CHAPTER 8
The policy of France is like an infection clinging to the walls of the dwelling and breaking out in every successive occupant who comes within their influence.
LORD PALMERSTON 1
We know that France and Britain were never to fight each other again. That was not how it seemed at the time. The Napoleonic wars cast a long shadow. The mid-century decades were marked by a succession of crises, war scares and preparations for war on both sides. But they only fought as allies, against Russia and China; and they even considered intervening jointly in the American Civil War. But mutual suspicion meant that they were unable to exert a stabilizing effect on Europe in the 1860s, which ended in the disastrous Franco-German war of 1870. That is why their bickering mattered. Not for the last time, they failed to establish a relationship of trust that might have preserved Europe from some of its future disasters.
A Beautiful Dream: The First Entente
Cordiale, 1841–6
Perhaps the ‘intimate and permanent union’ of England and France was a dream, but it was a beautiful dream. The idea of these two great peoples . . . enveloping the universe within their vast embrace and forcing it to remain in repose and peace, that idea was great.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE to the chamber of deputies, 1843.2
The difficulty of destroying English illusions, suspicions and misconceptions about our interests after forty years of contact with them . . . is greatly weakening my confidence that I can establish between Paris and London that cordial and sincere accord which is, I believe, the real interest of both countries and the veritable alcazar of European peace.
LOUIS-PHILIPPE to Guizot.3
For Louis-Philippe and Guizot, war and revolution were all-consuming destroyers. Both men’s fathers – one a prince, one a provincial solicitor – had died on the guillotine, victims of ‘the savage beast’, in Louis-Philippe’s words, that liked to ‘dip its muzzle in blood’.4 Both had known flight and exile. They saw their mission as making France a bulwark of liberty and peace. They hoped that this would gain the respect of other states, especially Britain, and hence please moderate patriots at home. Palmerston, popular spokesman of patriotic liberalism and scourge of Continental conservatism, fell from office following a Tory victory in 1841. The new foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen wished Louis-Philippe well. He and Guizot maintained personal relations, bypassing diplomatic channels. Aberdeen was supported by the Queen and influential Whigs such as Lansdowne, eager to ‘smooth the ruffled feathers’. Victoria and Albert visited Louis-Philippe at his castle at Eu in Normandy in 1843, the first visit to France by a reigning British sovereign since Henry VIII,5 and the first personal gesture of solidarity towards the ‘citizen king’ by any European monarch. Louis-Philippe was put on his best behaviour by his daughter the Queen of the Belgians: ‘Victoria never talks politics . . . it is thepaterfamilias rather than the king she wants to see . . . Dear father must therefore be natural, paternal, patriarchal, unaffected, as usual.’6 It worked, and the queen duly warmed to the Orléans family, so fecund, domestic and affectionate – so ‘Victorian’. The king used the words ‘cordiale entente’ in his 1843 speech from the throne. He planned a return visit to Windsor in 1844 (his wife wrote to ask Victoria to make sure he did not over-eat or go riding) and inaugurated annual royal and ministerial meetings. He took Victor Hugo into his confidence:
I’ll be welcomed there: I speak English. And the English are grateful to me for knowing them well enough not to hate them, for everyone begins by hating the English . . . But I respect them and I show it. Between ourselves, the only worry is too warm a welcome . . . Popularity there would mean unpopularity here . . . But I mustn’t be badly received either: badly received there, mocked here.7
The visit went well, and Guizot was jubilant: ‘The effects are excellent, excellent in England, excellent here . . . Lively and joyous pride at the welcome he received in England and the spectacle given to Europe. Lively satisfaction at the consolidation of peace . . . We could ask for nothing more from England.’8 There are few moments in history in which a French head of government could have written such words.
Just as things were going so right, they went suddenly very wrong. George Pritchard, a Methodist missionary, had just returned from the South Seas with a story of French brutality and insult. He had been successfully preaching the gospel in Tahiti, becoming an adviser to Queen Pomare and honorary British consul. In 1842, Admiral Dupetit-Thouars, commander of the French Pacific squadron and a nephew of the legless hero of the Nile (see above, page 229), declared Tahiti a protectorate. He had acted without authorization, but his act conformed with France’s policy of acquiring bases in distant oceans as stepping stones to colonial expansion. Patriotic opinion, especially on the Left, favoured this as a means of spreading French civilization and combating Britain. Dupetit-Thouars deposed Pomare in November 1843, declared Tahiti a French possession, and arrested and deported Pritchard. His arrival in England caused much embarrassment to Aberdeen and Guizot. ‘It would be deplorable,’ wrote the former, if ‘you and I, two Ministers of Peace, should be condemned to quarrel about a set of naked savages at the other end of the world.’9 The press and evangelical philanthropists were angry. Lord Shaftesbury was wrung with ‘grief and indignation’ at the fate of a ‘peaceable and helpless people’, a ‘Christian model’, and moreover ‘English in laws and Constitution’, who had been ‘inundated with bloodshed, devastation, profligacy, and crime’, while England did nothing – ‘a disgusting and cowardly attitude’.10 Guizot tried to ignore the whole affair, but eventually offered financial compensation to Pritchard. Even Aberdeen thought this ‘rather slender’; but the French parliamentary opposition and press took quite the opposite view: the injured party was France, whose noble efforts to civilize Tahiti had been hampered, and by an Englishman and a creeping Methodist to boot. That the government should actually pay him compensation was an outrage, and proof that ‘Lord Guizot’ was an abject puppet: ‘Nous avons pour ministre un Englishmann bâtard/ Très-humble serviteur du révérend Pritchard’, ran one lampoon.”11 Pritchardiste became the opposition label for Guizot’s supporters for the rest of his time in power. A public subscription bought Dupetit-Thouars a magnificent sword of honour, to which Louis-Philippe’s sailor son the Prince de Joinville (who had escorted Napoleon’s remains back to France) contributed.
If Tahiti was an embarrassment, Spain was to be a tragi-comedy. No one had forgotten the ‘Spanish ulcer’ that had weakened Napoleon and devastated the Peninsula. A generation later, Spain was still in turmoil, and France and Britain were supporting rival parties. Though commercial interests had some importance, prestige and security outweighed them. Palmerston, apt to assume the worst, feared that France would take over in Madrid, the Spanish would again revolt, and Britain would be drawn into another peninsular war – or else by appeasement would encourage the French to yet more threatening adventures in Belgium and elsewhere. Court and army factions ruled in Madrid, and as Queen Isabella and her sister were adolescents, providing them with husbands was a way of gaining important political influence. Aberdeen and Guizot thought they had made a deal. Not for the first or last time, the British were happy with the sense that they had a broad agreement, while the French concentrated on the small print. The agreement was to marry the queen to one of her cousins, probably the Duke of Cadiz, and later (once she had had an heir, the British assumed) marry her sister to Louis-Philippe’s youngest son, the Duc de Montpensier. But Cadiz – nicknamed ‘Paquita’ – was, as one historian puts it, ‘not a very seductive stallion’, and it was widely doubted that he would father an heir – though Louis-Philippe promised breezily that ‘an operation would set all to rights’. If Cadiz failed to perform, the Spanish crown would pass in time to Louis-Philippe’s eventual grandson – an outcome the French were quietly anticipating. The pro-British party began to think that a Saxe-Coburg prince (another relative of Queen Victoria) might make a more productive sire than Paquita. To forestall this, the pro-French party pushed ahead with the original two weddings on the same day, 10 October 1846. Guizot congratulated himself on having done ‘a great and fine thing.’12 The French knew London would be annoyed, but they underestimated the anger that seized not only hard-liners like Palmerston and his ambassador (who wanted to rent a mob to riot in Madrid), but France’s best friend Aberdeen, and life-long francophiles such as Lansdowne (who fumed about ‘rottenness’, ‘duplicity’ and ‘treachery’). Queen Victoria wrote what Palmerston called ‘a tickler’ to her former friend Louis-Philippe.
Palmerston: this patriotic liberal had little patience with French ambitions.
Why did the entente cordiale go so wrong? It is common to blame Palmerston: even a present-day French scholar describes him as ‘having for the French that hatred and contempt that only the English are capable of’.13 But Palmerston was sincere in his desire to support the spread of liberal government; and besides, the Pritchard affair and the Spanish marriages row began when he was out of office. Douglas Johnson identifies the real problem: for the British, the entente was a means of restraining France; for the French, it was a means of restraining Britain.14 Even the most pacific French politician wanted France to be treated as an equal partner: 1815 must be consigned to the past. They wanted colonies, economic concessions and influence over smaller western European states, especially Greece, Belgium and Spain. But no British politician, however emollient, was going to behave as if the Napoleonic wars had never happened, and certainly not as if France had won. There was such bitterness against Britain and the ‘Pritchardists’ in France that Louis-Philippe and his ministers dared not be too conciliatory. ‘Give us this day our daily platitude’ was said by his enemies to be the king’s morning prayer – platitude in French here meaning not a commonplace saying, but an act of self-abasement. Even Guizot, routinely mocked as ‘Sir Guizot’, the hypocritical Protestant in the pockets of the English, nourished ‘an ongoing desire for revenge, a rancour which lurked just below the surface’.15 In his own words, ‘one had to choose between a great success or a great failure, between defeat and a costly victory’. Vengeance was sweet: ‘In 1840, over the miserable question of Egypt, England won a victory in Europe. In 1846, over the great question of Spain, she is beaten and alone.’16 French diplomats argued, and French historians maintain, that France was within its rights over the Spanish marriages, and the British were hypocritical ‘bad losers’. The rights and wrongs need not detain us: it had become politically vital to be seen to defeat Britain. But it did not work: critics decried Guizot’s ‘victory’ as a mere dynastic intrigue, irrelevant to France’s true honour and interest.
We may think, with olympian hindsight, that the marriage of the Queen of Spain, Pritchard’s compensation, or even Egypt’s claims to Beirut were not worth all the fuss. But statesmen, journalists and voters are inevitably the prisoners of their history. Each side saw the other as a global rival, and they were right. France had not given up the struggle after Waterloo: indeed, it never has. The most progressive and high-minded elements in both countries, including great liberal thinkers such as Tocqueville and J.S. Mill, were convinced of their respective nation’s right and duty as the vanguards of progress to shape the future of the planet. Britain, because of its past victories, its technological mastery, and its self-proclaimed moral rectitude, buttressed by Evangelical philanthropy. France, because of its boasted cultural primacy and its universalist ideological claims, not least those stemming from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Consequently, influential figures in both countries still saw the world in terms of Franco-British rivalry. The two countries became the exponents of a new liberal imperialism.17
No one could know that this rivalry would never again lead to a Franco-British war. So the Spanish quarrel, like a butterfly’s wings in Tokyo setting off a storm in New York, had disproportionate results. The Prince de Joinville had published a pamphlet discussing how French steamships might attack British commerce and raid its coasts. A surprise invasion using a ‘steam bridge’ for the French army was something both Wellington and Palmerston considered frighteningly feasible.18 The government announced a large tax increase to pay for naval reinforcements and home defences. This caused protests and violent demonstrations. To calm the discontent, London began to shift some of the burden to the colonies, who were instructed to pay more and raise their own defence forces. This in turn created a storm of discontent and even rebellion throughout the Empire, which marked the beginning of the historic transformation of the colonies into self-governing states.19 In Europe, the effects were even greater. The Franco-British split encouraged the Austrians and Russians to crack down on dissidence. They invaded the independent city of Cracow, encouraged conservative Catholic cantons in a civil war in Switzerland, and menaced nationalists in Italy. ‘Since the Spanish marriages,’ accused Lamartine, ‘France, in betrayal of its nature and of centuries of tradition . . . has been Austrian in Piedmont, Russian in Cracow, French nowhere, counter-revolutionary everywhere!’ This sudden wave of instability began the collapse of the entire fragile European system.
