The World That Never Was (12 page)

Elisée Reclus might have felt the occasional twinge of unspoken sympathy for the emperor, as he too tried in vain to realise his ideals on the impossible middle ground of moderation and reform. At a time when Jules Verne had coined a new genre of ‘science fiction’ and was writing a series of books ‘that would describe the world, known and unknown, and the great scientific achievements of the age’, Reclus’ scientific insights and literary talent commanded great interest. The prestigious
Revue des Deux Mondes
was delighted to take his scientific articles, while Verne’s own publisher, the masterful Jules Hetzel, made bestsellers of his more popular works of geography. No such success, however, attended Reclus’ attempts to chart his own map of Utopia, as he and Elie poured their political energies into developing a series of mutual organisations.

The brothers began their project by establishing Paris’ first food cooperative, on principles similar to those pioneered at Rochdale in England some years earlier. Next, infuriated by the failings of the Crédit Mobilier, a supposedly socialist bank that pandered to bourgeois prejudices in its granting of loans, the brothers formed La Société du Crédit au Travail to offer workers a better deal. Then, finally, they founded a journal,
L’Association
, to propagate their ideas. The aim, Elisée wrote, was ‘to contribute to a promotion of the relations between the republican bourgeoisie of goodwill, and the world of the workers’. Each project failed, in turn, for lack of popular involvement. Even those friends that Reclus had made in the radical clubs of Batignolles and Belleville, the heartland of Red Paris, were reluctant to explore the viability of alternative economic models that depended on such ‘goodwill’, preferring simply to prepare for confrontation. Disillusioned, Reclus joined their ranks, and by 1867 had become a close associate of such prominent French members of the International as Benoît Malon. He even undertook to translate Marx’s
Das Kapital
into French: a pressing concern to its author, who wished to ‘counter the false views in which Proudhon buried them, with his idealised lower middle classes’.

In the early summer of that year, Napoleon III welcomed the world to Paris for a Universal Exposition of his own. On the surface it was a triumph of optimistic modernity. Those visitors able to afford the entry price could wander through an enchanted world where extraordinary feats of European engineering were demonstrated within a stone’s throw of stalls staffed by tribesmen from the depths of French colonial Africa or the remotest islands of Polynesia, and could witness the autopsy of a freshly unwrapped Egyptian mummy or inspect the model homes and ideal villages that Napoleon had designed for workers in the iron foundries of Le Creusot. Beneath the vast glass dome of the main pavilion, every important field of human endeavour was celebrated, while night after night in the Tuileries Gardens, hordes of ball-goers spun to the new waltz tunes of Johann Strauss the Younger.

Beneath the fairy-tale twinkle of tens of thousands of electric bulbs, however, lay a darker truth. Travellers arriving by train to wander the vaulted glass galleries of the exhibition halls, or promenade through Haussmann’s new boulevards, could easily forget that the tracks of the railways and the iron substructure of housing and exhibition spaces alike had originated in the strike-ridden foundries at Le Creusot. And when they looked at examples of ideal workers’ houses, they chose to ignore the reality that occupancy was offered only as a reward for those workers who toed the line. The radicals of the Red districts, though, were not so easily misled. Expelled from the city centre to make way for Haussmann’s grand new urban scheme, they seethed with resentment, seeing in Napoleon’s proposed welfare provisions for new mothers and injured workers projects proof that the emperor lacked either the will or the hard political support to implement in full.

