by Geert Mak
The ties between the artists were intense, the market eager. Claude Monet immediately sold his first paintings for 300 francs, twice the monthly salary of a teacher. Week after week in his diary, André Gide speaks of new exhibitions. Those were the places to which ‘the whole world’ went, the things ‘the whole world’ talked about.
Paris overwhelmed the senses as well with its boulevards, with that stunning order imposed on the city by prefect Haussmann. In that order, Benjamin said, ‘the institutions of the worldly and spiritual dominion of the citizenry found their apotheosis’. Of course, Haussmann's grands travaux were based on the necessities of law and order – from that point on, military units could operate much more easily in the event of a rebellion – but that was not their most important objective. The boulevards were primarily designed to be modern transport corridors between the various terminals; nineteenth-century Paris, like London and Brussels, was a complete chaos of horses, carts, carriages, coaches and omnibuses. They also served as visual corridors between monuments and major government buildings, national symbols to be viewed in awe by Parisians and visitors alike and therefore requiring a great deal of space. The boulevards served as dividing lines between the city's bourgeoisie and the common workfolk, between the wealthy arrondissements and dirty, smoky suburbs. But at the same time Haussmann's plan generated unprecedented dynamism, because it was based, for the first time, on an all-inclusive view of the phenomenon of the ‘city’.
‘Modern Paris could not exist within the boundaries of the Paris of the past,’ enthused the poet and journalist Théophile Gautier. ‘Civilisation blazes broad trails through the old town's dark maze of little streets, crossings and dead-end alleys: she brings down houses the way the pioneers in America bring down trees.’ In this way Paris was to become the outpost of the modern age, a beacon for the modern spirit, a light in the provincial darkness, France's song of glory, the city state of the new Europe.
No other metropolis is so much a city and, at the same time, so infused with the countryside as Paris. In the three-minute walk from my hotel to the nearest boulevard I pass six greengrocers, five bakeries, five butchers, three fishmongers. Shop after shop, the crates are displayed on the pavement: apples, oranges, lettuce, cabbage, leeks, radiant in the winter sun. The butcher shops are hung with sausages and hams, the fish lie in trays along the pavement, from the bakeries wafts the scent of hundreds of varieties of crisp and gleaming bread.
It has always been a complicated relationship, that of the Parisians with their mysterious rural roots, ‘la France profonde’, and an intense one as well. Many Parisians, or their parents, or otherwise their grandparents, originally come from the countryside. These days the French are not ashamed of that, they actually cultivate and flaunt it with holiday houses and products from ‘home’ on the table. It's all a part of ‘l'exception Française’, even though one third of France's urban population today consists of foreigners.
Around the turn of the century, however, they seemingly wanted to shake off the dust of the countryside as soon as they arrived in Paris. In that sense, too, one could speak of two French nations. The more the big cities grew to be machines full of light and movement, the darker and sleepier the provinces seemed.
Generally speaking, the Parisians saw farm folk as savages or barbarians. One could pick them out in a crowd by the sound of their clumping, clattering clogs, and even when they wore shoes in the city, their strange, waddling gait immediately gave them away. This social rift was found everywhere in Europe, but nowhere as emphatically as in France.
Around 1880, there were still many people in the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Massif Central, in all those villages and river valleys where Europe today spends its holidays, who had never seen a cart or a wagon. Everything went by horse or mule. Local dialects predominated; according to official figures from 1863, one quarter of all French citizens barely spoke a word of French. Many regions were still using units of measure and weight, and some of them even currencies, that had been officially done away with a hundred years earlier. Anyone who had visited Paris, even if only for a day, bore the honorary title ‘Parisian’ for the rest of their lives.
There was nothing very romantic about ‘pure’ French country life. The provincial court records bear constant witness to inhuman poverty and harshness. A daughter-in-law murdered ‘because she was sickly and no good to us’; a mother-in-law thrown down a well to avoid paying a yearly annuity of twenty francs and three sacks of grain. One old man's wife and daughter beat him severely with a pestle, a hammer and a rake, because they had grown tired of feeding him. Little Rémi from Malot's Sans Famille could be found everywhere: in 1905, there were some 400,000 beggars wandering the French countryside.
