TWELVE
If you have not lived through 1815, you do not know what hatred is . . .
—André Maurois
REACTIONS TO THE ULTIMATE DEFEAT at Waterloo varied across France, and across social strata. Pierre Fontaine, Napoleon’s official architect and one who had thus spent many hours with him replanning Paris, noted three days after Waterloo how, abandoning his army once more in defeat, “He came back to Paris like a fugitive, thinking only of his person . . . the magic is gone. We can no longer regard him as someone extraordinary ...” 1 Or, in the words of Metternich the previous year, excessively optimistic though they may have seemed at the time: “People speak of him as if he had ruled in the fourteenth century . . . All the eagles have disappeared . . .”
The twenty-five years of Revolution and Empire combined seem to stretch like a great bridge across the history of the world. Beyond it, can one truly say that this was where the “Modern Age” began? A Briton, triumphing in the reflected glory of Waterloo, might well ask, too, how did a defeated Frenchman feel in June 1815? He would have gone through two-and-a-half decades of hell and uncertainty; revolution, endless stress, deprivation and terror. There had followed a few years of hope and optimism, indeed joy, as it seemed that Napoleon was bringing in a New Order that worked, and overthrowing one after another the reactionary old royal Houses of Europe, with their dedication to old-fashioned, out-dated principles and ideas. There had been those ten halcyon years too, from Rivoli to Tilsit, irresistibly heady infusions of la gloire when Napoleon had brought home victory after dazzling victory. Then had come the terrible years of 1812, 1813, 1814—and finally terminal defeat at Waterloo. There was, though, mitigating relief in some royalist quarters that here was peace at last; but to the historic-minded Frenchman, it had to signify the end of thedéfi anglais, going back to 1214, to the battle of Bouvines when Philippe-Auguste had first drawn a line under English hegemony over France. Now—what had been lost, and what preserved? At least, under the terms offered by the Congress of Vienna, les goddamns were still removed from the heartlands of la patrie—Calais, Aquitaine; the “hexagon” was largely preserved; her overseas empire was lost, otherwise the territory of France was much as Louis XIV had left it.
Occupation costs in 1815 had amounted to ten times what had been exacted the previous year, before the Hundred Days. They reflected the Allies’ anger at having been led by the nose into war by Napoleon once again, and at the fresh casualties they had suffered to achieve final victory. In this light, the terms which Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand, the professional survivor, between them cooked up at the Congress of Vienna seem generous if compared with what Napoleon had dictated to France’s defeated foes at Tilsit. And, compared with the terms that Bismarck’s Prussia would demand from a defeated France in 1871, followed by the harsh retribution of Versailles in 1919, this was surely an eighteenth-century peace rather than one of the twentieth. Nor for all his sins had Napoleon been a Hitler—no “war criminal,” in the contemporary meaning of the term, or practiser of genocide.
Defeat, yes; but over the hundred years it lasted the Pax Britannica which followed Waterloo proved not unbeneficial to France. The country could grow prosperous, carve out a new empire for herself in North Africa and Indo-China, and even build up a powerful new army— anything as long as it did not upset Westminster’s notion of the balance of power, the Royal Navy, or the trade patterns of Britain’s race of shopkeepers. In fact, without the umbrella of Pax Britannica, would Hugo and Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, not to mention Manet, Monet and Renoir, have found that peculiarly fertile ground that was nineteenth-century France? A speculation not guaranteed to be universally popular in France—but one only has to recall the cultural desert that existed over the turbulent twenty-five years of the Revolution and Napoleon.
After Trafalgar, there would be no nation that could present Britain with a naval challenge, in an age when sea-power determined the international order. By and large philosophic Frenchmen accepted this. Nevertheless, nevertheless . . . After all those years of la gloire fulfilled by the Roi Soleil and the little man in grey, for such a proud people was it not understandable that some resentment at defeat, a hankering after new military adventures, would linger dormant to erupt destructively —self-destructively—every once in a while? This would prove much of the essential backdrop to French history in the nineteenth century— from Algiers to Balaclava to Sedan to Fashoda. It was, after all, a somewhat shameful world in which a patriotic young Frenchman found himself in 1815.
SO, WITH THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA, after twenty years of war peace came finally to Europe. England withdrew to her island and empire to prosper in a hundred years, not of solitude, but of peaceable hegemony. The fallen tyrant, the ogre, the disturber of Europe’s equilibrium, was definitively mew’d up on dank, wind-blown and termite-ridden Longwood where he would die—possibly of arsenic poisoning, some continue to think—in 1821. But for France, and Paris in particular, there would be little real tranquillity in the short term. The country was financially, morally and physically in ruins. More insidiously still, the issues of the Great Revolution had never been properly resolved.
Little more than three decades were to pass between Waterloo and the next major upheaval in Paris, in 1848, which would bring the end of the French monarchy. During those three decades, there would be two more major revolts in Paris, and after each one the proletariat, the poor and the revolutionaries of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine would feel that the bourgeois had cheated them out of their birthright, the gains of insurrection, as they had after the Great Revolution itself. It was a sense of being cheated comparable to what the same strata felt in post-Soviet Russia, where it was the ex-apparatchiks who were seen, deplorably, to make off with the fruits of revolt. Nevertheless, there were elements in the Restoration that a British historian like Richard Cobb, one of the greatest experts on nineteenth-century France, could find to justify it as “the happiest period in the violent and intransigent history of modern France.”
