PARIS AT A WATERSHED Christophe CharLe Oui, c’est vrai, un Paris anglaisé, mais qui a, Dieu merci ! pour ne pas lui ressembler, deux choses : la beauté comparative de son climat et l’absence de charbon de terre… viCtor hugo, dans gonCourt éd. 1957, p. 664-665. 20 fig. 4 of the century; and the rise to power of a o hark back to Paris in the 1870s, at a Auguste Victor Deroy, government elected in controversial circumstime when plans were laid for the first Panorama des incendies tances owing to enemy occupation and the exhibition of the group that came to be de Paris par la Commune, après 1871. Lithographie Prussians forcing the nation to come to a known, in 1874, as “the impressionists,” coloriée, 57,4 × 79,9 cm humiliating peace. One section of the Paris is to find oneself confronted with Paris, musée Carnavalet, population rejected this new direction and contradictory images. This was a watershed Histoire de Paris proclaimed its independence after the moment between two epochs, as if the history Communards took control of the city. There followed a of France were wavering between two possible courses: a relentless civil war fought by the regular army against the return to the past, with projects to restore the monarchy federate troops of the Paris National Guard. It ended, and establish a new “moral order”—including, most against the glow of blazing fires at major monuments notably, the imposition of intransigent Catholicism—or the possibility of boldly facing up to the future, examining the fig. 1021, with massacres and summary executions, terrific collective conscience in order to determine exactly what repression of the insurgents by the war councils, thousands had led the country to the disaster of 1870–71. of condemnations, exile for numerous outlaws, and—worst of all—the mass deportation to New Caledonia of a whole stuCK in the past militant generation. The city, which in 1867 had invited all Paris, as a city, as the capital, and as a historic place of nations to peaceful competition fig. 1018, was turned into a remembrance, was central to this disruption of the time field of ruins created by hatred and discord, and gave “to sequence that in point of fact pervades the entire ninethe world the spectacle of a city unhinged heading for its teenth century. 1 Only recently transformed as never before downfall, as in ancient times Sodom and Babylon,” as following twenty years of major building work, the city was Émile Zola wrote in a Russian periodical in June 1878. 3 brutally subjected, in the space of less than a year—from This dramatic turn of events occurred just three years September 1870 to May 1871—to every conceivable histobefore the 1874 impressionist exhibition. And yet, for all rical cataclysm: a war lost inside a month, thereby leading the destruction and the death toll, for all the humiliation to a revolutionary day—the Fourth of September—on of defeat and the political uncertainty, the battered city of which the regime of Napoleon III made way for the Paris, in ruins, in mourning, and hit by an economic slump Republic; two sieges of the city, one by the Prussians, the and financial squeeze caused by the payment of an indemother by the French army; enemy bombardments of the nity of five billion francs to the victor, appears to have neighborhoods on the south side; bloody battles at the city bounced back very quickly. When we thumb through the gates in a fruitless campaign to raise the Siege; the enlistnewspapers of 1873 or 1874, nothing much seems to have ment of workers into the National Guard; 2 widespread changed compared with what we might have read in the starvation during one of the harshest and longest winters same pages back in 1867 or 1868. The fashionable dailies T 21 a spurious image put out by the bourgeois city, with its were reporting on the same rituals as in the days of the fashionable western districts, attempting to erase its harSecond Empire: high-society receptions, first nights at the rowing past with a return to the heady days of imperial boulevard theaters, the opening of the Salon art exhibition splendor as if nothing had happened, notwithstanding the in May, the horse-racing season, the elections to the fact that the Tuileries, the Palais d’Orsay, and the Hôtel de Académie Française along with the usual verbal jousting, Ville figs. 1022, 1021 still lay in ruins as a reminder to the men or the solemn reopening of the magistrature in the fall. The only obvious change, namely the increasingly long-winded and women of Paris of what they had been through. Many and impassioned parliamentary debates, filled entire intellectuals and artists had lost all patience with this shacolumns in the place of news from the literary and art dow theater, these political quarrels endlessly rehearsing world. Political uncertainty remained prevalent: although the monarchy’s