Louis-Napoleon considered all of this with interest and, after careful consideration, decided to stand in the September 1848 by-elections. He swept the five departments where he was a candidate (one more than those he had won in June), and he chose to represent the department of the Seine. When he arrived in Paris on September 24 at the Paris embarkation point of the Great Northern railway (now the Gare du Nord), he carried with him a color-coded map of Paris—his plan for renewing the great city—along with dreams for improving the lot of workers and the entire nation.
The Assembly welcomed him and suspended the banishment order. Even Victor Hugo was enthusiastic: “The man just named by the people as their representative,” he proclaimed, was in his eyes a worthy heir of the great Bonaparte; “his candidacy dates from the time of Austerlitz.”10 Louis-Napoleon informally subscribed to a number of the progressive ideas that then were circulating, which held in common an optimistic view of the emerging industrial revolution and its promise for one and all. Jobs and riches could be had for worker and bourgeoisie alike if only the old way of doing things could be cleared away and replaced with the new. Regarding Paris in particular, Louis-Napoleon was thoroughly convinced that misery and mobs would disappear if only the narrow, festering streets could be demolished and broad thoroughfares created in their place, letting sunshine in and allowing the free flow of commerce as well as the activities of daily life.
The Provisional Government had already chalked up several potential public works in Paris, largely to satisfy the job requirements of the short-lived National Workshops. These included the completion of the northern wing of the Louvre Palace (the wing begun under Napoleon Bonaparte) and the continuation of the Rue de Rivoli (another Napoleon project). This had stalled in its eastward course alongside the Louvre’s uncompleted northern wing, reaching only a point even with Napoleon’s nearby Arc du Carrousel. Nothing for the moment came of these plans, but the government did in fact make a significant change in the law on compulsory purchases (eminent domain) that would have huge impact in Paris’s future: this now allowed the city to purchase the entire portion rather than just the precise area of land directly affected by whatever public works were involved.
Louis-Napoleon believed in the socialistic philosophies of his age, and he dreamed of initiating major public works that would foster progress and benefit one and all. But unlike those who had ardently supported the National Workshops or something like them, he believed in the necessity for good, solid organization. Indeed, his distaste for the National Workshops did not so much derive from a horror of handouts to what the bourgeoisie regarded as the undeserving poor as it recoiled from the sheer disorganization that riddled the project.
He firmly believed that he could do better, and in late October, when the Constituent Assembly set December 10 as the date for the presidential elections, Louis-Napoleon immediately announced that he would run.
At last, on November 4, 1848, the Second Republic had a constitution. This document, which the Constituent Assembly overwhelmingly approved, provided for a single Legislative Assembly and a president with full executive powers, both to be directly elected by universal male suffrage. This president would serve a four-year term and, most importantly—especially for those who cast a worried glance in the direction of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte—would not be eligible for reelection.
It quickly emerged that Louis-Napoleon’s main opponent would be none other than General Cavaignac, who was widely favored to win. Cavaignac, of course, was by then known as the man who had “gunned down the workers,” and Louis-Napoleon—who had made no public pronouncement whatever following the riots—is supposed to have remarked (at a London dinner party in the riots’ aftermath): “That man [Cavaignac] is clearing the way for me.”11
But Louis-Napoleon would benefit not only from worker support but also from the forces on the right—those conservatives (such as King Louis-Philippe’s former prime minister, Adolphe Thiers) who had always been un-enthusiastic about the Republic. Bonaparte easily promised them whatever they wanted and, according to historian Maurice Agulhon, “seemed to be a mediocre, simple-enough fellow whom it would be easy to maneuver in the corridors of power.”12
Certainly the general atmosphere in Paris had changed and not in Cavaignac’s favor. Maxime Du Camp noted this upon his return to Paris after an absence of several months. As he put it, “I was astonished at the change which had taken place in my absence. General Cavaignac, when I left Paris, was a great man—a savior of society. . . . Our French weather-cock had had time to turn, and it was ‘Cavaignac is a revolutionary just like the others.’” Reaction, he added, “‘was setting in’ with a will.”13
Louis-Napoleon’s right-hand man, Persigny, campaigned as he had in September, using the ample funds provided by Louis-Napoleon’s faithful (and wealthy) mistress, Lizzie Howard, to flood the streets of Paris and all the major French cities with posters, leaflets, and placards, in addition to match-boxes with the candidate’s portrait, medals on red ribbons with his effigy, and miniature French flags bearing his name. Persigny also bribed journalists to insert articles favorable to Louis in newspapers otherwise hostile to the candidate and paid street singers to sing songs acclaiming him. It was new, it was modern, and the public loved it. The public also took to Louis-Napoleon personally, despite (and perhaps even because of) his lack of polish as a speaker. Whereas Cavaignac was aloof and military in demeanor, Louis-Napoleon exuded charm and connected instantly with ordinary people. Riding through Paris on horseback, he took pleasure in greeting crowds in the streets and talking with soldiers in the barracks.
