The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (4 page)

More appropriate to the mood of the moment than the grim products displayed by Krupp, so it seemed, was Louis-Napoleon’s own contribution of a statue of a robust nude reclining upon a lion—entitled ‘Peace’. As might perhaps be expected, the beautiful and the frivolous formed an important part of France’s exhibits, which occupied nearly half of the total ground space of the Great Pavilion. Edwin Child, a twenty-year-old Briton serving as a jeweller’s apprentice in Paris, was quite overcome by the ‘fabulousness’ of the jewellery. In the diary that he was to keep so meticulously in the midst of the dramatic events of the next four years, he wrote goggle-eyed of ‘rich peacocks, birds of species as yet unknown, tiaras of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, etc., but in such profusion as even to rival the palace of Aladdin… one might go on for ever in describing it’. Less frivolous, however, was one of the main keynotes struck by the Exhibition as a whole, in which the Emperor himself had shown a special interest, and this was the life of the worker in the new industrial age. There was a special section devoted to ‘
bon marché
’ goods (though someone remarked superciliously that it slightly gave the impression of a shabby bazaar). Scattered around outside in the park lay complete ‘model’ workers’ dwellings, among which Louis-Napoleon in person was an exhibitor (tactfully he was given a prize). Denizens of Belleville and the other less salubrious working-class slums of Paris came and gazed at these in silence, wondering from what bourgeois dream of Utopia they could have emanated. At the very heart of the Exhibition the social achievements of the Second Empire (and they were by no means trivial) were to be found summed up in an imposing gallery,
entitled ‘The History of Labour’. But there were one or two events, perhaps too recent, perhaps too apparently insignificant, that went unrecorded. In this same year of 1867, a German-Jewish professor exiled in London published a weighty book called
Das Kapital
While, in Paris, the Great Exhibition was reaching its glittering climax, in Lausanne the ‘International’ held its second Congress; and seldom had France known a year with more industrial stoppages.

Beside the ‘History of Labour’ gallery stood that of the
Beaux-Arts
. Imposing as were its contents, however, the dead hand of the Academicians had deliberately excluded all the rising talent that was in any way controversial. Works by Ingres, Corot, and Théodore Rousseau crowded the walls, but Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet were all rejected, as were Courbet and Manet; though the last two had managed to obtain permission to erect, at considerable personal cost, private pavilions outside, where for 50 centimes you could go to jeer at the
Déjeuner sur l’herbe
. Indeed, it was really in the outer space surrounding the immense dome that the chief magic of the Exhibition lay; a magic that tended to distract the visitor from the more solid displays within. Walking through it reminded one of a voyage round the world, and visitors of the epoch were suddenly astonished to discover for the first time how shrunken the telegraph, the steamship, and the soon-to-be-opened Suez Canal were making the world seem. French was a language hardly heard. Each nation had erected stalls and kiosks where pretty girls or ferocious tribesmen served their customers in bizarre national costumes. Russians wandered about with their little steppe ponies among Yakut and Kirghiz
yurts
; while Mexicans in gay ponchos ogled a reconstruction of the Roman catacombs, pigtailed Chinese wandered serenely round a replica of the Green Mosque of Bursa. Bosomy maidens from Bavaria dispensed beer to morose Andalusians, who in turn were wooed by Arab coffee-vendors, with their raucously insistent calls and magnificent robes. Via the port of Antwerp, one reached an Inca palace; an avenue of sphinxes guarding the Egyptian Temple led to the Swedish house of Gustavus Vasa. Inside the temple, the blackened flesh of a mummy, dead two thousand years, was unbandaged before the shocked eyes of the Goncourt brothers.

Above this extraordinary panoramic babel, as an unread augury of a less distant future, bobbed and hovered a double-decker captive balloon in which Nadar, the famous photographer, took visitors—a dozen at a time—for flights over the exhibition grounds; while up and down the Seine new excursion boats capable of carrying a hundred and fifty passengers made their first appearance. They were called
bateaux-mouches
.