AS NAPOLEON’S EMPIRE UNRAVELLED, and France slowly came back to life, the peace treaty finally signed in November 1815 preserved most of France’s traditional frontiers—except for the new, neutral Belgium, Savoy handed over to Sardinia, and the German-speaking Saar to Prussia (which signified the beginning of a Teutonic presence on the left bank of the Rhine). With the return of Louis XVIII, France was also allowed to return, politically, to a status quo ante. As reparations she was required to pay ff700 million in gold, eventually whittled down to ff265 million. The Allies withdrew from Paris swiftly, and the Duke of Wellington—always the gentleman—insisted on paying the going market price for Pauline Borghese’s sumptuous house on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which was to become the site of the new British Embassy. Said Metternich: “We could have destroyed France . . . we preferred a state of things which does not leave cause for well-founded discontent.” But he predicted (as of June 1814): “it will happen of this peace as of all human beings. It will be found too harsh in France and too soft beyond their frontiers.” 2
Much more difficult to be made good by France were the losses in dead from the wars of the past twenty years, with estimates ranging from 430,000 to 2,600,000—almost certainly well over 1 million—for France alone, out of a total population of 33 million. As it used to be taught in British schools, “the French were a race of tall men before Napoleon.”
SO, EN PRINCIPE, the Age of Napoleon ended. But of course it did not—the age, the legend, continued long after Napoleon’s own lonely death on Saint Helena in 1821. “If I happen to be killed,” Napoleon had declared in grim prophecy in 1814, “my inheritance will not devolve upon the King of Rome. As matters stand only a Bourbon can succeed me.” He was remarkably accurate. The heir Napoleon had so ardently sought would never succeed him; instead he spent the sad remainder of his short life as a virtual prisoner of his Austrian grandfather, with his mother in Vienna.
On 6 July, King Louis XVIII (1814–24) made his formal re-entry into the capital which had twice thrown him out (“Louis deux-fois-neuf” the wags called him). That day Chateaubriand—returning from his post as secretary at the embassy in Rome with Louis—witnessed those adept time-servers, Talleyrand and Fouché, welcome him at Saint-Denis, arm in arm. Wellington—amazed by the wild cheering—wondered whether it could possibly be the same Parisians who had also cheered Napoleon, and then himself in such rapid succession? Such caprice was hardly a sure foundation for France’s return to legitimacy, to the ancien régime.
From his years of British exile Louis brought a (brief ) bout of anglophilia with him. Byron and Walter Scott became household names. There were even hopes that Britain might become the political model for France’s future; but this was not to be. Stendhal found a society “profoundly ill at ease with itself.”3 Typical of the confusion of loyalties inherited by the new regime was the varied fortune of the statue of Napoleon atop the Vendôme Column—melted down and replaced by a giant fleur-de-lys in 1818, restored by Louis-Philippe in 1833 with a bicorne hat which displeased the Emperor’s nephew, Napoleon III, replaced with a copy of the original statue, before the Commune revolutionaries of 1871 brought the whole column tumbling down, to be finally restored in 1875 by Republican President MacMahon with the present-day figure crowned in Caesarean laurels.
Rashly the King announced his intention to spend half the year at Versailles, putting the clock back and thereby displeasing Paris. He invoked a passion for commemoration and expiation for the victims of the revolution—notably of his late brother and sister-in-law. There was the Chapelle Expiaitoire on the Rue Napoléon (renamed, with fine irony, Rue de la Paix) on the exact site where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had originally been buried, and numerous memorial gardens. Swiftly Louis and his right-wing Catholic coterie tried to bring back much of the authoritarianism that had led his brother to the guillotine. “If these gentlemen [the Liberals] had full freedom,” he complained, “they would end by purging me as well.” Louis XVIII was already far too old and jaded to keep in check those tricoteurs des salons.
1815 AND 1816 WERE NOT GOOD YEARS for France. There was hunger and deprivation, and over parts of the countryside a “White Terror,” comparable to the purge that was to follow the Liberation of 1944, held sway. Bands of royalist carpetbaggers looted and settled old scores. In Nîmes, Protestant women were beaten because of their religion. Marshal Ney—“bravest of the brave”—was executed by way of example. But others, like Marmont and Soult, survived to find places of honour and importance under the new regime; one of the least deserving, Bernadotte, was to become King of Sweden, no less.
With nothing like what Germany and Japan were subjected to in 1945—no “de-Napoleonisation” imposed by victorious Allies determined to raze an evil system and start again—French society swiftly repaired itself. Hardly had the Place Vendôme been cleared of the wounded from Waterloo than chic women were showing off their finest silks there. Government stocks began to take off, and visiting tourists found “brilliant society” milling about in the Tuileries Gardens. France retained the remarkable system, the Code,which it had inherited from Napoleon. There was one important exception: divorce, permitted briefly under the revolution and Napoleon, was banned once more, with the ascendance of the moralistic bourgeoisie.
But the Restoration was a bitterly divided society, with secret societies and ultra-Catholic groupings vying against each other, and—all the time—the Bonapartists glowering in the background. To have presided over, and healed, all the disarray left behind in 1815 France would have required an Henri IV, but Louis XVIII was “partly an old woman, partly a capon, partly a son of France, and partly a peasant.” He was homosexual and therefore without a son. So obese and dropsy-ridden that eventually he had to be lifted in and out of his carriage, he would die after only ten years on the throne. The politician-historian Guizot saw him as “a moderate of the Old Regime and an eighteenth-century free thinker,” but in his baggage train Louis brought with him a coterie of reactionary émigrés or “Ultras,” which gave rise to the famous epithet about the Bourbons having “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.”
