CHAPTER 12

“Work Is the Sole Purpose of My Existence”

SHUTTLING BETWEEN BORDEAUX AND VERSAILLES IN early 1871, a distracted Adolphe Thiers was consumed by multiplying responsibilities. He had an entire nation to run. Jules Favre, however, could smell the coming storm. Unlike Thiers, Favre had spent the entire siege in Paris trying simultaneously to defend the city from the outside and to head off internal revolts. “You reproach me with thinking of nothing but Paris,” he said to Thiers. “I reproach you with neglecting it.”

In fact, Thiers was guilty of something worse than neglect. With potentially suicidal indifference, his new government had begun passing callous ordinances, each of which precipitously worsened the economic circumstances of Paris’s poor. On March 7 the government ended the siege-period moratorium on debts; all debts were to be repaid within forty-eight hours. Another law ended the moratorium on rents; families who couldn’t pay up were to be evicted. The government also ended a moratorium applying to items deposited at pawnshops, which had offered a lifeline to many; such goods could now be sold if they weren’t reclaimed. Thousands of items—including 2,300 mattresses and 1,700 pairs of scissors—were now lost to their former owners. Most provocatively of all, the Assembly cut off the daily stipend of 1.5 francs for National Guardsmen. This left tens of thousands of families without enough money to buy food. Thiers needed to raise money from the banks to make the first payment of war reparations, and the banks demanded proof of financial stability and order. But the upshot of these decisions was disastrous. Within three days, 150,000 people were thrown into bankruptcy.

Of course, everyone was short of money, including landlords. Manet, for instance, who owned, with his brothers, properties to the northwest of the city, was out of cash. On March 6 he wrote to Duret from Arcachon, begging for help: “I thought I would have some coming in about now and would not have to ask before you offered it—but there are a few commitments I must meet and I’m very short!” Other Parisians, however, were in much worse predicaments. They had no lifelines.

And now, their outrage was palpable. At a moment when the government needed to create and maintain hope after a prolonged disaster, it had instead ignited panic. Blind to the damage it had wrought, the National Assembly, still convening in Bordeaux, continued to go about its business. On March 8, it voted to annul the election to the Legislative Assembly of Garibaldi. There was logic behind the decision: Garibaldi was not, after all, a French citizen. But he was a committed republican who had fought valiantly for the French against the Germans. What’s more, he had broad appeal across the various leftist factions. (Louis Blanc called him “a soldier of revolutionary cosmopolitanism.”) His dismissal provoked Victor Hugo to resign. “I am bound to say,” he told the Assembly, “that Garibaldi is the only general who fought for France and the only general who was not defeated.”

Hugo was still in Bordeaux five days later, intending to leave the next day, when Charles, his forty-four-year-old son, died suddenly while in a cab on his way to meet his father at a café. Charles, a journalist and photographer, was obese, and his health had been undermined during the siege by long, cold nights on the ramparts. His distraught father decided that the funeral should be held in Paris, and he arranged to have his body transported back to the city.

On March 17, the day before the funeral, Thiers made two fateful decisions. Tipped off that Louis Blanqui would be visiting a doctor in Lot, in the South of France, he had the revolutionary socialist arrested and imprisoned. Taking Blanqui out, he reasoned, would deprive the radicals of their natural leader. Thiers then turned his eye on Paris. He knew that the cannons confiscated by the National Guard had become a powerful symbol for disaffected Parisians, especially those agitating for revolution. Almost two hundred of them were arrayed in serried ranks on the hill at Montmartre, their very presence feeding the radicals’ appetite to continue the fight against Prussia and to revolt against the National Assembly. All this turbulence needed to be calmed, and the government had to reclaim control of the capital. Thiers convinced himself that reclaiming the cannons was key to doing so.

It was the gravest mistake of his career. His plan was to launch raids at dawn to recover the cannons for the regular army. At the same time, in a citywide operation, he would arrest opposition figures, occupy railway stations and bridges, and take over the Place de la Bastille, where demonstrators continued to gather daily. These actions, he hoped, would discredit the radicals, rally moderates, and pacify Paris.