While enormous facilities for the supply and drainage of water were being built in Paris – small underground lakes can still be found there today – the gutters of provincial French towns like Rouen and Bordeaux were still open sewers. Rennes, a city of 70,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century, could claim precisely thirty bathtubs and two houses with a bathroom. In the literature of the day one finds an increasing number of complaints about the stench of domestic staff, for example, or of fellow passengers.
But here, too, began a period of rapid and radical change. Starting in the 1880s, the French state allocated tens of millions of francs to the development plan advanced by the ambitious Charles de Saulces de Freycinet. By building roads and schools, this minister of public works hoped quickly to narrow the gap between Paris and the provinces, while at the same time giving the stagnating French economy a badly needed boost.
The measures soon bore fruit. By 1900, the infamous black bread, symbol of grinding poverty and backwardness, was almost nowhere to be found. Within two decades, stiff traditional costume was replaced by supple, ready-made clothing; around 1909, a farm girl at the fair was almost indistinguishable from a dressed-up factory maid from the city. The market stands run by public scribes also began to disappear: from 1880, every farm child learned to read and write, effectively putting an end to a brand of dependency we can scarcely fathom today.
The regionalist writer Émile Guillaumin described the lives of five hired men hoeing a field of beets near Moulins on a hot summer's day in 1902. Eight years later, in 1910, the first of these farm workers had become a hotel doorman, the second lived in the city of Vichy, the third worked in a furniture factory, the fourth was a domestic servant. Only the fifth man still worked the land. Today, in 1999, I dare assert, no more than two of their one hundred great-grandchildren still work the soil. At least thirty of them will have ended up in Paris, and the Parisians – more than the residents of any other metropolis – seemed to realise that they are all the great-grandchildren of beet-weeders, and that they must grant due respect to both beets and their hoers.
At Opéra metro station I start a conversation with Pierre Maillot. With his grey beard and plain spectacles, he is standing in one of the corridors holding a tin can and a cardboard sign: ‘I beg your forgiveness. But I am hungry.'This is how he earns about a hundred francs (roughly fifteen euros) a day, enough for a bed and a lonely meal with a quarter-litre of wine. The older people are generous, but the young ones tease him. ‘I have my only friend right here with me,’ he says, reaching into his inside pocket and pulling out a bible with a red plastic cover. Then he tells me a complicated story about prisons, a divorce, problems inside his head, vanished unemployment benefits and the other vagaries of a man's life.
Up at street level, there's a demonstration going on. To my knowledge there is no other city in Europe where the papers each day print maps, as nonchalantly as they do the weather report, showing the anticipated routes of popular assemblies: illegal aliens, dentistry students, royalists, telecommunications workers, it goes on day after day. I come across a group of students. They are angry because their teachers have been laid off in mid-term. Philippine Didier explains to me that she will not now be able to complete her Greek exams. Like her fellow student
s, she plans to attend the École Nationale d'Administration, the ENA, the breeding ground for France's top politicians and administrators.‘The minister hates us,’ Philippine says with great conviction. ‘It seems he once failed his exams himself.’ I begin seeing all these sloppy pea jackets, bent spectacles, velour caps and backpacks through different eyes: standing here before me, I realise, is the French elite of the year 2030, the cabinet ministers, the top officials, the iron rails on which France rolls along, the Establishment of the future.
In Paris, even the ordinary is often impressive. That applies particularly to the city's public transport system. Paris and its environs have a network the likes of which cities such as London, Amsterdam and Berlin will only be implementing thirty or forty years from now. Every detail speaks of an unparalleled feeling for quality: the automatic ticket system, the uniform prices, the clear signposting, the high frequency of departures, the seeming effortlessness with which the trains rocket all these thousands of people through the city.