Nor was it only in the realm of social reform that the Expo exhibited the overconfidence of the Second Empire. The crowds in the Champs-de-Mars who inspected the impressive scale model of the submarine
Le Plongeur
, and watched demonstrations of the secret
mitrailleuse
machine gun, spitting fire from concealment in a tent, were comforted that France possessed the ingenuity to protect her status as the Continent’s pre-eminent military power. They admired with misguided equanimity the steel bulk of the enormous Krupps cannon sent to represent Prussia, Europe’s rising power. And when the hot-air balloon
Géant
, owned by the satirical caricaturist and pioneering photographer and aeronaut Nadar, or the
Impérial
, Napoleon’s state-commissioned balloon, carried tourists up for a bird’s-eye panorama of the exhibition, few remarked on the stinking gas leaks that made their ascent so laborious, any more than they had concerned themselves over
Le Plongeur
’s failed tests of seaworthiness. Rather, they covered their noses and imagined themselves pioneering passengers on what Henry Giffard, the other aerostatic impresario at the Expo, brazenly touted as a journey to the first station of a Paris–Moon Railway.

Yet whilst the technological sensations on display appeared to promise a future of brilliant accomplishments, one dramatic incident two months into the Exposition came far closer to revealing what the immediate future would hold. Nine years had passed since the bomb attack on Napoleon III by Felice Orsini had left eight people dead and 156 bystanders injured. During recent months, however, first Tsar Alexander II of Russia and then Chancellor Bismarck of Prussia had narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of the young radicals Dmitri Karakozov and Ferdinand Cohen Blind. That both King Wilhelm and Tsar Alexander were to visit the Expo at the same time and appear alongside Napoleon III for a military parade at Longchamp racecourse should have seen the French police at their most vigilant. Somehow, though, a young Pole by the name of Boleslaw Berezowski, seeking vengeance for the brutal repression of a revolt in his Russian-occupied homeland, took his place in the crowd and discharged a pistol at the tsar, only narrowly missing his target.

The event represented the coincidence of the two great threats that faced Napoleon, and would trouble the Continent for decades to come. For it was from the Red clubs of Batignolles that Berezowski had emerged to make his attempt on the tsar’s life, one of many foreign revolutionaries who swelled the ranks of the indigenous radicals, and fired their imaginations with tales of political uprisings. And it was France’s desire to redress a prospective imbalance of power in Europe that suffered as a consequence of his attack.

Industrialisation in the German states was rampant, their birth rate growing even faster than France’s declined, and their production of coal – the key energy source of the age – was approaching that of France and Belgium combined, with no slowdown in sight. Whilst little love was lost between the tsar and the parvenu Bonaparte, whose ancestor had once entered Moscow as conqueror, France courted Russian friendship as a much-needed counterweight to the growing power across the Rhine. Now, though, Napoleon III had failed adequately to protect his guest from attack. In an attempt to redeem the situation, the French emperor turned to the tsar, who was flecked with the blood of the horse that the bullet had struck. ‘Sir, we have been under fire together; now we are brothers-in-arms.’ Alexander’s brusque response saw any small chance of an alliance disappear almost before the smoke of the assassin’s pistol.

The three years following the Exposition saw the emperor’s authority at home further eroded and the opposition to his regime mount as republicans of all colours increasingly made common cause. A disastrous intervention in Mexico, where France installed a puppet king only to abandon him in the face of a powerful insurgency, was compounded by a messy victory for French auxiliaries over an Italian nationalist force led by Garibaldi, whose attempt to liberate Rome from the deeply reactionary Pope Pius IX enjoyed the approval of the French left. Sensing Napoleon’s weakness, the republican press in Paris tested his powers of censorship with growing audacity until, in January 1870, journalistic activism crossed from the page on to the streets.

The occasion was the funeral of Victor Noir, a journalist with the radical
La Marseillaise
, who had been shot dead by the emperor’s cousin, Pierre Bonaparte, in murky circumstances, having visited him regarding a challenge to a duel. Up to 200,000 republicans joined the procession, which briefly threatened to become violent before fizzling out for lack of clear leadership. The arrest and imprisonment of the ringleaders bought Napoleon III time, but a month later another journalist from the newspaper, the glamorous and flamboyant Gustave Flourens, attempted to stage an insurrection in Belleville. On that occasion, the weapons issued to his troops proved to be mere replicas, stolen from the props room of the local theatre, but a full performance seemed certain to follow the dress rehearsal before long. Having tried repression, conciliation and reform over many years, the only option left to Napoleon was the fallback of every struggling leader: the distraction of war.

