Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Hardly had Louis-Philippe left than the mob invaded the Tuileries, just as they had done in the last days of Louis XVI. Though some looters were shot on the spot, women and children dressed themselves up in valuable tapestries; sofas and armchairs were flung out of the windows, portraits of the King were ripped to pieces, even Voltaire’s bust was hurled down into the courtyard. The throne was carried in triumph through Paris, and set on fire at the foot of the July Column (which commemorated the July Days of 1830), while a great crowd danced round it. The Palais Royal was also sacked and gutted. A republic was proclaimed, as workers flocked to the Hôtel de Ville.

  France, and Paris, was taken totally by surprise by the events of February 1848. With 350 dead over the three days, it was the least bloody uprising of the century. For many, the dominant bourgeoisie had become, as Tocqueville saw it, “a small aristocracy, corrupt and vulgar, by which it seemed shameful to let oneself be ruled.” Few, probably, had really wanted Louis-Philippe to go. Says Tocqueville again, “this time a regime was not overthrown, it was simply allowed to fall.” In truth, the monarchy had died out of sheer boredom, for “lack of panache,” in a uniquely French fashion. The good King had given France some of the happiest years in her history, but, as has been remarked, “the French do not live on happiness.”

  As the July Monarchy crumbled, so romantisme petered out. In its place came freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, universal suffrage and the right of every Parisian to join the National Guard. In Saint Petersburg, recalling what had followed 1792, a thoroughly alarmed Tsar shouted, “Gentlemen, saddle your horses; France is a Republic!” In fact, the Second Republic was virtually doomed before it started. Once again the Parisian proletariat realized that—although, much more than in 1789, this had been a rising of the slums and the workers’ districts—the new revolution had not been won by them. They emerged from it more abjectly poor, but more concentrated and more aware of their own strength than at any time before. These were conditions that remained highly favourable to revolt, and as early as June 1848 it broke out again in Paris—this time to be suppressed with far greater violence.

  ENTER LOUIS NAPOLEON

  In Paris the coming of the Republic was greeted with “a carnival-like exuberance,” according to Gustave Flaubert’s sympathetic recollection, and “enjoyment of a sort of camp life; nothing was more entertaining than this aspect of Paris during the first days.” But the mood swiftly changed as reality replaced fantasy. Unemployment in the capital spiralled up to the previously unheard-of total of 180,000. To bring matters to a head, the new (Republican) government, nominally of “the people,” dissolved the national workship (atelier) scheme designed to provide work for the unemployed, on useless earthworks. From the ateliers left-wing political “clubs” mushroomed throughout the city, their members studying with interest the revolts that had swept the rest of Europe—especially the heroic but futile Polish uprisings.

  On 23 June, rioting began once more in Paris, and by the evening the whole eastern half of the city was in the hands of insurrectionists. Yet again the revolt was ill prepared, in effect a spontaneous insurrection against hunger and misery. But this time the government was ready for trouble. General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, Minister of War and another successful pacifier in Algeria, had for some time been drawing up a battle plan against the “Reds,”* and was now invested with almost dictatorial powers. He spent a day bringing in 30,000 regular troops from outside the city, while the rebels constructed their barricades. The following day Cavaignac attacked, deploying his artillery without compunction against the barricades. The rebels fought back sullenly, without leaders, without cheers, and almost without hope. The killing was quite ruthless, but the battle continued for three days. When, most courageously, the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Affre, tried to intervene, he was mortally wounded.†

  Killed, too, were no fewer than five of Cavaignac’s generals, as well as hundreds of unarmed civilians. Official figures—though these were almost certainly a gross underestimate—put the deaths at 914 among the government troops and 1,435 for the insurgents. A police commissioner counted fifteen large furniture vans piled high with corpses; many were “shot while escaping,” or summarily executed in the quarries of Montmartre or the Buttes-Chaumont in eastern Paris. The Rue Blanche reeked with rotting cadavers hastily interred in the Montmartre cemetery. The details of 11,616 Parisians captured after the “June Days” were listed in the official records; thousands were arrested and transported to the colonies, or to Algeria, without trial. Flaubert provides a grim picture of one of the dungeons: “Nine hundred men were there, crowded together in filth pell-mell, black with powder and clotted blood, shivering in fever and shouting in frenzy. Those who died were left to lie with the others.”

