Seven Ages of Paris (30 page)

THE LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION

The whole of the Marengo campaign kept Bonaparte out of Paris for only fifty-seven days. It would give him nearly five years of peace, the longest in his career, which he could spend in Paris, devoting himself to restoring and reforming the social fabric of France. There was much to be done, mountains and pyramids to be moved. Inflation was rampant: shoes worth five livres in 1790 cost 200 in 1795, and 2,000 in 1797. The country—once more—was bankrupt, but imbued with the singular urge to reinvent herself.

Returning to France in 1800 after seven years’ self-exile, the writer Chateaubriand had been dismayed by the ravages that he found inflicted by the Revolution, especially in its militant atheism: “the ruinous castles, the belfries empty of bells, the graveyards with never a cross and the headless statues of saints.” At Saint-Denis, the resting place of French monarchs from time immemorial, tombs had been defaced, decapitated or totally destroyed, their royal contents sacrilegiously scattered. In Paris, though it was horribly vandalized, Notre-Dame had escaped by a whisker—scheduled for destruction, its stones had actually been put up for auction. Louis IX’s priceless Sainte-Chapelle, profaned and used as a flour warehouse, and so dilapidated that it bore a sign proclaiming “National property, for sale,” had also survived. But a great many churches had been totally destroyed. In the centre of squares, pedestals stood bereft of their statues; almost the only monument left was that of the sombre Place de la Révolution (renamed Concorde only a few months after Robespierre’s execution there). The façade of the Tuileries, which had once housed Robespierre and the dreaded Committee of Public Safety, was still marked with bullet holes, while the Church of Saint-Roch bore the more recent scars of General Bonaparte’s own “whiff of grapeshot” from 1795. The great houses of the nobility and the bourgeois had been pillaged, with barely a courtyard gate still left on its hinges. Walls had been brought down, and shacks built upon the girdle of market gardens. On both banks of the Seine Paris resembled one immense house-breakers’ yard, combined with a no less enormous junk shop.

Although the massacres perpetrated on the Royalist Vendée far exceeded the Terror in Paris, the mess left behind by the revolutionary Commune would have daunted any lesser man than Napoleon. A worn, wrecked and exhausted city, Paris now smelt more of filthy mud and sewage than she had at the worst moments of the Middle Ages. There had after all been “ten years of anarchy, sedition and laxity, during which no useful work had been undertaken, not a street had been cleaned, not a residence repaired, nothing improved or cleansed,” as Sainte-Beuve wrote. There was a serious lack of clean water, a deficiency only partially offset by a few so-called purifying fountains with which to fill buckets. Most Parisians, however, preferred to take their chances with the ever more polluted Seine. “You are barbarians,” Stendhal castigated the post-revolutionary Parisians; “your streets stink aloud; you can’t take a step in them without being covered with black mud, which gives a disgusting appearance to the populace, forced to travel on foot. This comes of the absurd idea of turning your streets into a main sewer.” Walkers hugged the walls to avoid being run over in the squalid streets. Even in the more salubrious areas, armed robbers (some of them outlawed priests or noblemen forced into hiding) preyed on those spared by Robespierre and his allies, while as an ironic reminder of the levelling work of Madame Guillotine, la Veuve, in the Place de la Révolution there still stood a peeling pink cardboard statue of Liberty.

France after the Terror resembled a madman who had been subjected to excessive bleeding. Yet, in providing another example of Paris’s miraculous capacity to recover from catastrophe, within only fourteen months of the dreadful Robespierre losing his sea-green head on the scaffold, the capital under the Directory had begun to explode in an amazing display of gaiety and frivolity—one of the most dissipated periods in the city’s history. There might be hunger and riots in the rest of the country, but for now all Paris danced. The city was indeed seized by a kind of dance mania. Everywhere bals publics sprang up; by 1797 they totalled nearly 700, and there the waltz—recently imported from Germany—reigned. All classes joined in the craze, not least the young aristocrats who had ventured back and had come into inheritances earlier than if their fathers had not been guillotined. (Some of the relatives of the guillotined found it smart to wear round their necks a thin red ribbon; “à la victime” as it was called.) It was even rumoured that that great survivor, Director Paul-Jean-François-Nicolas, Vicomte de Barras, had his two mistresses dance naked before him—Mme. Tallien and Josephine de Beauharnais, the future Empress—in a scene made famous by the cartoon of Gillray.

