astonishment of most of Paris, unlike its predecessor in 1855, which Queen Victoria had visited and which had opened a fortnight late while exhibits were still being uncrated, the Great Exposition of 1867 began precisely on time.

The heart of the exhibition, on the Champ-de-Mars, not far from where the Eiffel Tower stands today, was an enormous oval building of glass 482 metres long, set in a filigree of ironwork similar to the Crystal Palace in London. Inside this pavilion exhibits had been set out by all the leading countries of the new industrial era. “There art elbowed industry,” wrote Théophile Gautier, “white statues stood next to black machines, paintings hung side by side with rich fabrics from the Orient.” The pavilion was divided into seven regions, each representing a branch of human endeavour, where the exhibiting nations displayed their most recent achievements. It was the year that Lister introduced antisepsis, and Nobel invented dynamite. It was also the year that a German Jewish professor exiled in London published a fateful book entitled Das Kapital.

Above this extravaganza floated an unrecognized augury, a tethered balloon in which Nadar, the celebrated photographer, took visitors for flights over the exhibition grounds; while up and down the Seine new excursion boats with room for 150 passengers made their first journeys. They were called bateaux-mouches. There was something for everybody. Unsophisticated provincials crowded in to stare at the city women dressed in the new, svelte line with which the English couturier Worth had finally—that same year—ousted crinoline with all its ample billows. From all over Paris the many ranks of the demi-monde also converged, the cocodès and cocodettes, lorettes, grandes horizontales and petits crevés parading past glowering men in black who peddled Bibles.

As the weeks passed, illustrious guests and visitors descended on Paris from all over the world. Among the guests came the Prince of Wales, delighting in the gay city he so relished. But the Tsar of Russia was the real guest of honour, because Louis Napoleon desired the security of an alliance with him against the perceptibly growing threat from Prussia—though it was King Wilhelm of Prussia himself and his giant Chancellor, Count Otto von Bismarck, whom everyone wanted to see. The old King set the edgy French at ease, and indeed seemed utterly relaxed himself. As someone was later to remark, he explored Paris as if intending to come back there one day. Even the fearsome Bismarck exuded bonhomie.

On 12 April the Emperor attended the première of Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein, with Hortense Schneider in the title role. The opera depicted an amorous Grand Duchess of a joke German principality launching an unnecessary war because its Chancellor, Baron Puck, required a diversion from his domestic difficulties. The principality’s armed forces were led by a joke German general called Boum. The joke was perhaps too obvious. When the Tsar came to see it, he and his party were said to have roared with unroyal laughter. Members of the French court were more interested in Bismarck’s reaction, half fearing that they had gone too far. But the Iron Chancellor seemed to be enjoying himself more than anybody. Perhaps, one feels, his enjoyment really lay in some very secret joke of his own.

Parisians did not want this féerique dream of a Thousand and One Nights ever to end. The climax of it all came with a great military review at Longchamp of 31,000 troops. The Emperor arrived with an escort of Spahis on handsome black chargers, with the Tsar on his right and King Wilhelm on his left. The spectacular review ended with a massed cavalry charge of 10,000 cuirassiers, who halted in perfect unison within five metres of the royal guests and saluted them with drawn sabres. Gravely the Tsar and the King of Prussia saluted their host, and bowed to the Empress Eugénie.

Louis Napoleon was especially keen to impress Tsar Alexander II. It was after all the uncle of this new Emperor of the French who had burned the Moscow of the Tsar’s uncle, and memories of the Crimea were still raw. As they drove together from Longchamp, Alexander appeared to be in excellent humour. Then it all went terribly wrong. A young Polish patriot named Berezowski rushed from the crowd and fired a pistol at the Tsar. He missed, but the white gloves of the Tsarevich were spotted with blood from a wounded horse. The Tsar, shaken by this uncomfortable preview of the awful death that awaited him, was suddenly unfriendly. At a stroke Louis Napoleon’s hopes for an accord with Russia seemed dashed.

But it was not until November that workers began the wearying labour of dismantling the Great Exposition, and the Seine was dark with barges queuing to carry away the detritus, the smashed papier-mâché remains of the kiosks and pavilions. Before long the Champ-de-Mars was an empty field once more. A mood of after-the-ball-is-over settled on the city. To some it seemed that the exhibition had been the last hurrah of an imperial regime heading inexorably for destruction. There was no doubt that it had been a triumph: an astonishing fifteen million people had been to see it, three times the total its predecessor had attracted in 1855. But what had it done for the unemployed, for the creation of new prosperity or for France’s international relations? Had the visiting foreigners merely acquired insight into French weaknesses and resentment of French triumphs? Comte Fleury’s assessment—“In any case, we had a devilish good time”—could be taken to apply as much to the Second Empire as to the exhibition alone. But the remark also sounds an elegiac note more easily detected in what Gautier said as he reflected on the Champ-de-Mars in grimmer circumstances three years later, when he felt that whole centuries had passed since 1867: “C’était trop beau!”

As memories of the Great Exposition faded and the Empire hastened onward to oblivion, in the three years of life remaining to it the sounds of revelry were still heard. The masked balls carried on; in 1869 the last would be held, with Empress Eugénie splendidly, but ominously, attired as Marie Antoinette. Yet the worm was in the apple. The historian, with his potent instrument of hindsight, might wish, “If only”: if only Louis Napoleon had concentrated his energies on the expansion and embellishment of his capital. Instead, he would be drawn disastrously into foreign adventures, like other French rulers before him. In Italy, in an echo of French Realpolitik from Charles VIII down to Napoleon I, his meddling had cost him the support of the Church without winning the friendship of the King or Cavour. Similarly his ill-advised “policy of nationalities” had led him courageously to back Polish independence, but at the same time—foolishly—it had earned him the hostility of the Tsar. In 1867 the collapse of his rash endeavour to found a new empire in Mexico, together with the humiliating execution of Maximilian Habsburg, cost him the chance of acquiring Austria as an ally, while earning him frowns from America and Britain. Suddenly there was a powerful Prussia, led by a Bismarck bent on trouble, facing an isolated France.

At home, things were no better. Under Louis Napoleon’s authoritarian Empire, the government was to stand for cheap bread, great public works, holidays and leisure. The Emperor had genuinely wanted to be a good tyrant; but, alas, there is no such thing as a good tyrant. Under pressure from a dissatisfied public, in 1869 Louis Napoleon was forced to permit elections, and the successes of opposition Liberal candidates heralded the short-lived “Liberal Empire.” As Tocqueville observes, the most dangerous moment for a dictatorship is when it first releases the brake. So it was to prove for Louis Napoleon. Paris in particular now became a stronghold of the Liberal opponents of the regime, and of protest. Meanwhile in 1869 there were also fateful investigations into Prefect Haussmann’s finances. The following January he was sacked, and Paris was left without a strong hand on the wheel. The Emperor himself was a tired and sick man, with a large stone growing in his bladder. In the Tuileries acute nervousness reigned; the writer and friend of the regime Prosper Mérimée described the atmosphere as “like that aroused by Mozart’s music when the Commendatore is about to appear.” It looked as if the government, in time-honoured fashion, would be only too ready to seek the distraction of a foreign adventure. In the summer of 1870, it came.