century-old war on the republic. The man officially a republic, France still had no constitution (the in the street had other concerns: reviving business and constitutional laws were not voted upon until 1875). The industry, and mending the devastation and scars left by the conservative majority that had governed France since 1871 civil war, as well as paying off the funds borrowed by the had dreams of a restoration, but it was increasingly split city hall to finance its makeover. into factions unable to come to an agreement. The official Emerging from the “terrible year,” 4 Paris suffered pretender, the Comte de Chambord, a descendant of the supreme humiliation at the hands of the official governBourbons, single-handedly ruined his chances of acceding ment following its victory over the communalist insurrecto the throne by rejecting the tricolor flag, a revolutionary tion: the capital was “decapitalized.” The Assemblée symbol in his eyes. Most of all, the government came under Nationale and the provisional government stayed on at threat from an increasingly influential repuVersailles, old capital of the monarchy, for fig. 6 Alphonse Liébert, blican movement. Its voter base was no lon- « L’Hôtel de ville incendié », fear of having to return to sit in Paris, the ger restricted to the capital or the other large cradle of the Republic and only recently up in Les ruines de Paris et de ses environs, cities and, with each by-election held during arms. As a further security measure, the state 1870-1871, 1872 those years, was gradually spreading across Tirage sur papier albuminé, of siege was not lifted in the Seine and Seinethe country. et-Oise départements until 1876, which gave 22,5 x 31 cm (vol.) Paris, Bibliothèque This right-minded press, however, prethe executive the right to scrutinize the press nationale de France, sented a misleading picture as it sought to in particular, and any gatherings or demonsdépartement des Estampes move on from still-recent tragic events. It was trations liable to disturb public order. Such et de la photographie 22 city population to head out of town for the suburbs or the newly annexed communes: Les Batignolles, Montmartre, La Chapelle, La Villette, Belleville, Charonne, Gentilly, Montrouge, Vaugirard, Grenelle, and Passy, for instance. the new paris Having set their sights on bringing Napoleon I’s urban And yet Napoleon III’s fallen Empire had done its utmost projects to fruition and showing Europe how Paris was “the to avoid being held to ransom by these insurrections that world’s most beautiful city,” the two modernizers also were a regular feature of all nineteenth-century regimes, wanted to see the capital catch up with her great rival, and that either posed a serious threat or caused them to London. The conveniences of modern living—gas lighting, self-destruct. 5 In order to eradicate the trouble-making at drains, fountains, mains water, urban furniture, building source, during the 1850s and 1860s the emperor and his renovations, city parks and squares, hospitals—were prefect, Baron Haussmann, had embarked upon a program intended to improve daily life for everybody, bring down to overhaul the city radically. In the old inner-city quarters, death and morbidity rates, facilitate the circulation of where most often the riots would start and the barricades people and goods through the establishment of new covebe set up, they bulldozed their way through, building boured markets, train stations, and omnibus routes, and levards and new streets. They crisscrossed the worensure a more even distribution of public facilities. The king-class neighborhoods on the north, east, and south worst polluters—abattoirs, gas plants, garbage dumps, and sides with new avenues. In addition, they interspersed hazardous industries—were all relegated to outlying areas them with army barracks so as to ensure a capability of surin the new arrondissements or nearby suburbs (Ivry, Saintveillance and prompt intervention at any and all strategic Denis) cat. 062. As an attractive, healthier, spots. In the fight against epidemics, which fig. 6 Alphonse Liébert, were linked with overcrowding and insalu- « L’Hôtel de ville incendié », greener place, the new Paris sought to draw brious working-class homes, in 1860 they visitors from the rest of France and from Les ruines de Paris et de ses environs, doubled the city’s official surface area. This around the world, for them to go on a spen1870-1871, 1872 step was needed in order to accommodate a Tirage sur papier albuminé, ding spree and through taxes on consumer population that had itself almost doubled items pay off the government loans stigma22,5 x 31 cm (vol.) Paris, Bibliothèque over the same period of time. Owing to a lack tized by the Republican opposition. 