Outside the dance halls, the Parisians’ zest for living, for a revival of life itself, extended—even while the tocsins were still sounding the call to arms—to the Pavilion of Hanover, a popular meeting-place on the Boulevard des Italiens, where the children of Louis XIV by
Mme.
de Montespan and, later, the incorrigible Duc de Richelieu had once lived. Here, amid the gaming tables and the stalls dispensing mouth-watering ice-creams, Thérèse Tallien, Josephine de Beauharnais and Barras all held forth, promoting the success of the Paris fashions of 1798–1800, for the benefit of the mistresses of men who had somehow enriched themselves and now crept out of their hiding places. The new modes represented an astounding rejection and throwing-off almost to excess of all the puritanism of the revolutionary years. The styles for women, Graeco-Roman imitations, were exaggeratedly high-waisted, as low cut as minimal decency would allow, and as gauzily transparent as possible (the diaphanous material would often be moistened with water). There were the merveilleuses, eccentrics dressed as classical beings—Ceres, Galathea or Diana—all with immense, imaginative and high unproletarian hats.

The merveilleuses would be escorted by the equally ridiculous incroyables, men whose aim, in sharp contrast, was often to appear as ragged and as uncouth as possible, or in deliberately over-length coats with leg-of-mutton sleeves, wide padded lapels, exaggerated cravats and “coiffures à la Titus sprouting from empty heads.” Alternatively there were the elegant, Royalist muscadins, hair often set in tight curls, legs sheathed in fragile, flesh-coloured breeches that had to be changed several times in the course of an evening’s dancing. They displayed black revers in mourning for the late King, and would sometimes carry a knobbly walking-stick—with which to “hunt terrorists.” The incroyables would cheerfully walk about the Paris streets in white stockings, regardless of the mud; this represented, remarks one French historian, “a great expense of effort to achieve a painful result.” Returning to Paris from self-exile in America, a former deputy of the revolutionary Constituent Assembly, Jean-Nicholas Demeunier, described in a letter to a friend how the merveilleuses and incroyables would “talk about politics as they dance, and express their longing for the return of the monarchy as they eat ices or watch fireworks with affected boredom.”

Deeper down, however, the social topography of Paris, with the residual violence and hatreds left over from 1789, was little changed. In the eyes of a modern German historian, Johannes Willms, “The Paris of the rich and the Paris of the poor grew into two separate cultural and political worlds, divided by a wall of fear and mistrust.” Here was to be the source of repeated turbulence and upheaval all through the next century and beyond.

THE PEACE OF AMIENS AND THE CONCORDAT

In March 1802, Napoleon concluded the Peace of Amiens with England. What the English, smarting from defeat, dismissively called “the peace which passeth all understanding” heralded for both France and Napoleon a halcyon period. Alas, in the words of Winston Churchill, “the tourist season was short.” During these thirteen months of peace, English tourists crossed the Channel in their tens of thousands to savour the abandoned joys of post-Directory Paris. With its 547,000 inhabitants to London’s 960,000 at the turn of the century, Paris seemed to her British visitors a decrepit city, where cattle were still driven through the streets on their way to market—much as it had struck Dr. Lister over a hundred years before. The tourists would have reacted with scepticism to Napoleon’s declared ambition of 1798 to “make Paris not only the most beautiful city that is in the world, the most beautiful that ever existed, but also the most beautiful that could ever exist.”

Nevertheless, for the English tourists swarming in, as the chestnuts along the Seine sprang into blossom that spring, it was all quite captivating: suddenly, it was gai Paris, 1801. They rejoiced at discovering in the Champs-Elysées Greek goddesses naked under their gauze dresses; they were titillated by the spectacle of
Mme.
Hamelin sitting in a box at the theatre, her bare breasts outlined “in a river of diamonds”—though the more puritanical among them wondered whether the recent storms and frosts on the vines had been sent as a punishment from the heavens for the indecency of the Parisiennes’ dress.

The Parisians sometimes found their visitors unlovable and uncouth. At the opera in the stifling summer of 1802, two Englishmen in a box took off their coats to sit in shirtsleeves, and were roundly booed from the parterre, never exactly renowned for its chic, to the extent that the commissaire de service had to be summoned to remind them of continental niceties. But for all their disapproval of the visitors the Parisians swiftly began to ape English dress and styles, as dandies in black dress coats and shiny riding boots made their appearance on the boulevards.

Foreigners privileged to be invited to the First Consul’s birthday celebrations were charmed by the graciousness and bonhomie with which he greeted them. Keen to respect the sensibilities of his English visitors, he arranged, on either side of his chimneypiece, busts of Fox and Nelson. His court was certainly a brilliant one—“A newly born government,” he told his secretary, “must dazzle and astonish”—but, in contrast to the splendour of the generals and Mameluke orderlies who escorted him on parades, Napoleon’s own uniform was notably simple, putting his visitors in mind of an English sea captain in undress. Could this really be the ogre who had lately terrorized all Europe? Among his own people, he had never been so popular as he was that year.