The Pavillon de Marsan in Paris became the headquarters of reaction where the future Charles X’s sons, their wives, courtesans and body-guards 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 Louis’ brother and heir, Charles Duc d’Artois— “an émigré to the fingertips and a submissive bigot,” in Guizot’s eyes—also conspired against him. When in February 1820 Louis’ nephew, the young Duc de Berry, was assassinated by a fanatic called Louvel out of “hatred for the Bourbons,” there was little public outcry. But the murder was used by the Ultras to press for a less liberal regime; for instance, one new law “on sacrilege” made theft of church vessels subject to the same penalty as patricide—the hand to be severed, and the head sliced off.
In 1824, Louis, old, infirm and half-blind, died. His younger brother, the dashing, ultra-conservative Duc d’Artois, succeeded him as Charles X (1824–30). Characteristically, Charles made his state entry into Paris on horseback, displaying with panache his fine figure, instead of in a carriage as every monarch had since Louis XIV—and from the west, the direction of Versailles. He was greeted with an enthusiasm that would not be long-lived; he thought, disastrously, that “the only good way of governing France is that of Bonaparte.”
THOUGH THERE WERE NO MORE of the grand imperial projects initiated (and left incomplete) by Napoleon, French cities embarked on energetic building schemes. Pointedly, however, they were mostly orientated towards luxurious properties for the triumphant bourgeois—to the exclusion of the urban poor, who emerged from the turmoil precipitated in their name worse off than ever. The greatest building boom since the reign of Louis XV embodied the new ethos of enrichissez-vous. The population of the capital had risen to 715,000; by mid-century it would reach over a million, still crammed into a web of narrow, ill-paved and filthy streets.
Its growth rate of 86 per cent was, however, massively eclipsed by that of London at 136 per cent, which became double the size of Paris. For Chateaubriand, returning from exile, the Thames with its thousands of ships moored in the world’s largest port “surpasses all images of power.” Imported cotton goods as well as spices, silks and saltpetre poured in from the East Indian empire, while manufactured goods poured out through Liverpool to the ever-expanding US economy. The relative growth of the two capitals reflects how, amid the revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution had bypassed and then come late to France. In comparison, by the first half of the eighteenth century England’s canals and inland navigation were already becoming an imposing network. From the reign of Queen Anne, Britain’s iron-makers had been using coal-coke for the smelting of iron, in place of wood-charcoal. In 1767, while courtiers in powdered wigs were decorously walking the corridors of Versailles, the “spinning jenny” had been invented in England, presaging the introduction of the wool factories; two years later Arkwright patented the water-frame and James Watt his steam engine, marking the birth date of mechanical power in cotton and engineering. In 1779, the third of the Abraham Darbys completed the world’s first iron bridge. British patents issued in the quarter of a century following 1769 were more numerous than those issued in the previous century and a half. The Industrial Revolution in Britain was under way, only given extra impetus by the challenge of Napoleon—France had to catch up rapidly.
As the steam age began, the fastest transport in France was by mail-coach, carrying only four passengers in some discomfort from Paris to Bordeaux in forty-five hours, Lyons in forty-seven. In 1837, however, an ambitious decision, unique in Europe, was taken to link Paris by rail with all the frontiers. The railways spread outwards, with lines to Orléans and Rouen both opened in 1843; it was soon possible to reach Calais from Paris in nine hours. Balzac, perennially in debt but always the optimist and speculator, predicted (in a letter to his lover Mme. Hanska of 3 April 1848) what the railway would do for Paris:
In six to seven years the remaining 1400 metres I own will be worth 300,000 to 400,000 francs . . . The reason is the train station for Versailles, Saint-Germain, Rouen, and Le Havre lines which is located between the future neighbourhood of Monceaux and that of Tivoli ...4
Alas for Balzac, dead within two years, he was not to benefit from this gamble; but, in an epoch where self-enrichment had become a be-all and end-all, many others would.
A more significant symbol of French commercial growth was the rise of the Paris house of Rothschild, become the richest bankers in Europe, which had first arrived from Frankfurt via nineteen-year-old James in 1811. Discriminatory laws disappeared in 1818, marking the rapid growth of the Jewish banking community in France, which played an increasingly important role in the financing of government loans. In Louis-Philippe’s reign the Rothschilds intervened frequently to avoid fresh warfare between France and Austria. Their famous carrier pigeons were able to bring vital political and commercial news far more swiftly than the diplomats could.
More modern technologies brought other benefits. Advances in medicine were reflected in increasing longevity (for the better-off ); men like Victor Hugo, Thiers and that veteran of revolutions, Lafayette, all lived into their eighties or late seventies. Then there were inventors like Jacques Daguerre with the novelty of his pivoted “Diorama”—and, in 1838, the first photographs, or daguerréotypes. The first horse-drawn omnibus made its clip-clopping appearance on the clogged streets of Paris. And there was gas lighting, which, though a French invention (by Philippe Lebon in 1799), was first pioneered in London.
THE QUESTIONABLE BLANDISHMENTS of city life enticed more and more hopefuls to head for the boom-town by cart or train, but the vigorous expansion was not matched by any advance in health, hygiene or social welfare. By comparison with Paris (even though the drains of Windsor would kill off Prince Albert), London was a sweet-smelling city. The Paris sewers still served mainly as street drains, discharging directly into the Seine. Cesspools still had to be emptied periodically. In 1832, Paris would be stricken with a major cholera epidemic. The Opéra-Comique was turned into an emergency hospital; the hard-line Prime Minister, Casimir Périer, died of it. Nevertheless, in September 1837, an optimistic Balzac could write to Mme. Hanska,
In ten years we shall be clean, we shall no longer talk of the mud of Paris, and then we shall be so magnificent that Paris will truly be seen as a lady of the world, the first among queens, wreathed in walls. 5
But no, in 1849 there was yet another plague of cholera, claiming over 19,000 victims. It was, of course, once again the urban poor who suffered most.