  When it was all over, relieved bourgeois and dandies from the western arrondissements came out to inspect the havoc. From his exile in England, Louis-Philippe, recalling how few deaths had brought about his fall, commented with bitter irony that the Republic was lucky “to be able to fire upon the people.” June 1848 had unleashed the most sanguinary fighting that had yet been seen on the streets of Paris. Yet the spectacle of a republic butchering its own supporters in a way that no French monarchy or empire could rival would be repeated, with even more hideous consequences, twenty-three years later under the Commune of Paris. The June Days had only created a new generation of embittered Parisians.

  Following Cavaignac’s intervention the military were indisputably masters of Paris, though the Second Republic limped on. There were elections for the presidency. A dark horse in the shape of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, emerged from exile and, backed by provinces and a middle class dismayed by recent events, won three-quarters of the total vote. This was, in fact, a massive vote against Paris. Louis Napoleon collected five and a half million votes to Cavaignac’s million and a half; while Ledru-Rollin, the socialist candidate, polled only 370,000, and the poet Lamartine fewer than 8,000.

  Louis Napoleon, remarked Thiers scathingly in private, was “A crétin whom we will manage.” But this was soon to prove something of an exaggeration. While in exile in England, the new President of France had enrolled as a special constable during the London troubles. There he had studied carefully, at first hand, how an authoritarian figure like the Duke of Wellington could outflank the revolutionaries and bring to heel a great city. For the best part of two years, former Special Constable Bonaparte trod warily, and kept his counsel. On the evening of 1 December 1851, with great calm and betraying no emotion, he received guests at the Elysée, now the presidential palace, on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. After the last guest had left, he opened a file labelled “Rubicon”—obsessed, like his uncle, by the memory of Caesar. At dawn in a surprise coup, and under pretext of monarchist threats, his troops occupied key positions in Paris. It was the anniversary both of Austerlitz and of his uncle’s coronation as emperor; again like his uncle, Louis Napoleon trusted in augury. In contrast to the revolts of 1848, fewer than 400 Parisians were killed. One of the dead was a courageous Deputy, Dr. Baudin, who gained immortality by rashly climbing atop a barricade to proclaim, “See how a man dies for twenty-five francs a day!”** and was promptly felled by three bullets. A further 26,000 “enemies of the regime” were later arrested and transported on the hulks. On 20 December, a plebiscite confirmed the latest Bonapartist coup by a huge majority of nearly seven and a half million to 650,000. A Te Deum was sung in Notre-Dame.

  Twenty years later the French electorate would painfully agree with Thiers that Louis Napoleon was a crétin—though he had most certainly not proved “manageable.” Meanwhile, however, the Second Empire had arrived.

  * The Reds, as they were already called, embraced a wide range of revolutionaries that pre-dated Marxist Communists.

  † The Archbishop of Paris died of wounds sustained on the barricades while attempting to mediate. A successor archbishop was taken hostage and executed by the Commune twenty-three years later.


  ** The daily wage of a Republican deputy.

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  The Second Empire

  We ripped open the belly of old Paris, the neighbourhood of revolt and barricades, and cut a large opening through the almost impenetrable maze of alleys, piece by piece, and put in cross-streets whose continuations terminated the work.