You rarely see anyone running for a train: the next one will be coming in two to four minutes. One seldom feels unsafe: there are always people around, every corner is put to good use. And only very rarely is one ever tempted to go by car: nothing can equal the speed, for example, of the RER connection between the Eiffel Tower and Versailles. And most amazing of all is that the system has been running exactly this way for many years, as though it is the most normal thing in the world. If you want to catch a glimpse of the future, you need only travel around Paris for an afternoon.
Meanwhile, my antiquated Baedeker has started baulking. The outskirts of Paris today comprise a jungle of factories, warehouses and tower blocks, but the foldable map at the guide's centre shows light-green fields and woods, with villages such as Neuilly, Pantin and Montreuil. Le Bourget is a market town along a tributary of the Seine. Later it housed the most famous airport in Paris; today that airport is a museum.
Originally, my expedition to Le Bourget was dedicated to the airplane in which Louis Blériot became the first man to fly across the Channel on 25 July, 1909, but in the end I spend the entire morning ogling the machines built by his predecessors, the bunglers and the bluffers. See here the building blocks of progress: intelligence, nonconformity and, above all, chutzpah. Take Félix du Temple's steam-powered airplane, for example, built in 1857; I know nothing about the man himself, but I can see him before me in his workshop: his plane is of the flapping-swallow variety, atop it a ship's rudder, beside that a burnished copper kettle complete with steam whistle. Or Traia Vuia's square cart, a fixed wing attached to the top of something that looks like the under-carriage of a pram, in which the first manned flight was made in France on 18 March, 1906, over a distance of twelve metres, at a height of fifty centimetres.
Then there is the machine that belonged to Louis Blériot himself. I found an old newspaper article by the Dutch correspondent Alexander Cohen, dealing with a series of aviation experiments at the parade grounds in Issy-les-Moulineaux late on a dusky Friday afternoon, 22 November, 1907. Cohen watched M. Farman leave the ground in a ‘giant insect’ of canvas, bamboo and aluminium, and fly for several hundred metres. Which was more than could be said of Blériot's ‘flying beast’.
The Libellule, as Blériot's juggernaut was called, put-putted across the parade grounds at breakneck speed, made several impressive pirouettes, but never left the ground.
A little more than eighteen months later, however, Blériot climbed aboard this construct of filament and canvas and flew to England. Just before the flight, his machine seemed on the point of falling apart: the fish glue holding it together had started to rot. Just before departure, he casually asked someone which direction it was to Dover.
And then there are the photographs of the airmen. Voniman (1909, with cap) stares straight ahead, behind him an engine that looks as if it belongs in an ocean-going freighter. Coudron (1910, Breton beret) has something casual about him, he looks as though he stands a chance. Gilbert (1910, suit and tie), looking like a respectable family man, is lying in a sort of hammock beneath his bamboo aircraft. The entire plane is hung with tassels. I look Octave Gilbert right in the eye. His fatherly hands nervously grip the little reins attached to the two bicycle wheels that comprise his landing gear. Fear, dignity: for him, all that is subordinate to progress. His face, full of courage and despair.
Chapter THREE
London
‘I STILL RELISH YOUNG PEOPLE'S AMAZEMENT WHEN I TELL THEM THAT, before 1915, I travelled to India and America without possessing a passport, without actually ever having seen one,’ Stefan Zweig wrote in 1941.
My Baedeker guide, too, considers a passport superfluous, ‘but they often prove useful in establishing the traveller's identity when one wishes to gain admission to museums on days when they are closed to the general public.’
The passport was part of life in Western Europe for less than a century, and today I once again go zipping across borders unhindered in the high-speed Eurostar. (Not that the state is unaware of my whereabouts; I am scrutinised and shadowed electronically in dozens of different ways, but that is another story.) Only here in Great Britain do they still do things the old way. My papers are inspected earnestly by conscientious, solid citizens in Her Majesty's service.
For Britain, the century began with a funeral; the morning after my arrival, therefore, I dive immediately into the newspaper archives of the new British Library, that gigantic red-brick warehouse of thought.