AT THREE A.M., on an unusually icy and blustery night, soldiers under the command of General Vinoy fanned out across the city. Another general, Claude Lecomte, led a contingent up into Montmartre, close to Nadar’s balloon launching site. Encountering no opposition, Lecomte seized the field holding 171 of the cannons. But what appeared to have been a quick and easy success soon began to unravel. The army had failed to supply enough horses to drag the cannons away, so the soldiers were forced to stand around them in freezing winds. The wait dragged on, and as dawn approached, many wandered off into the sloping streets to find coffee or bakeries. When residents awoke, they saw the soldiers and assumed a royalist coup was underway. Drawing back their curtains, they spilled out into the streets, trying to make sense of what was going on. Word spread that something was awry and that the cannons were about to be taken.

Soon Lecomte’s stranded soldiers found themselves harangued by shopkeepers and National Guardsmen berating and shaming them for doing Thiers’s bidding. “Where are you taking the cannons? Berlin?” they taunted. Louise Michel, the schoolteacher and radical activist (and one of Victor Hugo’s many lovers), ran down the hill shouting about treason. The crowd near the cannons swelled. The soldiers looked hesitant, pliable. Their exchanges with the locals, who now surrounded the cannons, became more inflamed. Unable to get the crowd to disperse, Lecomte ordered his soldiers to load their rifles, fix bayonets, and finally to fire on the crowd. He yelled the command three times. But the soldiers refused. Many lifted the butts of their rifles in the air, signaling their allegiance to the National Guard rather than to the government. Others dropped their guns and proceeded to remove layers of their uniform. Lecomte’s authority had evaporated. Suddenly some National Guardsmen grabbed Lecomte and several of his officers and bundled them into a nearby dance hall.

General Vinoy had been informed of the deteriorating situation and now arrived on the scene, only to vanish again, taking the remainder of his loyal soldiers with him. He knew they were outnumbered and that reinforcements were required.

But he had left Lecomte and his officers behind. Under armed guard in the dance hall, they could only wait and hope for help to arrive. The wait went on. No one came. After a while, they were frog-marched to the local headquarters of the National Guard. As they proceeded, they were hounded by a Goyaesque rabble baying abuse and kicking them from behind. The building in which they were deposited was left undefended, which made the crowd bolder. The windows were smashed and doors kicked open. Still no reinforcements arrived.

Meanwhile a retired general arrived at the Place Pigalle, curious to see what was happening. Tall and august-looking, General Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas, a moderate republican, had participated in the failed January breakout at Buzenval. He had resigned his command of the National Guard of the Seine on February 13. Although he was wearing civilian clothes, he was soon recognized. Once his name was announced, some remembered him for his role in the deaths of revolting workers during the June days of 1848. When word of his presence spread, Clément-Thomas was seized, sprayed with invective, and thrown into detention along with Lecomte and his officers.

Morning turned to afternoon. Then, in a more chaotic version of the executions in Mexico that Manet had depicted four years earlier, first Clément-Thomas and then Lecomte were taken out into a garden with winding trellises at the back of the National Guard headquarters on the Rue des Rosiers (just behind where Sacré-Coeur is today). A shambolic group of Guardsmen and army deserters—the same soldiers who had earlier refused to fire on the crowd—had by now worked themselves up into a kind of delirium and were ready this time to use their rifles. They shot Clément-Thomas, then turned to Lecomte and murdered him, too.

Georges Clemenceau, still the mayor of Montmartre, heard about what was happening and tried desperately to avert it, knowing that the murder of two army generals was guaranteed to trigger violent reprisals. But he arrived on the scene too late. When he saw what had happened—what was indeed still happening, since the generals’ bodies had been dragged out into the street where men and women were now urinating on them—he wept.

THAT VERY MORNING Victor Hugo had arrived in Paris by train for the funeral of his son. The writer had no idea what was taking place in Montmartre. He waited for two hours in the stationmaster’s office at the Gare d’Orléans—right by the poignantly empty zoo—as people gathered for the procession to the Père Lachaise Cemetery. The funeral was expected to attract an enormous crowd. Goncourt was among those who came to pay their respects while Hugo waited. Finally the procession set off across the Seine in the direction of the Place de la Bastille.

Only then did it become clear that something dramatic was taking place in the city. The procession was forced to make several detours to skirt freshly erected barricades. A red flag was flying at the Place de la Bastille. Upon seeing Hugo, the commander of a National Guard battalion ordered his troops to present arms. There was a drum roll and a short silence. A cry of “Vive la République!” went up. The procession moved on. Charles’s prodigious size made the coffin unusually heavy, and when it arrived at the cemetery, it was too big to be carried through the narrow entrance to the burial vault. Workers set to filing down the stone—it was the only solution anyone could think of. For several hours they toiled, turning stone to dust. Worthies filled the unscheduled hiatus with somber speeches as, elsewhere in the city, a revolution was underway.

