Seven Ages of Paris (43 page)

STYLE AND STRATEGY

For all Haussmann’s massive public works, the salient feature of his new Paris was the apartment building. His standardized block, running for hundreds of unbroken metres down the new boulevards, was both an extrapolation of Napoleon I’s Rue de Rivoli and a product of the new industrial age. An extraordinary degree of architectural unity was achieved by the continuous run of symmetrical wrought-iron balconies on the piano nobile, linking one building to another, as did a common cornice line which was there to reinforce the horizontal effect of a street’s perspective. Pilasters linked the piano nobile with the floors above, while carved decoration of the external white limestone was otherwise minimal. The overall intent was that the visual impact should be that of the street rather than of the individual building. The austere appearance of the façade was softened by the trees lining the new, wider streets. Interior decor, however, would often be much more ornate. At street level, there would be a grand porte-cochère entrance through which carriages seldom passed.

In terms of planning regulations, little had been changed since those of 1783–4, and Haussmann annulled them with decrees of 1852 and 1859. By these, with health as well as aesthetic standards in mind, a lighting-angle formula of 45 degrees was established, so that on the new twenty-metre-wide streets a maximum height of twenty metres was now permitted, allowing insertion of another storey to provide six or seven floors. At the same time, because of rocketing ground values, deep sites were avoided—which meant that, unlike in Victorian London, Haussmann’s apartments had few gardens, the streets few leafy squares.

The whole emphasis of a street of Haussmann apartment blocks, which remains the basic image still of Paris today, was one of bourgeois comfort. In his writings Proust describes what it was like to grow up as a child in 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, where the family of his successful doctor father enjoyed the luxuries of gas lighting, central heating from a coal furnace, running water, lavatories and a large bathroom, and a marble staircase with wrought-iron bannisters. There were seven rooms (including Dr. Proust’s consulting rooms); and a fifteen-metre-long corridor separated the parents from the children’s quarters, reeking of the eucalyptus fumigations for poor Marcel’s asthma. On a middle-class physician’s salary, the Prousts employed a live-in butler, chambermaid and cook. But Marcel deemed the family salon to be of “an ugliness completely medical.”

With so much borrowed from the past, was there (leaving aside the new apartment blocks) any such thing as a Second Empire style? In church architecture, certainly, there was little to boast about: the Trinité was built in pseudo-Renaissance style; Saint-Augustine, crammed ingeniously into a narrow triangular space, was a Romano-Byzantine pastiche constructed around one of Baltard’s iron frameworks. Perhaps the age is best epitomized by Charles Garnier’s new Opéra, which in its florid magnificence symbolized the wealth of the day, its affection for the new rococo, with just a touch of vulgarity. However, because of its elaborateness, the most exotic decoration ever seen in Paris, it was not on stream for the Great Exposition of 1867, and in fact would be opened only eight years later, after the Empire had already fallen (when Garnier himself would even be made to pay for his seat).

For Haussmann aesthetics had been only one of several considerations. There was one further aim all-important to the precariously installed Emperor. In 1855 Queen Victoria came to Paris on an official visit, the first by an English monarch since Henry VI had been crowned at Notre-Dame in 1422. Cementing a brief period of entente cordiale that followed the joint Anglo-French effort in the Crimean War, Louis Napoleon had pushed the boat out and had laid down a special branch railway between the Gares du Nord and de l’Est, so as to make a better impression of the entry into Paris; he had flirted agreeably with the Widow of Windsor and had made her, she recorded, “feel safe with him.” Exactly forty years after Waterloo, diplomacy persuaded her to genuflect over Napoleon’s tomb, while the organ of the Invalides played “God Save the Queen.”

The Queen’s sharp eye, however, had quickly noticed that her host had had the streets of Paris covered with macadam, “to prevent the people from taking up the pavement as hitherto.” Later on, it would have been evident to any competent military observer what useful fields of fire Haussmann’s long, straight streets provided, what opportunities to turn the flank of a barricade there were for troops debouching from their oblique intersections, and how easy the wide boulevards made it to convey riot-breaking squads from one end of Paris to another. In particular, evoking a century of Parisian insurrections, in the troublesome east end there was now the broad and straight Boulevard Voltaire to allow for speedy passage of troops between what is now the Place de la République and the Place de la Nation. At last, Haussmann felt assured, they had succeeded “in cutting through the habitual storm-centres.” In the words of one French historian, Paris now was “as strategically ordered as any battlefield.” In fact, however—and with what force will be seen later in the hideously destructive Communard revolution of 1871—he had to a large extent achieved the defeat of his own purpose.