Still, it came as a surprise to most seasoned politicians when this Bonaparte upstart, as many derisively called him, demolished Cavaignac on election day, December 10. Louis-Napoleon had promised peace as well as prosperity, and having thus reassured those who dreaded another Bonaparte on the loose in Europe, he found his base among a large majority who favored a return to order under an approachable leader with a pleasant smile—especially one with a legendary name.
Ten days later, he took the oath of office, swearing “to remain faithful to the democratic Republic.” He then read a brief speech in which he extolled the Republic and again promised it his complete loyalty.
According to Victor Hugo, many representatives were reserved in their applause, not knowing whether they were witnessing “a conversion or a perjury.”14
Victor Hugo adored Paris and had done so ever since he could remember. The youngest son of an officer in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, Hugo was born in 1802 in Besançon, near the Swiss border, but arrived in Paris soon after, when his mother, a confirmed royalist, left Major Hugo to his mistress and his wars. Settling in Paris with her three sons, Madame Hugo acquired a lover of her own, who actively plotted against Bonaparte until ending up facing a firing squad.
In the midst of this turbulent family life, young Victor went back and forth between mother and father (now a general), between royalist and Napoleonic sympathies, and between Paris, Italy, and Spain. Even Paris offered little stability during his early years, as one home depressingly followed another. But in the midst of this unsettled life, young Hugo began to write and found that he was good at it, winning a major prize when he was fifteen and (with his older brothers) founding a literary review that he filled with torrents of poetry and prose.
Yet even these successes could not distract from the Hugo family’s mounting troubles, including the unmistakable evidence that Victor’s brother Eugène was going mad. On the day of Victor’s wedding to Adèle Foucher, Eugène permanently slipped into insanity and spent the rest of his brief life in confinement.
Life for young Victor Hugo was already looking a lot like one of his emotion-packed novels. Still, there were more serene moments, and by his midtwenties, he was beginning to achieve a literary reputation and the income to go with it. He now began to write plays and made his triumphal debut at the Comédie-Française with Hernani, where it prompted riots with its daring new Romantic style.
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But it was the 1831 publication of Hugo’s remarkable novel Notre-Dame de Paris that really announced his arrival as a literary star. Huge, sprawling, and fairly dripping with emotion, this dark Romantic tale quickly became a best seller and was translated into countless foreign languages, including English, where (much to Hugo’s dismay) it was retitled The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Passionately drawn to the medieval architecture and poverty-mired inhabitants of this ancient cathedral quarter, Hugo turned his novel into a demand for social justice as well as an elegy to the past. In the process, he saved Notre-Dame, for his book prompted a surge of public attention to the dying cathedral, resulting in the enormous restoration efforts that followed.