Alerted to that morning’s turning of the tables in Montmartre, the Central Committee of the National Guard discerned its chance. On its orders, National Guardsmen in Montmartre and Batignolles swept down into central Paris and took over key locations, including the Prefecture of Police, the Place Vendôme, and by evening, the Hôtel de Ville. They met no meaningful resistance, and that night at the Hôtel de Ville the Central Committee gathered for the very first time as a de facto government. It would be known as the Commune.

Thiers’s grand plan—to disarm and neutralize the agitators and restore order to Paris—had backfired spectacularly. He was left with no option but to order Vinoy to withdraw, at first to the Left Bank, then all the way to Versailles. He was working from the same playbook he had used in 1834, when confronted by the second weavers’ revolt: withdraw, contain, debilitate, crush.

ON THE DAY THIERS withdrew his troops from Paris, Édouard was in Arcachon writing to friends. He wrote to the printmaker and painter Félix Bracquemond, admitting that he was desperate to raise some cash. “This dreadful war,” he wrote, had left his finances in shambles. As yet unaware of the extraordinary events unfolding back in Paris, he was eager to return to his professional life as an artist. He wanted to submit The Balcony, his tribute to Goya and his first picture of Berthe, to the International Exhibition in London and was trying to make the necessary arrangements. The previous week, while still in Bordeaux, he had been ushered into the house where the National Assembly was gathering ahead of its move to Versailles. He had never imagined, he told Bracquemond, that France could be ruled by “such doddering old fools.” He made it clear that he meant his description to include “that little twit Thiers.” He hoped Thiers would drop dead one day, midspeech, thereby ridding France of “his wizened little person.”

Édouard’s opinion of Thiers was widely shared. Karl Marx called him a “monstrous gnome.” Flaubert was similarly contemptuous. “Can one find a more triumphant imbecile, a more abject pustule, a more turdlike bourgeois!” he had written to George Sand back in 1867 after Thiers’s speech against Italian unification. “No! nothing can give you the idea of the vomiting that this old diplomatic melon inspires in me. . . . He strikes me as eternal like Mediocrity itself! He crushes me.”

When he did learn of the events of March 18, Édouard was deeply troubled. Writing again to Bracquemond, he expressed himself with a political clarity matched nowhere else in his correspondence. It was a clarity born of bitter experience and profound disillusionment. “We’re living in an unhappy country,” he wrote, before proceeding to express his contempt for the contemptible murderers of Lecomte and Clément-Thomas. The radicals’ bloodthirsty actions, he feared, had all but killed off an idea that had been making such headway in the public mind: namely, that the only appropriate system of government for “honest, peaceful, intelligent people” was a republic.

Only a republic, Édouard maintained, would allow France to regain its pride and its primacy among the nations of Europe, and to rise again “from the appalling depths to which we have fallen.”

Édouard was Parisian to the core. But since the end of the siege, he had been out of the city long enough to appreciate the perspective of the rest of his countrymen. In the provinces, he explained to Bracquemond, you learned quickly that they hated Paris. Moreover, Thiers and the Assembly had erred grievously by choosing not to return to the capital in the immediate wake of the siege. Failing to control the city at that crucial juncture had encouraged the riots and upheavals that had, wrote Édouard, done so much damage, inspiring disgust and despair in “the hearts of all true Frenchmen.”

Shedding the ill-fitting military costume he had donned with such pride in the early days of the siege, Édouard appeared keen to distance himself from party politics and return to his earlier conception of himself as an artist. So much bloodshed and carnage was hardly an encouragement for the arts, he wrote wryly, but if, among so many misfortunes, there was a consolation, it was that they didn’t have to be politicians and win elections.

GUSTAVE COURBET, his old rival, felt differently. The sudden, unforeseen establishment of the Commune filled him with excitement. He had been waiting for this moment all his life. He sensed an opportunity to fulfill his heart’s desire—transforming the arts!—and wanted to make the most of it. On the very day when two generals were executed in Montmartre and government forces were ejected from Paris, several papers, including Le Rappel (which had been founded in 1869 by Victor Hugo’s sons Charles and François-Victor along with Paul Meurice), published an open letter by Courbet. Addressed to his fellow artists, the letter proposed exactly what Bazille and his fellow Impressionists had been agitating for before the war: the establishment of a new, radically overhauled Salon run by artists. “Let them [the artists] determine how they shall exhibit; let them appoint the committees; let them obtain a building for the next Exhibition. It could be fixed for this May 15,” he wrote, “for it is urgent that every Frenchman immediately start to help save the country from this immense cataclysm.”