Henri de Rochefort, aristocrat turned revolutionary and most bitter opponent of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire, growled, “Paris has been called France’s head, but is now nothing but its legs.” By this he meant the legs of the under-privileged classes laborieuses. One of the major tragedies of Louis Napoleon’s reign was that, however genuine he was in his desire to do something for the poor of Paris, the works of Haussmann were to have quite the opposite effect. Because of the escalation of rents in the newly developed quartiers—or because affordable accommodation had simply disappeared, as in the old Cité—the classes laborieuses were driven, eastwards and outwards, from the charmed city of the boulevards to crowded ghettos that were every bit as evil as those demolished in the centre. In a deeply suffering population, one inhabitant in every sixteen was living off public charity. One of these new slum shanty-towns would ironically become known as the “Cité Dorée.” Meanwhile the bourgeoisie now represented a greater percentage of the inner-city population than ever before.

Thus Haussmannization had led to a kind of apartheid provoking sullen resentment. Far from piercing the traditional trouble-centres of Paris, Haussmann had just created new and much more threatening ones, in solidly proletarian and Red arrondissements such as Belleville and Ménilmontant, where in the latter days of the Empire no policeman would dare appear alone and where—as the Commune was to show—concentration of manpower had made the work of organizing a revolt easier than it had ever been. The consequences for Paris would be terrible, insofar as the bulk of the Communards who, in 1871, would destroy much of what the Prefect had not swept away in the city centre came from this expelled proletariat. Still, as in bygone ages, the areas which they now inhabited lacked proper sewerage, and the terrible stench of deprivation remained—as did the almost endemic diseases of typhoid (which, in 1865, accounted for 1,161 deaths) and tuberculosis, infant mortality and the curse of alcoholism. L’eau à l’étage was a luxury that only the affluent like the famille Proust could afford.

Controversy continues to surround the merits of Haussmann’s new Paris. At the time it had its vigorous critics. The conservative Goncourt brothers said it made them think of “some American Babylon of the future”; Gautier agreed, “This is Philadelphia; it is Paris no longer!” (though he had never seen Philadelphia). George Sand, however, construed it a blessing to be able to walk without “being forced every moment to consult the policeman on the street corner or the affable grocer.” Emile Zola, in his novel Une Page d’amour, tried hard to depict the great city as “an enormous storm-tossed ocean, or a distant and alien Babylon,” but in the end affection triumphed over distaste: “I love the horizons of this big city with all my heart … depending on whether a ray of sunshine brightens Paris, or a dull sky lets it dream, it resembles a joyful and melancholy poem. This is art, all around us. A living art, an art still unknown.”

MORAL TONE

Just as in England the Victorian social and moral code became forever attached to the name of the sovereign, so from the start Second Empire society had never shown itself more loyal than in its keenness to tread the paths laid down by its pleasure-loving Emperor. In the earliest days of the Second Empire, the haut monde were determined to revive the paradise of Louis XV. In the Forest of Fontainebleau courtesans went hunting with their lovers, dressed in the plumed hats and lace of that period. The gratin (the upper crust) too delightedly sought to escape from the bourgeois virtues of Louis-Philippe’s regime.

If the Second Empire had an emblem, a cultural tone-setter, it had to be Jacques Offenbach, the German Jew from the Rhineland, who wrote no fewer than ninety infectiously gay and melodious operettas. Though his La Belle Hélène was intended as a satire on contemporary life, Second Empire critics exhibited the essential hypocrisy of the times by voicing their shock at the immorality of the ancients. Offenbach lingered on, almost forgotten, for nine years after the party that was the Second Empire came to its abrupt end. Symbolically, his Tales of Hoffmann (first performed just three months after his death), the chef d’oeuvre which he had spent years writing, was far more sombre in spirit than his previous works, reflecting the sense of morning-after that succeeded 1870–1.

In Paris nothing characterized the mood of the epoch more than those masked balls so cherished by Louis Napoleon, at which he delighted to appear as a Venetian noble of the seventeenth century. The masks allowed their wearers to enter a world of fantasy, the dazzling extravagance of the occasions themselves distracting the eye from disagreeable reality. Each ball was more sumptuous than the last, and throughout the reign those held at the Tuileries—far more fun than the entertainments offered by Napoleon I—took place with such regularity that they almost resembled a never-ending carnival.