As the Restoration took root, so much of the positive social gains achieved during the revolution and under Napoleon evaporated. Gradually the gaps between classes widened. During the early days of the Restoration, there were reckoned (by Eugène Sue) to be 30,000 thieves in Paris, their numbers swollen by thousands of impoverished and discontented ex-officers of the Grande Armée, then the fresh influx from the provinces, creating a soaring underclass. Thus was it surprising that repeated uprisings between 1830 and 1871 would overthrow three successive rulers and their dynasties, and end by destroying much of the city?6
ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE FEATURES in all the history of France is how, following two crushing nineteenth-century military disasters—Waterloo in 1815, and the capitulation to Prussia and the Commune of 1871—each time there was an extraordinary blossoming in the gentler and more enduring works of humanity. It was almost as if they came in direct response to catastrophe on the military plane. Following 1871, it would be the burst of liberating colour and joy that was Impressionism; in 1815, it was the unique flowering of the great French novel, once the great dead hand of Napoleonic censorship was lifted from the arts. Whereas in 1813, only 3749 books had been published throughout the Empire, already by 1825, 7605 were being published in France alone. While some like Alfred de Musset condemned the new-found freedom of the press as “one of the blackest sewers of our civilisation,” the number of journals multiplied; between 1830 and 1849, subscribers soared from 60,000 to 200,000. Swiftly Paris had become once more the literary capital of Europe, as France discovered Romanticism. Founders of Romantisme, the literature of revolt, artistic as well as political— Germaine de Stäel (living just long enough to rejoice in the final fall of Napoleon), Chateaubriand, Stendhal and the poetic geniuses of Lamartine and Vigny—were followed closely by giants like Balzac (1799–1850) and later Hugo (1802–85). Both described les petits gens of the city, the meanness and unfairness of life in the back streets in such incomparable classics as Père Goriot and Les Misérables. Both took it upon themselves, virtually for the first time, to publicise what it was like to be really poor, in debt, pursued by the police, struggling to stay above water. Hugo, however—son of a Napoleonic general, royalist turned radical republican in disgust with the Second Empire, self-imposed exile, posturing, fulminating—in Les Misérables (which was written three decades after the events it describes) seems to be motivated as much by political as humanitarian outrage;54whereas Balzac’s Père Goriot (1834–35) is the more directly concerned with immediate social inequalities.
Balzac never ceased to be obsessed by Restoration Paris. To him it was a monster; it resembled a volcano in permanent eruption, where “everything smokes, everything burns, everything seethes,” or a vast field, ceaselessly swept by a store of interests beneath which there eddy hosts of men and women like standing corn which death reaps more busily than elsewhere, but which springs up again as thick as ever; folk whose contorted twisted features exude through every pore, the thoughts, the longings, the poisons of which their brains are full; they are not faces, but masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of wretchedness, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all of them worn and wary, all graven with the ineffaceable marks of breathless greed ...7
Here Père Goriot, a once prosperous merchant, survives in the most abject poverty in Mme. Vauquer’s squalid boarding house on the present-day Rue Tournefort, between the Latin Quarter and the glum working-class Faubourg Saint-Marceau. His insatiable, heartless daughters live with their venal, titled husbands off Goriot’s dwindling capital. Although, with the close proximity of the rich and the poor that defined Paris, they live within walking distance of Maison Vauquer, neither can be bothered to visit the dying old man, are embarrassed to have him seen in their chic homes in the Chaussée d’Antin and Rue Saint-Lazare, with their halls of marble mosaic. They are too busy even to attend his pauper’s funeral at Père Lachaise. The mortal sin of the besotted old father, a truly Dostoyevskyan figure (“What am I? A wretched corpse whose soul is where my daughters are?”), is his over-devotion in a callous society.
Seen through the eyes of the naive young provincial Rastignac, in contemporary Paris: “success is everything, it is the key to power.”
The very stink of powerlessness, in the Paris of the poor, the stale cabbage and untuned plumbing, its hollow-cheeked, pale and sallow denizens, seeps out from Père Goriot with Balzac’s description of the quartier where “Pension Vauquer” sits:
That illustrious valley of flaking plasterwork and gutters black with mud; a valley full of suffering that is real, and of joy that is often false, where life is so hectic that it takes something quite extraordinary to produce feelings that last. One can however occasionally encounter sorrows to which the concentration of vice and virtue imparts a solemn grandeur . . . the houses are gloomy, the walls like a prison . . . washed in that shade of yellow which so demeans all the houses in Paris ...8
The corruption extends to Parisian women:
If their husbands can’t afford their wild extravagance, they sell themselves. If they can’t sell themselves, they would rip open their own mothers to find some way to shine. They will go to any lengths. That is well known, well known!
Remarkably, less than two decades into the Restoration, Balzac identified a theme that was to be repeated throughout his vast work, that “wealth is virtue.” Dumas père would echo it in the Count of Monte Cristo, portraying a society where everything—whether social standing, or revenge—can be bought at a price.
ON A MORE CHEERING NOTE, for the put-upon city-dweller there was always the theatre—now returned to its old unfettered, unbridled rowdiness of pre-revolutionary days. In 1817, the Comédie-Française, where Mlle. Mars, alias Anne Boutet, resumed its great tradition, provided a reminder of the uninhibited days of Louis XIV when Ultras and Leftists came to serious blows over a political lampoon. Thereafter theatre managers insisted that canes, umbrellas and other weapons be deposited at the door, giving birth to the present-day theatre cloakroom.
