The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  By August, Manet's doctor diagnosed a nervous depression and urged him to leave Paris for the seaside. He seems to have required little urging and promptly departed with Suzanne and Léon for Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he spent the month of September. He did little work apart from a number of pencil and watercolor sketches of crinoline-clad figures playing croquet. These studies were eventually worked into a canvas called Croquet at Boulogne showing three women and two men (one of them posed by Léon) in the midst of a match at the Établissement des Bains. Like his painting of Léon astride a vilocipede, the work captured an image of modern life, a genteel sport that had recently become popular following its introduction from across the English Channel. Croquet had been described by one exponent in England as, oddly enough, a healthy substitute for war but a moral danger zone because—and this was one of the main reasons for its popularity—it was played by men and women together.18 But Manet's canvas suggests neither moral impropriety nor war continued by other means. A picture of a middle-class leisure activity, it was strikingly different in its subject matter from either Civil War or The Barricade, offering no hint of the horrors its author had undergone.

  The Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the man who had ruled the French art world for almost two decades, had fled Paris in September 1870, disguised, humiliatingly, as a valet. By 1871 he was living in exile in England, on the seafront at Eastbourne. Yet Nieuwerkerke's replacement did not give Manet and the painters in the Café Guerbois any particular cause for cheer. Under the Third Republic the fine arts became the responsibility of what was called the Ministry of Public Instruction, Cults and Fine Arts; and in November 1870 Charles Blanc, the fifty-eight-year-old founder of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, became Director of Fine Arts. Manet's father had known Blanc many years earlier, but this friendship was about the only thing that could possibly have recommended the two men to each other.

  Though his brother was Louis, the "Red of the Reds," Charles Blanc was, if anything, even more conservative in his views than Nieuwerkerke. Chennevières described him, in a grand understatement, as "more a supporter of Ingres and the Académie des Beaux-Arts than of Courbet and the Commune."19 In fact, Blanc had published a biography of Ingres, whom he idolized, a year earlier, and for several decades he had been the most prolific and articulate exponent of the sort of Neoclassicism celebrated at the École des Beaux-Arts. In his lofty conception of art, Eve was the original representative of ideal beauty, but by plucking the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge she had plunged the world into a catastrophic state, a sort of Platonic world of appearances in which the ideal was obscured by the humdrum and ugly material world. Blanc believed that the ability to see through the veil of appearances, and glimpse the ideal beyond, was "obscure, latent and sleeping" among the majority of men. However, great artists—by whom he meant especially Ingres and the painters of the Italian Renaissance—"carry within themselves this idea of the beautiful in a state of light."20 The true mission of art was therefore to show the "idea of the beautiful" that concealed itself behind the flickering shadows of the fallen world. "Art is the interpretation of nature" was his motto,21 by which he meant that art should not portray nature in all its warts but should idealize it instead. Not surprisingly, he was vehemently opposed to Realism and paintings of la vie moderne, believing that artists who imitated nature and everyday life were slaves to appearance.

  Blanc was especially anxious about the role that art should perform at the Salon of 1872 since the eyes of the world would, he knew, inevitably turn to Paris to witness the artistic response to the tragedies of the previous two years. The October issue of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts accordingly called on French artists to play their part in the national recuperation, urging them to "revive France's fortunes" and help to "rebuild the economic, intellectual and moral grandeur of France."22 Two months later, Blanc exhorted them to create stirring works of art by finding "even in the spectacle of our disasters" heroic episodes and "gripping motifs" that could adorn the walls of the Palais des Champs-Élysées.23 This was precisely the kind of scene to which Meissonier—who Blanc believed had no equal "either in France or anywhere else"—had turned his attentions with The Siege of Paris and The Ruins of the Tuileries, two paintings that attempted to depict French honor and pride even in the hour of defeat.