The July Monarchy was one of the first casualties of the ‘year of revolutions’ of 1848 that tumbled governments across Europe. Historians cannot say exactly why revolutions happen. The great economic depression that starved much of western Europe and devastated its economy in the late 1840s obviously played a part, creating masses of hungry unemployed workers and bankrupt businessmen. But why revolution in France, and not in Belgium, Holland or Britain? France, of course, was one of those states that had been destabilized by the revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and which were less able to weather serious social and political unrest. The fraught relationship with Britain also counted in two ways. First, Louis-Philippe and Guizot were attacked as ‘Pritchardists’ who did not defend French interests and pride, and this alienated even former supporters. Second, they themselves believed, not without reason, that they were beset by reckless chauvinists. This made them determined to retain their grip on power by refusing political change. ‘You want reform and you won’t have it!’ the king told one of his ministers, ‘it will bring . . . war! And I won’t destroy my peace policy.’20
As crowds surged towards the Tuileries palace on 24 February 1848, the king and his family fled towards the Channel. Resentment over the Spanish marriages had not cooled. Louis-Philippe’s daughter was sure that ‘Father’s dignity will not permit him to seek asylum on any point of English territory.’ But with revolution spreading across Europe there was nowhere else to go. The British vice-consul at Le Havre smuggled him, disguised in dark glasses and a cap, his whiskers shaved off, on to a British ferry, with a false British passport. The last French king left his kingdom as Bill Smith, the consul’s uncle: ‘my dear Uncle talked so loud and so much that I had the greatest difficulty to make him keep silent’.21 Guizot escaped to Yorkshire. Queen Victoria – pronouncing primly that events showed ‘a great moral’ – was less than welcoming. The government rather gracelessly lent the refugees Claremont House, south of London, where they were severely poisoned by lead from the water pipes. Palmerston assured the new Republic in Paris that the exiles would not be allowed to plot. Louis-Philippe ended his days in a bath chair at St Leonard’s-on-Sea.
‘God bless the narrow sea’: From Revolution
to Empire, 1848–52
God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain, whole within herself . . .
I wish [it] were a whole Atlantic broad.
ALFRED TENNYSON, ‘The Princess’ (1850)
A revolution in France was frightening and exciting, opening vistas of blood, liberation, and war. Revolts broke out across Europe as the news from Paris spread. Polish, Italian and German exiles in Paris and London rejoiced, drafted proclamations and bought guns. Statesmen and monarchs trembled. The king of Prussia predicted that he would end on the guillotine, and an Austrian minister was hanged on a Vienna lamp-post, in French revolutionary style. Even Queen Victoria worried: ‘what will soon become of us God alone knows’.22 Alphonse de Lamartine, a conservative turned republican and one of France’s greatest lyric poets, was proclaimed head of the provisional republican government. This was not on the strength of his verses, but because of his recent best-sellingHistory of the Girondins, which praised the revolution and established his popular credentials. There was widespread relief inside and outside France, for throughout the July Monarchy he had bravely attacked the ambient nationalism. ‘I do not believe it is a good thing ceaselessly to deify war,’ he had dared to tell Parliament in 1840, ‘to encourage that impetuous rush of French blood that we are told is eager to flow after twenty-five years of truce: as if peace, the happiness and glory of the world, could be a national shame.’23 This was the man to reassure Europe that the Second Republic did not intend to imitate the First. His colleagues in government included champions of bellicose left-wing nationalism. But in power, facing chaos and bankruptcy, they drew back from the revolutionary Armageddon they had often demanded under Louis-Philippe. ‘We love Poland, we love Italy, we love all oppressed peoples,’ declared Lamartine, ‘but we love France above all.’24
In Britain there was no regret for Louis-Philippe, whose fall, said one paper, ‘will be welcomed with contented laughter by perhaps three-fourths of mankind’.25 There were many enthusiasts for the new republic. In Oxford, a young fellow of Exeter College, J.A. Froude, hired a brass band to play the ‘Marseillaise’ under the vice-chancellor’s windows. Radicals, Chartists*, Irish nationalists and political exiles were galvanized by the news. Some heard it in the middle of a political meeting in London: ‘Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, Magyars sprang to their feet, embraced, shouted and gesticulated in the wildest enthusiasm . . . great was the clinking of glasses that night in and around Soho and Leicester Square.’26
In the more sober atmosphere of Whitehall, resentment over the Spanish marriages remained so acute that expressions of good will were readily dispatched to the new regime. ‘We desire friendship and extended commercial intercourse with France,’ wrote Palmerston. ‘We will engage the rest of Europe from meddling . . . The French rulers must engage to prevent France from assailing any part of the rest of Europe: upon such a basis our relations with France may be . . . more friendly than they have been . . . with Louis Philippe and Guizot.’27 Problems concerning British workers chased out of France were dealt with calmly. Unlike in 1789, the French government was eager to accept advice, realizing that British protection would make Russian or Austrian attack impossible: ‘When France and England agree together to secure the peace of Europe,’ wrote Lamartine, ‘no power can with impunity disturb it.’28 He even wrote to the aged Duke of Wellington assuring him that he wanted France to adopt a British-style constitution. He and the ambassador, former Tory MP Lord Normanby, met daily. Lamartine’s great virtue, thought Normanby, was that he was the only republican who actually liked Britain; he even had an English wife. Via the embassy, Lamartine informed and consulted London sometimes several times a day about the Republic’s external and even internal policies, such as appointments and the electoral system. The hated francophobe Palmerston, who could have played John Bull in any pantomime, and the languorous poet Lamartine, who could have played a stage Frenchman with equal ease, stood joint watch at the cradle of France’s first real democracy.
Delegations of Chartists and Irish nationalists hastened to Paris in the weeks following the revolution to convey congratulations and solicit support. Chartists (who had a strong Irish element drawn from immigrants in England) held numerous public meetings hailing the revolution: ‘France has the Republic; England shall have the Charter.’ Some radical Chartist leaders felt strong affinities with France: Feargus O’Connor was the son of a United Irishman who had become a general under Napoleon, Bronterre O’Brien was writing a biography of Robespierre, and G.J. Harney was an admirer of Marat. The British authorities were sensitive about French contacts with Irish radicals, especially as Ireland was in the agonizing grip of famine and rural unrest. Normanby was incensed by a speech made by the leader of one delegation, William Smith O’Brien, who recalled the Franco-Irish alliance at the battle of Fontenoy. Lamartine responded by telling the delegates of ‘Young Ireland’, the radical wing of Irish nationalism, that ‘we are at peace, and we wish to remain at peace, not with such or such a part of Great Britain, but with Great Britain as a whole’. Palmerston approved this as ‘most honourable and gentlemanlike’, and Punch portrayed it as the Irish being doused with cold water.29France quickly began to figure less prominently in the speeches, and the hopes, of Irish leaders.
Lamartine, besieged by radicals and nationalists, set out the Republic’s foreign policy in a carefully phrased Manifesto (2 March) trying to please domestic opinion while placating foreign governments. He ensured that this was clearly understood by Normanby, who received advance notice of the contents:
War . . . is not now the principle of the French Republic, as it was the fatal and glorious necessity of the republic of 1792 . . . The world and ourselves are desirous of advancing to fraternity and peace . . . The treaties of 1815 have no longer any lawful existence in the eyes of the French republic; nevertheless . . . those treaties are facts . . . The Republic . . . will not pursue secret or incendiary propagandism; [but] will exercise the only honourable proselytism, that of esteem and sympathy.30
Lamartine even condemned the July Monarchy over the Spanish marriages, ‘an obstacle to our liberal alliances’. Palmerston concluded, ‘evaporate the gaseous parts, and scum off the dross, and you would find the remains to be peace and good-fellowship with other Governments’.31 Yet there was duplicity here. Lamartine, like all republicans, wanted to throw off the treaties of 1815, regain territory lost by Napoleon, and encourage national movements looking to France for leadership. He and his successor Jules Bastide (formerly editor of the bellicose National) were active in secretly aiding revolutionaries in Italy, Belgium, Poland, Hungary and Germany. But the biggest dog did not bark: anglophobia stayed muzzled. If we wish to identify a turning-point in Franco-British relations, this is one: the anglophiles of the July Monarchy had seriously considered war with Britain; the anglophobes of the Republic ruled it out. They sought good relations to prevent another anti-French coalition. They were aided by the widespread revulsion caused in Britain by the brutal crushing of national liberation movements in Hungary and Italy in 1848–9 by the Russians and Austrians. Palmerston even contemplated encouraging the French to end Austrian rule in northern Italy by military force. He joined with them in protecting Hungarian refugees, and he refused to apologize when the Austrian General Haynau was beaten up by London workers.
During the spring and summer of 1848, attention was fixed on internal politics in both Britain and France. The Chartists held a succession of meetings across industrial Britain, culminating in a mass rally in London on 10 April and the presentation of a huge petition to parliament demanding the Charter. The government – advised by Wellington, and learning lessons from events in France – had marshalled large numbers of volunteer special constables armed only with truncheons. This famous day became the subject of conflicting myths. That it passed off without violence, and that Parliament shrugged off the petition, persuaded observers across Europe that Britain was not going to join in ‘the year of revolutions’. There had been no chance that it ever would. The ruling classes were far less divided than in France. Efficient steps were taken to keep order. The argument that Britain did not need revolution was easy to make: The Scotsman stated that ‘the revolution in France arose out of the people not being even allowed to ask for less than we already possess’.32 Britain’s empire, as noted earlier, was less stolid – and had fewer rights. There were disturbances in Canada (where parliament was burned down), Australia, Ceylon, the Cape and many smaller colonies, often openly appealing to the French example.33 Ireland was as always the most ambitious, but without French support an uprising by ‘Young Ireland’ came to nothing.
The tide of revolution turned in France too, and more bloodily. A huge armed insurrection in June 1848, motivated by the political and social disappointments of unemployed Parisian workers, was crushed by the army under General Cavaignac, one of the few truly republican generals, who became the new head of government. Louis-Philippe commented from England that ‘republics are lucky: they can shoot people’. Cavaignac told Normanby that ‘he was sure that in London and everywhere else much satisfaction would be felt’.34 For the time being, revolution in France was over, and it ceased to be an inspiration to radicals in Britain.
The real beneficiary was someone who had recently begun to attract notice in Britain, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew. The emperor’s only son – ‘Napoleon II’, ‘The Eaglet’ – had died young in Austria. Louis-Napoleon was his political heir. Until 1848 his career had been a bad joke. He made absurd attempts in 1836 and 1840 to seize power, was imprisoned, escaped, and lived as a man-about-town in London. After the revolution, he returned to France and found himself a political celebrity. When he announced his candidature to be the first elected president of the republic, it soon became clear that he would win by a landslide; and in December 1848 he duly did. The Napoleonic legend, fashioned on St Helena to portray the emperor as a selfless philanthropist, enabled him to declare that ‘my name is a programme in itself’. He had created an image of concern for social problems. The political alternatives – republican, royalist, socialist – had all made themselves unpopular. He attracted support for different, even contradictory, reasons: he would both prevent further revolution and stop royalist counter-revolution; he would both help the poor and restore business confidence; he would both make France great and keep the peace. However, the new constitution allowed presidents to serve for only one four-year term, which was not enough for a Bonaparte. To stay in power he carried out a coup d’état on 2 December 1851, which involved brief fighting in Paris and a major insurrection in the provinces. A plebiscite gave him overwhelming popular support; but it was never forgotten that he had shed French blood and transported thousands to penal colonies.
THE PRINCE-PRESIDENT’S FIRST LADY
‘Miss Harriet Howard’, born Elizabeth Harryett in 1823, the daughter of a Brighton publican, was a beautiful, intelligent and accomplished courtesan, one of several English women who, notwithstanding the frumpish stereotype, became famous in France for louche glamour. No English woman – except perhaps Queen Victoria – played such an important role in French politics. She had begun her career as the mistress of the champion jockey, Jem Mason. She met Louis-Napoleon in London and astutely picked a winner. As well as providing comforts to the pretender, she also invested vital cash in his political career when he was still a despised outsider. Unlike the hero of Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias, Louis-Napoleon was not ashamed of profiting from his lover’s immoral earnings. Yet however lucrative Miss Howard’s charms, it seems implausible that she could have made herself rich enough to give him several hundred thousand francs. Might she have provided a channel for secret donors? When Louis-Napoleon became ‘Prince-President’, he often held secret meetings with political allies at her house conveniently close to the Elysée. But when she appeared at the Tuileries palace as his unofficial consort after his 1851 coup d’état, Parisian society was scandalized. She quickly had to make way for a suitable wife and mother for the dynasty when the president became emperor. Disillusioned, bitter, unmollified by a chateau, a pension, a husband and a title, she died in 1865.
From pub to palace: the fragrant Miss Howard.
The period 1848 to 1851 demolished the orthodox liberal view that France and Britain were following converging paths. France had had a revolution, a civil war and a coup d’état, and then over the next two decades, Louis-Napoleon (who made himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852) turned France into a modernizing dictatorship. Britain, in contrast, had survived ‘the year of revolutions’ without even the resignation of a minister. The Chartist and Irish campaigns of 1848 were soon forgotten or incorporated into the national narrative of continuity, consensus, moderation and reform. Britain, said an Austrian minister, was ‘apart from the European Community’.35 It was, in Tennyson’s famous lines,
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.