  BARON HAUSSMANN, MEÈMOIRES, PP. 54–5

  LOUIS NAPOLEON

  On 2 December 1852, a year to the day after his coup, forty-seven years exactly since his uncle’s famous victory at Austerlitz had welded together the First Empire, Louis Napoleon declared himself emperor, as Napoleon III.* So what did the Second Empire stand for? First and foremost, it pledged France to a return to the old Bonapartist ethos of authoritarian order, in contradistinction to the anarchic chaos of the short-lived Second Republic—yet it would end its days in a failed attempt to regain liberalism. To the envious world outside, it represented the summit of gaiety and frivolity, the music of Offenbach, the rediscovery of a joyous world in the unfettered splashes of Impressionist colour, and sexual liberation—yet, on its underside, there were decay, corruption and venereal disease. Through Prefect Haussmann old Paris would be reborn as an astonishing new city, but much that remained precious in the ancient capital was swept aside. For the bourgeoisie and the new rich, there would be an extension to the prosperity consolidated under Louis-Philippe; for the poor, however, there would be no improvement in the misery of life. In foreign affairs, the Second Empire would offer self-determination of “nationalities” abroad, but would end with a friendless France plunged into the worst military disaster of her long history—her proud capital starved, bombarded, humiliated and, finally, incendiarized by her own citizens.

  Aged forty-three at the time of the 1851 coup, Louis Napoleon was the third son of Louis Bonaparte, briefly King of Holland, and—via his mother Hortense—also a grandson of Josephine. Twice he had made abortive attempts to overthrow Louis-Philippe. The second time, in 1840, he had been condemned to life imprisonment in the fortress of Ham near the Somme. But in 1846 he escaped to England, disguised as a mason called Badinguet—a nickname under which his enemies would thereafter constantly attack him. In his outward appearance, France’s new ruler had none of the presence of his illustrious uncle. One who met him while in exile in England found “a short, thickish, vulgar-looking man without the slightest resemblance to his imperial uncle or any intelligence in his countenance,” while those who saw him enthroned in his full glory were disappointed to find a man with dull eyes, a long moustache and faintly absurd impérial goatee beard—the delight of caricaturists like Daumier who immortalized him as “Ratapoil,” a broken-down Quixote. To George Sand, who was disgusted by the bourgeois rapacity alongside so much misery that came to stigmatize his rule, he was a “sleepwalker.”

  Rarely has so controversial a character held so much power in Europe. He was bursting with contradictions: wild courage vied with timidity; astuteness with extraordinarily poor judgement; winning charm with boorishness; powerful reactionary instincts with progressiveness and humanity ahead of his time. Kindly writers dubbed him “the Well-Intentioned.” But, whatever he intended for France, the end result was usually the opposite. In many ways, he was a very talented man, his reading during the years of imprisonment having made him much better educated than most of his peers. The trouble was that, for him, the time was always out of joint. His political legitimacy was questionable; to many he was simply the usurper (which indeed he was). Yet the ultimate catastrophe might have been averted had he not been confronted with two of the most adroit, and dangerous, statesmen of the nineteenth century, Cavour and Bismarck.

  Having imposed an authoritarian regime on France, Louis Napoleon then set to work to create internal prosperity as one way of diverting minds from the loss of essential liberties. In the early years of the Second Empire (exploiting the groundwork laid by Louis-Philippe) he had been strikingly successful, and prosperity had indeed become an acceptable substitute for the majority of Frenchmen. Over the short duration of the Second Empire, industrial production doubled and within only ten years foreign trade did the same. Quantities of gold cascaded into Paris from new mines in California and South Africa. The Bourse re-established itself as the biggest money market on the continent. Giant banking concerns like the Crédit Lyonnais and the Crédit Foncier were founded, the latter especially designed to stimulate Louis Napoleon’s massive new building programme. In Paris there sprang up huge stores like M. Boucicaut’s Maison du Bon Marché on the Left Bank. To women like Denise, Emile Zola’s provincial heroine in Au bonheur des dames, these new emporia were indeed modern wonders of the world: “Here, exposed to the street, right on the pavement, was a veritable landslide of cheap goods; the entrance was a temptation, with bargains that enticed passing customers.”