  Blanc's appeal for patriotic art was played out against a wider binge of national self-scrutiny. The French entered a period of self-doubt, and breast-beating and finger-pointing became popular pastimes as they tried to understand how the events of the previous few years could have occurred.24 Many people, conveniently, blamed the Emperor for everything. A resolution in the National Assembly declared Louis-Napoléon "to be responsible for all our misfortunes and the ruin, the invasion and the dismemberment of France."25 It was carried by 691 votes to 6—the dissenting votes belonging to the half-dozen Bonapartists who had managed to get themselves elected. By this time Louis-Napoléon himself was safely in England, having spent only six months as a prisoner of war in Germany. He had passed his time by reading The Three Musketeers and composing two short books about the Franco-Prussian War. Released in March 1871, he was reunited with Eugénie and Loulou at Camden Place, an elegant eighteenth-century mansion in Chislehurst. Few people in France believed him when he claimed, in an interview with The Times in October 1871, that he had no wish to regain his imperial throne. Indeed, he was watched closely by secret agents of the French government, who scaled trees on the village green in order to peer into the grounds of his house.26

  Despite the many fingers of blame pointing in his direction, most people agreed that Louis-Napoléon could not be faulted for everything, least of all the horrific butchery of Bloody Week. Suspicions arose that the French themselves had been to blame for their afflictions. As early as September 1870 the Prussian Crown Princess Vicky wrote primly to her mother, Queen Victoria, regarding the defeated French: "It would be well if they would pause and think that immoderate frivolity and luxury depraves and ruins and ultimately leads to a national misfortune."27 This theme of French decadence was soon taken up by many others. In 1871 a German doctor named Karl Starck published The Physical Degeneration of the French Nation, which argued that the French character and morals had become enfeebled by the sexual and materialistic excesses of the Second Empire. The French themselves did not deny these charges. Ernest Renan published in the same year The Intellectual and Moral Reform of France, asserting that France, unlike Prussia, lacked "scientific spirit" and had fallen victim to "presumption, puerile vanity, indiscipline, a want of seriousness, application and honesty."28 Scapegoats were naturally found for the spread of this frivolity, vanity and sexual excess. The suspects were the usual ones: homosexuals, women (especially prostitutes) and abusers of absinthe. Bohemian artists in their Left Bank garrets were likewise singled out for blame. Elme Caro, a lecturer in philosophy at the College de France, would publish in 1872 a work called Jours d'ipreuve ("Days of Hardship") in which he held bohemianism responsible for the Commune. The romanticization of Latin Quarter poets and artists had, in Caro's opinion, turned young people against good, honest bourgeois values. Caro did not specifically name members of the École des Batignolles in his diatribe against artistic depravity in Paris. Even so, the winds did not seem auspicious for a painter such as Manet to relaunch his career.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Apples of Discord

  THE YEAR THAT has just ended," declared L'Opinion nationale in an editorial published on the Jour de I'An in 1872, "will have been for France one of the saddest and most painful." In keeping with the national mood, winter fashions were sober and restrained. Dresses were made from wool instead of velvet, while their colors—dark blues, browns, myrtle greens—verged on the funereal. Elaborate and expensive gowns were an irrelevance since for the second year in a row no winter balls were held. Salons in fashionable neighborhoods such as the Faubourg Saint-Germain opened for simple afternoon and evening receptions, "from which," a newspaper reported, "dancing h
as been rigorously excluded." Even a favorite winter festival, the Boeuf Gras ("Fat Ox"), was canceled in 1872. Normally taking place on Shrove Tuesday, the festival saw an enormous ox paraded through the streets of Paris, garlanded with laurels and followed by capering attendants costumed as wild beasts and Roman soldiers. But in 1872 such merrymaking was considered to be in poor taste.1

  Nonetheless, a few signs of life stirred in the capital. The Emperor and Empress of Brazil, arriving in January, were entertained by Adolphe Thiers at a grand reception in Versailles. They were followed soon afterward by the King and Queen of Naples, who, like any other tourists to Paris, requested a tour of the city's charred ruins. New music by Offenbach, the court minstrel of the Second Empire, could be heard at the Théâtre-Gaieté; and Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias, banned for thirty years, was staged at the Odéon. In addition, buildings steadily began rising from the ashes as Paris sheathed itself in scaffolding. The dome of the Panthéon, struck by a Prussian shell, was under repair, as were buildings burned by the Communards, such as the Palais-Royal and the Palais de Justice. Funds had been raised by means of a national subscription to rebuild the devastated Hôtel de Ville, and a competition to design the new structure was won by the architects Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes. Only the Tuileries, scorched and crumbling, was to be left in ruins—a grim memento of civil strife.