In February 1830 the Comédie-Française was the scene of another noisy battle, fought out by “Romantics” at the first night of Hugo’s drama Hernani. In the expensive stalls sat the traditionalists, determined to dismiss the play and with it the pretensions of the new school; above, in “the Gods” were hordes of Hugo’s young fans—led by Théophile Gautier in the cherry-coloured satin doublet that he made famous. The Hugo claque so out-clapped and out-shouted the traditionalists below that the success of the play and the future of Hugo and the Romantistes was assured. Up on the un-chic Boulevard du Temple, the Théâtre des Funambules (“tightrope-walkers”), founded in 1816, established enormous popularity with its performances of mime, vaudeville and melodrama, playing to even noisier audiences, and with an always more financially precarious company. Here the great, tragic clown Jean Deburau held sway as the lovelorn and pathetic Pierrot—ever hopeful, but always disappointed.
The comic opera, called the Italien from the eponymous adjacent boulevard, home of the new “Romantic” music, also thrived. Rossini, living in Paris from 1824 to 1836, was appointed director in an epoch when concert-goers could hear Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt perform their works. By the early 1830s, Paris reckoned to have replaced Vienna as the European capital of music. Yet it was not all gold; returning to Paris, Hector Berlioz, his magical Symphonie Fantastique, written (for his Irish paramour) while he was not yet thirty, with its lilting Romanticism but sombre reminders of the guillotine that seemed to typify the age, went unacknowledged. He died crushed by the critics at the apogee of the Second Empire, where lesser musicians like Offenbach carried off the laurels.
“LA FRANCE S’ENNUIT,” declared the Romantic poet Lamartine in January 1839, redefining that age-old national affliction that was to be repeated everywhere the further the passage of time removed France from Napoleon. For neither the first nor the last time, a French regime sought to divert dissatisfaction at home with a foreign adventure. Once it was Italy, now it was Algeria. In 1827, the Dey of Algiers lost his temper with the French Consul, Deval, struck him in the face with a flywhisk, and called him a “wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal.” Here was a perfect pretext for the unpopular government of Charles X. Though they took three years in winding up to avenge the shocking insult, in June 1830 a French expeditionary force landed on a beach at Sidi Ferruch, 27 miles west of Algiers. At a grand ball on the eve of the expedition, which lasted till 6 a.m., a guest had observed to the Duc d’Orléans (the future Louis-Philippe) that it was “a truly Neapolitan fête; we are dancing on a volcano.” Britain growled, then did nothing and the Algerian annexation swiftly yielded some satisfying diversions for the mother country; there were glamorous silk cloths, reaching even to provincial Rouen to help assuage the desperate ennui of poor Emma Bovary; in Paris there was the cancan, the bizarre and shocking new dance first seen in the cholera year of 1832, and said to be based on something discovered in barbaric Algeria. It would be under the liberal regime of Louis-Philippe, rather than Charles X, that the often brutal “pacification” of Algeria would take place. But the “adventure” would not suffice to preserve the thrones of either. Acquiring the world’s tenth biggest nation would in fact grant Charles X only a few months more on the throne.
Most Frenchmen found the restored monarchy quite endurable, but Paris was as ever more politicised and less acquiescent. There the reactionary Charles X had become progressively more unpopular, especially since he expressed his intent to bin the reconciliatory and liberal Charter, to which the Bourbon monarchy had pledged itself on returning to power. “We must lock the Bourbons up in the Charter; so hemmed in, they will explode,” declared a brilliant young anti-monarchist journalist, Adolphe Thiers. Indeed, had Charles X been prepared to respect the Charter, possibly the monarchy could have taken fresh root between 1815 and 1830. But by the summer of 1830, as in 1811, there were soaring bread prices, wage cuts and unemployment; some 64,000 Parisians had no stable employment, making them dependent on either charity or crime. Foreigners were horrified to discover four-year-olds working long hours in the mills. Soup kitchens appeared on the streets, as they had in the early years of the Great Revolution. The warning signals were out, but no one noticed them.
In June, Charles dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, in order to hold the fresh elections that would enable him to do away with the liberal Charter and suspended freedom of the press. On 26 July—a stiflingly hot day in the city—a demonstration broke out with a dense crowd in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. They were driven away by the police, and by midnight the calm suggested that the authorities were in control. Charles X, relaxing out at Saint-Cloud, put Napoleon’s veteran commander, Marshal Marmont, in charge. It was a foolish choice; many Parisians remembered him as the man who had surrendered the city to the enemy in 1814. On the 27th once again the crowds were out on the streets, this time setting up barricades near the Rue Saint-Honoré and around the Bourse.
That day a young woman had been shot down in the Rue Saint-Honoré with a bullet in the forehead, and a butcher’s boy carried the corpse into the Place des Victoires. The sight aroused the crowd with calls for vengeance. During the night of the 27th/28th barricades were run up in the eastern districts, the traditional haunts of revolution. Trees were felled and workers from Saint-Antoine plundered gunsmiths for weapons, as they had done in 1789, and seized the arsenal. On the morning of the 28th, demonstrators peacefully occupied the Hôtel de Ville, unfurling the tricolore flag from its towers, and fraternised with the rebels. Elsewhere, on the Place de Grève and the Rue Saint-Antoine, there was now a full-scale insurrection. At a serious disadvantage fighting in the narrow streets, Marmont could only order a withdrawal from the inner city. Nevertheless, the fighting continued savagely on the 29th. Its centre moved westwards to the Louvre. Swiss guards fled in panic up the Champs-Élysées as the mob entered and sacked the Tuileries, getting hopelessly drunk in its cellars. The Archbishop’s palace was also occupied, its furniture and rare books hurled into the Seine.