When the Spanish throne fell vacant in the early summer of 1870, Bismarck baited the trap, proposing a Prussian candidate in what was both an affront to French pride and a tacit threat of encirclement. After the French ambassador to Prussia importuned the vacationing King Wilhelm during his morning promenade in the spa town of Bad Ems to express Napoleon’s outrage, Bismarck leaked to the press the king’s version of the encounter, carefully edited to impugn France’s breach of diplomatic etiquette. It was the eve of the 14 July celebration of Bastille Day in France and his timing was perfect. With leisure to debate the insolence of Prussia, and wine coursing hotly through their veins, the French buoyed Napoleon III up and along on a wave of chauvinism. A pope who within days would declare himself infallible gave his blessing, and the emperor declared war on Prussia.

‘A Berlin! A Berlin!’
resounded the cries of the Paris crowds on 19 July, and among the voices were those of many republicans, who later preferred to deny it, or else to claim that they had welcomed France’s aggression only as a prelude to revolution. Inconveniently, though, the archetypal bumbling Teuton pilloried by French popular culture failed to materialise on the battlefield. Instead France was wrong-footed by its own incautious rush to war: its railway system had been too busy introducing its hedonistic citizens to the pleasure of seaside holidays to prepare proper mobilisation plans as Prussia had done; its artillerymen were untrained to operate the army’s secret wonder-weapon, the
mitrailleuse
, and its regiments were optimistically given maps of Germany but none of France. The result was chaos when, engaged by a well-organised and highly manoeuvrable enemy, the French armies were forced to retreat.

Only six weeks later, the emperor found himself leading the last stand of the Army of Châlons, outside the citadel of Sedan. Nearly 20,000 French soldiers had already been killed in the attempted breakout and a similar number captured, with over 100,000 now encircled. According to the loyalist press, Napoleon rode before the ramparts to rally the defenders; in reality he was dosed with opiates, and courting a bullet to end the agony of his gallstones that France’s military shame exacerbated. The courage he showed the following day, 2 September, was of a greater kind, when his acceptance of the need for surrender to save further futile loss of life led to his own capture and exile.

Despite the military defeat, Napoleon’s opponents in Paris received the news with elation. ‘We shook off the empire as though it had been a nightmare,’ wrote Juliette Adam, the feminist and journalist, as those imprisoned for political crimes were freed and borne aloft on the
shoulders of the crowd. Amid rapturous scenes at the Hôtel de Ville, on 4 September Léon Gambetta appeared at a window to proclaim a republic to the packed square below, the names of prospective members of the new Government of National Defence confirmed by popular acclamation. Outspoken critics of the old regime, lawyers who had campaigned against its injustices in particular, received key roles, with Gambetta himself appointed as interior minister. Descending to the crowd that thronged the steps outside, Jules Favre, the new minister for foreign affairs, embraced the most radical figures present, among them students to whom he taught politics and science at night school, calling them ‘my children’ in a gesture of the inclusiveness with which he and his colleagues meant to govern. The harmony did not last long.

France had achieved the creation of a new republic, which all on the left had devoutly craved, but as the armies of general Moltke closed in to encircle the capital, the question of what that republic should aspire to be was thrust to the fore. Informed of developments in Paris, King Wilhelm fretted that France’s new government might somehow conjure a
levée en masse
. He was old enough to remember tales from his childhood of how, in 1793, just such a popular army had risen to drive out the forces of the First Coalition, Prussia’s among them, when they attempted to suppress the original French Revolution. The mirror image of those thoughts now preoccupied the more extreme radicals who saw, in an embattled France, fertile ground from which a true social revolution might grow, reversing the setbacks of the past eighty years.