Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The extreme overcrowding of residents in certain quarters, and the stench of the household animals blended with that of excrement, decaying animal cadavers and rotting food, all create extensive atmospheric pollution in which people live and eat. The fetid air is a visible haze that generally covers Paris and there are districts over which it is particularly thick.

  Every worker had to possess a registration book, and anyone without was treated as a vagabond. Hours were harsh—builders worked from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. in summer, with wages fixed at between three and five francs a day, and when it came to litigation it was the employer’s word that was always accepted. Following a decree of 1806, strikers would be sent to prison (as were twenty-seven in that first year). Bakers were fortunate if they lived to the age of fifty. Nevertheless, the workers of Paris, Jingos all through the Revolution, remained hawks from Marengo onwards—though they became increasingly apathetic towards politics.

  As always, hand in hand with poverty marched disease. On a visit to the Hôtel Dieu in November 1801, Chaptal had been profoundly shocked by the lack of hygiene, the disorder and the dirt and dilapidation he found. He succeeded in persuading the Paris authorities to relocate elsewhere pregnant women and sick children, and above all the mad. Hitherto sick children of the working classes had been mixed in with adults in ordinary hospitals—greatly to their detriment, not least of their morals. Relaxation of morals under the Revolution had resulted in a galloping increase in venereal disease, euphemistically known as les maladies honteuses, and the “progress of immorality” had demanded the creation of a special hospital in the vacant Capucin monsastery in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques. At first called simply the Hospital of the Vénériens, then—more delicately—the Hôpital du Midi, the Vénériens had an enormous waiting-list. Yet by the end of the Empire great strides had been made in improving the medieval conditions in Paris hospitals. At the time of Napoleon’s accession, there had been the three main establishments—the Hôtel Dieu, La Verité and Saint-Louis; by the time of his fall, the capital counted no fewer than eleven hospitals with only modest charges. Orphanages had been founded and a special hospital for enfants malades opened in the Rue de Sèvres.

  SALON LIFE

  As has ever been the story of Paris from the days of Philippe Auguste onwards, alongside all this poverty and misery coexisted extreme affluence—despite the high reformist ambitions of the Empire. The old aristocracy—those who hadn’t lost their heads—and the haute bourgeoisie had recouped their fortunes most miraculously; while a new class of nouveaux riches (which included the imperial family and its hangers-on) had arisen from the ashes of the Revolution with astonishing speed. Even the Récamiers, products and symbols of this revival, had somehow regained their fortunes following the bank crash of 1805.

  From her legendary salon in the Chaussée d’Antin, once home of Louis XVI’s ill-starred Minister of Finance, Necker, Juliette Récamier dispensed lavish hospitality. Daughter of a Lyons solicitor, financed by an elderly banker husband (whom she had married at sixteen) and closest (perhaps only) friend of Mme. de Staël, she fashioned her house into a worldly shrine, its décor setting the standards of Empire style. Her great and serene beauty, which seemed to embody the period’s ideal of feminine perfection, inspired many passions, none fulfilled until Chateaubriand came along and picked the lock.

  “Mme. Récamier has,” wrote an impressionable German, “such a thoroughly translucent skin that one can see the blood course through her veins … her beautiful mouth, full of fine teeth, is always half open; she seems to find it quite natural that people like to look at her in the same position and pose for hours on end”—notably on the uncomfortable sofa to which she lent her name. Yet another dissatisfied customer of the great court painter, she rejected David’s famous 1800 painting of her as a chilly vestal virgin, disliking the coarseness of the feet, and promptly placed a second order with one of his pupils—Baron Gérard. David refused either to alter it or to release it from his studio; on his death, it went to the Louvre.