6 Grand nationale de France, of available housing and also rent hikes, the hotels (the Hôtel du Louvre), large departdépartement des Estampes demolitions forced one section of the innerment stores (Au Bon Marché, Le Printemps), et de la photographie symbolic and punitive measures made for an oppressive atmosphere, particularly in working-class neighborhoods. 23 extensively reconfigured Right Bank; between the downtown neighborhoods and outlying areas incorporated too recently to have shaken off their country look; between the different classes who lived in these places, receiving unequal service and disservice. Unquestionably, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the middle classes enjoyed a higher standard of living than a generation earlier: they settled comfortably with more space and quiet in the west end of town and the central shopping district, in dressed-stone buildings with their wrought-iron balconies and luxurious entrances, and, for the wealthiest, their small hôtels particuliers along the green belt down by the Boulevard Malesherbes, the Avenue du Bois (the present-day Avenue Foch), the Parc Monceau, or Passy. To the north, east, or south, where the watchword for speculators and investors had been economy, housing was either cramped or ramshackle: brick and rubble stone or planks and sheet metal were used instead of stone and zinc, and it was never more comfortable than strictly necessary. The lavatory was in the backyard, and running water was available only on the landing or from a standpipe. Such frugality was the way to ensure property owners a minimum revenue from rent, despite the limited disposable income of their working-class tenants now rehoused away from the city center. For the poorest and the most insecure, even this was still unaffordable, so the furnished accommodation demolished in the city center and the Latin Quarter reappeared in neighborhoods such as Les Gobelins, Montmartre, Plaisance, and Belleville, while shantytowns sprang up once more in “la Zone” 9 at the gates of Paris. Steam engines continued to spit out their coal dust into the backyards of the industrial developments of the eleventh and thirteenth arrondissements, for Paris was still a city in which factories, workshops, and precarious housing were all jumbled together. It was not by chance that the map of the front lines established during the “Bloody Week” of May 1871 10 coincided—depending on the scale of local resistance to the Versailles troops— with the social boundaries of Paris, where Haussmann’s transformations had merely papered over the cracks. 11 neo-Gothic (Sainte-Clotilde) or neo-Byzantine churches (Saint-Augustin) fig. 1016, new theaters (including the Théâtre du Châtelet and Théâtre de la Gaîté), and a spanking opera house gradually rose up out of the ground along the new avenues. 7 On the Champs-Élysées and elsewhere, café concerts became commonplace, launching new popular artistes, one of whom, the singer Thérésa (Emma Valadon), would be immortalized by Edgar Degas fig. 1023. The gamble appeared to have paid off on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle of 1867, despite the war that had been fought only recently between Prussia and Austria. It had outdone the London exhibition of 1862 in terms of both attendance figures and attractions. La Vie parisienne (1866) artists in two minds by Offenbach, Meilhac, and Halévy, an opera buffa showWriters and artists were very much in two minds regarding case that poked fun at all the foreigners who would be this new Paris. On his return from exile in the fall of 1870, flocking to sample the pleasures of the city of luxury and Victor Hugo, that arch-critic of “Napoleon the love, captured a new and lasting image of the fig. 6 Alphonse Liébert, capital that has come down almost to our own « L’Hôtel de ville incendié », Little,” nonetheless willingly granted that the new city built by his adversary had some day (significantly, the piece was revived as Les ruines de Paris et de ses environs, merits, all the while clinging to his soft spot early as 1873). 8 1870-1871, 1872 Beyond the brand-new white stone facades Tirage sur papier albuminé, for the old Paris of his younger days, the city he immortalized in Notre-Dame de Paris and the blare of light music, the transformed 22,5 x 31 cm (vol.) Paris, Bibliothèque (sometimes called The Hunchback of Notrecity continued to offer glimpses of sharp nationale de France, Dame, 1831) and especially in Les Misérables contrasts: between the Left Bank, less affecdépartement des Estampes (1862): ted by the upheavals of renovation, and the et de la photographie 24 fig. 4 like what it was even in Gustave Courbet’s When I asked him if he felt at home again in Auguste Victor Deroy, day, if we are to believe Zola, who lived an Paris, he replied roughly to this effect: “. . . But Panorama des incendies impoverished youth there: don’t imagine . . . that I’m condemning everyde