Given his considerable earnings from Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo now could afford to move his family to 6 Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), the most well-known of his many Paris residences. Here in this beautiful seventeenth-century square—which Hugo shrugged off as too modern and architecturally uninteresting—he lived for sixteen years in the height of Gothic comfort. It was now that he established his liaison with actress Juliette Drouet that would last the rest of his life, while his wife, Adèle, turned to Hugo’s friend, the writer and critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
This could not have been the happiest of households, and indeed, after an 1847 visit, Charles Dickens gave a memorable description. From Hugo’s wife (“who looks as if she might poison [Hugo’s] breakfast any morning when the humor seized her”) to his daughter (whom Dickens suspected “of carrying a sharp poignard in her stays”), Dickens was struck by the family’s over-the-top creepiness, ensconced “among old armor, and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables.”15
Still, Hugo seemed content in this remarkable setting and continued to pour out torrents of words, including the initial portion of Les Misérables. Revolution and imperial coup would drive him from his home and his country long before the final version of the book would appear.
Seventeen-year-old Edouard Manet, writing to a friend in February 1849, asked: “How do you feel about the election of L[ouis] Napoleon[?]” He then added, “For goodness sake don’t go and make him emperor.” Soon after, Manet wrote to his father: “So you’ve had more excitement in Paris; try and keep a decent republic against our return, for I fear L[ouis] Napoleon is not a good republican.”16
At this time, young Manet was aboard a naval training ship bound for Rio de Janeiro, having acquiesced to family insistence that he find a career, any career, after the young man’s poor school record negated any possibility of following his father (a distinguished lawyer in the Ministry of Justice) in the law. Young Edouard reluctantly agreed to give up his dream of becoming an artist and took the naval exams but failed them. Then, after a change in navy regulations made it possible to reapply after making a voyage south of the Equator in the merchant marine, Edouard’s determined father signed him up on a vessel bound for Rio. Edouard made the best of it and seemed to enjoy the voyage, crossing the equator on January 22, 1849, with the usual crossing-the-line rituals, and finding suitably exotic entertainment in tropical Rio. After his return to Paris in June, though, Edouard again dashed his father’s hopes by once again failing the naval entrance exams. At long last, Manet père gave in to his son and agreed to let him go to art school.
This meant either studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, with its Academy of Painting and Sculpture, or entering a private atelier. The former offered a highly formalized and classical training, largely with members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and emphasized drawing the human figure and copying Old Masters in the Louvre. The aim here was to win special competitions—the most exalted being the Prix de Rome. Instruction in private ateliers, on the other hand, could be less rigid, and among these, the ateliers of Charles Gleyre and Thomas Couture were the most prominent.
In time, Charles Gleyre would attract young Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. But now, Edouard Manet opted for Thomas Couture, and in January 1850 he entered Couture’s atelier—located just inside what then was the Farmers-General wall, at the foot of Montmartre.
Louis-Napoleon began his presidency of the Second Republic with a certain amount of discretion. Despite his long history of proclaiming himself heir to the Empire, he went through the motions of swearing loyalty to a constitution that forbade him from seizing what he had always regarded as rightfully his.
Some of his first steps were to reinforce his image as benefactor of the people. Envisioning huge green spaces for the city as well as a major road-building program, he soon ordered work to begin on the Bois de Boulogne. Paris at that time had four public parks: the Luxembourg Gardens, the Jardin des Plantes, the Tuileries gardens, and the gardens of the Palais Royal, all in the city’s center. But Louis-Napoleon saw a need for parks on the city’s growing outskirts. The lands of the Bois de Boulogne, immediately to the west of Paris, belonged to the state, but the new president soon provided for their transfer to the city free of charge, on condition that they be turned into an area for public walking and relaxation. Louis-Napoleon’s idea, based on his years in London, was to create a curving watercourse there modeled on Hyde Park’s Serpentine. It was, in theory, a pleasing idea, and Louis-Napoleon eagerly awaited the outcome, as teams of workmen set to digging.