Whether you regarded it from aloft in the
Géant
or the
Céleste
, from the river, or merely on foot, the Champ-de-Mars presented an unbelievable ensemble of brilliance, mediocrity, and simply execrable taste, but above all of dazzling colour beyond the palettes of even that garish new school not yet named ‘Impressionist’. In this era of the Suez Canal and Indian nabobs, of the Japanese print and the first of the European interventions in China, the influence of the Orient predominated. It was especially so as dusk came on. Then, the Goncourts remarked, ‘the kiosks, the minarets, the domes, the beacons made the darkness retreat into the transparency and indolence of nights of Asia…. And the banners, the flames, the unfurled flags of the nations gave us an impression of walking on a street of the Middle Empire.’ With nightfall, too, life on the Champ-de-Mars assumed a new allure. Cheap food, wine, and entertainment attracted all Paris; you could dine excellently for 80 centimes, and Edwin Child recorded that even on his apprentice’s pittance he could afford ‘a jolly good oyster supper and white wine’. At the same time in one of the casinos he also noted (though far from prudish) being ‘nearly disgusted with the masks… bordering on the obscene’. There was indeed something for everybody’s taste. Simple provincials came to gaze and gape at the city women wearing the new, svelte, seductively reduced line, with which the English couturier, Worth, had finally—that same year—dethroned crinoline with all its protective billows. From all over Paris the
demi-monde
in its various ranks converged; the
cocodés
and
cocodettes, lorettes, grandes horizontales
, and
petits
crevés
jostled disapproving men in black selling Bibles. Pimps and pickpockets mingled with the swarm of street performers and the charlatan salesmen of patent hair-restorers and arsenic-based rejuvenators that were said to have killed off the Duc de Morny. All night, and week after week, the Capuan revels continued amid the
kiosques
with their provocative girls in national dress, offering an infinite variety capable of satisfying all but the most jaded appetite. Even the Goncourts, profoundly knowledgeable about Second Empire life, were evidently stirred by what they saw:

At the English buffets in the Exhibition, there is a fantastic quality in the lustre of the women, in their crude pallor and their flaming hair; they are like the whores of the Apocalypse, something terrifying, frightening, inhuman.

As the weeks went by, illustrious guests and visitors poured into Paris from every corner of the globe. The city resembled one enormous inn, bearing a sign of ‘
Complet
’ at the entrance. Prices soared, and in protest at being driven from their garrets by the sudden increase in rents, students in the Quartier Latin threatened to ‘go and camp in
the Jardin du Luxembourg’. They were spurred on by an angry young man with a bushy beard called Raoul Rigault, who was later to achieve some notoriety during the days of the Commune, but now no one paid much attention to their plight. There were too many other things to occupy the mind, and what more than the resplendent arrival of the various monarchs and their retinues? There was the Prince of Wales, smiling appreciatively on the frivolous city he adored, and the Princess Royal, shocking it by her dowdy gowns; the Pasha of Egypt, the Sultan of Turkey, Kings of Greece, Sweden, and Denmark, Kings and Queens of Belgium and Spain; the brother of the Mikado of Japan, the King of Prussia and the Tsar and Tsarina of All the Russias. Only Franz-Josef of Austria, and his brother, unhappy Maximilian of Mexico, were conspicuously absent. Seldom had there been such a concourse. It comprised, as Prosper Mérimée remarked cynically, ‘
a table d’hôte
quite as amusing as that which Candide encountered in Venice’. No less than the cantonment on the Champ-de-Mars, Haussmann’s bright new Paris seemed to have been built specifically for these arrivals to the Exhibition. The straight wide boulevards imparted a pomp to the coach processions, flanked by the Imperial
Cent Gardes
, who with their blazing breastplates were themselves refulgent like gods of mythology; for all of which Edwin Child could only find the French word
féerique
. Almost daily there was a procession, with the Emperor seeming to be constantly in attendance at a station to meet a royal train.

