Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  In art as well as in literature, the Revolution of 1830 represented a triumph for Romanticism. Delacroix combined allegory and contemporary event in his Liberty Leading the People. He threw himself into a series of pictures inspired by Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Walter Scott and Chateaubriand. The jury that controlled the Salon, dominated by lesser-known artists of the generation of David’s pupils, were keen, however, to defend the canons of the classical school against the Romantics. In 1836, for example, they rejected Delacroix’s Hamlet, which was pointedly bought by the heir to the throne, the Duc d’Orléans.64 Reviews such as L’Artiste dedicated themselves to campaigning on behalf of the Romantic school.65 In time, however, the tide moved against the Romantics. In 1841 Ingres returned from Rome, where he had been director of the French school at which winners of the Prix de Rome studied, to preside over a revival of interest in harmonious line and beauty, articulated now less by reference to classical Antiquity than to mythology and the Orient. Whereas the Oriental themes of Delacroix were executed with passion, the odalisques or slaves in Turkish harems painted by Ingres were an excuse to study nudes that were both sensual and serene.

  The July Monarchy was keen to move beyond the battle between classical and Romantic art, preaching a juste milieu between order and movement, monarchy and the heritage of the French Revolution, and a national greatness that was articulated by a succession of regimes, royal, republican and imperial. Louis-Philippe converted the Château of Versailles into a national museum, with the motto ‘To all the Glories of the Fatherland’ over the entrance. The Hall of Battles was given over to paintings of fifteen centuries of French glory, from the victory of Clovis on the battlefield of Tolbiac (496) to the triumph of Napoleon at Wagram (1809). Romanticism and classicism were reconciled by inviting Delacroix to paint the battle of Taillebourg (1242) and Gérard to submit his Entry of Henri IV into Paris as well as a study of Austerlitz. Horace Vernet, a rebel after 1815, was tamed by Charles X with the Legion of Honour in 1825, and became Louis-Philippe’s artist of choice. He was entrusted with the last three battles of Jena, Friedland and Wagram, and also brought to the Hall his Bouvines and Fontenoy, painted for Charles X.66 When the French armies enjoyed a rare bout of glory after 1815 by subduing the Algerian leader Abd-el-Kader, Vernet was called upon to represent this victory in a vast panorama 21 metres long, exhibited in the Salon of 1845. The juste milieu of the July Monarchy was also expressed by an eclectic style that combined the best of classical and Romantic. The talking point of the Salon of 1847 was The Romans of the Decadence, another monumental painting, nearly 5 metres by 8, by Thomas Couture, a pupil of Gros. Its theme was classical and it was highly composed, but its subject was not the glory of Rome but its decline, a salutary tale for the French bourgeoisie, and the forms of some of the draped bodies echoed those on the Raft of the Medusa, albeit in languid ecstasy rather than death. Ingres and Delacroix, wrote one critic, ‘are no longer the young generation… They have established their style; we must bow to them and pass them by.’67

  THE ARTS, POLITICS AND MARKETS

  IN THE SECOND EMPIRE

  The Second Empire censored the political press and took a broad view of the need to protect public order and public morals. The economic boom with which it coincided and which it tried to foster by railway building, urban development and free trade, was designed to have a depoliticizing effect on a bourgeois public which had more disposable income but less patience and preferred to be entertained rather than challenged. Political repression and bourgeois philistinism bred a frustration in a new generation of writers who wished to challenge the narrow and materialist values of the bourgeois society that was now dominant. However, artists challenging dominant mores ran the risk of provoking the ire of the state, which did not hesitate to prosecute writers who were held to transgress these norms.