  As well as setting the tone in salon life, dress and furnishings, Mme. Récamier also played an important part in reviving the culinary arts in Paris. With the end of the Terror, there had been a proliferation of restaurants in Paris, opened by chefs of the grands seigneurs who had lost their jobs when their masters lost their heads. As early as 1798, there were an estimated 2,000 restaurateurs in the city, many of whom depended on the patronage of the Empress Josephine. There was Chez Noudet in the Palais Royal and not far from the Récamiers, which in 1813 cheered up Paris with the secrets of brandades de morue—the greatest gastronomic success of the time. Lower down the scale were the plentiful plebeian bastringues and guinguettes, outside the barrières where one could dance on grass lawns. Then there were the cafés, the most popular in the Palais Royal, but also much sought after was the Café de Paris, on the Pont Neuf where the old statue of Henri IV had stood. Then there was the unusual Café des Aveugles, with its orchestra composed entirely of blind musicians. Between six and nine in the evenings, Parisian bachelors would enjoy themselves in such cafés.

  Under the Empire, eating times and habits changed. The old routine of dîner at 4 p.m. was abandoned by the chic for the more modern time of 7 p.m.; the old habit of singing with the dessert was deemed socially “ridiculous” and was dropped. The dîner would usually finish at nine, though Napoleon himself, from military habit, found twenty minutes long enough for any repast (not dissimilar to his love-making, if reports are to be believed). There was no regular dining room in the Tuileries, so he would give orders each morning where the table was to be laid. Those, like Mme. Récamier, keen on the bonne table would consult Grimod de la Reynière and his famed Almanach des Gourmands. Here you could learn how to prepare a gigot; it had to be “looked forward to like a lovers’ first rendezvous, beaten as tender as a liar caught in the act, blonde as a German girl and bleeding like a Carib.” By 1812, however, when the Almanach closed down, all Paris was tightening its belt as, with the English blockade becoming ever more effective, gourmets found essential ingredients increasingly rare. Almost no rum, coffee, chocolate or sugar was coming in from the French West Indies. In common with ordinary Parisians, even imperial dignitaries were obliged to suspend a piece of sugar on a string from the ceiling, each member of the family allowed to dip it in his or her cup only briefly.

  Despite the austerity imposed by war, imperial society was renowned for its parties, receptions and balls, which afforded varying degrees of pleasure to the invités. Starting at the top, Napoleon, characteristically, did everything on the grandest scale. There were five, and only five, imperial receptions mounted at the Hôtel de Ville attended by Napoleon, each a nightmare for the party planners. The first, two weeks after the Coronation, in December 1804, caused a major traffic jam with 6,000 coaches attempting to move. Even princes and marshals had to wait four to five hours before they could get away.

  As soon as the Consulate became Empire there was a notable change in the style of Parisienne dress. Josephine led the way—but, as in all things, the orders came down from the top. For a while the daring Grecian nudity of the Directory prevailed, before Napoleon, the Mediterranean, let it be known that he wished to suppress “this masquerade of gallantry.” He wanted women in general, not only of the court, to be less naked. Josephine’s fun-loving friend Thérèse Tallien was ticked off for appearing as a particularly seductive, semi-clad Diana at the Opéra. Josephine was to provide the example with a “relative severity in her attire.” Aided by her couturier Leroy, dresses under the Empire became heavier: “sleeves short and puffed, the tunic falling straight, moulding the forms without stressing them.” These heavier dresses were also more expensive. A quite ordinary dress for the Empress would cost 3,000 francs—her bill for one year amounted to 143,314 francs, 10 centimes—and when her wardrobe was inventoried in 1809 it totalled 666 winter dresses, 230 summer ones and, toujours la Créole—only two pairs of knickers. An enormous amount of money was spent on r
ouge (3,000 francs a year for Josephine), because Napoleon hated pale women.

  As for the men, dress had also sobered down considerably from the modes of the incroyables. In February 1805, a young Stendhal described himself as “never so brilliant”:

  I was wearing a black waistcoat, black silk breeches and stockings, with a cinnamon-bronze coat, a very well-tied cravat, a superb shirt-front. Never, I believe, was my ugliness more effaced by my general appearance … I looked a very handsome man, after the style of Talma [the actor].

  Thus attired, he could also have paraded passably down St. James’s without being taken for a French spy.