  The Palais des Champs-Élysées had come through the siege and the Commune miraculously unscathed. It had been used as a hospital during the Siege of Paris and then suffered the indignity, in March 1871, of serving as a billet for Prussian soldiers briefly occupying the capital. By early 1872 it was accommodating the Ministry of Finance, whose offices in the Louvre had been burned during Bloody Week. But there were still plans to hold the 1872 Salon on the premises. Space would be restricted, though, not only because of encroachment from the Ministry of Finance but also due to Charles Blanc's determination to inaugurate his Museum of Copies in the building.

  This museum was one of Blanc's long-standing ambitions—a gallery that would encompass full-scale copies of the great masterpieces of European painting and sculpture. He planned to include among the exhibits a bronze reproduction of Lorenzo Ghiberti's "Doors of Paradise" from the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, copies of Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, as well as line-by-line imitations of frescoes and altarpieces by Masaccio, Raphael and dozens of other Old Masters. Blanc hoped the Museum of Copies would instill in young French artists a love of the great art of the past, in particular that of the artists and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance—and wean them, at the same time, from what he saw as the false paths of Realism and the "new movement" in painting. The moral and artistic decadence of the Second Empire could be purged, Blanc believed, by a healthy injection of the "idea of the beautiful." Witnessing these plans take shape, many artists, according to Zola's friend Paul Alexis, "began to regret the passing of the Empire and Monsieur de Nieuwerkerke."2

  Blanc managed to make himself even more unpopular with his artistic constituency when he published his regulations for the 1872 Salon. Rolling back Nieuwerkerke's reforms from the 1860s, he decreed that jurors would not be selected by means of universal suffrage but rather by a select group of artists meeting certain rigorous requirements, such as having won either a Salon medal or the Prix de Rome. These criteria, a throwback to the old days, drastically reduced the number of eligible voters. This new regulation was received with such widespread dismay that petitions—another throwback to the 1860s—began doing the rounds even before the elections were held. One of them, addressed to Thiers, exclaimed: "It is with most painful astonishment and a truly patriotic chagrin that the vast majority of artists have read the new regulations."3

  But Blanc was uncompromising. The deadline for submissions to the 1872 Salon, March 23, arrived with no change in his position. The jury produced by the new regulations was, unsurprisingly, top-heavy with painters associated with the École des Beaux-Arts: Baudry, Robert-Fleury, and a former winner of the Prix de Rome, Isidore Pils, who had been a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts since 1864. Also elected were other notable conservatives from previous juries, including Breton and Dubufe, along with Antoine Vollon, a former exhibitor at the 1863 Salon des Refusés and a friend of Daubigny, Manet and Fantin-Latour. Vollon, a painter of still lifes, had come a long way since his days as a refuse. In 1869 he had won a Salon medal, in 1870 he had been decorated with the Legion of Honor, and in the spring of 1872 he had been paid 10,000 francs to paint a reproduction of a Frans Hals painting for Blanc's Museum of Copies. Even so, Vollon was an unconventional painter who astounded his friends by adding pigments to his canvases with his fingers, palms and sometimes even the sleeves of his coat.4

