Children of the Revolution Read online

  In the musical world the Second Empire was keen to eliminate any political opposition and to encourage pure entertainment. The goguettes were closed down and effectively replaced by the café-concerts, which multiplied after 1850 and reached their apogee around 1865. Making money out of the drinks they sold, they attracted a varied clientele of students, bohemians, the elegant and foreign tourists. Politics was replaced by sex, in terms both of the sauciness or obscenity of the songs sung and of the prostitution that was plied there. Some of the café-concert singers acquired star status, such as Thérésa, a former seamstress with a brief acting career who sang at the Alcazar and Eldorado. She competed for fame with the great actress of the day, Hortense Schneider, claiming that Schneider ‘was called the Thérésa of the theatre, while I was called the Schneider of the café-concerts’.92

  In the theatres the public of the Second Empire began to tire of the pompous extravagance of Meyerbeer’s grand opera, favouring instead the smaller-scale, lyrical and intimate. Charles Gounod, who had fallen under the spell of Lacordaire when he won the Prix de Rome in 1839, became director of the Foreign Missions church in Paris and was briefly a seminarist at Saint-Sulpice in 1847–8. Now he turned from sacred music to opera and had Faust, based on Nerval’s translation, performed at Léon Carvalho’s Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859. It found itself in competition with Meyerbeer’s latest work, The Pardon of Ploërmel, with a Breton and religious theme, at the Opéra-Comique. Georges Bizet, who saw both productions, thought Meyerbeer’s ‘rather boring’ and Faust ‘splendid. Gounod is the most complete of French composers.’93 It was no easy task to judge the taste of the opera-going public. Bizet won the Prix de Rome in 1857 but his Pearl Fishers, produced at the Théâtre-Lyrique by Carvalho in 1863, was regarded as too Wagnerian and had to be alternated with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro to keep up box-office receipts. Even more of a flop was Berlioz’s Trojans, which he could not get accepted by the Opéra and which became another Carvalho production in 1863, but lasted for only twenty-one performances.94

  The career of Offenbach beautifully illustrates the way in which popular music was upgraded and grand opera subverted in order to produce a new genre, the operetta, which exactly matched the musical taste of the French bourgeoisie in the Second Empire. The son of a bookbinder and synagogue cantor from the Rhineland, Offenbach came to Paris in 1833 for Conservatory training, worked his way up through the orchestras of the boulevard du Temple and the Opéra-Comique, and became leader of the Comédie-Française orchestra in 1850. The Paris Exposition of 1855, which brought five million visitors to the capital, prompted him to write to the minister in charge, Achille Fould, asking for permission to open a theatre putting on ‘a show in good taste, where until now there have been only more or less uncouth parades’.95 The outcome was the small-scale Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, which enjoyed the backing of Le Figaro newspaper, and made an impact with a send-up of The Huguenots, Ba-Ta-Clan, in 1856.96

  More success came with Orpheus in the Underworld which parodied Greek myth and with it the court of the Second Empire, and opened at the Bouffes in 1858. Offenbach now moved on to the Opéra itself, with a ballet called Papillon in 1860, but the forum of his greatest triumphs, after theatres were accorded far more freedom in 1864, was the Théâtre des Variétés. La Belle Hélène, another spoof of Greek myth, starring Hortense Schneider, was described by La Vie Parisienne as encapsulating ‘the present, our society, us, our beliefs, taste and gaiety’, confident enough in itself that it could poke fun at the Ancients.97 The Paris Exposition of 1867, which attracted eleven million visitors, was a showcase of French industrial progess as well as French culture. Two Schneiders were in view. Eugène, who announced that a French locomotive had been bought by the British, and Hortense, who played the lead in The Grand Duchess of Gérolstein, a story of love and war set in a diminutive German state which became the talk of the town and was attended by Napoleon III, the Prince of Wales, Bismarck and Tsar Alexander II.98 Gérolstein was familiar as the duchy of Rodolphe, hero of Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, and illustrated how Offenbach was taking over popular tropes just as the somewhat violent boulevard theatres were being demolished by Haussmann. At the same time, however, the witty and playful operetta displaced heavyweight opera as the favourite genre not only of the bourgeoisie but of high society, fantasizing about soldier Fritz, General Boum, Baron Puck and the Grand Duchess just as an altogether more militaristic Germany was about to bring Parisian gaiety to an end.