  THEATRE AND CENSORSHIP

  Once Napoleon had returned from Tilsit, it seemed as if he had begun to lose interest in some of the great institutions founded under the Consulate. To Fouché he declared that one newspaper—the official Moniteur—was quite sufficient; there was no need for others. When he came to power there had been over seventy papers in Paris; within a year these had been reduced to thirteen, all under strict censorship. Among other things, no caricatures of the ruler or his policies were permitted, a ban which accounted for the serious dearth in the cartoonist’s art of the times. The once lively Paris press became uninformative and dull. Following Trafalgar, Stendhal’s diaries reveal how little he was able to glean about political developments or commercial pressures in Europe from his reading of Paris journals. Censorship rapidly spread to books and plays as well, where any allusion to politics was forbidden. Fouché’s spies were everywhere. All at court were required to report on each other, with suspects promptly arrested.

  At the same time that Napoleon ordered the curtailment of newspapers, he instructed that the overall number of Paris theatres be reduced to eight. As a result, between fifteen and twenty petits théâtres were closed down. There were indeed too many in Paris, all struggling, but this ruthless measure also provided a means of controlling subversive propaganda on the stage.

  Napoleon was passionately attached to the theatre and (to a lesser extent) the opera, but there was scarcely any other aspect of Parisian life in which he interfered more. From Milan in 1805, Napoleon told Fouché that he thought a new play about Henri IV was “too close to the present day” even at two centuries’ distance (clearly he viewed the assassination of Henri somewhat subjectively, in the light of the various recent plots against himself). He added, “I think that you should prevent it, without showing your intervention.” In particular he objected to the words, in the heroic King’s mouth, “je tremble” on the ground that “A sovereign may be afraid, but must never say so.”

  The theatre attracted all classes of Parisian as an essential element of their daily pleasure. Geoffroy, the leading drama critic of the era, reckoned that—after the dead years of the Revolution—with the Consulate the taste for the theatre had virtually grown into a fureur. With the curtain usually rising at 6 p.m., all performances were required to end around 9:30—by police order, so as to make the journey home through darkened streets less menacing. In everything, the police presence—under the despised Prefect Dubois—made itself felt. By decree of 1806, no new play could be put on without the authority of the Minister. There were severe penalties for actors (and actresses) failing to clock in for a performance because of sudden laryngitis; they could be imprisoned, or confined in an abbey or convent. High-handed as such treatment may sound, the theatre managers had a point. Parisian vedettes of the time were notoriously undisciplined and would think little of taking a night off. Even Napoleon’s favourite, the irresistible Mlle. George, found herself in the summer of 1808 fined 3,000 francs for non-appearance, expelled from a number of societies and required to forfeit her pension rights.

  A new stage morality was defined by Geoffroy: “People are determined to have virtue on the stage, because there must be some somewhere.” Thus a dramatist must not introduce a woman deceiving her husband, nor a girl being seduced. Taste, always influenced from the top, was on the whole unreceptive to comedy. “Our comedies serve no purpose [that is, no political purpose],” Napoleon once complained. “On the other side of the Rhine they are not understood.” Beaumarchais’s Barbier de Séville was widely applauded; Marivaux was just about acceptable; but Molière would be performed only “when there is nothing better.” The great Corneille, neglected in the eighteenth century, was popular once more—because he was the favourite poet of the Emperor.

  Nevertheless, as in the days of Louis XIV—and, indeed, as in many other epochs in the life of the Parisian theatre—it was the parterre that continued to wield the most effective powers of censorship. Out of six new plays produced between the summer of 1811 and December 1812 not one was allowed to succeed, thanks to the repeated interruption and barracking. The parterre would be quite different on Sundays, when it was populated by schoolboys. On weekdays, it would be far less good humoured, more turbulent and aggressive, even before the curtain went up. On one occasion, “twenty hotheads” were recorded as climbing across the orchestra and on to the stage, demanding that Mme. Duchesnois replace Mlle. George in Phèdre. Eventually Fouché discovered the existence of a band of thirty or forty organized claques who would applaud or whistle to order, and threatened to refuse them entry to any theatre—or even to expel them from Paris.