By the afternoon of the 29th, the insurgents found themselves in control of the whole city, bewildered by the totality of their success. Taking advantage, liberal deputies under Thiers called for the abdication of Charles X. They rejected the call of the left for a republic (under the probable presidency of seventy-three-year-old Lafayette, still going strong after his third revolution), on the grounds of national unity. Instead they nominated Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, to assume the throne. In vain, Charles attempted to save the dynasty by putting forward his grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux, as Henri V. Constitutional monarchy held no charms for the last of the Bourbons; “I would rather hew wood than be a king like the King of England!” he declared, turning to the ever-at-hand Talleyrand: “I see no middle way between the throne and the scaffold.” To this the old cynic, who had seen it all, murmured: “Your Majesty forgets the post-chaise!”9 Charles took Talleyrand’s advice, and the post-chaise—to hew wood in England. “Still another government,” was Chateaubriand’s acid comment, “hurling itself down from the towers of Notre-Dame.” In Italy and partitioned Poland there were risings in emulation of the events in Paris.
A new breed of politic leaders was growing up, who were neither of the nobility nor of the haute bourgeoisie. The public had no high opinion of the Assembly (when did they?), holding it to be “A great bazaar where everyone barters his conscience for a job,” but from the ranks of mediocrity—the Richelieus and the Decazes—two stand out: the Protestant François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874) and Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), the owl-like revolutionary deputy with his famous quiff of hair like the stalk of a fruit. Guizot would declare proudly in his memoirs: “I am one of those whom the élan of 1789 raised up, and who will never consent to descend again.” Both were journalists and distinguished historians (professions which—unique to France—were to prove to be as suitable backgrounds for politics as any other), and with conspicuously long lives (eighty-seven and eighty respectively) which would span prodigious events. Thiers, son of a modest family from Marseilles and endowed with “furious energy,” in his early years as Prime Minister under Louis-Philippe would complete Napoleonic projects like the Arc de Triomphe, crown the Concorde with an Egyptian obelisk, and build the great ring of forts to protect Paris from an enemy which (then) seemed too remote to identify. In his later years he would brutally crush the left-wing insurgents of the Commune, and—as its first President—establish the Third Republic firmly in France.
IN PARIS, following what came to be known as the Trois Glorieuses after the three days of uprising, the insurgents licked their wounds. They had lost 1800 dead and some 4500 wounded, most of whom were under thirty-five, while the royalists had suffered about a thousand casualties. But it was, once more, the bourgeoisie who had won this latest revolution.
Epitomising the bourgeois class, at fifty-seven Louis-Philippe (1830–48) was the great-great-grandson of the free-living regent to Louis XV, and his acceptability to both sides in 1830 stemmed partly from the fact that his father had been the regicide, “Philippe Égalité,” though his duplicity had not saved his neck during the Terror. Even his own wife, the good Queen Amélie, regarded him a usurper, but few could doubt the good intentions of Louis-Philippe, who always tried to be all things to all sides—surviving as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom under both Charles X and the Commune of Paris. It was symbolic that the last King of France accepted the crown not at Rheims but in the Palais Bourbon, as the politically elected choice of “the people.”
Shorn of the monarchy’s inherited mystique and the authority of Louis XIV or Napoleon, the “People’s King,” the “Citizen King,” the “Grocer King” or the “Bricklayer King,” reigned presidentially, but had little more power than a British constitutional monarch.
Louis-Philippe played the role well. He lived in the Palais-Royal— where his ancestor, the Regent, had once resided—without the pomp and circumstance of Versailles. He addressed workmen as “my friends” and the National Guard as “my comrades,” and liked to stroll through the streets with a green umbrella under his arm, shaking hands promiscuously; at the least enticement, he would appear on the balcony, obligingly brandishing the tricolore, and lustily singing the “Marseillaise.” Heinrich Heine was somewhat shocked to learn that the King had two pairs of gloves for the occasion, one for shaking hands with every spice merchant and partisan . . . he wore a special dirty glove for that purpose, which he always took off and exchanged for a cleaner kid glove when he kept more elevated company and went to see the old aristocrats, his banker-ministers ...10
If he evoked the British “champagne socialist” of our day, Louis-Philippe’s Queen Marie-Amélie, with her clutch of ten children (of whom eight survived), was the very quintessence of bourgeois virtue.
At first the bourgeois rejoiced in their new monarch, and the peace and prosperity he signalled. Delightedly they took up Guizot’s exhortation of “enrichissez-vous!” (though it was widely misinterpreted; in truth a rider was attached: “but leave politics to me”). The humdrum royal family seemed rather incidental, for, as de Tocqueville perceived, and the populace soon detected, Louis-Philippe was moved by “no flaming passions, no ruinous weaknesses, no striking vices . . . he hardly appreciated literature or art, but he passionately loved industry.” The bourgeoisie and the labouring classes hardly needed an exhortation to industry. Soon there would be few occasions when Louis-Philippe would not be savagely criticised by the newly emergent Parisian press, or derided with merciless cruelty by caricaturists like the new young genius, Honoré Daumier (1808–79), lampooning his pear-shaped features.
Within a year there was a serious revolt in Lyons, and fresh trouble on the streets of Paris. In February 1831 riots broke out and the Archbishop’s palace was sacked; in October there were more riots over Louis-Philippe’s proposal to drop the death penalty. In June half of Paris was taken over by some two thousand young insurgents, of whom one in ten were killed by cannon-fire amid cries of “Down with Louis-Philippe!” and “He’ll die on the scaffold like his father!” In April 1834 further riots brought about a shocking butchery by nervous troops of innocent civilians in the Rue Transnonain—to be fixed for ever in Parisian minds by Daumier’s cartoon of a slain man lying at the foot of his bed in nothing but nightcap and shirt.