Very soon there were the first small signs of the clock being turned back on the Revolution. First Bonaparte abolished the savage Law of Hostages, which had made the illegal return of émigrés punishable by death, and he next proclaimed a general amnesty for virtually all categories of proscribed exiles. (He was keen to attract the support of the monarchists for his plans of continental conquest.) Within the first year of the Consulate alone, over 40,000 families were permitted to return. The bonnet rouge was removed from steeples; the titles “Madame” and “Mademoiselle” replaced the dreaded appellation of “citoyenne”; the revolutionary calendar of ten months was discreetly dropped in favour of the old twelve months, so that “18 Brumaire, An VII” once more became 9 November 1799; and the good old pre-revolutionary festivals like Christmas and Easter once more returned to fashion. Dropping its revolutionary name, the former Place Royale now became (and remained for ever) the Place des Vosges—for the very good reason that that département had excelled itself in revenue contributions over the previous year. Churches ceased to be “decadel temples,” such as the Temple of Concord, of Genius or of Hymen, and resumed their former names. And in May 1802 Napoleon instituted the new award of the Légion d’Honneur: a new society, he reasoned, needed a new elite, an aristocracy not of birth but of merit. Boundless in his own ambition, Napoleon derided it in others, remarking disdainfully of his own creation, the Légion, “It is by such baubles that one leads men by the nose!” Under the Empire no fewer than 48,000 rubans rouges were distributed (including 1,200 to civilians). “Hanging by a thread!” said the cynics, yet the Légion would remain a source of power and influence for republican regimes long after Napoleon’s demise.

One of the most complex issues Bonaparte confronted as first consul, and which would take five years to sort out, was that of giving houses a rational street number. Hitherto there were none; the Revolution, with motives of state security, had tried but had ended in such a muddle that a certain Isaïe Carus, mentioned in a police report, was listed as residing at 1,087 Rue du Bac. Now Napoleon conceived the present-day system of odd and even numbers on alternate sides, with every street numbering from its position relative to the Seine.

Aware that piety was once more fashionable, Napoleon had the synagogues reopened and decreed that churches which had been wrecked during the Revolution were to be restored. In this last enterprise, it was not architectural values alone that prompted him. With the Revolution fading away, the final years of the century had been marked by a strong religious revival which progressed side by side with the new Romantic movement—a development encapsulated in Chateaubriand’s work Le Génie du Christianisme. Sensitive to the new mood, Napoleon then erased the divisions that still prevailed in France by his Concordat with Pope Pius VII, signed in July 1801. All this was part and parcel of his somewhat cynical attitude to religion, a way of posing as the champion of Old Catholic France, a hero-leader who would restore her former values. As he warned visiting Vendéean leaders, “I intend to re-establish religion, not for your sake but for mine.” Achieved after nine months of secret negotiations, a triumph of diplomacy for Bonaparte, the Concordat brought France back into the Roman Catholic fold (though the head of state retained the right to appoint bishops).

On Easter Day 1802, Napoleon sealed the new agreement with a grand Te Deum sung at Notre-Dame to celebrate the re-establishment of peace, which also came across as a powerful ceremony of atonement. It was the second of his extravaganzas since coming to power. After ten years’ silence, the tenor bell in the cathedral tolled out to proclaim the new alliance between France and the Vatican. At 11 a.m., preceded by four regiments of cavalry, a procession of coaches rolled up, with grooms in the full livery of the ancien régime, bringing the three Consuls, ministers and the Corps Diplomatique. Bonaparte was received under the portico by the recently nominated Archbishop, the ancient Monseigneur de Belloy, and solemnly escorted up to the choir. It was duly noted that, of the grandees present, only the two defrocked priests, former Bishop Talleyrand and ex-priest Fouché (the Minister of Police), knew properly how to genuflect. There was some surprise when the military presented arms and the drums beat a salute. Commenting on the large number of troops and gendarmes drawn up around the cathedral, irreverent wits suggested that this was to prevent God the Father from being burgled, while one general remarked afterwards that it had been “A fine piece of church flummery! The only thing missing was the million men who gave their lives in order to destroy what you have just re-established!” Perhaps a more general Parisian view of the ceremony, however, was that of a glazier across on the Ile Saint-Louis who was heard to exclaim, “Ah! Now I hear the bell of Notre-Dame; I like it much better than the canon d’alarme!”