  The moment Napoleon arrived at a theatre there would be more or less unanimous applause. It gave him an opportunity to make contact with his public. But, almost immediately, the parterre would resume its liberty to demonstrate for or against the play, and on at least one occasion its hostility prevented the conclusion of a play even with the Emperor still in attendance. Once in the royal box, he could be seen lying full length on a sofa of velvet, arms and legs crossed. Standing behind him would be his attentive aide General Comte de Ségur, the Grand Chamberlain, in full uniform. Only seven weeks after Austerlitz, in January 1806, Napoleon’s late arrival at the theatre caused the first scene to be played again. And once, at a command performance in 1803, there was an unscripted moment of comic-tragedy when a bat suddenly flew straight at Mlle. George, playing Hermione. “Hermione” took instant refuge in the wings. The bat then swooped down on a terrified Josephine and her entourage in the imperial box.

  The vedettes of the Napoleonic stage were as well known as the Napoleonic marshals, their varying merits, doings and foibles, and the scandals of their private lives, familiar to and discussed by the parterre. As the new age began, the Comédie Française found itself chronically short of dramatic talent; when re-formed in 1799, it had only one great tragic actress, Mlle. Raucourt, who was already over forty and beginning to lose her looks. Two new vedettes arose in the shape of Mlle. George (alias Josephine Weimer), renowned in equal parts for her acting, her beauty and her fierce temper, and Mlle. Duchesnois. They became bitter enemies, and the parterre divided in support, like rival soccer fans.

  Only fifteen at her début as Clytemnestra in November 1802, but already physically mature, Mlle. George stunned Paris, and within a few months she had made her way to Napoleon’s bed. On his third visit to the Comédie Française to watch her perform, as Emilie in Corneille’s classic Cinna, Napoleon arrived late, amid cries of “Recommencez!” When Mlle. George then came to the key line, “Si j’ai séduit Cinna, j’en séduirai bien d’autres,” the parterre exploded in tumultuous applause, rising to its feet with all heads turning towards the First Consul’s box. According to Mlle. George, it was later that same night that she succumbed: “He undressed me little by little, and acted as my femme de chambre with so much gaiety, grace and decency that there was no resisting him.” The following morning the future Emperor thoughtfully helped her make the bed, “witness of so much tenderness.”

  Josephine was swiftly on the trail, however, on one occasion managing to catch the pair in flagrante. Napoleon, in the fervour of love-making, threw a faint. When he came to he found himself being cosseted by Josephine en peignoir, and young Mlle. George stark naked. His fury was terrifying. In consequence, the liaison did not last long. Josephine
revenged herself by announcing in the press that she was giving Mlle. George’s bitter rival, Mlle. Duchesnois, an expensive coat for her next appearance in the role of Phèdre. “He left me to become emperor,” sighed Mlle. George. Her stage career was meteoric, both while the Empire lasted and afterwards, when new young talents like Victor Hugo came along. Meanwhile on the side she did indeed “seduce many others” in the Empire galère—from Talleyrand and Murat to Lucien and Jérôme Bonaparte (the Emperor’s brothers), and from the arch-enemies Tsar Alexander and the Duke of Wellington to Dumas père. Sadly, in her old age she was reduced to keeping the chalets de necessité (public lavatories) at the Paris Exposition of 1855.

  Yet, above all the warring actresses of the Empire, it was the great talent of François-Joseph Talma that reigned supreme. The son of a Parisian dentist who declined to follow his father’s calling, Talma in the first decades of the century created the principal roles in all the famous tragedies of the day. He restored the reputation of tragedy in Paris, bringing in many lasting reforms in production and in method—such as less artificiality, less declamation. Skilful at adapting lines of the classics to contemporary events, he became a close intimate of Napoleon. Despite his tirades against “tyrants,” he was to be seen breakfasting regularly at the Tuileries with the Emperor.

  Napoleon liked music and revelled in spectacle, but it is not certain how much he genuinely enjoyed opera—especially given the memories of the night so rudely spoiled for him by the bomb back in December 1800. But his interference was about the same as in the theatre. To Fouché he wrote from his campaign headquarters in 1807, “I am very dissatisfied with the handling of the Opéra. Let Director Bonet know that matters of intrigue will not succeed with me … If it doesn’t cease I will give them une bande militaire which will make them march with drums beating.” Immediately on his return to Paris Napoleon summoned the three curators of the Opéra to ask them what was happening.