  When the ballot boxes were opened, Ernest Meissonier found himself returned to the jury, finishing in the top five for the first time since 1866. However, Meissonier had changed since his days as one of the moderates on the Jury of Assassins. If in the early 1860s he had presented himself to the electorate as a friend of Daubigny and Delacroix, a liberal opponent of the "old Académie," and a lover of landscapes and plein-air painting, by 1872 his profile had altered. His attitudes had begun to harden even before the Siege and the Commune; his obsession with artistic grandeur and his own exalted reputation made him as reluctant to exhibit his dainty musketeers and Antibes landscapes as he was eager to paint heroic scenes on the vaults and walls of the Panthéon. The disasters of the past few years only confirmed his opinion that French art, like French society as a whole, was in need of moral and patriotic regeneration. He showed his newfound aesthetic conservatism by endorsing Blanc's controversial Museum of Copies, stating that it was "an excellent thing for artists," and he took very much to heart Blanc's idea that French artists had to play an important part in the national renovation. "An exhibition," Meissonier proclaimed, "is a work of patriotism."5 Yet his patriotism could not induce him to show work at the Salon, since neither The Siege of Paris nor The Ruins of the Tuileries was destined to appear.

  Meissonier's influence on the jury was boosted with his appointment as its Vice-President; Robert-Fleury would serve as President. The judging then commenced at the start of April. The weather outside the Palais des Champs-Élysées was unpleasantly cold, with hard frosts, heavy snowfalls, and ice on the Seine. Conditions inside were even stormier: proceedings were quickly brought to a halt when the jurors, as they made their way through the maze of canvas, found themselves shocked by a piece of what they called "senseless impudence."6 Two paintings by Gustave Courbet had just appeared before them.

  The previous year had been, for Courbet, one of startling contrasts. "Paris is a true paradise!" he wrote at the height of the Commune.7 Besides toppling the Vendôme Column, he had also dismantled the entire edifice of the French artistic establishment. Taking charge of artistic affairs for the Commune, he had abolished the École des Beaux-Arts, the Académie de France in Rome, and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. "We are avenged!" he wrote in an open letter to French artists. "Genius will soar!"8 His delight was made wondrously complete as he began a passionate affair with a beautiful woman calling herself, with dubious entitlement, Comtesse Mathilde Montaigne Carly de Svazzena. But within months he was languishing in prison.

  Courbet was fortunate to escape the firing squad that awaited so many of his fellow Communards. Following his arrest, he had appeared before a military court at Versailles in September. He was convicted of being a "toppler" (déboulonneur), fined 500 francs, and sentenced to six months' confinement in Sainte-Pélagie, a prison on the Left Bank. Here he had passed the next three months, sleeping "amid the rabble on vermin-infested ground."9 Making his confinement even worse was, as he put it, "a hemorrhoidal condition."10 He had suffered dreadfully from hemorrhoids throughout his trial, and the gallery at Versailles did not fail to peal with laughter as he planted his ample posterior wincingly on a leather cushion. Desperate for relief, he began petitioning the governor of Sainte-Pélagie to allow him sitz baths and, to
ease his constipation, bottles of beer. But his sufferings continued, and by the end of the year he had lost so much weight—more than fifty pounds—that he was transferred to a clinic in Neuilly. Surgery was successfully performed at the end of January 1872, after which he was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence in the clinic. So congenial did he find this establishment that he elected to occupy his room even after his term expired at the beginning of March.

  Courbet had managed to paint numerous canvases during his confinement. He finished at least fifty works in Sainte-Pélagie, many of them still lifes of the fruit and flowers brought to him by his sisters. At Neuilly, in the month of January alone, he completed eighteen more. As his prison term ended, he submitted two of his recent efforts to the 1872 Salon, one a female nude, the other a still life of apples, at the bottom of which he had inscribed, in bright vermilion, "Sainte-Pélagie"—even though this particular work had actually been painted in Neuilly.

  The effrontery of this Communard and convicted déboulonneur proposing to show work at the Salon—and work that apparently advertised and even glorified his status as a prisoner—was simply too much for the jurors, and particularly for Meissonier, to countenance. Courbet's apples were all the more provocative since the canvas arrived in the Palais des Champs-Élysées against the grim backdrop of a series of trials and executions. In February, five men were condemned to death for the murder of the Dominican monks; a week later three men found guilty of killing Lecomte and Clement-Thomas were shot by firing squad; and in April a Communard named Fimbert was convicted of "incendiarism"—a lesser charge than the one faced by Courbet—and condemned to death. Henri Rochefort, meanwhile, was sentenced to deportation to a penal colony in New Caledonia.