  The great event of the artistic season, during the Second Empire as before, was the annual exhibition of the Paris Salon. The jury drawn from the Academy of Fine Arts mediated between the government and the bourgeois public, excluding any works that went against an aesthetic canon which favoured paintings that were religious, historical, mythological, pastoral or sentimental, inspired by classical or Renaissance art, and more recently by the Orient. Whereas the movement to keep out in the 1830s was Romanticism, in the 1850s it was Realism, the portrayal of modern life in all its grimness, and depicting peasants and workers rather than aristocrats and bourgeois. The defeat of the Revolution of 1848 destroyed the illusions of many artists and drove them to examine the reality of the world around them that had brought dreams of social emancipation to nothing.

  Gustave Courbet had enjoyed no success under the July Monarchy, with only three of the twenty-two pictures he submitted accepted by the jury. At the Salon of 1849 he won a gold medal for his After Dinner in Ornans, and as a medal-winner he now gained the right to exhibit every year, bypassing the jury. In 1850 he provoked controversy with the unyieldingly severe Stone-breakers and Burial at Ornans. The art critic Champfleury, who took up the defence of Realism, asked, ‘Is it the artist’s fault if material interests, small-town life, sordid egoism, provincial narrowness have clawed their faces, dimmed their eyes, furrowed their brows, made their mouths stupid? Many bourgeois look like that. M. Courbet paints bourgeois.’ A contrary view was put by the aged Delécluze, who wrote, ‘Never, perhaps, has the worship of ugliness been so openly practised.’99 Again, at the Salon of 1853, Courbet exhibited his Bathers, which portrayed not nymphs in some ethereal glade but flesh-and-blood women of generous proportion climbing out of a river. At a private view the empress thought they looked no different from the plough-horses exhibited in the next painting. The authorities had their revenge at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Courbet submitted his Burial at Ornans but had no special privilege for this festival. He was turned down, and erected a tent for his own private show, under the banner, ‘Realism. Gustave Courbet’.100

  The artists who were favoured by the Academy at this moment were those who continued the classical school such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau. Bouguereau won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1848 and studied in Italy for four years, while Gérôme travelled in Italy in 1843–4 and after 1857 made several journeys to Egypt. Under the Empire Bouguereau accepted commissions to decorate public buildings, churches and town houses, typically with allegorical figures representing music and love. His paintings, of a photographic realism and highly finished, were nevertheless of purely imaginary mythological idylls, featuring nymphs and fauns moulded like Greek statues. Gérôme’s first paintings were in a neo-Greek style but after he discovered the Orient he specialized in slave-markets and Arab street scenes, and painted a series imagining Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt.101

  In 1863 there was another challenge to this school of painting. For the Salon of that year Gérôme presented three paintings which were all accepted: Greek Comedians, A Turkish Butcher in Jerusalem and a historical work, Molière Breakfasting with Louis XIV. Édouard Manet, however, presented Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which subverted paintings such as Raphael’s Judgement of Paris by moving the scene from a mythological setting to a modern river bank and putting his carefree nude in the presence of dressed men. His new style of painting depicted modern life in the form of cafés, the theatre, bullfights, railway stations, street-scenes, the racetrack and t
he seaside, rather than beauty or ideals clothed in some timeless and escapist form. The composition was sometimes randomly cropped at the edges and used a rougher surface rather than the perfect design and glossy finish beloved of the Academy. So many paintings of this kind were rejected by the Salon jury in 1863 that the emperor exceptionally authorized a ‘Salon des Refusés’ to be arranged to show them.102 The artists whose works were turned down were not social misfits or social rebels but of bourgeois background, possibly even more exalted than Gérôme, a jeweller’s son from Vesoul, and were formally trained at the École des Beaux Arts. Manet was the son of an official in the Justice Ministry, while Édouard Degas was the son of an Italian banker and American mother, who, like Baudelaire and Flaubert, had abandoned his law studies. Socially, although Gérôme was a regular at the salon of Princesse Mathilde while Manet met the likes of Baudelaire and Émile Zola at the Café Guerbois in the Grande rue des Batignolles (now the avenue de Clichy), Manet had also toured Italy where he met up with Émile Ollivier, whom he caricatured in 1860, and was visited in his workshop by the Goncourt brothers. Generationally, the painters of modern life were a decade younger that the academic artists, but the main source of antagonism was aesthetic and political.