This sense of apartness shaped British identity, and France again gave the fullest example of what Britain was apart from: 1830 had not after all been its 1688. The French, it seemed, were incapable of liberty. The British attained perhaps their highest-ever level of self-satisfaction. Schoolchildren would learn that they belonged to ‘the greatest and most highly civilized people that the world ever saw . . . The modern era of European civilization receives its highest expression in the British isles . . . There are no people like the British.’36 The French were mocked, or worse, pitied. This has been diagnosed as just the usual francophobia.37 But things had changed. First, in contrast with the 1790s and 1800s, the old francophobic imagery – foppish mannerisms, skinniness, dandified appearance – had disappeared. In cartoons (some by French artists such as Gavarni, who worked for Punch), the French are no longer portrayed as a different genus from the English. Following the dictatorships of Cavaignac and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the commonest symbols of Frenchness became army uniform and the fashionable military moustache and goatee. The French had formulated a concrete set of ‘English’ stereotypes since 1814, but the British no longer had a clear image of the modern French. Second, ‘francophobic’ British criticisms are indistinguishable from those expressed by French commentators themselves: British perceptions were influenced by the views of liberal and republican exiles, who had become pessimistic about their own nation.
EXILES: HUGO AND THE STORMY VOICES
OF FRANCE
Victor in Drama, Victor in Romance,
Cloud-weaver of fantasmal hopes and fears,
French of the French, and Lord of human tears . . .
As yet unbroken, Stormy voice of France!
Who dost not love our England – so they say;
I know not – England, France, all men to be
Will make one people ere man’s race be run.
ALFRED TENNYSON, ‘To Victor Hugo’
The question now is whether these islands belong to us or to Victor Hugo & Co.
LORD PALMERSTON, October 1855
In 1848 one French exile left England – Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte – and a stream flowed back. Louis-Philippe and his entourage. Guizot and other ministers. Left-wing refugees after June 1848. More left-wing politicians after a doomed uprising in May 1849. Then a sizeable and diverse influx after the coup d’état in December 1851, which included Catholic conservatives, liberals and republicans, and the protean Victor Hugo, who had been through several political reincarnations, but now found his vocation as arch-exile. They totalled about 4,500, some banished, most fleeing prison or penal colonies. Though Dover complained about the cost to its ratepayers, the British as a whole were proud to give refuge with no questions asked: from 1823 to the end of the century, not a single asylum-seeker was refused or expelled. This was bitterly resented by other governments, who suspected that the British and Palmerston, ‘the most universally and cordially hated man in Europe’, were encouraging subversion for their own machiavellian ends.38
Victor Hugo on Jersey.
Exile, poverty, inactivity and frustration do not generate affection for hosts, or for fellow exiles. Most exiles kept to themselves, uninterested in English life. The English were equally indifferent, for these were not allies in a common struggle. Most refugees gathered in the cheap grimy streets near the traditional haunts of Soho and Leicester Square, where they frequented cafés, political clubs, and Thomas Wyld’s Reading Rooms. In March 1851 a republican banquet had 600 participants. A policeman reported that meetings were ‘a very curious sight . . . the words Canaille, Voleur, Brigand, Coquin, Jean-foutre continually used in speaking of each other’.39 They were no less critical of their hosts. The radical leader Ledru-Rollin caused offence by dashing offLa Décadence de l’Angleterre, gleefully predicting its inevitable collapse into mass famine. It was the usual, if rather well-expressed, diatribe against ‘the vulture alone in its eyrie’, its exploiting aristocracy, starving workers, hellish slums, suffering colonies, universities sunk in ‘pleasure and dissipation’, and its lack of idealism, organization and even grammar.40 The Russian exile Alexander Herzen thought that ‘the Frenchman cannot forgive the English, in the first place, for not speaking French; in the second, for not understanding him when he calls Charing Cross Sharan-Kro, or Leicester Square, Lessesstair-Skooar. Then his stomach cannot digest the English dinners . . . the whole habitus, all that is good and bad in the Englishman is detestable to the Frenchman.’ Hugo declared superbly that ‘when England wishes to converse with me, it will learn to speak French’.41
Hugo’s thoughts in his island exile: the tidal wave of ‘destiny’.
Assimilation, even if it were possible, would negate the integrity of exile. Guizot declined a chair at Oxford. A leading socialist was sneered at as ‘Louis Blanc Esquire’ for settling in too well, even having English books and furnishings. Hugo rejected the life of literary and social London, the receptions and the country houses which his fame and his royalties would have opened. Not even his sexual rapacity prevented his choice of an exile within exile, the closest he could get to France, the Channel Islands (where he contented himself with maidservants and needy local women). He worked ingeniously at smuggling his book-length philippics Napoléon le Petit and Les Châtiments into France; they also had a considerable influence in Britain. He invented a new religion (still practised in Vietnam), and experimented with spiritualism (Napoleon I communicated his approval of Hugo’s opposition to his nephew.) About 100 of the most militant exiles – ‘hairy, hunch-backed and obtuse’, according to Hugo’s long-suffering lover Juliette Drouet42 – gathered round him in Jersey, under the surveillance of the French vice-consul and the Royal Navy. But they had less legal protection than in England, and after one exile published rude remarks about Queen Victoria, several dozen were expelled, really as a sop to the French government, by now Britain’s ally in the Crimean war. Hugo simply moved to Guernsey. Real exile, like that of his former hero Napoleon, had to be on a sea-girt rock – ‘I shall gaze at the ocean.’ Napoleon had had Longwood House; he had Hauteville House, both shrines to their masters’ egos. Guernsey was a rejection of Victorian England as well as of Imperial France – especially when the former began to find virtues in the latter.
Hugo spent nearly twenty of his most superhumanly productive years in exile, and he became a worldwide celebrity, even more so than his English counterparts Dickens and Tennyson. He finished Les Misérables, the overflowing political and social saga of post-Napoleonic France, a huge popular success. He wrote vast quantities of poetry and visionary literature, and two novels, one set in the Channel Islands, the other in a fantasy Britain inhabited by characters such as Gwynplaine, Dea and Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie. Meanwhile, his son translated Shakespeare. Hugo, like most of the disillusioned French Left, abandoned nationalism, which had been hijacked by Napoleon III. France – ‘that wretched fellow’s whore’ – had shown itself unworthy of its sacred mission to liberate mankind. As Lamartine grandly put it, ‘too bad for the people’. Hugo turned to pacifism, campaigns against the death penalty, and dreams of a united Europe that would have to manage for the time being without French leadership, but which would eventually, and inevitably, have Paris as its capital – ‘Before it has a people, Europe has a city.’ Above all, he remained as the ‘unbroken voice’ of opposition to Napoleon III’s dictatorship:
If we’re but a thousand, count me in,
If only a hundred, there I’ll be.
If ten stand firm, I’ll be the tenth
And if there’s only one, it will be me!
‘Such a faithful ally’, 1853–66
Napoleon broods for years over an Idea, and sooner or later tries to carry it out; . . . before he became Emperor one of his fixed Ideas was to wipe out Waterloo by the Humiliation of England . . . He hardly knows himself
how he may feel Six or Twelve Months Hence.
PALMERSTON, 185943
Really it is too bad! No country, no human being would ever dream of disturbing or attacking France; every one would be glad to see her prosperous: but she must needs disturb every quarter of the Globe and try to make mischief.
QUEEN VICTORIA, 186044
Napoleon III was the most ambitious ruler France has had since his uncle, Charles de Gaulle included. That he is not as famous as either is because he failed disastrously, and his failure, unlike that of Waterloo, could not be transformed into heroic myth. Domestically, he wished to ‘end the revolution’ by creating popular authoritarian government, buttressed by a modernized economy. Like all his predecessors since Charles X, he wanted to supersede the ‘treaties of 1815’, regain territories lost in Napoleon’s defeat, and make France the dominant power in a new European system based on what he called ‘the principle of nationalities’ – broadly speaking, national self-determination. This ‘principle’ would justify France’s expansion to her ‘natural frontiers’, fragment her multinational enemies, Austria and Russia, and create new nation-states allied to France, especially Poland and Italy. If carried out it would inevitably bring France into confrontation with other Great Powers, but if it worked it would restore French hegemony. Napoleon III, who claimed, probably sincerely, to be carrying out the ideas of his uncle, had learned one vital lesson from the St Helena pronouncements: ‘all our wars came from England’ – though he reassuringly ascribed this to a regrettable misunderstanding.45To change Europe he needed British acquiescence. So, unlike Charles X or Louis-Philippe, he would champion causes popular in France and Britain, offering to be Britain’s ally. He was the least anglophobe of French nationalists. He had enjoyed his exile in London, and used it to make friendly contacts. He admired British modernity, expressing none of the fastidious distaste shown even by relatively anglophile intellectuals. He is surely the only French ruler to have served a British monarch as a special constable.
Opinions of the new emperor were divided in Britain as in France. Was he the man of destiny who had saved France from anarchy, or the ‘conspirator . . . the walking lie’, as Prince Albert put it,46 who had cruelly destroyed its liberties? Should British criticisms be moderated for the sake of good relations – should ‘our free press cease to brawl’, as the prolific and political poet Tennyson put it, so as not to ‘sting the fiery Frenchman into war’? Was it true, as Napoleon had proclaimed, that ‘the Empire means peace’, or would a Bonaparte inevitably menace Britain? British confusion manifested itself early on. Palmerston’s unauthorized expression of approval for the coup d’état in December 1851 got him the sack. The Foreign Office was unhappy at Bonaparte calling himself ‘Napoleon’ or ‘the Third’, not least because this was forbidden by the 1815 Treaty of Paris. British consuls in French ports were instructed to watch out for preparations to invade. Over the next two years, Britain hastily built up its navy to deter such a possibility, but ended up using those ships as France’s ally in a war against Russia.
The Crimean War, remembered now on both sides of the Channel for a few vignettes – the Taking of the Malakoff, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Lady with the Lamp – was the deadliest war fought anywhere between 1815 and 1914, costing some half a million lives, mainly Russian and Turkish. It shattered the European peace established in 1815, and, together with the 1848–9 revolutions, of which it was a consequence, ignited a century of conflict. Tsar Nicholas I, untouched by the revolutions, flexing his muscles, and hostile to the new Bonaparte, quarrelled with the French over the conflicting rights of Christian churches in Palestine. Behind the monkish squabbles stood two states whose ancient claims to ‘protect’ Christians were excuses to interfere in Ottoman politics. Nicholas recklessly used the quarrel to manufacture a crisis intended to destroy the Ottoman empire and redistribute its territories. No other state wanted this, and Britain especially wanted to prop up the Turks to keep European rivals away from its land route to India.
Napoleon III and his able advisers realized that the crisis could put France back at the centre of European affairs, whether they brokered a compromise or fought a war in alliance with Britain – this, according to the foreign minister Walewski (Napoleon I’s illegitimate son) would be ‘a gift inspired by Providence’.47 A Russian attack on Turkey in 1853 brought the British and French navies into the Black Sea to protect Constantinople, and led to war. London and Paris decided to attack Russia’s naval base at Sebastopol, in the Crimean peninsula, the source of the tsar’s seaborne threat to Constantinople. An expedition duly landed in the Crimea in September 1854 and fought its way to Sebastopol – an epic commemorated in patriotic paintings, verse and street names on both sides of the Channel. Napoleon made a state visit to Britain, and the queen was delighted to find him ‘as unlike a Frenchman as possible’. She returned the visit, making a pilgrimage with her son to Napoleon’s tomb, a gesture which, she hoped, wiped out ‘old enmities and rivalries’. Palmerston (prime minister from 1855) and Napoleon both fantasized about ‘rolling up’ Russian power, and the navies operated in the Baltic (bombarding Russian bases) as well as the Black Sea. But Sebastopol held out, and the Allies were forced into a winter siege, in which disease and cold killed far more men than bullets.