But before long, the new president began to take other steps, these ones carefully calibrated to consolidate his power. Soon after assuming the presidency, Louis-Napoleon formed a government of former royalist notables and cronies, completely excluding any republicans. And, working to curb resistance in the Legislative Assembly, whose large republican majority still distrusted him, he and the Assembly’s right wing forced through spring elections. These, which (like the presidential election) were based on universal male suffrage, installed a legislature more to Louis-Napoleon’s liking, delivering a crushing victory for the bourgeois party of order (the order of obedience rather than the order of law). No matter that the leaders of the right regarded Bonaparte as an adventurer and an illegitimate one at that; they and he shared a fear of a democratic upsurge. While these leaders of the right dismissed any possibility that he could rule without them, Bonaparte saw things entirely differently and was quite willing to accept their help until he no longer needed them.
In the meantime, this new majority for the French right had an immediate impact on affairs far from home, for Louis-Napoleon—whose sympathy with Italian unification and independence dated from his youth, when he and his brother fought with Italian revolutionaries against Austrian domination in northern Italy—now agreed with the strongly Catholic French right to support the temporal power of the pope. The papacy had dominated much of central Italy for centuries, but now the Papal States were under attack from nationalists inspired by the same waves of reform and revolution that had swept France and other countries in 1848. In early 1849, Italian nationalists under Giuseppe Mazzini declared a Roman Republic, and the pope fled Rome. Louis-Napoleon’s conservative Catholic backers now strongly urged him to go to the pope’s aid. Despite his sympathy for the revolutionaries, Louis-Napoleon was not about to risk his own political power. The French army attacked Rome, ousted the republicans, and welcomed back the pope.
Since this military action was directly in contradiction to the French constitution (which stated that the Republic “respects foreign nationalities just as it expects its own nationality to be respected . . . and never employs its forces against the liberty of any people”), the political left attempted to protest, with peaceful demonstrations. But these protests failed. The Parisian workers, still traumatized by the bloody days of June 1848, did not show up, and in those cities—such as Lyon—where they did, they were brutally repressed. “No one could say that the Government erred on the side of leniency,” Maxime Du Camp observed, adding that from 1849, “the prisons were crowded with political journalists.” For his part, a newly authoritarian Louis-Napoleon proclaimed that “it is time that the good took heart and the bad
trembled.”17
The tide of revolution had definitely turned. French forces turned a subdued Rome back to the pope, who embarked on severe repression. Soon after, Austria retook an insurgent Venice and crushed the Hungarian revolution. Later, Maxime Du Camp wrote that “as early as . . . June, 1849, the more sagacious spirits foresaw what the end would be, but neither Flaubert nor myself suspected anything.”18
In October 1849, Louis-Napoleon announced that he was forming a ministry that would be accountable to him alone and that henceforth the Assembly would be narrowly limited in its legislative responsibilities—meaning that it would be dependent upon the direction of the president. Victor Hugo, who had believed that Bonaparte was preferable to Cavaignac, now saw the light and, in a speech to the Assembly, denounced the regime’s brutality. With this dramatic switch, he found himself in the company of a growing network of international socialists, including revolutionaries from the popular uprisings that had recently swept Europe. Hugo even chaired an international peace conference in Paris in August 1849.
But Hugo and those now fearing for the Republic could do little or nothing to stop the train of events, especially since conservatives in the Assembly were still willing to put up with almost anything from Bonaparte so long as they got what they wanted in return. In particular, this meant the establishment of control over public education by the Roman Catholic Church, a longed-for event that became law (the Falloux law) in March 1850. Church-run public education had always appealed to the party of order, whose clerical ties were strong, but it became essential now with the introduction of universal male suffrage. Who, indeed, would teach the workers and the peasants? Who would guide them in their opinions? With the Falloux law, the Church rather than the State became that mentor, in public as well as spiritual affairs—giving rise to hard-fought opposition that would last through the rest of the century.
Paris, City of Dreams Page 3