Great was the excitement in Paris when it was announced that the King of Prussia and the Tsar would arrive in close succession at the beginning of June. Although the latter was the real guest of honour (high politics decreed it so), it was King Wilhelm of Prussia and his massive Chancellor, Count von Bismarck, who attracted all eyes. On the train they passed positions the old king had occupied in 1814, when he had contributed to the downfall of his present host’s uncle. Though some Parisians detected a note of typical Teutonic tactlessness as the King complimented them, ecstatically, on ‘what marvellous things you have done since I was last here!’, on the whole they thought his behaviour quite unexceptionable. In fact he stole many hearts by always doing the right thing; for instance, by his kindly display of affection for the fragile Prince Impérial, then recovering from an illness. A comfortable figure projecting an image of some benevolent country squire, he set the nervous French at ease, and indeed seemed utterly at ease himself; as someone remarked uncharitably after the event, he explored Paris as if intending to come back there one day. Even the terrible Bismarck, whose great stature made Wickham Hoffman of the U.S. Legation think of Agamemnon, positively
glowed with goodwill. Beauties of Paris society surrounded him, admired his dazzling White Cuirassier uniform and the enormous spread eagle upon his shining helmet, and attempted to provoke him; but in vain. In conversation with Louis-Napoleon, he dismissed last year’s Austro-Prussian war as belonging to another epoch, and added amiably ‘Thanks to you no permanent cause of rivalry exists between us and the Court at Vienna’. The festive atmosphere temporarily obscured the full menace of this remark.

On April 12th, the Emperor attended the première of one of the great entertainments to be produced in honour of his Royal guests: Offenbach’s
La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein
, with the immortal Hortense Schneider (persuaded not without difficulty) playing the lead role.
La Grande Duchesse
was an event of international importance. Of all its galaxy of talent, no one represented the spirit of the Second Empire in all its irony and gay hedonism more than this migrant from a Cologne synagogue choir, Jacques Offenbach. For years the orchestras in the Bois had had their repertoires full of the lilting tunes from
Orphée aux Enfers
and
La Belle Hélène
, the regimental bands marched to Offenbach, and only last year Paris had been driven to a frenzy by the
cancan
from
La Vie Parisienne
. Now here was this new triumph about the amorous Grand Duchess of a joke German principality, embarking on a pointless war because its Chancellor, Baron Puck, needed a diversion. Its forces were led by a joke German general called Bourn, as incapable as he was fearless, who invigorated himself with the smell of gunpowder by periodically firing off his pistol into the air. The farce, tallying so closely with Europe’s private view of the ridiculous Teutons, was too obvious to be missed. When the Tsar came to see it, his box was said to have rung with unroyal laughter. Between gusts of mirth, members of the French court peeped over at Bismarck’s expression, half in malice, half in apprehension, wondering if perhaps King Wilhelm’s lack of tact about his previous visit to Paris had not been revenged to excess. But nobody appeared to be showing more obvious and unrestrained pleasure than the Iron Chancellor himself; one might almost have suspected that the pleasure was enhanced by the enjoyment of some very secret joke of his own. In the interval, crowned heads jostled each other to enter Hortense’s dressing-room, and the more fortunate were honoured at her home, gaining her the unkind nickname of
le Passage des Princes
. Overnight
La Grande Duchesse
became the jewel of the Exhibition.

Day after day the sparkling entertainments continued. On April 29th it was the first night of Gounod’s new opera,
Roméo et Juliette
; his greatest, Paris thought. On June 21st, as a demonstration of just
how liberal the Empire was becoming, and could afford to become, Louis-Napoleon permitted a revival of
Hernani
, proscribed since 1852, the work of that incorrigible old revel in exile, Victor Hugo. It nearly backfired; the occasion was marked by a noisy anti-Bonapartist manifestation, amid a clamour to bring back Hugo. (Fortunately by this time most of the visiting dignitaries had already returned to their homes.) And all the time the giggles and laughter echoed from behind the
cabinets particuliers
in the restaurants and from the private establishments. Never had prostitution in all its various degrees found Paris such a paradise. On the Champs-Élysées one of the Goncourts over heard a
cocotte
boasting to her friend: ‘I’ll tell you frankly; one’s making eight hundred francs; one lives on three, and puts five hundred in a Savings Bank.’ Writing to his friend, Panizzi, about the
opéra bouffe
arrival of the Sultan, Prosper Mérimée expressed the thought that ‘all these great personages come to see Mademoiselle Thérésa
¹
and Mademoiselle Menken. These ladies are doing brilliant business and have raised their prices, like the butchers; like them they too are selling fresh meat, or what passes for it.’ The more prudish critics of the regime were heard to remark: ‘If I were the Emperor I wouldn’t be flattered that people came to visit me in order to carry out public orgies.’