COMRADES IN ARMS
This was the first time French and British had fought as allies since the Dutch war of 1674. The elderly British commander Lord Raglan, once Wellington’s dashing aide de camp who had lost an arm at Waterloo, occasionally referred absent-mindedly to the enemy as ‘the French’, as every textbook relates. Yet he got on well with them, and spoke the language fluently. Indeed, relations between the Allies at all levels were good. Wrote one British corporal, ‘The French and ourselves got on capitally, particularly the Zouaves whom we found a very jolly set.’ The British were impressed by the uniformed female cantinières, ‘very ugly, but pronounced by our men to be stunning’. Even a gaffe by the Duke of Cambridge, who without realizing it invited General Canrobert to review the troops on the anniversary of Waterloo (which Canrobert had also forgotten) was treated with good humour. The difference between the Allies was that the French were more professional. Canrobert said that seeing the British was like going back a century. French professionalism included grabbing the best billets and the best food, skills the British soldiers rather admired. British blunders – most notoriously the charge of the Light Brigade – seem to have evoked both sympathy and professional disapproval. General Bosquet’s comment, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’, remains famous; and another French general exclaimed ‘I have seen many battles, but this is too much.’ There was some British resentment that as their own numbers and morale dwindled through sickness the French took the leading role, and there were accusations of too much ‘talk and bravado’. But at the culmination of the siege, the French took the key position, the Malakoff, whereas the British could not take their objective, the Redan – ‘a shameful and disastrous failure’ after which the French seem to have regarded the British as negligible.48 The poor equipment and administration and inept leadership of the British army caused a political scandal, whereas the French army (despite even worse losses from disease) proved that it was once more the most effective in Europe.
A decorative ribbon from the Crimean War, symbolizing the new alliance.
The length and cost of the war caused alarm in France, especially when Napoleon announced that he would go and take command in person – something his advisers managed to prevent. When Sebastopol was finally taken in September 1855, the French were determined to make peace. The war transformed the standing of Napoleon III and France. It broke up the alliance of Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia that had defeated the first Napoleon and kept the Bourbons and Louis-Philippe in a position of inferiority. The peace conference was held in Paris in 1856, a recognition of France’s status. For the emperor, it was the first step towards his vision of a new Europe. He explained to his ministers that the war had been ‘the revolution everyone expects’, and he told the foreign secretary Lord Clarendon ‘frankly’ that his real objects had been ‘Poland and Italy’. The Russians, who had refused to recognize him as a legitimate monarch, now depended on him to protect them from the consequences of defeat, and were delighted to find him treating them as long-lost friends. The British were furious: ‘the Emperor and His Minister have behaved . . . ill’.49 It worked. The Russians, weakened, humiliated and feeling betrayed by their former allies Austria and Britain, were willing to give Napoleon a free hand in western Europe. The conference was still in session at the Quai d’Orsay when in July 1858 the emperor slipped away to the spa at Plombières, not to take the waters, but secretly to meet Camillo Benso di Cavour, prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia.*Together they planned a war to eject the Austrians from Italy and create an Italian confederation under French protection. In return France would obtain the territories of Savoy and Nice, won and lost by Napoleon I.
Orsini’s bomb attack outside the Opéra.
Britain had played an unwitting part in Napoleon’s Italian machinations. On 14 January 1858 three Italian republican nationalists exiled in Britain, led by Felice Orsini (the son of a survivor of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow), threw bombs at the emperor’s carriage as it arrived at the Paris Opéra. They hoped that killing him would bring back a republic that would intervene in Italy. He was unharmed, but 156 people had been injured, eight of whom died. Orsini was guillotined, but was permitted to make a stirring public appeal to the emperor to free Italy: ‘Prince, the roots of your power cling to a revolutionary stem. Be strong enough to assure independence and liberty, they will make you invulnerable.’ This Napoleon himself fundamentally believed, and his narrow escape convinced him that he should act – hence the meeting with Cavour. However, he and his ministers had been angered and scared: had Napoleon been killed, France would have been thrust into turmoil. When it was realized that Orsini and his comrades had prepared their attempt in Britain, Bonapartists rounded on the old enemy.
BRUMAGEM BOMBS FOR BONAPARTE
In October 1857, a Birmingham metal-caster, Joseph Taylor, received an unusual order from a certain Thomas Allsop, whom he assumed had some connection with the army. The specification was for thin steel cases for six large grenades of a new design. Each was made of two hemispheres, the lower having several protruding detonators, the upper being segmented to produce 150 fragments. Allsop was a middle-class Chartist, the son of a Derbyshire landowner acquainted with the radical writers Cobbett and Hazlitt. A French refugee, Simon Bernard, bought mercury and nitric acid from several London pharmacists to make the highly unstable explosive fulminate of mercury. Orsini’s housekeeper Eliza Cheney helped to dry it in front of her kitchen stove in Kentish Town. A prototype bomb was successfully tested in an empty quarry in Sheffield by George Holyoake, a Birmingham craftsman turned journalist, former Chartist parliamentary candidate, and supporter of the cooperative movement. The steel hemispheres were carried via Belgium as ‘gas equipment’, and filled in Paris. Although when thrown the bombs all exploded, one right under the emperor’s carriage, they failed in their main purpose. Flying fragments caused many injuries, but the bombs’ design may have made the fragments too small to penetrate the coachwork. None of the ‘English connection’ was ever caught.50
Whitehall was crimson with embarrassment – ‘we are a nuisance to Europe’, admitted Clarendon. Yet there was no question of handing over refugees: ‘we might just as well ask Parliament to annex England to France’. Lord Cowley, ambassador in Paris, urged that it did not matter ‘what is done provided something is done’. This timeless political wisdom caused Palmerston to introduce a Conspiracy to Murder Bill, intended to convince the French that action was being taken while assuring the British that nothing had really changed. But, as one minister confided to his diary, ‘John Bull has got his back up.’ A leading Liberal condemned the government as ‘abject, afraid of France, and bold only in the massacre of Chinese’. A protest rally was held in Hyde Park. The Bill failed in the Commons, and the government resigned. Most of Orsini’s helpers escaped, but Simon Bernard was caught and in April 1858 tried at the Old Bailey for murder. The defence council turned it into a political trial, alleging that its purpose was to ‘gratify a foreign potentate’, whose throne was ‘built upon the ruins of the liberty of a once free and still mighty people’. He urged the jury to stand up for the ‘cause of freedom and civilization throughout Europe . . . though 600,000 French bayonets glitter in your sight’. They duly acquitted Bernard. The foreign secretary thought this ‘a rascally demonstration, disgraceful to our country’.51
The French ambassador Persigny was threatening and the foreign minister Walewski demanded whether ‘the right of asylum [ought] to permit such things? Is hospitality due to assassins?’52 Several army regiments petitioned the emperor to let them ‘get at these wild beasts even in the recesses of their lair’. Once again the prospect of a French invasion loomed, and there were even fears that India, in the throes of the Great Mutiny, might have to be abandoned to concentrate troops for home defence. Napoleon, however, was determined to prevent a breach, and three months later welcomed Victoria and Albert to the gala opening of the naval base at Cherbourg, begun under Louis XVI – an ambiguous compliment, as it would be the base for an invasion, ‘a knife pointing directly at Britain’s jugular’.53
In April 1859 Napoleon and Cavour began their war against Austria, France’s main enemy on the Continent. Since 1815 Austria had been the dominant power in Italy, and its ejection was a dream of French policy. The violent counter-revolution of 1848–9, in which Austria had been the most ruthless agent, had made British public opinion anti-Austrian and no less pro-Italian. ‘I side with those who are at war with Russia and Rome, with earthly and spiritual despotisms,’ wrote one of Gladstone’s friends, ‘and who stand for the liberty of enslaved nations and consciences.’ Giuseppe Garibaldi, the nationalist guerrilla, was a hero in Britain – perhaps the most popular foreign hero there has ever been. The British government’s pleas for a negotiated compromise were ignored by everyone. Though it was highly suspicious of French ‘piracy’, it was certainly not going to help Austrian ‘tyranny’.54 So French troops could be ferried from Marseilles to Genoa without fear of interference from the Royal Navy. They duly defeated the Austrians in June 1859. The Kingdom of Sardinia expanded into the Kingdom of Italy. The British applauded and tried to take some credit. The new nation then ceded Savoy and Nice to France.
British opinion was thoroughly confused. Since the revolution, French patriots had demanded their ‘natural frontiers’ of sea, mountain, and river. Savoy and Nice gave them the Alps. But ‘natural frontiers’ also meant the Rhine, which implied absorbing parts of Germany, Luxembourg and that most sensitive of trouble-spots, Belgium. Did Napoleon intend to take these too? It seemed that the Bonapartes had not changed their spots. The launching in 1860 of the world’s most powerful warship, the ironclad Gloire, made the British wooden battlefleet semi-obsolete. Gentlemanly espionage took place, including by Lord Clarence Paget, parliamentary secretary to the admiralty, who bluffed his way on to the Gloire and made measurements with his umbrella. The British responded with the even more powerful Warrior, the first all-iron battleship, and an expensive arms race began. Experts on both sides, professionally inclined to worst-case analysis, saw the other as planning aggression. Napoleon sent officers – ostensibly doing research for his book on Julius Caesar – to study landing places in England.55 Both sides spent huge sums on coastal defences. Palmerston persuaded Parliament to double the military budget to fortify the south coast and the colonies – something that had been advocated and tinkered with ever since the Spanish marriages dispute. Now, at last, mighty structures of brick, stone and iron took shape to defend Portsmouth, Plymouth and the Thames estuary: in all, seventy-six forts and batteries were built in probably the largest such programme in British history. Others can still be seen as far from Cherbourg as Australia and New Zealand.
The queen feared a future of ‘bloody wars and universal misery.’56 So did Tennyson:
Be not deaf to the sound that warns,
Be not gull’d by a despot’s plea!
Are figs of thistles? Or grapes of thorns?
How can a despot feel with the Free? [ . . . ]
Form, be ready to do or die!
Form in Freedom’s name and the Queen’s!
True we have got – such a faithful ally
That only the devil can tell what he means.
This poem, published in The Times (and confiscated in Paris), not only expressed a fear, it had also proposed a remedy: volunteer military units, unseen since the first Napoleon. Men flocked to join up. Patriotism and genuine fear mingled with the excitement of wearing a uniform and handling a rifle – volunteering was most popular in Scotland, where the invasion threat was least. The volunteers quickly drew in 100,000 men. Units were based on local communities and existing social networks: there were university units, factory units (the initiative often coming from the workers), the famous ‘Artists’ Rifles’ and ‘London Scottish’, and also teetotallers, cricketers, freemasons, and some radical units dressed in Garibaldian red shirts. In short, the Volunteers were a social and political cross-section, and an undeniable manifestation of the unity that patriots were so proud of. As many as one man in twelve served at some time. They changed the face of Britain, by popularizing military-style beards. Many believed they would stand no chance against French regulars hardened in North Africa, the Crimea and Italy, but they did provide ‘the spectator sport of mid-Victorian Britain’,57 attracting crowds to their parades, balls, concerts, shooting matches and fielddays, even if these also attracted some mockery – a gentle example being Mr Pooter’s experience at the East Acton Rifle Brigade ball, in George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1892). The Volunteers continued until replaced in 1908 by the Territorial Army.
Yet Britain and France continued to act together. Their 1860 expedition against China remains notorious because, in retaliation for the torture and execution of captured diplomats and soldiers, they sacked and burnt the imperial summer palace, one of China’s greatest cultural monuments. Booty turned up in salerooms and museums. Victor Hugo condemned the outrage – and bought some silk for his Guernsey salon. In Mexico, Britain, France and Spain sent ships in 1861 to force the Mexican government to honour its debts – though Palmerston (who had already dismissed Mexican requests to join the British empire) refused to join France in sending troops. Most seriously of all, the two countries teetered on the brink of intervening in the American Civil War. The French and British publics were divided over the rights and wrongs, but both countries depended on cotton imports from the slave-owning South. The British government hoped to keep a distance – ‘They who in quarrels interpose, Will often get a bloody nose,’ quipped Palmerston.58 But the British faced unwonted problems arising from being a neutral (trading with and supplying armaments to both sides), and hence the victim, rather than the enforcer, of a blockade. There were heated exchanges between Washington and London. Napoleon had a political interest in involvement, as the Confederacy was offering to support his adventure in Mexico, which he was trying to turn into a quasi-colony under the cricket-playing Habsburg Archduke Maximilian. In the summer of 1862, with the American civil war seemingly deadlocked, Napoleon suggested joint mediation by France, Britain and Russia. But neither Britain nor Russia agreed. Soon afterwards, a temporary improvement in the military situation of the North, and more importantly Abraham Lincoln’s belated proclamation of slave emancipation, made British intervention on behalf of the slave-owners unthinkable. Anglo-French mediation, backed by naval blockade-breaking, would have saved the Confederacy, with unpredictable long-term consequences. But Napoleon could do nothing without British support. Sudden European problems caused him to abandon Mexico and Maximilian, who was executed. The events of the 1850s and 60s showed how powerful a combination France and Britain might be, but also how uncertain and mistrustful their partnership was.