The following year, on the anniversary of the Trois Glorieuses, a Republican terrorist called Fieschi fired a remarkable infernal machine, consisting of twenty-five musket barrels, lashed together like organ tubes, at Louis-Philippe’s cortège as it rode slowly up the Boulevard du Temple. The Minister of War, Napoleon I’s veteran Marshal Mortier, dropped with a bullet through the head; thirteen others died, including a fourteen-year-old girl, and twenty-two were wounded. The King’s horse was also hit, but he himself was untouched, returning courageously to review the troops for two hours that afternoon, and declaring “It’s me who is driving the coach!” Wounded by his own device, Fieschi (whose colleagues tried to cover their tracks by ensuring that Fieschi also died in the explosion) went to the guillotine. He was the first French would-be regicide to be spared torture.
THE KING’S COURAGE under fire gained him a respite. In 1840, he sought new favour from his increasingly vocal Bonapartist opponents by having the dead Emperor Napoleon brought back to France and reinterred under the imposing dome of the Invalides. As disenchantment with successive Restoration regimes had grown, so, also, did an inflated image of Napoleon. Writers like Hugo did much to help cultivate it.55 Many hearts still beat for him across France, and between August and December 1830, no fewer than fourteen glorifying plays were performed in Paris. But no one did more to refocus Napoleon in French minds and legend than Louis-Philippe by returning him to Paris, fulfilling Napoleon’s desire to be buried “on the banks of the Seine, midst the French people whom I love so well.”
To compensate for the drabness of his own regime, Louis-Philippe arranged a rousing Napoleonic extravaganza. On top of the Arc de Triomphe—which Napoleon had left to Louis-Philippe to complete—was erected a massive plaster statue of the Emperor, decked out in his coronation robes, and flanked by statues representing War and Peace. From the Champs-Élysées to the Concorde and over the Seine to the Invalides there were gilded Napoleonic eagles and flags and boards bearing the details of Napoleon’s victories. Balconies along the route were rented out for up to ff3000. Shortly after midday, the cortège, with the coffin borne in a huge coach drawn by sixteen horses clad in cloth of gold, reached the Invalides. Victor Hugo, letting himself go, wrote: “An immense murmur enveloped this apparition . . .” It was “as if the chariot were trailing the acclamation of the entire city, as a torch trails its smoke.”11 There were cries, not heard for many a year, of “Vive l’Empereur!” and “À bas les Anglais!” The dramatic ceremony aroused that latent militaristic and sentimental nostalgia.
For all the good Louis-Philippe’s protestations that war was a “terrible scourge,” it was hardly coincidental that the fictional but legendary figure of Monsieur Chauvin, hating foreigners and Algerians alike, was born under his reign. A new nationalism was beginning to take root. There was increasing talk about avenging Waterloo, while the great nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, perpetuating his own ardently nationalist image of France, urged that schoolchildren be taught to venerate his notion of la patrie; he exemplified the period. In 1840, Heinrich Heine would express the glum fear that “Deprived of all republican qualities, the French are by nature Bonapartist. They like war for the sake of war.” 12 Meanwhile, among Heine’s still disunited countrymen a new national consciousness was also beginning to form across the Rhine.
LIKE THAT OF 1968, 120 years later, the year 1848 was one of revolt and revolution across Europe. Old political structures collapsed like the walls of Jericho. Given the paucity of communications, the simultaneous shockwave of revolution was remarkable. “There was,” wrote Philip Guedalla, “a sound of breaking glass in every continental capital west of the Russian frontier.”13 In Vienna even the seemingly immortal Metternich —who had given Europe its past three decades of peace—was deposed. For Britain alone revolution was to prove—literally—a damp squib, when, in April, a demonstration of half-a-million Chartists mustering on the South Bank of the Thames to march on Parliament was headed off by a combination of the “Iron Duke’s” wily strategy and London rain. Prince Albert was able to sigh, comfortably from within the tranquil walls of Windsor Castle: “we had our revolution yesterday, and it ended in rain.” By the end of 1848, except for Britain, there were to be dictators in almost every country of Europe. Writing to Brussels, Queen Amélie admitted, “I do not know where I am any more.” The world had truly moved on its axis.
It had all begun in Paris. Public anger towards the regime had begun to crystallise the previous year with the shocking, and brutal, murder in high society of the Duchess de Praslin, by her husband—who was having an affair with the governess. There was widespread disgust that the Duke, using his title, was able to cheat the guillotine—though he had the good taste to poison himself in prison. The case simply exemplified the inequalities still endemic in France. Her population was much larger, yet had less than a quarter of the total number of voters in Britain; while a visiting Karl Marx was shocked by the misery of the proletariat that he had found in Paris, and developed his philosophy of revolution accordingly. For many, the dominant bourgeoisie had become, as de Tocqueville explained it, “a small aristocracy, corrupt and vulgar, by which it seemed shameful to let oneself be ruled.” Somewhat inappropriately, given the prelude of poor harvests in 1846–47, on 22 February a mass banquet was planned by the Opposition to lend expression to Parisian discontent at the government’s resistance to reform. But it was abruptly cancelled, and the following afternoon word was received from the Minister of the Interior that there was already fighting in the city. There were shouts of “Down with Guizot!,” who, as successively Louis-Philippe’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister, had been the virtual ruler of France for the past eight years. A highly reluctant Thiers was seized and carried shoulder-high by demonstrators. Barricades began to appear on the Rue de Rivoli. More ominously there were cries of “Vive la Réforme!” and “Down with Guizot!” even from the respectable ranks of the National Guard.