Paris par la Commune, après 1871. Lithographie thing that has been done in Paris in my absence: coloriée, 57,4 × 79,9 cm Without any shadow of doubt, the demolition of Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle have been Paris, musée Carnavalet, the old houses and the opening of new streets and beautifully restored, and there are undeniably Histoire de Paris new boulevards have transformed the look of the some fine new houses. . . . As a matter of personal Latin Quarter. The Boulevard Saint-Michel, and the taste, I prefer my old streets . . .” And answering somebody who Boulevard Saint-Germain, which cuts across it, give it light, spoke of great arteries, he said: “Yes, the Empire did nothing air, and extra liveliness. Only a few backstreets have survived to provide a defense against foreigners; everything it did was as they were before. The cafés have become as spacious and designed to provide a defense against the population. 12 luxurious as the restaurants on the Boulevard des Italiens. 14 This exchange between Victor Hugo and Edmond de Haussmann and Napoleon III saw themselves as harbinGoncourt, two great admirers of heritage with fond memogers of progress. Paris was to be the magnum opus of the ries of a bygone era, certainly encapsulates the uncertainty reign, a city as a work of art but nonetheless a functional of many literary figures, caught between an attachment to one, linked to France and Europe via a star-shaped railroad the “old” Paris and the attractions of the new. As early as system. In the field of architecture, they were more conser1866, for the purposes of preserving some trace of the vanivative. They sacrificed a number of old structures but they shed city, George Haussmann himself came up with the restored or showcased the more venerable examples idea for a museum of Paris’s history, the Musée Carnavalet, (Notre-Dame, the Île de la Cité, the Sainte-Chapelle); the ordering the purchase of the Hôtel du Marais in which to quadrangle of the Louvre was cleared of its dilapidated house it. The ancient could also appear out of the modern, buildings and the new wing on the Rue de Rivoli linked up and in 1872 the archaeological remains of the amphitheater with the Tuileries in a pastiche of the classical styles of of Roman Lutetia, discovered in 1870 during engineering royal palaces. Even when building from scratch, the Empire work on the Rue Monge, were excavated. 13 tended to revert to a mixture of old styles, as with the new Meanwhile, the neighboring Latin Quarter was nothing 25 widened: Édouard Béliard, Guillaumin, Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, and Sisley were all obliged to live for the time being away from the capital or on its outskirts. 17 Living out of town while awaiting recognition, however long it took, made all kinds of sense: it saved on household expenses, allowed for friendly mutual support while working outdoors, and offered the attraction of country landscapes in the Île-de-France area, where painters would tirelessly explore a myriad shades, as strikingly evidenced in several paintings on show at the group’s maiden exhibition in April 1874 on the Boulevard des Capucines: The Seine at PortMarly cat. 019, for instance, Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes cat. 133, Poppy Field cat. 071, or House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise cat. 072. Guillaumin, who made ends meet by working as a ditch-digger with the highways department, offers a landscape scarred by industry in the newborn suburbs cat. 062; and Monet for once turns away from the countryside to provide a daring bird’s-eye view of the Boulevard des Capucines cat. 033, as seen from Nadar’s studio, where the exhibition would be held. The more Parisian of the impressionists offer interior scenes or evoke their favorite haunts of the leisured classes: Degas’s The Dance Class cat. 053 and At the Races in the Countryside cat. 010; Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle cat. 064 and The Mother and Sister of the Artist cat. 018; and Renoir’s The Loge cat. 039 and The Parisienne cat. 017. With such gentle pictures, whether consciously or unconsciously, both groups were seeking to get away from a nightmarish, traumatic past that had left an enduring mark on Paris and an entire generation. opera house by Charles Garnier, which combined the baroque and the classical fig. 1017. In its handling of the “fine arts,” the Bonapartist state in 1863 could tolerate a “Salon des Refusés” while steadfastly upholding the aesthetic order handed down via the École des Beaux-Arts and its competitions, or the official Salon and its medals, in the face of increasing anti-establishment activity among the younger generations. 15 Rejecting a petition by artists in April 1872, the Republic would not hear of repeating the experiment. 