  The new artists had an ambivalent relationship with the Salon, for they could not afford to forgo the recognition it provided. Manet’s Olympia, which was accepted by the Salon of 1865, poked fun at the stylized nude of paintings such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino by painting a reclining prostitute, accompanied by a black cat and black servant, obviously awaiting a client. In 1866, however, more of Manet’s pictures were rejected from the Salon and Zola took up his cause. In a series of articles in L’Événement in April–May 1866 he defined the works of Manet and his circle as ‘a corner of creation seen through a temperament’.103 By the end of the Second Empire Manet’s pictures called into question not only the canons of the Salon and the Academy, but the politics of the regime. While Gérôme hailed the establishment of a French empire in Indo-China for the Salon of 1865 by painting a line of Siamese ambassadors crawling to the thrones of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, Manet chose to depict The Execution of Maximilian, the ill-fated prince the French government tried to impose on the Mexican people, who expressed their thanks by shooting him. The thanks of the regime naturally went to Gérôme, who was sent as one of the official party for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, while Manet was told that his Execution would be rejected by the Salon of 1869 if it were submitted.

  7

  The French in a Foreign Mirror

  The French reached the apogee of their military power in 1812, their domination of Europe reaching as far as Moscow. After that, their power collapsed, leaving France with a long road to recover great-power status. The French people’s image of themselves was never purely conditioned by military power. They saw their superiority in terms of being bearers of liberty and culture, which might be but did not have to be propagated by cannon or bayonets. But they never lost confidence in themselves as a great power, a major player in Europe and the world. As they travelled, the French judged each nation by the liberty, culture or power to which it could lay claim. Some had culture but no liberty or power, some had power but no liberty or culture. Each nation held up a different image of the French to themselves, and made them think about their own identity, but none in their eyes could achieve that unique blend of liberty, culture and power that was French.

  ITALY: RUINS AND BEAUTY

  Stendhal began The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) with the entry of General Bonaparte into Milan on 15 May 1796, after his victory at Lodi, expelling the Austrians who occupied Lombardy, and ‘in a few months awoke a people who had fallen asleep’. The French soldiers were all under twenty-five; Bonaparte, at twenty-seven, was said to be the oldest man in the army. Italy was taken by a storm of youth and ‘suddenly found itself inundated with light’. The only opposition to the arrival of the French came from the monks who had preached that learning to read was a waste of time and if the Lombards simply paid their tithes and confessed their sins they would earn their place in heaven.1

  This novel was in a sense autobiographical. Stendhal himself ended the account of his painful childhood, The Life of Henri Brulard, during which he had battled against his father and the priests hired to educate him, with his entry into Milan on 10 June 1800, attached to the French army and aged seventeen, when the French army again expelled the Austrians after the battle of Marengo. He later said of the Italians that ‘Marengo moved on the civilization of their country by a hundred years, just as another battle [Waterloo] stopped it for a century’.2 On another occasion he argued that the Italians had known modern civilization only between 17 May 1809, when Napoleon introduced the Civil Code into Italy, and April 1814, when the French were themselves forced to abandon that country and when the Kingdom of Italy, which Napoleon had set up and of which he had been crowned king in 1805, came to an end.3