  Alexandre Dumas fils came up against the authorities with his Dame aux camélias, the story of a courtesan, Marguerite, who falls in love with one of her lovers, Armand. First published as a novel, it was adapted as a play but was censored by the interior minister of the Second Republic, which was then dominated by royalists. Dumas went with his father to try to secure an audience with the minister, but to no avail. The situation improved when the Duc de Morny, one of the masterminds of the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, himself became interior minister. He took a much less cen sorious view, and the play opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris on 2 February 1852. In fact, the play did not really challenge social norms but rather reinforced them. Marguerite is visited in Act III by her lover’s father, who tells her that she is a ‘dangerous person’ who cannot marry his son. He has two children to marry, and his daughter, ‘young, beautiful, as pure as an angel’, is due to marry into ‘an honourable family which wishes that everything in my family is honourable too’. Besides, a marriage between his son and Marguerite ‘would have neither chastity for foundation, nor religion for support, nor a family as its fruit’.68 Rather than threaten bourgeois hypocrisy, Marguerite sacrifices herself, dies, and releases Armand for a successful career and traditional marriage.

  The challenges posed by Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were considered more serious. Baudelaire was in revolt against his own family as well as against society. His father, a civil servant under the Empire, died when he was five, and his mother remarried an establishment figure, a major-general and ambassador who was appointed an imperial senator in 1853. Charles contracted venereal disease at eighteen, dropped out of the law faculty at nineteen and having attacked his stepfather at a dinner party was put on a ship for Calcutta. Coming into his father’s inheritance at twenty-one, in 1842, he pursued the life of a writer in Paris, calling Sainte-Beuve his uncle, and becoming a disciple of Théophile Gautier (whose reputation as a poet was made with his 1852 Émaux et camées) and a friend of Maxime du Camp.69 Gautier admired his almost British reserve and called him ‘a dandy lost in bohemia’,70 He established himself as an art critic, and was a great admirer of Delacroix. Covering the Salon of 1846 he judged that while Hugo was a worker, Delacroix was a creator. ‘His works are poems,’ he wrote, ‘naively conceived, executed with insolence, shaped by genius… while the one takes only the skin, the other snatches the entrails.’71 In 1857 Baudelaire buried his stepfather and published Les Fleurs du mal. Gautier remarked that it betrayed a sense of the ‘original perversity’ of man but that ‘more than once, with a powerful movement of the wings, rises towards the bluest regions of spirituality’.72 Other did not agree, and the authorities took the view that the work was immoral, obscene and irreligious. Baudelaire was brought before the Tribunal de la Seine and fined 300 francs, one and a half times his monthly income. Fortunately, he had contacts in high places and on appeal to the empress his fine was reduced to 50 francs.73 After this he gave more time to art criticism, defending the work of Delacroix and Manet.

  One writer who sympathized deeply with what Baudelaire was attempting was Flaubert. Flaubert congratulated him on rejuvenating Romanticism and said he was ‘like nobody else’. ‘You celebrate the flesh without loving it, in a sad and detached way I like. You are as hard as marble and as penetrating as an English fog.’74 Flaubert, son of the chief surgeon at Rouen hospital, and the same age as Baudelaire, also dropped out of law studies in Paris, after failing in his first-year examination. In 1843 he met Victor Hugo, and was disappointed to find the great man so ordinary. That same year, after a carriage accident, he began to suffer epileptic fits. His closest friend from his brief student days, Maxime du Camp, said that ‘this illness ruined his life, making him solitary and wild’.75 Following his father’s death in 1846 he came into his inheritance, and was able to spend most of his time on the family’s country property at Croisset in Normandy.76 With du Camp he toured Brittany in 1847 and undertook a voyage en Orient taking in Egypt and Turkey in 1850, after which he hesitated between writing something exotic, such as Une Nuit de Don Juan or ‘Anubis, the story of a woman who wants to be seduced by God’, and som
ething that explored provincial bourgeois life in all its ordinariness.77 His Madame Bovary was serialized in La Revue de Paris, which du Camp edited, in the autumn of 1856. The novel explored the dreams and frustrations of a doctor’s wife in Normandy, and rather than dress up sex or death in any distant or invented setting it laid it bare in the heart of the French bourgeoisie. As with Les Fleurs du mal some passages were deemed an affront to ‘public and religious morality’ and Flaubert was brought before the courts by the government. The prosecution argued that the book glorified Madame Bovary’s adultery and elided her sexual desires and religious yearnings. The defence argued that it was a work of social criticism, demonstrating what happened to a farmer’s daughter who was educated above her station and was married for reasons of social advancement rather than for love. The prosecution said that the book would corrupt female readers, the defence that Madame Bovary’s death would serve as a warning to them. Some critics also thought that the novel was too brutal in its realism. ‘The son and brother of distinguished doctors,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve, ‘Flaubert wields his pen as others wield the scalpel. Anatomists and physiologists seem to be everywhere.’78 Many readers, on the other hand, using the same metaphor, were moved by the truthfulness of Flaubert’s portrayal of the predicament of contemporary women. ‘I have not stopped crying since yesterday about this poor woman and have not been able to sleep at night,’ wrote Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie of Angers. ‘Monsieur, where did you gain this perfect understanding of human nature? It is like a scalpel applied to the heart, to the soul. Alas, it is the world in all its ugliness.’79 Flaubert was acquitted, he was acclaimed as the leader of the Realist school, and Madame Bovary, now published in hardback by Michel Lévy, became an instant success.80