They did became economic allies, however, signing a commercial treaty in 1860, negotiated by the idealistic free traders Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier. This was proposed by the British, and agreed by the emperor as a ‘bone’ to stop Britain ‘growling’ over the annexation of Savoy.59 For Napoleon and his advisers it was also a bold step to cut working-class living costs and stimulate growth. The influence of former Saint-Simonians (an 1830s sect that combined socio-economic and religious utopianism), who included Chevalier, was strong under the Empire. They were keen on railways, canals (both Panama and Suez were planned by them), modernization and free trade. The treaty was popular among British industrialists and in the City. France’s powerful silk and wine producers also approved, and their exports ensured that France had a trade surplus with Britain. But the treaty was highly unpopular with the French coal, metallurgical and cotton industries. Protests by employers and workers revived the hitherto weak opposition to Napoleon. Critics recalled the Eden Treaty of 1786, which had preceded the revolution. They argued that France was not like Britain and ought not to be: everyone knew that Britain was full of starving proletarians, and had to depend on imports for its food and raw materials. France should remain ‘balanced’, harmonious and if possible self-sufficient. The treaty remains controversial with economic historians, who perpetuate contemporary arguments: was free trade a gust of fresh air, doubling Franco-British trade, and blowing away economic cobwebs; or was it a doctrinaire experiment that damaged French agriculture and industry, and precipitated economic depression?
The Anglo-French treaty was the core of an embryonic European economic community, soon extended to the whole of western and central Europe, with free movement of population and certain rights of citizenship. Europe became for a time Britain’s main trading outlet.60 The French also sponsored a Latin Monetary Union, with Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and the Papal state, whose common currency lasted until the First World War. Yet cross-Channel relations remained tense and suspicious.
Tales of Two Cities
London may become Rome, but it will certainly never be Athens: that destiny is reserved for Paris. In the former we find gold, power, material progress to the highest degree . . . the useful and the comfortable,
yes; but the agreeable and the beautiful, no.
THEOPHILE GAUTIER, 185261
Paris . . . is a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully attractive.
CHARLES DICKENS62
Cities, multiplying their turbulent populations, overflowing their boundaries, stinking, smoking, germinating new diseases, vices and crimes, multiplying opportunities and dangers, dissolving old conventions and distinctions, producing prodigies of technology and wealth, became a dominating manifestation of the nineteenth century, its vanities and fears. The two cities par excellence were London and Paris, perpetually compared and contrasted, ‘the two faces of civilization’, which crystallized the differences and rivalries of their respective countries.63 Writers and artists thrilled and alarmed the public with tales of their mysteries and dangers. Governments competed to penetrate the mysteries, control the dangers, tidy up the filth and put the cities on show.
The century’s two greatest popular novelists, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, created haunting images of the two cities, most famously in Oliver Twist (1837–8) and Les Misérables (1862). Balzac, Stendhal and a host of lesser but popular writers shared the fascination and the sales. Hugo had begun with Notre Dame de Paris (1831), quickly translated, which took the medieval city as its protagonist. He was palely copied by W.H. Ainsworth, in Old St Paul’s (1841). The pioneer of the contemporary urban romance was Pierce Egan, in the very successful Life in London (1821), with heroes Tom and Jerry. Eugène Sue, scapegrace dandy, member of the Jockey Club and brilliant populist, was commissioned to write something similar on Paris. His rambling Mystères de Paris(1842–3), combining sex-and-violence with sentimentality, promised ‘episodes in the lives of barbarians as uncivilized as the savage tribes portrayed by Fenimore Cooper. But these barbarians are among us.’ His poor but honest victims, spine-chilling criminals, heartless oppressors, a repentant prostitute and a philanthropic prince in disguise, drew a huge and demanding readership of all classes from the prime minister down. As the newspaper serial appeared, they corresponded with the author, demanded story lines, gave and asked advice, and eventually elected him to parliament as a socialist. Sue spawned an international literary craze. Paul Féval cheekily cashed in with Mystères de Londres (1844), without having set foot there, presenting London as ‘that great whore expert in every vice, whose colossal corruption when one day exposed will horrify the world, and which will finally collapse, rotted like Sodom and Nineveh, under the crushing weight of its shame’.64 But Sue’s real counterpart was G.W.M. Reynolds, inMysteries of London (1844–8). He also paralleled Sue’s politics, becoming a leading Chartist and owner of the radical Reynolds’ News. There were also many more-or-less factual investigations and revelations, most famously the memoirs of the Paris criminal-turned-detective Vidocq, the pessimistic Frégier’s Des Classes dangereuses (1840), which identified the criminal poor as a threat to the State, and Henry Mayhew’s more sympathetic London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Reporting of real crimes was popular in both cities.
This literary interchange between London and Paris created a picture of the nineteenth-century city that we still recognize. It is ‘a most intricate maze of narrow streets and courts’65 of incomprehensible behaviour and secret languages (the argot of Paris and thecant of London), of feral children and sinister criminals. ‘There are in Paris horrible passages, labyrinths, ruins . . . Paris at night is fearsome . . . when the tribe of the underworld sets forth . . . In the hideous lairs which Paris hides away behind its palaces . . . there lurks a swarming and oozing population.’66 This mysterious urban life takes place in a metaphorical and sometimes literal underworld (caverns and sewers), sometimes in desolate suburbs where the respectable never venture, sometimes in inner-city criminal strongholds. Dickens’s Jacob’s Island is matched by Hugo’s Cour des Miracles; Saffron Hill by the Boulevard de l’Hôpital; the Artful Dodger by Gavroche. Paris has its stink, reminder of corruption; London has its fog, symbol of mystery.
Paris had one secret that London did not share: revolution. One of the many dramatic climaxes in Les Misérables is the barricade, during the abortive 1832 insurrection, from which the heroes escape through the ancient Paris sewers, ‘the city’s conscience’. Fear of revolution lies behind much of the writing on nineteenth-century Paris. But there is no great French novel about Paris during the revolution of 1789, too huge and too controversial a challenge: even Balzac and Hugo stayed silent. So the great Paris revolutionary novel is Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859), which fixed the revolution in the collective imagination of the English-speaking world, and thus created lasting ideas about the French.
Dickens’s novel crystallized round his imaginative preoccupations – imprisonment, rebirth, renunciation, sacrifice – and its plot was borrowed from a forgotten melodrama. It reflected British ambivalence about the revolution, ‘in favour of reforms and violent against violence’.67 Yet the British were also fascinated by that violence, as shown by the success of Madame Tussaud’s exhibition of revolutionary horrors. Dickens, a Tussaud enthusiast, was equally impressed by his friend Thomas Carlyle’s lurid French Revolution, with its moralism, melodrama, sentimentality and spluttering rhetoric. Carlyle guided Dickens’s research on the revolutionary period, which he did seriously – his French was good – and he was sensitive to criticism of inaccuracy. His caricature of the ‘cringing and fawning’ Old Regime was all cruel, foppish aristocrats, hungry Parisian workers and emaciated, clog-shod peasants – just like Hogarth and Gillray. The seminal event in the Tale, the killing of a child by a nobleman’s carriage, recalls many eighteenth-century complaints about Paris streets. Dickens claimed ‘full authenticity’ for this episode, and insisted that noble privileges had led to ‘frightful oppression of the peasant’, whose lot, ‘if anything be certain on earth . . . was intolerable’.68 Hence, he shows the revolution as a terrible act of popular justice and revenge, but which corrupted those carrying it out. There are no French heroes in the Tale, only predators and victims. The English, on the other hand, though often absurd, represent kindness, humanity and selfsacrifice, and England, with its manifold faults, is a haven where people can lead ‘peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy lives’. Even in Soho, the exiles’ refuge, ‘forest trees flourished, and wild flowers grew . . . country airs circulated with vigorous freedom’.69This idea of England as haven was given further popular expression in Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). Dickens’s hope for France was expressed in his hero’s prophetic thoughts at the foot of the guillotine: that ‘the evil of this time’, caused jointly by the aristocrats and the revolutionaries – ‘new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old’ – would end by ‘gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out’.70
A Tale of Two Cities was neither francophobic nor reactionary. Conservative French critics attacked it for condoning revolution. If characteristically English in its interpretation, it was not exclusively so. Most French people also rejected the Terror. ‘Human blood has a terrible power against those who have spilt it,’ wrote the republican historian Michelet. ‘The Terrorists have done us immense and lasting harm. Were you to go into the last cottage in the farthest country of Europe, you would meet that memory and that curse.’71 What changed France’s own view was a long rehabilitation of the revolution by liberals and moderate republicans from the 1820s onwards, who repudiated the Terror and created an expurgated vision of the revolution as the messy birth of a better age. This is compatible with the Dickensian picture. But French republicans also exalted the revolutionaries as heroes, the revolution as the climax of modern history, and France as the vanguard of humanity. Their revolution is not just tragedy, as it was for Dickens, but mystical redemption: France ‘owed it to the world . . . those laws, that blood and tears she gave to all, saying: Take, drink, this is my Blood’.72 This version of world history fell on deaf ears across the Channel, where Progress had a different pedigree, and where the Dickensian view of the revolution as tragedy not triumph prevailed.
London, disparaged during the eighteenth century for its lack of dignified monuments, took up the challenge after Waterloo. The Prince Regent urged John Nash to outdo Paris. In the biggest single building plan ever carried out in London, he created Regent Street, Regents Park and Carlton House Terrace, remodelled St James’s Park and Buckingham Palace, and planned Trafalgar Square. But a financial slump in 1825, the death of George IV, and a complete change in aesthetic taste, put an end to visions of stuccoed grandeur. Paris after Napoleon remained largely static, with its medieval street plan forming the swarming, picturesque, dirty and dangerous warren evoked by Hugo and Sue. The centre was becoming a vast slum, choked by people, traffic and refuse, and deserted by its richer inhabitants.
Both cities were manufacturing centres specializing in small-scale skilled production, though Paris had more heavy industry and far more bureaucrats, while London had more commerce and banking. Already the largest cities in Europe, both had to cope with accelerating growth. During the first half of the century, Paris doubled and London trebled its population, London reaching 1 million in 1811, and Paris in 1846. Both received a grim warning in 1832 when cholera, spread through drinking water, killed 19,000 people in Paris and 5,000 in London. London had begun, however haltingly, to make the herculean effort to keep itself relatively clean and healthy. Both cities were to have their epic conquests of sewage, but Paris lagged generations behind, with its open sewers, its streets ‘rivers of black and putrid muck’, its overflowing cesspits, and its notorious suburban mountain of refuse. Despite the condemnation of London by French (and many British) observers as a purgatory of filth, poverty and smog compared with the charms of Paris, Londoners had much more space, better hygiene, a higher standard of living, more children of whom a larger proportion went to school, and longer life expectancy. Despite accusations that London epitomized harsh class inequality, income was more evenly distributed there than in Paris, where more people lived on unearned income, and far more children worked.73 A British artisan visiting Paris in the 1860s found ‘the general domestic condition of the French ouvrier greatly inferior to that of the British workman’.74
The Great Exhibition of 1851, coming so soon after the devastating depression of the late 1840s and the upheavals of 1848–51, showed off Britain’s self-confidence and London’s primacy. The idea had come from a businessman, Henry Cole, who had got it from the 1849 exhibition held in Paris – one of the regular exhibitions of French goods. The Great Exhibition, however, was unprecedentedly international. The astounding glass and iron Crystal Palace, four times as long as St Paul’s, was ‘indescribably glorious’, thought the queen. Few dissented, as 15,000 exhibitors from round the world displayed their wares to an average of 43,000 people every day for six months – the largest indoor crowds ever assembled. The French press urged readers to go to London and be ‘dazzled’. French exhibitors and the French government regarded it as a Franco-English contest – no one else counted – which they felt they had won on grounds of quality. They were determined to outdo the original exhibition by their own version in Paris in 1855: ‘The struggle is keen . . . France is incontestably ahead in all that concerns art, taste, finish, elegance, distinction . . . England is ahead in strength, power, the astonishing, the enormous, the useful.’75 More broadly, French writers liked to claim Paris as the cultural capital of the world, while the British saw London as the centre of its political, moral and economic progress.
