Seven Ages of Paris (38 page)

The Allied sovereigns held swaggering parades on the Champ-de-Mars. French pride was shattered. Over the rest of the country a Royalist “White Terror,” comparable to the épuration which was to follow the Liberation of 1944, held sway. One Parisian eyewitness, Dr. de la Sibouti, recalled that “the Bois de Boulogne was laid bare, the statues of Luxembourg mutilated with sabre cuts; our hearths and homes were overrun by soldiers who spoke to us as masters. Such are the rites of war.” But, with generous objectivity, he went on to admit, “Our own soldiers have probably abused them on more than one occasion.”

Nevertheless, for all the bitterness in the air, once again in her turbulent history Paris displayed her remarkable capacity to recover and live again as if little had happened. Captain Mercer of the Royal Horse Guards thought “how strange it was that the French were so happy in their defeat … !” The wounded were cleared out of the Place Vendôme, which soon filled with beautiful women showing off their finest silks. On 8 July, the King returned; Chateaubriand witnessed those adept time-servers, Talleyrand and Fouché, welcoming him at Saint-Denis, while Wellington—amazed by the wild cheering—wondered whether it could possibly be the same Parisians cheering each time. In the Tuileries Palace, work at once recommenced on replacing the bees with fleurs-de-lys. At the Comédie Française, life began again as
Mlle.
Mars (who had begun her career under the Revolution and would continue until 1841, after the last King had once more disappeared) resumed its traditions. In the Luxembourg Gardens the first bicycles (invented by a German) took part in a race; and there was a first session of the new Chamber of Deputies, imposed on the King by the Allied peace terms. The fearless Marshal Ney was shot, pour décourager les autres, it might have been said. But the French army, for all he had inflicted upon it, and no matter how often he had betrayed it, would never cease to revere the small man in the grey frock coat.

REPARATIONS AND RESTORATION

Considerably harsher than the terms offered by the Allies in 1814, the Treaty signed in November 1815 demanded 700 million francs in gold, eventually whittled down to 265 million. Compared with the fierce reparations that would be exacted on the defeated by the victors after the succeeding wars of 1870 and 1914–18, Paris escaped lightly. With a sense of honour which did England lasting credit, as well as setting the tone, the Duke of Wellington insisted on paying the market price for Pauline Borghese’s sumptuous house on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, for the site of the new British Embassy. His defeated foe would hardly have done the same in any of the conquered capitals he had occupied. What caused the most distress in Paris, and was regarded (quite unfairly) as excessive vengefulness on the part of the occupiers, however, was the repatriation of the looted works of art in the Louvre, agreed as part of the terms of the peace settlement.

To undo the assiduity of Vivant Denon and gather up the masterpieces removed from Italy, from Rome Pope Pius VII sent Canova, the greatest sculptor of his day. It was a daunting, and in no way felicitous, commission. Andrew Robertson, the Scottish miniaturist whose visit to Paris coincided with Canova’s, at first sight was agreeably “surprised by the vivacity of Parisian night life, the cafés, the music, the dancing and the well-dressed people.” Rushing to the gallery of the Louvre after Waterloo, he saw “the first and greatest productions of human genius,” but was then shocked by “the bare walls and frames where a number of the pictures had been taken away by the Allies and the original proprietors.” Blücher had been there before him. Sir Walter Scott, writing to his sister from Paris that autumn, was describing the Louvre as “truly doleful to look at now, all the best statues are gone, and half the rest, the place full of dust, ropes, triangles, and pulleys, with boards, rollers etc.”

Faced with the dismantling of all he had achieved in the name of Napoleon, his life’s work, Vivant Denon resigned, to die heartbroken in 1825, four years after his master, gazing out from his Left Bank house on the Quai Voltaire at his precious, ransacked Louvre across the Seine. Meanwhile Canova found himself virtually ostracized by the Paris art world as fellow artists such as Gros and Houdon cut him dead. But, worse than that, he found himself living in sheer timore, “often afraid to go to his lodging there for fear of being murdered.” The job completed, he was delighted to leave occupied Paris for friendly London, which, following Waterloo, had taken over from Paris as the leading world capital of power and patronage. Even so, despite all the “enforced redistributions” of 1815, the Louvre never lost its status as the world’s greatest museum of art. As Denon predicted in a letter to Talleyrand of September 1815, “We have already had some big losses, Monseigneur, but, with time, one could hope to recoup them. The gaps that exist will be filled in the long term.”