Near the elegant Boulevard des Capucines, the progress of “a decidedly villainous-looking mob,” singing revolutionary songs, was blocked by the loyally royalist 14th Battalion of the line. One of the rioters thrust his torch into the face of its commanding officer and a trigger-happy sergeant shot him dead. It was a single shot that changed the course of French history. On hearing it, the other nervous soldiers fired a ragged volley into the crowd. A hundred or more people “were laid low, stretched out, or rolling over another, shrieking and groaning.” News of the shooting spread instantaneously, and an outraged mob headed for the Tuileries.
After jettisoning Guizot, Louis-Philippe had been advised by Thiers to retire to Saint-Cloud and assemble a force for retaking Paris. The King refused; instead he called up the unpopular Marshal Bugeaud, pacifier of Algeria, to take over command; then ordered him to cease fire. The National Guard went over to the insurgents, and, as the sound of firing reached the Tuileries, on 24 February the King abdicated in favour of his son, the Comte de Paris. He who had once declared bravely, “It’s me who is driving the coach!,” now left in one, just like his predecessor, for exile in England. He and Queen Amélie escaped hurriedly through a side door in the Tuileries terrace. With Louis-Philippe, the last King of France, departed the thousand-year-old French monarchy.
Hardly had the King and Queen left than the mob invaded the Tuileries, just as they had done in the last days of Louis XVI. Though some looters were shot on the spot, women and children dressed themselves up in valuable tapestries; sofas and armchairs were flung out of the windows; portraits of the King were ripped to pieces; even Voltaire’s bust was hurled down into the courtyard. The throne was carried in triumph through Paris, and set on fire at the foot of the July Column, amid a great crowd. The Palais-Royal was sacked and gutted, and a republic proclaimed, as workers flocked to the Hôtel de Ville.
With 350 dead over the three days, it was the least bloody uprising of the century. Says de Tocqueville: “this time a regime was not overthrown, it was simply allowed to fall.” In truth, the monarchy had expired for “lack of panache.” The good King had afforded France some of the happiest years in her history, but in the memorable words of a French historian, “the French do not live on happiness.”14 In its place came freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right of every Parisian to join the National Guard. In April, France’s first national election with universal male suffrage was held; it put her in advance of both Britain and the US. In St. Petersburg, a thoroughly alarmed Tsar shouted: “Gentlemen, saddle your horses; France is a republic!” No less than 84 per cent of 9,395,035 men eligible voted. In fact, the election represented a massive vote against radical Paris by the conservative rest of France.
IN PARIS the coming of the Second Republic was greeted with “a carnival-like exuberance, according to Gustave Flaubert’s sympathetic recollection. But the mood changed as reality replaced fantasy. Unemployment spiralled to the previously unheard-of total of 180,000. The proletariat realised, more swiftly than in 1789, that they had emerged more abjectly poor, but now more concentrated and more aware of their own strength. These were conditions that remained highly favourable to revolt. This time, however, the government was ready for trouble; General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, Minister of War and another successful “pacifier” in Algeria, had for some time been drawing up a battle plan and was now invested with almost dictatorial powers. In response to riots on 23 June, within twenty-four hours he brought in 30,000 regular troops by train from outside the city, as the rebels constructed barricades.
The next day Cavaignac attacked, deploying his artillery without compunction. The rebels fought back sullenly, without leaders and almost without hope, but the battle continued for three days as the provinces crushed Paris. When—most courageously—he tried to intervene, the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Affre, was mortally wounded. Killed, too, were no fewer than five of Cavaignac’s generals as well as hundreds of many unarmed civilians—at least the official number of 914 among the government troops, and 1435 for the insurgents. A police commissioner counted fifteen large furniture vans piled high with corpses; many were “shot while escaping,” or summarily executed in the quarries of Montmartre or the Buttes-Chaumont in eastern Paris. The Rue Blanche reeked with rotting cadavers from those hastily interred in the Montmartre cemetery. Thousands were arrested and transported to the colonies, or Algeria, without trial. The details of 11,616 Parisians captured after the “June Days” were listed in the official records, while Flaubert provides a grim picture of one of the dungeons: “Nine hundred men were there, crowded together in filth pell-mell, black with powder and clotted blood, shivering in fever and shouting in frenzy. Those who died were left to lie with the others.” When it was all over, bourgeois and dandies from the western arrondissements came out—in relief—to inspect the havoc.
June 1848 had unleashed the most sanguinary fighting that had ever been seen to date on the streets of Paris, including that of 1789, but the scenario of a republic butchering its own supporters in a way that no French monarchy or empire could rival would be repeated—with even more hideous consequences—twenty-three years later under the Commune of Paris. The June Days had only created a new embittered generation.
THE SECOND REPUBLIC LIMPED ON with the military in charge. There were elections for the presidency. In them a dark horse in the shape of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, emerged from exile to win three-quarters of the total votes from a middle class and provinces dismayed by recent events. Louis-Napoleon collected 5½ million votes to Cavaignac’s 1½ million, while the socialist candidate polled only 370,000 and the poet Lamartine fewer than 8000. He is, remarked Thiers scathingly in private of Louis-Napoleon, “A crétin whom we will manage.”15With almost insouciant speed, life resumed its normal tempo, as was observed by the journalist Alphonse Karr, coining the immortal phrase in July 1848: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!”16