  Writers who attacked the moral and religious basis of the Empire might still be socially acceptable to it. In an attempt to avoid trial, Flaubert mobilized contacts in high places including the poet Lamartine, the emperor’s cousin ‘Plon-Plon’ (Prince Jérôme-Napoléon) and ladies-in-waiting to the empress. In the 1860s he was a guest at the leading literary and artistic salon, presided over by another cousin of the emperor, Princess Mathilde, who was separated from her husband Prince Demidov and had found a new calling as a patron of the arts. The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, who had also been tried on an obscenity charge in 1853, recorded that at the empress’s in January 1863 they and Flaubert ‘formed an odd-looking group; we were almost the only three people there without decorations and the government of the Emperor, whom we could almost touch with our elbows, had dragged all three of us through the police courts for outraging public morals. The irony of it all.’81 In fact they were happier in the cafés and restaurants of Paris which provided a more democratic if male-dominated form of sociability. In 1862 the Goncourt brothers founded a dining society of Realist writers that met on Sunday nights, twice a month, at Magny’s restaurant. It included Sainte-Beuve, now happy to denounce Victor Hugo as a ‘charlatan’, Turgenev, Taine, Renan and Flaubert. George Sand was invited on a few occasions but said little and told Flaubert, ‘You are the only person here who does not frighten me.’82

  The social connections that linked the writers of the Realist movement did not, however, necessarily bring public recognition. George Sand may have been shy in the restaurant but she enjoyed a wider public. In 1869 Flaubert published L’Éducation sentimentale, featuring a mirror-image of one of Balzac’s heroes, ‘a man of every weakness’, who blends perfectly into the bourgeois milieu by dint of education, manners and fortune, but fails to pursue a career and fails to win the woman he loves, while the tumultuous events of 1848–51 simply pass him by. The novel was at best widely misunderstood and at worst condemned by the critics as an attack on bourgeois ideals. There were only two isolated voices of praise. Émile Zola defended Flaubert by underlining his ‘nervous analysis of the smallest facts, a notation of life that is both meticulous and alive’.83 George Sand argued, positively, that it was the fault of contemporary society if it was ‘in fact mediocre, ridiculous, condemned to see its aspirations continually aborted’.84 However, she was a friend and had the delight at the same time of seeing her play, L’Autre, become a box-office success at the Opéra-Comique. Flaubert, who saw it himself early in 1870, told Sand, ‘what a pretty work, and how one loves its author!’85 The fact that a masterpiece was damned by the critics while a play of which nothing has since been heard was praised to the rooftops says a great deal about the bourgeois society that was the market for literature, drama and music in the nineteenth century.