So, with the Congress of Vienna engineered by those astute statesmen Metternich and Talleyrand, after twenty years of war peace came finally to Europe. England withdrew to her island and her empire to prosper during a hundred years of Pax Britannica. Bonaparte, the disturber of Europe’s equilibrium, was penned in at dank, wind-blown and termite-ridden Longwood on Saint Helena, where he would die—possibly of arsenic poisoning, some continue to think—in 1821. Not till December 1840, on the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz, would his remains be brought back for interment under the great dome of the Invalides, which Louis XIV had bequeathed to Paris. But for France, and Paris in particular, there would be little real tranquillity over the ensuing years. The country was financially, morally and physically in ruins. Estimates of her military dead alone range from 430,000 to 2,600,000. More insidiously still, the issues of the Great Revolution had never been properly resolved.

Age Five

1815–1871

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THE COMMUNE

Paris in 1851 at the accession of Napoleon III

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THIRTEEN

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Constitutional Monarchy and Revolt

Parisians are like children; one constantly has to fill their imagination, and if one cannot give them a victory in battle every month, or a new constitution every year, then one has to offer them daily some new building sites to visit, projects that serve to beautify the city.

COMTE DE RAMBUTEAU, MEÈMOIRES, P. 269

THE LAST BOURBONS

After the fervour and violent upheavals of the Napoleonic era, the years 1815 to 1870 offered a period of rest, readjustment and retrenchment under the leadership successively of Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis-Philippe and Louis Napoleon. Or so it was on the surface, but underneath there were deep currents of discontent and disunity, waiting to shake France and destroy more of Paris than either 1789 or any foreign enemy had done. Returning to Paris during the Restoration, Stendhal found a society “profoundly ill at ease with itself.” Typical of the confusion of legitimacy and loyalties inherited by the new regime was the varied fortune of the figure atop the mighty Vendôme Column. First, in 1818, the statue of Napoleon was removed, melted down and replaced by a giant fleur-de-lys. Then, in 1833, Louis-Philippe—always keen to oblige the prevailing mood—had the Emperor restored complete with bicorne hat; but the statue displeased his nephew, Napoleon III, who removed it to Les Invalides and replaced it with a copy of the original figure. In 1871, the Commune revolutionaries—under the guidance of the painter Gustave Courbet—brought the whole column tumbling down. Finally, in 1875, Republican President McMahon had it restored with the present-day figure crowned in Caesarean laurels.

To have presided over, and healed, all the disarray left behind in 1815 France would have required an Henri IV. But Louis XVIII was certainly no Henri of Navarre; he was, so the people said, “partly an old woman, partly a capon, partly a son of France, and partly a peasant.” He was homosexual, without a son, so obese and dropsy-ridden that eventually he had to be lifted in and out of his carriage. Aged beyond his sixty years, he would die after only nine years on the throne. But his instincts were not all bad. The politician-historian Guizot saw him as “a moderate of the Old Regime and an eighteenth-century freethinker.”

Unfortunately, in his baggage train Louis brought with him a coterie of reactionary émigrés thirsting for vengeance after twenty-five years of exile and hardship, determined to put the clock back to the ancien régime, to Louis XIV if possible, and who gave rise to the famous epithet about the Bourbons having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Louis wanted to abide by the liberal “Charter” modelled on English constitutional practice, which he had admired during his exile and been forced to accept on his return. But the émigré extremists, the “Ultras,” trampled it under foot, launching in the provinces a White Terror of threat and murder, with Royalist bands plundering, looting and settling old private scores. It was well said at the time, “If you have not lived through 1815, you do not know what hatred is.”

Of the Ultras who surrounded him Louis remarked glumly, “If these gentlemen had full freedom, they would end by purging me as well!” In Paris, the Pavillon de Marsan became the headquarters of reaction, and there the sons of the future Charles X, their wives, courtesans and bodyguards, all talked treason twenty-four hours a day. Plotting away against the regime too was the Charbonnerie, a secret society based on an Italian prototype; while the childless Louis’s brother, and heir, the future Charles X—“an émigré to his fingertips and a submissive bigot,” in Guizot’s eyes—also conspired against him. Then, in June 1820, and accompanied by revealingly little public emotion, the young Duc de Berry, nephew of Louis and third in succession to the throne, was assassinated by “a little weasel-faced mongrel,” a fanatic called Louvel, motivated simply by “hatred of the Bourbons.” The deed was seized upon by the Ultras as a welcome excuse to press for more power and a less liberal regime. Many of the harsher new laws passed reflected the pressures imposed on the regime; for instance, one “on sacrilege” made theft of church vessels subject to the same penalty as parricide—the hand to be severed, and the head sliced off.