16 This is what forced the innovators to seek out alternatives, such as the founding of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Graveurs, Sculpteurs, etc., the joint-stock company of painters, engravers, and sculptors that was behind the 1874 “impressionist” exhibition. How did the artists involved in this act of dissidence against the established aesthetic order react to the transformation of Paris? In a broad variety of ways, for reasons as much to do with biography as history: hailing from the provinces (Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin, Eugène Boudin) or abroad (Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley), many of the impressionists-to-be came to Paris before 1870 to learn their trade, just like the majority of educated French youth, drawn irresistibly to the capital of art and literature, much as described in a Balzac novel as something deeply ingrained in the French cultural and social way of life. Neither did they escape the consequences of the transformation of Paris: the new painting was known for a time as the “Batignolles school” (with reference to one of the newly annexed towns) because these beginners had to take refuge in the cheaper quarters in the northwest. Likewise, cafés on the city’s outskirts (Café Guerbois, Grande Rue des Batignolles, Nouvelle Athènes, Place Pigalle) had taken over from the cafés on the boulevards or in the Latin Quarter as venues for getting together and conversation for the same reason. These establishments were friendlier to young people and mixed age groups, and there was no standing on ceremony, whereas the downtown boulevards were primarily where already established artists, chroniclers, and writers liked to be seen. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this socio-geographical determinism. Non-conformism was not the preserve of artists who lacked a lower middle-class background. A number who had come into money (Edgar Degas, Henri Rouart, Giuseppe De Nittis, Berthe Morisot, and, later, Gustave Caillebotte) also belonged to the collective that gradually emerged from these encounters and successive group exhibitions. Even though they too had difficulty making a name for themselves whenever they strayed off the beaten track, they at least had a supportive family and other resources to fall back on in order to preserve their standing in the bourgeois city. Degas, Auguste Renoir, and Eugène Boudin remained faithful to the old artists’ quarter, the one known in the Romantic period as the “Nouvelle Athènes” (New Athens), in the ninth arrondissement; meanwhile, Berthe Morisot lived in Passy. During the difficult period that followed the FrancoPrussian War, the gap between these figures and less welloff artists, or those who were less fortunate in their sales, 1 Charle 2011 and 2021. 2 Workers who enlisted were guaranteed a minimum wage at a time of massive unemployment following the Siege. 3 Zola 2003b, p. 711. See also Fournier 2007. 4 L’Année terrible is the title of a collection of poems by Victor Hugo (Hugo 1872) about the Franco-Prussian War, the Commune, and the tragic loss of his son. 5 Such uprisings include the end of the Restoration and the July 1830 revolution; the toppling of the July Monarchy during the days of revolution in February 1848; the workers’ revolt in Paris in June 1848 during the Second Republic; the end of the Second Empire and a return to the Republic on September 4, 1870; and the uprising of the Commune of Paris on March 18, 1871 against the Thiers government. 6 See Ferry 1868. 7 See the present catalogue, pp. XX–XX. 8 Yon 2000, pp. 331–38. The closing chorus (quoted on p. 335) was “Never mind what comes after / Here is life in Paris!” 9 The “non aedificandi” (no building) zone consisted of a miles-long belt just outside the fortifications that circled the capital. No permanent structures could be built there, so that the army’s sightlines over the city walls would not be blocked, but one result was the proliferation on this strip of land of temporary facilities for the poorest of the poor such as could be readily demolished. 10 May 21–28, 1871. 11 Rougerie 1971. 12 Goncourt 1957, pp. 664–65 (Monday November 7, 1870), trans. Baldrick 1978, pp. 178–79. 13 Van Damme 2012. 14 Zola 2003a, p. 696. 15 See the present catalogue, p. XX. 16 A Salon des Refusés did, however, go ahead in 1873; see the present catalogue, p. XX. 17 The artists’ addresses were listed in the catalogue of the 1874 Société Anonyme exhibition (Paris 1874a and 1874b) [Paris 1874 = Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc., Première exposition 1874: Catalogue, exh. cat., 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, April 15–May 15, 1874. Paris: Imprimerie Alcan-Lévy, 1874.] and in the directory Annuaire des Beaux-Arts et des arts décoratifs (Paris, 1879), both browsable online at Gallica.fr. 26