  It was not that Flaubert lacked a good publisher for his novels, rather that the eye of publishers in the Second Empire was on the expanding demand for information and entertainment. The careers of the Lévy brothers and Louis Hachette demonstrate the dramatic changes that took place in book publishing after 1840. Simon Lévy was a Jewish pedlar from Alsace who came to Paris in 1826, selling theatre programmes and the texts of plays running in Paris before opening a cabinet de lecture in 1836. His son Michel set up as a music publisher in his own right in 1845 and, having taken the side of Alexandre Dumas against accusations of running a ‘literary factory’, secured the right to publish the complete works of Dumas, which appeared as thirty-eight volumes at 2 francs each in 1847. The success of that year led to Michel and his brothers Calmann and Nathan putting 50,000 francs each into a family publishing business, and they acquired rights to the works of both George Sand and the playwright and librettist Eugène Scribe in 1855. In 1857 they published Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in a first edition of 6,000, at 1 franc each, and a second edition in 1858, but their all-time bestseller was Ernest Renan’s 1863 Life of Jesus, which sold 140,000 copies in the first year and a half and made them enough money to open a new bookshop on the place de l’Opéra in 1871.86 For his part Louis Hachette, having dropped out of law studies, developed a publishing niche in school textbooks for the expanding school system and soon became king of the textbook, publishing fifty-four titles in 1833–9. Another sector of his market was the publication of dictionaries, culminating in Littré’s dictionary of 1863. In 1851 he visited the Great Exhibition in London and returned to Paris determined to establish himself as the French W. H. Smith. Just as the main railway system was being completed and with the powerful patronage of the Duc de Morny, with whom he co-owned a paper-manufacturing business, he negotiated an exclusive right with railway companies to set up station bookstalls. He developed a whole library of colour-coded paperbacks as train-journey reading, retailing at between 50 centimes and 1 franc 50, avoiding anything political or immoral and including the popular children’s stories of the Comtesse de Ségur. Hachette also acquired the right to distribute newspapers through station bookshops, and by the time of his death in 1865 newspaper sales were bringing in more than book sales.87

  The press likewise responded quickly to the commercial and communications revolutions. The heavy censorship of the political press after the 1848 Revolution encouraged press barons to develop a more informative, entertaining kind of newspaper. Hippolyte de Villemessant, the illegitimate son of an aristocratic mother who sought redemption in Legitimism and commercial success, acquired Le Figaro in 1854, and turned it into the society paper of the Second Empire which ‘relates Paris to Paris’.88 When press censorship was relaxed in 1867 he successfully merged the literary-gossip dimension with American-style political reportage, and the paper had a healthy daily circulation of 47,000 in 1868.89 One of his journalists, Henri Rochefort, the son of a Legitimist marquis who was introduced to republicanism by his father-in-law, broke with Villemessant and in 1868 launched his own paper, La Lanterne, in response to the more liberal press laws. Satirical and scurrilous, it caught the mood of growing opposition to the Empire in Paris and sold 125,000 copies on its second Saturday, before the government clamped down. He had already fled to Belgium to take refuge with the Hugo family, who dubbed him ‘the proud archer’, before the government sentenced him to a year in prison.90

  Very different from
both these papers was Le Petit Journal, launched in 1863 by Polydore Millaud, who originated in the Sephardic Jewish community of Bordeaux and sought his journalistic fortune in Paris after 1836. Tabloid in design, selling for a mere 5 centimes, Le Petit Journal was distributed along the railway network and expedited to towns and villages by a network of itinerant paper-sellers who replaced the colporteurs, killed off by government restrictions since 1849. It not only served a popular audience in town and country that was no more than semi-literate but taught it to read. Non-political, it provided a wealth of information and entertainment from stock-market prices to reviews and reports of criminal trials, with faits divers or human-interest stories a new selling point. Its editorialist, who went under the trade name of Timothy Trimm, provided comment on the issues of the day from Easter celebrations to military service, answered readers’ letters and was careful to avoid a Parisian focus. The novels it serialized were far from high literature, concentrating on Rocambole, the mysterious righter of wrongs of Ponson du Terrail’s Drames de Paris, and the Monsieur Lecoq detective stories of Émile Gaboriau. The line between fact and fiction was not always closely drawn, and news, human interest and the detective story came together with the Tropmann affair, the case of a murder of parents and six children in the Paris suburb of Pantin. Circulation was 357,000 on 23 September 1869, the day the crime was announced, and rose when each body was found and the culprit apprehended, reaching 594,000 on 15 January 1870, the day of his execution.91