THE PROFILE OF RESTORATION PARIS

Compared with what preceded it under Napoleon and what was to follow under Baron Haussmann, during the years of the Restoration and of Louis-Philippe the profile of Paris changed but little. Its population had risen to over 700,000 (by 1844 it would reach one million, as more and more hopefuls flooded in from the provinces, enticed by the questionable blandishments of city life). These hordes were still crammed into a web of narrow, ill-paved and filthy streets. Among the few novelties was the Chapelle Expiatoire, built—first things first—for Parisians to atone for the murder of Louis XVI and his queen, on the exact place where they had originally been buried; and, with fine irony, the Rue Napoléon was renamed the Rue de la Paix. Uncompleted Napoleonic projects such as the Bourse—fundamental to the enrichissez-vous era on which Paris was about to embark—were completed. But lack of financial resources and of the absolutist power to project bold new commissions left its mark on the city. Stylistically, it was revived Louis XVI. New apartment buildings were lower and smaller, more spartan and utilitarian in style, with less spacious rooms. Most were swept aside by later and less ephemeral buildings. Many were erected, speculatively, at such high cost that they could be neither rented nor sold and the result left many houses empty. In the 1820s there were schemes launched to develop peripheral areas like the Batignolles on the Right Bank and Grenelle on the Left, which encouraged the speculators as wealth increased. Outside the old Octroi (customs) wall the delayed industrial revolution began implanting major manufacturing industries, years after London had done the same.

With more money came splendid galleries and covered passages constructed—by private speculators—around the Rue Vivienne and other Right Bank areas, for bourgeois shoppers to spend what was being accreted in the new counting houses constructed by financiers around
Mme.
Récamier’s Chaussée d’Antin. The aim of these opulent new arcades was not merely to “protect the passer-by from the dangers of the streets; they had to hold him, enslave him, body and soul … he was supposed to feel so enchanted that he forgot everything: his wife, his children, the office, and dinner.” Heinrich Heine particularly enjoyed strolling through the Passage des Panoramas, though a contemporary German biographer observed that it was “a place one avoids walking through in the evening if accompanied by a lady”—for here the elegant and affluent jostled shoulders, as they always had, with the underworld, pickpockets and tricksters, prostitutes and beggars.

Otherwise, little changed. The residential areas around the Louvre and Marais had fallen into decrepitude, and the revolutionary poor continued to exist, and seethe, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. By 1830, the western limit of the city was still the Place de la Concorde, while the Champs-Elysées continued to be bordered by ditches and hovels, with strange subterranean cabarets. An incomplete Arc de Triomphe stood in a forest glade, while the equally incomplete Madeleine rose out of a piece of terrain vague—though its unfinished beauty was to arouse the romantic sensibilities of Mrs. Trollope, who on a moonlit night in 1835 thought this “pale spectre of a Grecian temple … was the most beautiful object of art I ever looked at.” In place of Napoleon’s decaying elephant monstrosity at the Bastille, Louis-Philippe erected the July Column, crowned by a statue with broken chains and a torch, as a symbol (unsuccessful) of reconciliation after the 1830 Revolution that brought him to power;* while that earlier symbol, the Concorde, was reorganized around the vast obelisk filched from Egypt (a suitably neutral device, politically).

As a consequence of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the industrial revolution came late to Paris. By 1844, France still had only one-third as much railway line as Britain, and just over half as much as backward Prussia; the fastest mail-coach, carrying only four passengers in some discomfort, reached Bordeaux from Paris in forty-five hours, Lyons in forty-seven. Instead of appreciating its economic significance, many Parisians regarded the railway as an object of frivolity, with even the enlightened Adolphe Thiers remarking that a line from Paris to Saint-Germain would have amusement value only. When it was finally opened it reached no more than halfway. But in 1837 a momentous decision, unique in Europe, was taken to link Paris by rail with all the nation’s frontiers. That same year—though it was considered too dangerous for King Louis-Philippe—Queen Amélie took the first train in Paris. Working girls could now go and dance in the Forest of Loges, once the favoured retreat of Diane de Poitiers, for only seventy-five centimes. The enterprise was backed by a banker from Vienna, James de Rothschild, who had arrived as Austrian consul-general in 1810, liked what he saw and swiftly become naturalized. Five years later those fearful for the King’s safety found justification when a terrible accident occurred as an engine axle fractured on a fast train returning from Versailles. Of 700 Parisians who had been on a jaunt to see the fountains, 48 were killed and 110 injured.