  The national railway network increased from nothing in 1840 to 18,000 kilometres by 1870, so that all of a sudden the Riviera—formerly the haunt of only a few eccentric English at Cannes—became a Parisian resort. Paris was also now the country’s largest inland port. Telegraph lines radiated out all over the country, and shipbuilding expanded as never before. The enrichissez-vous exhortation applied with even more force to the Second Empire. Men like M. Potin the grocer became millionaires overnight; and, as Alphonse Daudet’s unhappy Nabab discovered, scandals and vicious intrigues could reduce them to nothing again just as quickly. Speculation raged, the contagion spreading to the summit of the establishment, with even the Emperor’s most esteemed adviser, the Duc de Morny, heavily tainted.

  Yet out of this frenzy a wealthy new bourgeoisie had arisen, installing itself solidly and comfortably in the châteaux from which its forebears had driven the aristocrats. As ostentatious as any European aristocracy and determined not to be driven out in its turn, the bourgeoisie was the chief political mainstay of the regime that was responsible for its good fortune—though it had little favourable to say of its benefactor. Never before had France as a whole been more prosperous, and in a very short time she had established herself as one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Her population at the census of 1866 had grown to 37.5 million, but the most remarkable feature was the immense growth of the big cities, especially Paris, as a result of this industrialization. In the twenty years between 1831 and 1851 Paris alone grew in population from 786,000 to 1,053,000.

  * Napoleon II, the tragic son of Bonaparte and Marie Louise, died of tuberculosis, aged only twenty-two, in Vienna, a virtual prisoner of his Austrian grandfather.

  HAUSSMANN

  “I want to be a second Augustus,” declared Louis Napoleon even before coming to power, “because Augustus made Rome a city of marble.” One of the first steps he took after the coup of 1851 was to issue orders that all future work connected with the transformation of Paris would be sanctioned by simple decree. From then on he pursued the city’s reconstruction with almost maniacal fervour. This was certainly the Second Empire’s greatest surface achievement (in fact its one truly ineffaceable landmark). As an urban developer Louis Napoleon, for better or worse, ranks in Parisian history with Henri IV. In terms of scale alone he in his two decades of rule left far more of permanence behind him than his uncle, despite the immense powers wielded by Napoleon I. To a large extent it was Napoleon III who completed the unfinished grandiose designs of his uncle.

  Between Emperor and master architect, there was an instant and almost total accord and identity of purpose. Georges-Eugène (later Baron) Haussmann had no training in architecture, but—a Protestant Alsatian with more than a streak of the German in his genes—he was really a highly efficient, ruthless and somewhat arrogant administrator, with a touch of financial wizardry. He was to describe himself, with painful accuracy, as having been chosen first and foremost “as a demolition artist.” Aged forty when Louis Napoleon discovered him (he was then Prefect of the Var in the sleepy south), Haussmann was brought to Paris and installed as prefect of the Seine. As such he fou
nd himself in a position of almost limitless power. With no mayor, as of yore the city Council was appointed by the Prefect and its authority reduced to that of a municipal commission; while, as senior executive of the central government, the Prefect ruled over not only Paris but also all of her surrounding suburbs. In this role Haussmann was reinforced by Louis Napoleon’s dictatorial decrees, which enabled him to expropriate at will properties and whole streets that were intended for development. Financing, on a massive scale, was effected by a mix of private investment and huge public loans yielding at least 5 per cent. With both the Bourse and industry supporting Louis Napoleon’s coup, there was little difficulty here.

  During the first stage of the programme—the extension of Napoleon I’s Rue de Rivoli—expropriation so pushed up the value of property bordering the development that Paris was able to finance part of her costs virtually for nothing. Within two weeks of the December 1851 coup, the city received a credit of over two million francs to clear, finally, the slums between the Louvre and the Tuileries—one of the many undertakings which Napoleon I had failed to complete. Two days later a further decree earmarked twenty-six million francs for the completion, and extension, of the Louvre; in March 1852, a decree ordered the construction of the Palais de l’Industrie on an empty space between the Champs-Elysées and Marie de Médicis’s Cours de la Reine. In July, the state conveyed to Paris what is now the Bois de Boulogne, lying well outside the city limits—with the condition that she spend two million francs developing it as a park, this being one of Louis Napoleon’s hobby-horses. Two weeks later came another decree laying down the Rue de Rennes on the Left Bank.