Queen Victoria's funeral was held on Friday, 1 February, 1901, I read in the special commemorative edition (price: twopence) of the Yorkshire Post. Hundreds of thousands looked on as the procession trundled through London, with the bagpipes of the Scots and Irish Guards leading the way. The Post's correspondent John Foster Fraser goes to great lengths to reproduce the sound of the muffled drums: ‘Rumble – rattle rumble – rattle.’ The rest of his report deals mainly with the family following after the bier: the new king, Edward – ‘his cheeks ashen, his eyes dull and tired’; his cousin, Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany – ‘moustaches drooping’; his second cousin Leopold II, king of Belgium; his brother-in-law, the Greek king George I; ‘blond and blue-eyed’ nephew Heinrich of Prussia; the ‘manly-built’ Grand Duke of Hesse ‘with his firm chin’; and so the entire House of Hanover and its entourage shuffled through London, with Kaiser Wilhelm out in front.
This was the European summit of 1901. Foreign affairs was still largely a matter for royal households, and for decades short, resolute Victoria in her perpetual black satin dresses had been almost literally the ‘grandmother of Europe’, or at least of the clan network of European rulers. Those rulers all had their quarrels, large and small. But at the same time there were countless family weddings, parties and funerals, photograph sessions during which they switched uniforms: the future King George V in Prussian pomp, Kaiser Wilhelm in British uniform. Kaiser ‘Willy’ in Russian braid, Czar ‘Nicky’ in Prussian gear. When the queen died on 22 January, 1901, it was as a kind of primal mother (according to an eyewitness report from Lord Reginald Esher):‘The queen occasionally recognised those around her and spoke their names. Reid, the physician, put his arm around her and supported her. The Prince of Wales knelt beside her bed. The German kaiser stood silently at the head, beside the queen. The other children and grandchildren were there as well, all their names were spoken from time to time. She died peacefully. After the king left for London, the German kaiser arranged the rest.’
In the end it was Kaiser Wilhelm, along with his uncle, King George, who lifted his grandmother Victoria into her coffin. That was how things went among the eternal kin, within the European family.
And there was yet another bedrock certainty: the British Empire. In Southwark, on Walworth Road, one finds the Cuming Museum. This ‘British Museum in miniature’, as it is sometimes called, is in fact more like an incredible collection of curiosities, piled high in the upper room of a library. Over the span of 120 years, father and son Richard (1777–187
0) and Henry Cuming (1807–1902) dragged everything they could lay their hands on back to this plush lair; they were true nineteenth-century gentlemen. Father Richard's passion was born in 1782, when an aunt gave him three fossils and an old Indian coin for his fifth birthday. When Henry Cuming died in 1902, he left behind more than 100,000 objects, plus enough money to run a museum that would preserve the results of their collectors’ frenzy for all eternity. Consequently, we can still today wander about in the dream world of two Victorians.
The museum's cabinets and showcases contain, among other things: a length of Roman sewer pipe, an apple corer made from a sheep's bone, a phial containing crumbs from the wedding cake of Edward VIII, a stuffed chimpanzee – originally sold as ‘the mummy of a two-hundred-year-old man’ – an orange tooter from the 1864 races at Epsom, a piece of plaster from the room in which Napoleon died, every programme from every play the Cumings ever attended, a pair of Etruscan vases, a cigarette butt thrown away by a member of the royal family, a Roman child's toy, a medieval flute found in the Thames, a piece of the vest of Charles 1 and six ‘figurines from a lost civilisation’, kilned and aged in 1857 by two dredgers who turned a profit on the Cumings’ collectors’ mania.
A walk through this museum inevitably leaves one with the image of a huge pyramid of bones, knick-knacks, cake crumbs and slices of mummy, and atop it all two neatly dressed London gentlemen. With their museum they hoped to ‘create a storehouse of knowledge’ for ‘the merchant and the manufacturer, the archaeologist and the historian, the painter and the playwright, the military man and the naval strategist, the philanthropist and the philosopher, for the lover of culture in general’. The more they collected, the Cumings believed, the more people would know. And the more people knew about other cultures, past and present, the better they would realise that Britain under Queen Victoria formed the apotheosis of human civilisation, and that the Briton was the pinnacle of creation.