London, despite or because of its decentralized governance, was the more modern and economically successful city. Probably most French people did not admit this. One who did was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, and his view counted. He wanted to transform Paris, making it the hallmark of his rule. He began model workers’ housing within months of being elected president, and the young architect Baltard was commissioned to design a huge covered market, inspired by the Crystal Palace – the famous Halles Centrales, begun in 1851. After his coup d’état Bonaparte had power to do what previous regimes had only dreamt of, and he found an effective agent in Georges Haussmann, prefect of the Seine department. London was their model. They conceived a Parisian ‘Hyde Park’ complete with Serpentine in the Bois de Boulogne, and planned small urban parks described by the franglais term square. Parisian versions of ‘English gardens’ were built in the new parks at Montsouris, the Buttes Chaumont, and Monceau (the neglected site of the Duc d’Orléans’s 1770s extravaganza), with artificial lakes and mountains – though walking on the sparse pelouses was forbidden. Successful efforts were made to equal, and surpass, London’s standards of policing, street lighting, traffic access, public transport, shopping, sanitary regulation, and water supply. At last, in the 1870s, Paris began a real sewerage system, and the 60,000 domestic cesspits faded into odoriferous memory. The ‘métro’ was, however, forty years behind the ‘tube’.
Both cities demolished swathes of their past, grew in size and wealth, were hailed as the ‘capital of the world’ and denounced as the ‘modern Babylon’. They scrutinized each other, and deliberately grew apart. London, loosely administered and market-driven, sprawled into its surrounding villages, so land, building and rents stayed cheap for a century, and even working-class families could have houses. Victorians hated being crowded into the city, which they saw as dirty and dangerous: they wanted space, freedom, family life and domestic privacy – in short, suburbia. The ideal was to express individuality through variety of styles, decorations and materials. Paris, hemmed in until the 1920s by a moat and ramparts, whose line still forms its administrative and psychological frontier, and ruled by a central authority, remained more compact and densely populated. Defence, prestige and internal security were its priorities. Its new style was disciplined, uniform, monumental and aggressively modern. Some compared it with London: ‘Go to the Rue de la Paix, the Rue Castiglione, the Rue de Rivoli: it’s a real piece of London on the banks of the Seine.’76 Others thought of New York or San Francisco. New roads prised open the riot-prone slums and dispersed their inhabitants. The medieval Ile de la Cité was mostly razed and made into an official enclave. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, hotbed of revolution, was outflanked by wide avenues. The intention was ‘to assure wide, direct and multiple connections between the main parts of the capital and the military bases destined to protect them’.77 One critic mocked that the aim was ‘to promote the free circulation of ideas and of troops’.78 Haussmann, less philanthropic than his master, concentrated more on the opulent west than the poorer east of the city. The outer districts, where working-class immigrants were piled, were neglected wastelands, ‘the first big social ghettos in urban history’.79 ‘Families are crowded worse than in any Irish hovel,’ wrote the London Building News in 1861, in ‘houses built of lumps of plaster from demolitions . . . roofed with old tin trays’.80 It is hard to know what sort of city Parisians wanted, but it was not that of Haussmann. Political opposition grew, which aggravated the problems, because Napoleon and Haussmann reacted by pushing factories and workers out into thebanlieue. Only in the twentieth century were tentative experiments made to copy English ‘garden suburbs’ near Paris, but without affecting the character of the banlieue as a whole. The problem thus originated still plagues France 150 years later. Yet the achievements of two decades were stupendous, and came in the nick of time. London too lives with its Victorian legacy, its ‘inner city’ problems balancing Paris’s blighted banlieue.
The changes in London and Paris attracted admiration and condemnation on both sides of the Channel as contrasting visions of modernity. Each was seen as the antithesis of the other. Critics saw London, four times the size of Paris and twice as populous, as a drab, featureless monster, whose dispersal of its residents into suburbs and separate houses destroyed community. ‘London is not really a city,’ wrote a French essayist in 1862, ‘it is an agglomeration of boroughs, villages, countryside, plains, meadows, and gardens . . . It is not an entity.’81 Paris, more compact and crowded, was more convivial – or, to English and some French critics, lacked domesticity and that untranslatable concept, privacy. Paris became more like Samuel Johnson’s London, with its social life in public; whereas London democratized the salon, as middle-class families entertained at home. Although the two cities wrote another chapter in the great saga of Franco-British incompatibility, there was more to it than the usual prejudices. Attitudes towards the new Paris were aesthetic, political and ethical, not national. Critics of the Empire, French as much as British, saw it as the stultified expression of centralized dictatorship: ‘we have only one street . . . under a multitude of names’.82 Moralists deplored it as materialistic and corrupt. Taxpayers jibbed at the cost. Aesthetes discovered the treasures of the old city, fast disappearing into rubble: ‘poor, brilliant, joyous, sublime, filthy and adorable Paris’ was being replaced by ‘a city without a past . . . the quintessence of dullness, pomposity and straight lines’.83 Criticisms were shared by Left and Right, and could take many forms. French republicans condemned speculators’ profiteering, lamented the economic and social costs and demanded urban self-government. British liberals pointed to the ‘un-English’ methods of Haussmann as an argument against over-regulation and expensive new building projects in London. British governments, on the other hand, were determined that new official buildings, notably the Foreign Office, the India Office and SomersetHouse, as well as churches, law courts, museums, and the new Thames Embankment (rivalling the quais of the Seine), should keep pace with Paris and sustain London’s pretensions to be the ‘capital of the world’.84
Policing was also a cause of debate. Though both cities had a reputation for criminality, Paris was seen as more heavily policed – even though the Second Empire police copied the British ‘beat’ system. Libertarians often commented unfavourably on the visibility of the French police, but it was accepted that they made Paris more orderly. The streets and theatres were safer, without fights and drunkenness; and prostitutes, under police regulation, were less intrusive than in London. This relative ‘decency’ of public places in Paris meant that bourgeois women could move around more freely. However, when regulation of prostitution, modelled on Parisian practice, was imposed in English garrison towns by successive Contagious Diseases Acts of the 186os, this ‘Napoleonic system’ of ‘legislating on behalf of vice and against women’ was fought by feminist moralists.85
To other Victorians, the Paris that Carlyle condemned as ‘a corrupt, abominable city . . . nothing but a brothel and a gambling hell’ was a potent attraction – ‘a huge university where [men] go to graduate in vice’.86 Visits were promoted from 1855 through a series of six increasingly grandiose International Expositions over the next eighty years – more than any other city has ever staged. The Empire and the succeeding Republic deliberately set out to outdo the Great Exhibition and supplant London as the world’s metropolis. For the first time, international tourism became the experience of hundreds of thousands, and Thomas Cook extended his operations to the Continent: 26,000 British tourists visited Paris in 1852, 40,000 in 1856, 60,000 in 1867. Much of the excitement lay in the imagination, for what seemed new and unique to Haussmann’s Paris could often be found elsewhere, and reality often fell short of fantasy. The risqué new entertainments of the boulevards and café-concerts, for example, were often pale copies of London’s music halls. The ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ of Napoleon’s court (which Queen Victoria feared had done ‘frightful harm to English society’87) normally amounted to croquet and charades. But more important was the impression of newness, excitement and indeed alarm inspired by ‘the American Babylon of the future’, as the fastidious Goncourt brothers dubbed it.88 A vogue for nostalgic books about ‘vanishing Paris’ was balanced by an equal vogue for futuristic fantasies. Paris and London, as it were, changed places: the quaint and traditional deliberately made itself the epitome of the new. In Baudelaire’s famous lines,
Old Paris is no more (alas! a city’s form
Changes more quickly than a mortal’s heart).
This was Napoleon’s intention – even though behind the new façades, with apt if unintended symbolism, Paris retained more ancient buildings than any other northern European metropolis. An economic boom after the lean years of the late 1840s, the reassertion of French military power, a dynamic regime relatively open to nouveaux riches and strenuously fashionable, and even a feeling in the 1860s – familiar to earlier French regimes – that they were ‘dancing on a volcano’ created a worldwide image of Paris as the quintessence of modernity. The images were fixed for later generations by artists and writers who set out to pin this florid butterfly. In their different ways Baudelaire, the Goncourts, Flaubert, Manet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Monet, Morisot, Degas, Zola, Toulouse-Lautrec, even Offenbach, set out to ‘paint modern life’, anonymous, venal and alluring – which largely meant Parisian life. The titillating notion of a can-can-dancing ‘gay Paree’, always to a large extent a creation of and for tourism, became from the 1860s onwards a central feature of British stereotypes of France.
ENGLISHNESS IN PARIS: THE DRESSMAKER
AND THE WHORE
We are Englishing ourselves more and more. Women are beginning to wear leather belts à l’anglaise, with steel trimmings . . . they have an Englishman, the famous Worth, as their couturier; they buy plaids and tweeds. Meanwhile, men are not being cured of their whiskers à l’anglaise, their suits à l’anglaise, their bearing and jargon à l’anglaise. Those purveyors of Parisian elegance who are not called Worth are called ‘John’s’ or ‘Peter’s’.
Paris Amoureux, 186489
Two celebrities of the new Paris were English. Charles Frederick Worth established haute couture as an international industry. He also, incidentally, universalized the slang term chic.90 Cora Pearl was one of the most famous of Paris’s few dozen luxury whores, the grandes horizontales.
Worth (1825–95), the son of a bankrupt Lincolnshire solicitor, was apprenticed to the fashionable Regent Street drapers Swan & Edgar. In 1845, he went to widen his experience in France, where the finest textiles came from, and worked for the leading Paris draper, Gagelin-Opigez. One of his jobs was showing customers shawls and cloaks, using a live model for whom he designed plain dresses to set off the merchandise. At customers’ demand, Gagelin reluctantly agreed to sell such dresses, which were then shown at the Great Exhibition and the Paris exposition of 1855, where they won a medal. Worth opened his own shop in the Rue de la Paix, not then a fashionable shopping street, with a Swedish male partner also trained in London. Male dressmakers – and foreign to boot – were unheard of, and regarded as improper, owing to the physical intimacy established with their customers. Worth’s breakthrough was due to two other foreigners, uninhibited by Parisian convention. He offered dresses at a very advantageous price to the unconventional Austrian ambassadress, Princess Metternich, who introduced him to her friend, the new Spanish-born Empress Eugenie, who liked his extravagant and colourful styles. This made Worth’s name and fortune. The empress never wore the same dress twice, and the same expectation was imposed on all women at court: a week’s stay at Compiègne required fifteen new dresses. ‘Monsieur Vorss’ became de rigueur, and his clothes feature in many portraits, including those by Renoir, Manet and Degas. How did he do it? His skills as a salesman (honed from the age of twelve) helped, and he developed them into a dictatorial caricature of the ‘artistic genius’: ‘I use colour like Delacroix and I compose.’91 He introduced English male tailoring techniques to achieve better fit and finish, and used sewing machines, a design studio, and 1,200 staff to speed production. He knew the textile trade, and had an excellent range of fabrics. Clothes became big business in Second Empire Paris: dresses for the 130 balls in the 1864 season cost some 29 million francs.92 Worth charged unheard-of prices and made unprecedented profits. He also standardized the features of the modern fashion industry: seasonal collections, live mannequins, branding and franchising. Helped by the Paris expositions, he made fashion into a global industry, with large sales in Britain and America – something only a man could have done at that time. Generations of English couturiers followed (including Redfern, who in 1885 introduced the suit for women, Creed, and Molyneux) all further bringing masculine cut and materials and freer, slimmer sporting styles into French female fashion – a continuation of an old tradition (see above, page 90). Even Coco Chanel, epitome of Parisian chic, based her daring 1920s innovations on clothes borrowed from English lovers.93 The ‘arrival’ of British designers in Parisian couture in the 1990s was the resumption of a long association.
‘Cora Pearl’, née Emma Crouch (1835–86), daughter of a bigamous musician, won comparable celebrity though inevitably less durable financial success. Educated at a convent in Boulogne, she became a prostitute in the 1850s and moved from London to Paris, where she quickly became famous for her ostentatious and spendthrift life financed by a succession of wealthy men-about-town, many of them members of the Jockey Club. Buying her was an initiation rite into a select yet raffish fraternity that included the emperor’s cousin Prince Napoleon and allegedly the Prince of Wales. Her career languished in the 1870s owing to her age, a change in political atmosphere, and a scandal when a young heir she had bankrupted shot himself in her house. She became dependent on gifts from former lovers, and tried to make money from her memoirs. She had received vast sums, and spent them. Lavish entertaining, jewels, clothes, horses and carriages were a necessary professional expense, because public notoriety – above all the knowledge that only the very rich could afford her – was a more important part of her allure than beauty or, probably, sex. ‘Women were luxuries for public consumption,’ wrote Dumas the younger, ‘like hounds, horses and carriages.’94
Worth and Pearl were English in occupations in which the islanders were not popularly believed to excel. Yet both flaunted and profited from their Englishness. Worth used only English sales assistants. High-class French prostitutes adopted ladylike public behaviour, but Pearl, ‘the English style of courtesan’, was famous for loud, ‘un-French’ manners, accent and appearance, including being one of the few women of her time to dye her hair blonde. Englishness enabled them to get away with and profit from unconventional behaviour, including aggressive entrepreneurialism. Pearl possibly benefited from the ingrained French belief in English kinkiness, and she was certainly advantaged by her horsey reputation among the Jockey Club set: ‘riding like a jockey, wielding her crop with a swagger,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘she drank a lot . . . her bosom [was] marvellous.’95
The successes of Worth and Pearl show that anglomania was still going strong. They also show that the style and image of Paris had become cosmopolitan.