  What Stendhal meant by civilization was something decidedly modern: political unity, a free society under the rule of law, and the Enlightenment. Italy may have been the cradle of ancient civilization, but that was now dead, and the Italians were gripped by political divisions, foreign rule, petty despotisms and the spiritual and temporal domination of the Roman Catholic Church. This perception was not peculiar to Stendhal but was a commonplace among French visitors to Italy. Chateaubriand, who arrived in Rome in June 1803 as secretary to the French legation there, and stood at the other end of the political spectrum from Stendhal, was delighted to find that the pope was reading his Genius of Christianity, but saw the city ‘slumbering in the middle of ruins’. The Tiber, he said, separated two glories that were now past, ‘Pagan Rome, sinking deeper into its tombs, and Christian Rome, descending once more into the catacombs from which it came’. The deadness of the city affected even its inhabitants, who seemed to be dying of hunger but did not work, preferring to live from the charity of the Church.4 Madame de Staël, who went to Italy in 1804–5, wrote in her novel Corinne, or Italy that Italy was a ‘country of tombs’ and ‘tired of glory’. Divided into small states and occupied by foreign powers it had no centre of enlightenment like Paris and liberty was there in mourning. What it did have was artistic genius: the country of Petrarch and Dante and of popular energy manifest at Carnival. ‘Our only glory’, Corinne tells Oswald, the Scottish lord she admires, ‘is the genius of the imagination’, and she herself excels as a poet, musician, actress and dancer, crowned with laurels on the Capitol. Corinne inspires Oswald with her genius, but this does not make her marriageable: Italy is dominated by conservative social conventions, imposed both by Italians and by visiting Britons and Frenchmen, so that Oswald marries her half-sister and does not realize his mistake until Corinne dies broken-hearted.5

  After the departure of the French in 1814–15 there were restorations of Austrian rule in the north, Vatican rule in the Papal States in the centre and Bourbon rule in Naples and Sicily. Stendhal, who was out of favour with the French Bourbons, lived from 1814 to 1821 in Milan, for him ‘the most beautiful place on earth’,6 hating the stifling political atmosphere but arguing that there was no better environment for music or love. While France was a nation state dominated by its capital, Italy was divided into a myriad of small states, each with their courts and ‘eight or ten ministers without the workload of a [French] prefect between them’, with nothing better to do than to vex the population. The peoples of the different city states, he said, all spoke different dialects and hated each other. He saw this as a ‘legacy of the tyrannies of the Middle Ages and a great obstacle to liberty’. Rome, under papal rule, was a despotism which refused to countenance any new ideas. There was scarcely any middle class to serve as a vehicle of progressive ideas and the nobility made common cause with the people in their support of reaction. The small number of Italians who desired liberty and unity, members of the carbonari secret society, risked being put to death in the cruellest way in the Papal States if they were
caught. And yet for Stendhal La Scala was the greatest opera house in the world. ‘Only music is alive in Italy,’ he said. ‘If you are a citizen you will die of melancholy… the only thing to do in this beautiful country is to make love.’ He estimated that of a hundred French women in the Bois de Boulogne scarcely one was beautiful, whereas in Italy thirty would be over made up, ‘fifty would be beautiful, but with nothing more than an air of voluptuousness, while the twenty others would be of the most ravishing classic beauty’.7

  Attempts were made by liberals and patriots to shake off Austrian, papal and Bourbon rule, but without success. An uprising in Bologna, once part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy but now ruled by the papal bureaucracy, was put down with the help of Austrian troops. Edgar Quinet, visiting Italy in 1836, was horrified to find Austrian troops still occupying Bologna, as well as Milan and Venice. ‘At that moment,’ he confessed, ‘I hated Germany for all the ill it has done to Italy. No, no, it cannot go on. The white uniforms must disappear, the prickly cavalry must go back over the mountains… let them return to the valleys of the Danube, the Elbe and the Spree, and harness their feudal ploughs.’8 Flaubert, travelling in Italy a decade later, in 1845, saw Milan as a place of transition between Italy and Austria, and was fascinated by the variety of uniforms of the Austrian and Hungarian regiments. Like Stendhal, he remarked on the paradox of political lifelessness and clerical despotism on the one hand and cultural life and emotional excitement on the other. ‘I entered La Scala with a religious emotion,’ he wrote, ‘because there human thought… seeks to escape reality and people come to cry, to laugh or to marvel.’ At an open-air theatre in Genoa, he was fixated by ‘the most beautiful woman I have ever seen’ and ‘contemplated her as one drinks a wine of exquisite taste’.9