As the fashions dictated, the women at these balls emphasized their bosoms to the limits of decency (and sometimes beyond): they were splendid, disturbing and voracious creatures. There was the nineteen-year-old Comtesse de Castiglione, Louis Napoleon’s most delectable and dangerous mistress, a source of great trouble for his foreign policy. She once appeared at the Tuileries seductively dressed as a Queen of Hearts, which prompted from the Empress the lethal observation that “her heart is a little low.” What went on in the antechambers to these entertainments the rest of Paris could easily guess, without needing to hear about Madame X, who had once returned to the ballroom with the Duc de Morny’s Légion d’Honneur imprinted upon her cheek. Indeed the scene more often evoked Rubens than Watteau.

An unedifying hypocrisy ran through the Second Empire. Flaubert was prosecuted in 1857 for offending public morals with Madame Bovary, Manet was venomously attacked in the press for the “immorality” of his Olympia and the Déjeuner sur l’herbe; and women smoking in the Tuileries Gardens were as liable to arrest as were young men bathing without a top at Trouville. Yet the moral tone of the Second Empire was far from elevated. Zola’s Nana was its emblem, and its motto the rhetorical question from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène:

Dis-moi, Vénus, quel plaisir trouves-tu

À faire ainsi cascader la vertu?*

From top to bottom Paris was obsessed with love in all its varieties. In 1858 the Goncourts confided to their journal, with a slightly bemused air, “Everybody talks about it all the time. It is something which seems to be extremely important and extremely absorbing.” Even in their own literary circle, where some of the foremost intellects of the day congregated, few evenings went by without someone like Sainte-Beuve discoursing on sex in an almost schoolboy vein.

The most notable of the grandes horizontales, “La Païva,” once asked Ponsard the playwright to write some lines in celebration of her grand new staircase (in which is now the Travellers’ Club on the Champs-Elysées), and he came up with an adaptation from Phèdre: “Ainsi que la vertu, le vice a ses degrés” (Vice, like virtue, has its steps both up and down). This was entirely true of the Second Empire, where everything was precisely ordered. Everyone had his place, his own step on the staircase. A married woman, forced to leave home when some indiscretion became known, could set herself up at one of several levels within the demi-monde without actually descending to prostitution. At the top of the social staircase, vast sums could change hands. Even Egyptian beys could be reduced to ruin in weeks. Louis Napoleon himself reportedly bestowed on the Comtesse de Castiglione a pearl necklace worth 422,000 francs, and added 50,000 francs a month pin-money; while Lord Hertford, supposedly the most tight-fisted man in Paris, gave her a million for the joys of one night in which she promised to abandon herself to every known volupté (afterwards, it was said, she was confined to bed for three days). La Païva, who adopted the admirably punning motto of “Qui paye y va” (Who pays, gets there), herself spent half a million francs a year on her table.

The grandes horizontales found their clients among the idle rich like the hero of Feuillet’s Monsieur de Camors, who gave this account of his day: “I generally rise in the morning … I go to the Bois, then to the club, and then to the Bois, and afterwards I return to the club … In the evening if there’s a first night anywhere I fly to it.” Every aspect of life in the Second Empire seemed devised for the greater convenience of these men. There was even a newspaper, the Naïade, printed on rubber so that dandies could read it while soaking in the bath. Later, as the fortunes of these idlers were dissipated in the same extravagant ways, they became known as petits crevés, for whose degenerate tastes there was nothing more amusing than a turkey dancing on a white-hot metal plate. They now took their pleasures, as did those lower down the social scale, among the semi-amateurs: the comédiennes—whom, it was said, the Bois de Boulogne “devoured in quantity”—the lorettes (named after their territory around Notre-Dame de Lorette), the grisettes and the cocodettes. All these girls were available in large numbers at Mabille’s, the celebrated dance-hall in today’s chic Avenue Montaigne. Or, up in the 9th arrondissement, there was the new Folies Bergère, opened in 1858—appropriately enough, next to a bedding shop called The Springy Mattress. Or there was the circus, which on opening night reminded the Goncourts of “a stock exchange dealing in women’s nights.”