LONDON THROUGH FRENCH EYES
Gustave Doré, whose popularity in England led to a gallery devoted to his work being established in London, produced in the late 1860s some of the most famous images of the ‘Dickensian’ city, published in 1872 as London, a Pilgrimage. Unlike many French observers, Doré liked the life and bustle. He shows ‘typical’ scenes of work and leisure, including docks, slums, Hyde Park, the Boat Race, and the Derby. Yet his seemingly realistic images have a dreamlike quality: the sombre, foggy atmosphere; impossibly dense, but orderly and unthreatening crowds; rather beautiful but inanimate faces – all reflecting common French perceptions.
The 1870 war with Germany and the 1871 Paris Commune led several French artists to take refuge in Britain. Among them were Claude Monet, living in Kensington, and Camille Pissarro, who got married at Croydon registry office. ‘Monet and I were very enthusiastic about the London landscapes. Monet worked in the parks, whilst I, living at Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effects of mist, snow and springtime.’96 They also studied Turner and Constable, with their ‘open air’ paintings oflight and ‘fugitive effects’. British and French historians long disagreed on whether this had a significant effect on their art. It now seems clear that if for Pissarro it was superficial, for Monet Turner became a life-long source of inspiration, visible in his paintings of the Thames and the Seine. One contemporary French critic even called him ‘the French Turner’.97
Doré’s British: an alien but unthreatening species.
Pissarro’s Impressionist view.
Tissot: making London chic.
Pissarro found no demand for his paintings, and grumbled that ‘only when abroad does one feel how beautiful, great and hospitable France is, what a difference here, one meets only disdain, indifference, even rudeness . . . there is no art here, only business’. Ironically, his correspondent was simultaneously writing to tell him that ‘Horror and terror are everywhere in Paris . . . my only desire is to get out . . . One would think that Paris had never had any artists.’98 Pissarro was being rather unfair to London, but certainly contemporary French painting was not then highly considered in comparison with British or German. Jacques-Joseph – alias ‘James’ – Tissot, who left Paris because of the Commune, also discovered this. Yet after a few months Degas wrote to him enviously that ‘they tell me you’re making a lot of money. How much?’ Tissot succeeded, according to a jealous compatriot, by being an ‘ingenious exploiter of English stupidity’. His works were both admired and criticized for their Frenchness – that is, Second Empire Frenchness, flashy, modern, hard and shallow. His glossily chic paintings of English scenes and people – in ‘Neo-French-English’ style – were seen as verging on the improper, and making the London elite look vulgar and nouveau-riche, like Parisian ‘swells’ or ‘French actresses’, or else like French caricatures of Britishness, ‘supercilious, ‘disdainful, ‘cold and antipathetic’, with ‘lanky faces and crane necks’. Many felt that Tissot was giving distasteful messages. Oscar Wilde found him ‘deficient in feeling and depth’, showing ‘over-dressed, common-looking people’.99
Spectators of Disaster, 1870–71
[The English] are a terrible race, and I would not like my fatherland to be
their enemy – or their friend.
JULES VALLES100
I fear the French are so fickle, corrupt & ignorant, so conceited and foolish
that it is hopeless to think of their being sensibly governed . . . I fear they
are incurable as a nation though so charming as individuals.
QUEEN VICTORIA101
France blundered into one of the worst years in its history – what Hugo called ‘the terrible year’ – in July 1870. Britain stood by and watched with mixed feelings. Britain and France, if united, were strong enough to deter any attack on Europe’s power structure. But they were not united. British suspicions of Napoleon’s intentions ensured that he was seen as the problem, not the solution. So London had done nothing effective to prevent Prussia from starting successful aggressive wars against Denmark in 1864 and against Austria and other German states in 1866.
Napoleon was playing with fire. He was under domestic pressure to show that he was still the master of European affairs. So in July 1870, the emperor and his ministers, in a dispute with Prussia over the Spanish throne, pushed the crisis to the point of war. French generals believed that they had the world’s most effective army, as did cheering Parisian crowds chanting, ‘To Berlin!’ The chief minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, believed that a war with France was inevitable before Germany could be united, so he goaded them into declaring it. He also leaked to The Times proof of Napoleon III’s intrigues to annex Belgium, which confirmed London’s worst suspicions.102 British opinion thought the French were the aggressors as usual. Most sympathized with what they thought was the underdog – in Carlyle’s famous letter to The Times, ‘noble, patient, deep, pious and solid Germany’. The queen expressed the general view in characteristically emphatic prose: ‘We must be neutral as long as we can, but no one here conceals their opinion as to the extreme iniquity of the war, and the unjustifiable conduct of the French!’103
War had become a spectator sport. The electric telegraph, the war artist and the photographer had brought the immediacy of the Crimea and the American civil war to the public. Battles a few hours from London were a thrilling prospect. The national dailies, and the London Illustrated News, had unrivalled abilities to bring back news and pictures fast. They had famous correspondents with both armies, who were on familiar terms with generals and statesmen, and there was no effective censorship. The French and German armies clashed on the frontier in August, and the British settled down to watch. The German armies, instead of being thrown back in disorder by the battle-hardened French, advanced with astonishing speed. Most of the French regular army was chased into the great fortress of Metz, and besieged. The rest of the army, and the emperor himself, were forced to capitulate at Sedan on 2 September. When the incredible news reached Paris, the imperial regime evaporated. Empress Eugenie, joined eventually by the emperor, became the fourth successive monarch to flee across the Channel.
The veteran statesman Adolphe Thiers came to London to plead for British assistance in securing moderate peace terms. The prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, made it clear that France should make concessions. Its refusal to cede territory was ‘out of proportion’ to the military situation. He did not oppose annexations on grounds of British interest, but only disliked the ‘transfer of human beings like chattels’; ‘It would comfort me to find that the Alsatians were disposed to be German.’104 The press tended to think that France deserved all it got, and that Thiers, the jingoist of 1840, was the ideal recipient of condign humilation. The Manchester Guardian gloated that ‘when he sues for peace . . . the vainglorious spirit of his country, which he personifies, has at last been sufficiently chastised’.105 The Pall Mall Gazette mocked his pleas in a Tennysonian parody: ‘Thiers, idle Thiers, I know not what you mean.’ (The original, from The Princess, was ‘Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean . . .’) France was, however, allowed to borrow in the City, and weapons were sold to the new Republic. Thiers summed up the British position acutely: ‘the European balance, of which we speak to her endlessly, is not much changed for her . . . the sleepless nights that France used to cause her will now come from Prussia’.106 An indignant Parisian wrote to a London friend that ‘The influence of Britain in Europe is down; England is now a merchant’s country, as America is.’107 British residents in Paris were far from popular. The perception of the British as amused bystanders appears in a story by Guy de Maupassant, in which a duel between a bullying German officer and a peaceful French bourgeois is witnessed by two English tourists, ‘close up to see better . . . full of joy and curiosity, ready to wager on either combatant’.108
Paris was surrounded on 19 September. The siege, an epic for France, became a gripping drama for Britain, and a lifetime’s adventure for 4,000 British residents who had stayed until they were effectively trapped. They included Edwin Child, a jeweller’s apprentice learning his craft in Paris, who volunteered for the National Guard, Richard Wallace, the wealthy heir of the Hertfords, Frederick Worth, Cora Pearl, clergymen, journalists, doctors and charity workers for the British Red Cross and the English Seed Fund Society.109 The embassy and consulate departed, leaving about 1,000 British subjects dependent on the financial help of their wealthy compatriots, who set up a British Charitable Fund, chaired by Wallace. Supervised by Ellen and Annette Sparks, this provided money and modest weekly rations – 20z of meat extract, 1lb of rice and 8–12lb of bread.110 Many besieged Britons later published reminiscences, including the wealthy radical MP Henry Labouchère. All were fascinated by the contrast between the frivolous Paris of the 1860s, ‘a modern Babylon, celebrated for its dolls and bonbons’, with ‘vice flaunting unrestrained about the streets’111 and the fervently patriotic fortress-city of 1870 – a change from which moral lessons were drawn. Newspaper reports and memoirs emphasized the incongruities: epicures eating salmis de rat; dandies in uniform; placid bourgeois with rifles; fashionable actresses bandaging the wounded, the zoo elephants bought by the Boucherie Anglaise. The British tone was often sardonic, sometimes in reaction against the gales of bombast from republicans such as Victor Hugo, who had returned from exile. There was much head-shaking over the decadence supposedly caused by the Empire, and doubts as to whether the French could muster genuine, as opposed to histrionic, patriotism: ‘the Paris of the Empire and of Haussmann is a house of cards . . . The war and the siege have knocked down the cards.’112 Such attitudes mirrored those of French upper-class milieux in which many journalists moved, despising both the Empire and the Left.
The proclamation of the new German Empire in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871, followed ten days later by the surrender of Paris without a death-or-glory battle, was a double humiliation that confirmed many sceptics in their views of Parisian efficiency, courage and moral fibre. Edwin Child
Gave my resignation to the Captain, feeling heartily disgusted with the whole affair. 400,000 men capitulating . . . What an end of 20 years uninterrupted prosperity, and what a lesson to a nation fond of flattery and calling itself the vanguard of civilisation . . . [After] a bloodless campaign . . . without hardly seeing the enemy . . . they talk about giving everyone a medal. Why I should be ashamed to wear it!”113
Yet as the war progressed, the British tone had changed. The French bully had become the underdog. Wrote one British radical, ‘Ab[ou]t the war I think the Prussians were right at 1st but in its present phase my sympathies are intensely & most painfully French.’ The foreign secretary Lord Granville wrote ‘my heart bleeds for the misery of France – I lie in bed thinking whether there is nothing to be done’.”114 Many were moved by the gruelling struggle in the provinces, where newly raised French armies, badly equipped and barely trained, fought on despite repeated defeats. At least one British officer cadet joined them – Herbert Kitchener. The siege of Paris ceased to be a joke when real hunger, cold and disease began to kill its inhabitants. Women waited for hours outside food shops in long patient lines, called les queues – a new word for which there was ‘no equivalent in English – happily!’”115 When the Germans, frustrated by Paris’s refusal to surrender, began to bombard the city in January 1871, there were diplomatic protests and a small demonstration in Trafalgar Square. The change in sympathy is clear in Punch’s cartoons. The allegorical representations of France and of the Republic for the first time ever are unambiguously heroic and pathetic, while the Germans begin to appear as heartless barbarians, foreshadowing the ‘Huns’ of 1914–18.
The French, at first blamed for the war, attracted increasing sympathy, even admiration.
The French surrender in January 1871 was welcomed in Britain. Fortnum & Mason and Crosse & Blackwell received orders for large hampers from ravenous Britons in Paris. The Lord Mayor of London’s Relief Fund, with the help of the British government, sent in shiploads of supplies – 1,000 tons of flour, 450 tons of rice, 900 tons of biscuit, 360 tons of fish, 7,000 live animals and 4,000 tons of coal – and it provided grants to destitute peasants and workers to buy seed and tools. The mayor of Paris telegraphed that ‘the citizens of Paris will never forget’, and anti-British feeling subsided. Meanwhile, Richard Wallace had quietly given an estimated total of 2.5 million francs to relieve suffering in Paris.”116
Paris and France faced further disaster. In March 1871, patriotic Parisian radicals rebelled against the newly elected national government led by Thiers, and full civil war broke out a fortnight later. The regular army, controlled by the government (which had retreated to Versailles) began a second siege of Paris, defended by an army of republican National Guards (some equipped with British Snider rifles supplied during the war) commanded by an elected Commune – a name taken from the revolutionary city government of the 1790s. British sympathy for the rebels was limited. Republicans, socialists, free-thinkers and Nonconformists were the most favourably inclined. Some, praising the Communards as ‘thorough patriots and true republicans’, organized a rally in Hyde Park in which 3–4,000 took part. Reynolds’ News and the International Working Men’s Association, directed from London by Karl Marx, gave support. George Holyoake (the tester of Orsini’s bombs) compared the Communards to the Roundheads. TheEconomist admitted that the Commune was effectively a legal government, and the poet and critic Matthew Arnold wrote privately that ‘all the seriousness, clear- mindedness and settled purpose is hitherto on the side of the Reds’.117 Several British visitors (who were allowed to travel in and out) reported sympathetically that Paris was calm and normal. At least one young Englishman was conscripted into the National Guard, and wrote that ‘I can never forget the kindness I met with from them.’118 The Methodist Revd Gibson had some sympathy for their hatred of ‘priestcraft’, and Positivists explained Communard anti-clericalism on the grounds that ‘the Romish priesthood’ were ‘active enemies of liberty and progress’. The Times, also anti-Catholic, gave credence to Communard tales of priestly crimes. But Protestants generally were revolted by acts of anti-Catholic violence, even if they thought that Catholicism was partly to blame for France’s problems. Many British republicans and trade unionists distanced themselves from the ‘Red Republicans’. The strait-laced Edwin Child thought that ‘the words Liberty, Fraternity and Egalité mean obedience to our orders, pillage of all churches and fighting against your own brothers’. British newspapers were alarmed by the Commune’s (largely rhetorical) resurrection of what The Times called ‘the Terror according to the golden model of ’93’. They dismissed Communard politics as ‘childish’ and ‘theatrical’, but were fascinated by women making speeches in political clubs and wearing uniform – a shocking, though titillating, proof of the boldness of Parisiennes. Hostility grew when the Commune arrested the archbishop of Paris and several priests as hostages. Many observers regarded the Commune as having been taken over by ‘ruffians, thieves and assassins’ manipulated by extremists. Child ‘would string ’em up, the cutthroat vagabonds’.119
‘The Commune or Death’: a British vision of the Commune: a nightmarish world turned upside down.
The decent British workman rejecting French extremism.
On 21 May 1871 the regular army broke through the city’s fortifications and a nightmarish week of street fighting began. Huge fires were started, as acts of defence or defiance. Many of the greatest public buildings – including the Tuileries palace, the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice and the Palais Royal – were destroyed or severely damaged. The Louvre, Notre Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle had narrow escapes. The Daily News compared it to the simultaneous burning of ‘the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Place, Windsor Castle, the National Gallery and the British Museum’.120 The London Fire Brigade offered help. The British press, like the French, propagated the myth of women pétroleuses setting fire to buildings. The army shot thousands of actual or suspected rebel combatants and arsonists. The rebels replied by shooting some hostages, mainly policemen or priests, including the archbishop. It would be hard to exaggerate the sensation caused by ‘a week of horrors, unparalleled in the History of the World’ – tinged with occasional hints of grim satisfaction that ‘Babylon’ had been chastized. The British press harrowingly reported the army’s atrocities – ‘shooting, bayoneting, ripping up prisoners, women and children’ – as well as those of the rebels. British journalists and press artists were probably the only people freely roaming the city (at least one came close to being executed by both sides) and they provided eye-witness reports and pictures. A Daily News reporter watched as prisoners were picked out to be shot: ‘It was not a good thing on that day to be noticeably taller, dirtier, cleaner, older or uglier than one’s neighbours.’ The Times thundered that ‘The French are filling up the darkest page in the book of their own or the world’s history . . . The Versailles troops seem inclined to outdo the Communists in their lavishness of human blood.’121 One of the last of thousands of prisoners to be shot was an English student named Marx (no relation).
The grim irony of these events was heavily underlined: ‘the capital of civilization’ was ‘blazing to the skies’, and in a ‘France boasting of culture, Frenchmen [were] braining one another with the butt-ends of muskets’. The even-handed reporting of both sides’ atrocities must have made many Britons feel, even more strongly than after 1848–51, that all parties in France were beyond the pale. France was ‘a nation determined to be lost’ in which ‘all the wild passions of the human heart have been fused into one vast and indistinguishable conflagration’.122 Again, how fortunate Britain was to be different! This, for Punch, was the ‘French lesson’.
Ravaged Paris became a tourist attraction, while the city authorities hastened to show that Paris ‘was herself again’. French governments always removed traces of civil conflict as soon as possible. Worth bought stones from the gutted Tuileries to make picturesque ruins in his suburban garden. Edwin Child wrote to his father a fortnight after the fighting ended that in six months ‘we shall wonder where all the fires took place’. Revd Gibson was shocked that the city did not seem ‘saddened by the disasters’.123Thomas Cook organized excursions to see the sights, and Parisians were annoyed by ‘big herds of English, binoculars round their necks, guidebook to the ruins under their arms’, ‘feverishly taking notes . . . occasional gutteral exclamations revealing them to be from across the Channel’.124 Tourists bought faked photographs of the dramas of the revolution, including the killings of the hostages. A fragment of sculpture from the demolished Vendôme Column was recovered by the French Embassy from a London saleroom. French observers vilified the ‘English’ tourists as gloating voyeurs; but they also contributed money to restore damaged buildings.125 Some at least were clearly motivated by solidarity, not merely curiosity.
British visitors to the ruins of Paris caused resentment: here a Parisian urchin threatens ‘mylord’ that if he finds it so amusing the Parisians might go and do the same in England. Yet many of the ‘mylords’ gave generously to feed and rebuild the city.
EXILES: AFTER THE ‘TERRIBLE YEAR’
There are only seven leagues of salt water between Calais and Dover – but
between the English and French character there is an abyss.
JULES VALLES, exiled Communard126
Crossing the Channel in the opposite direction were 3–4,000 men, women and children fleeing the repression in which at least 12,000 people had been killed and 40,000 arrested. There was less sympathy than for past asylum-seekers: the world had been horrified by the Commune, grossly caricatured by conservative French propaganda. But this horror was partly counteracted by the brutality of the repression. The French government, eager to pin responsibility elsewhere, was trying to blame the disaster on an international conspiracy directed from London by the International Working Men’s Association. Some conservatives denounced a Protestant–Masonic plot against France, initiated by the late Lord Palmerston and inherited by ‘his pupil Gladstone’, in which Bismarck and Karl Marx (‘Bismarck’s secretary’) were all accomplices.127 The French government put pressure on foreign governments to treat fleeing Communards as criminals and refuse asylum. The Economist responded that though England was ‘disgusted with the horrible atrocities of the Commune’s last acts’, they were clearly political crimes, and not amenable to extradition. So as in the past: ‘our government had no power whatever to prevent any of the Communist leaders from coming to England’.128England was the safest refuge, and many of the leaders came. The British authorities paid little attention, apart from asking Karl Marx for information and sending a police sergeant to attend a ‘communist’ meeting at a pub in Islington. He was swiftly thrown out with the promise to break his head if he came back: ‘I did not return,’ he reported with dignity, ‘in order that no breach of the peace should take place.’129
Most refugees clustered as ever round Soho. A few hundred remained until an amnesty was given in 1880. Some settled for good. It was the usual wretched and poverty-stricken ordeal, spiced with recrimination, factionalism and accusations (sometimes justified) of spying for the police. Marx quarrelled with the Communards – though two of them married his daughters – and the International broke up. Positivists, who at first idealized the Communards, soon ended financial aid. So the refugees had to rely on themselves, and set up mutual aid societies, a school, political clubs, freemasons’ lodges and a coop, with expulsion for adultery, homosexuality or drunkenness.
More than fifty refugees set up businesses in London, using their skills in articles de Paris. A musical instrument maker employed fifteen other Communards in Camden Town; others set up a wallpaper business, others again the typically Parisian manufacture of artificial flowers. Several lost savings in a porcelain-painting venture. More successful was the Maison Bertaux, a patisserie in Greek Street, still flourishing in 2006. Pascal Grousset, the Commune’s foreign minister, developed an interest in sport, which he was later to transfer to France. The sculptor Jules Dalou, despite not speaking the language, found that ‘the English welcome us with open arms’.130 He taught at the Royal College of Art and led a new Naturalist school in Britain, receiving many commissions, including for the royal chapel at Frogmore, before returning to Paris to create the huge statue of the Triumph of the Republic in the Place de la Nation. Even more extraordinary was the career of the revolutionary extremist Georges Pilotell, an artist who, fleeing a death sentence for murdering hostages, became a successful theatrical designer, memorably creating the costume for the ‘super-aesthetical’ poet Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience.131 Life was harder for men of letters. Several struggled to make a living with a newspaper aimed at bringing Parisian arts and literature to a British readership. Another abortive scheme was a French cultural centre in Bloomsbury. Teaching was the eternal standby. General La Cécilia (who failed to get a chair in Sanskrit at University College, London), Colonel Brunel (notorious for burning down the Rue de Rivoli) and other leading Communards taught at Eton, Sandhurst, the military academy at Woolwich and the naval college at Dartmouth. Brunel taught at Dartmouth for more than thirty years, where his pupils may have included the future George V. The poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud – ‘deux Gentlemen parisiens’ – advertised ‘LEÇONS de FRANÇAIS, en français – perfection, finesses’ in the Daily Telegraph, and at least one student took them up at ten shillings a time. Rimbaud later got a job at a language school in Berkshire.132
Verlaine and Rimbaud had come to London to escape disapproval of their sexual relationship as well as possible police enquiries into their tenuous connections with the Commune, for which Verlaine had been a newspaper censor. Rimbaud was ‘delighted and astonished’ by what French visitors usually hated – the ‘energy’, the ‘tough’ but ‘healthy’ life, the fog (‘imagine a setting sun seen through grey crêpe’), the drunkenness and the vice, which made Paris seem provincial.133 They found a job writing French business letters for an American newspaper. Rimbaud spent much time in the Reading Room of the British Museum, published a poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and wrote the greatest work of Franglais, Illuminations.
Rimbaud’s excitement with London was not shared by the leading Communard journalist, Jules Vallès, who bemoaned the ‘horrors of pale ale’ and ‘everyone’ being drunk. His corrosive La Rue à Londres (1876) followed in the footsteps of Flora Tristan forty years earlier by savaging almost every aspect of English life, from boys whistling in the street to the colour of the buildings – and he added some that Tristan had overlooked, such as London’s deplorable lack of facilities for illicit sex. English girls were ‘shocking’ in their willingness to pet on park benches, though the damp climate made them ‘stupid’ and ‘frigid’, incapable of real sensuality. Older English women, with ‘horse lips’, were lazy, drunken and after their early twenties unpalatable – they went off quickly, ‘like game’. Besides, they showed a disgraceful lack of interest in exiled foreign writers. Worst of all were female ‘eccentrics’: campaigners against prostitution or cruelty to animals, explorers, mountaineers or evangelists – ‘neither man nor woman’. He was appalled by the lack of class-consciousness of London workers, who dressed like everyone else, rather than in the costumes of their trade, and he was incensed by the patriotism of the poor. Indeed, patriotism was for Vallès the essential vice of the English, above all their abominable dislike of the French, which even caused them to drive perversely on the wrong side of the road. The conflict was fundamental: ‘the furious fog that resents the sun . . . the duel between beer and wine!’ He did, however, grudgingly allow that ‘the black city’ was free: although ‘it never speaks ill of the queen [it] taught me, from a republican country, what liberty is’.134
A very different kind of refugee was Richard Wallace, who decided, given its narrow escape from bombardment and arson, to move the most valuable part of the vast Hertford art collection to London. Since the 1st Marquess of Hertford had been ambassador in 1763, successive marquesses and their illegitimate offspring had become the most prominent, wealthy, cultivated and dissolute Parisian–British family. Wallace now abandoned the boulevards to become a rather French-looking country squire, baronet and Tory MP, as popular for his munificence in Ireland and England as he had been in Paris. It is for his parting gift to the city, the drinking fountains he provided soon after the war (of which some fifty survive) that he is remembered there. He died in 1890, leaving everything to his widow, née Amélie Castelnau, whom he had met more than fifty years earlier as a nineteen-year-old selling perfume in a Paris shop. She subsequently bequeathed the world’s finest collection of eighteenth-century French paintings, furniture, jewellery and porcelain to the British nation as the Wallace Collection – ‘the greatest gift ever made by a private person to a state’.135
1 Britain’s most important democratic movement, with a large working-class membership, which campaigned for a ‘People’s Charter’ of democratic rights.
2 Despite its name, the Kingdom of Sardinia was ruled by the House of Savoy, and its main territory and capital, Turin, were on the mainland, on both sides of the Alps, hence the Kingdom was often known as Piedmont.