Earlier regimes, his open letter continued, had “nearly destroyed art by protecting it and taking away its spontaneity.” That “feudal approach” had lasted so long, he claimed, only because it was sustained by a “despotic government.” It had failed. The result had been “nothing but aristocratic and theocratic art, just the opposite of the modern tendencies of our needs.” What were those needs? They were expressed, wrote Courbet, in a philosophy that revealed “man manifesting his individuality and his moral and physical independence.” Government was the enemy: “It is beyond a doubt that the government must not take the lead in public affairs.” Meanwhile, Courbet insisted, art shouldn’t “lag behind the revolution that is taking place in France at this moment.”

But was France, in fact, going to remain a republic, one that valued the “moral and physical independence” of its citizens and artists? To realists, it must have seemed unlikely. But Courbet—although he was the father of Realism in art—was not known for realism in his politics. He seemed blind to the fact that the Communards were far from unified and that their opponents in Versailles were intent on regaining control of Paris.

REACTION WAS SETTING IN. In Versailles, Thiers’s government issued proclamations from which the word republic was pointedly missing. A majority of the Parisian National Guard had just effected a coup, but Thiers, refusing to cede control of the city, now appointed a conservative, Jean-Marie Saisset, to take charge of the Guard—or at least, that part of it not involved in the insurrection. The appointment was deliberately provocative. And yet Saisset remained in the city, mustering Bonapartists, royalists, and all those who wanted the coup to fail. Young Tiburce Morisot was on his staff.

On March 21, Saisset convened as many conservatives and moderates as he could to stage counterdemonstrations in central Paris. The following day they marched from Garnier’s Opéra down the Rue de la Paix toward the Place Vendôme, where Saisset, his small force, and various supporters—about eight hundred people in total—gathered outside the National Guard headquarters, possibly with the intention of seizing it. They held up banners describing themselves as “The Friends of Order” or “Battalions of Order” and shouting “Down with the Committee!,” “Down with the Assassins!,” and “Long live the National Assembly!” But a group supporting the Commune, including a battalion of National Guardsmen, had also gathered. And just as Saisset was about to speak, shots were fired in his direction. It was unclear who fired them, or who was responsible for the return volley of gunfire. Everything about the incident would later be contested. But in the ensuing stampede, a dozen people were killed, including two National Guardsmen, a director of the Bank of France, the editor of Paris-Journal, a young American, and a viscount. The murder of the two generals, Lecomte and Clément-Thomas, had been egregious enough. The Commune now had more blood on its hands.

Paris appeared to be descending into open civil war. The residents of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, including Passy, could no longer feel confident that the “low-life” and “rabble,” as they called the Communards, would be defanged and marginalized by stronger, more moderate forces. Even Victor Hugo was disturbed by the carnage at the Place Vendôme and what it betokened. He left the city for Brussels that day. For all his sympathy with the Communards, he knew the coup was illegal and didn’t want to get involved. (He later described the Commune as “an admirable thing, stupidly compromised by five or six deplorable ringleaders.”)

Over the next few days, Saisset, with the scant forces at his disposal, holed himself up in the Grand Hôtel—a conservative redoubt in the heart of a radicalized city. Tiburce withdraw there, too, but not before making his way through the deserted streets of central Paris—lined with closed businesses and anxious faces peering out from behind curtained windows—to a rendezvous with his parents. He told them he had been in the front ranks during the previous day’s confrontation at the Place Vendôme. “He could not have done more to make himself a target,” marveled Madame Morisot; “he must think he is invulnerable by this time.” Cornélie and her husband felt it best to return to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where they had installed Berthe, but they wanted to stay within reach of Tiburce: “How can one leave one’s son in the thick of this fighting?” For all her maternal concern, Cornélie was proud of her son. In a time of pervasive, generalized shame, when men everywhere—including, in her mind, Édouard and his brothers—had performed feebly and sometimes disgracefully, Tiburce had shown backbone. “This is my idea of how men should behave in a time of peril,” she wrote to his sisters.

Meanwhile, at the Grand Hôtel, Saisset’s forces padded the windows with mattresses and set up barricades and cannons outside. They were isolated and vulnerable, their position seemingly untenable.

On the evening of the twenty-second, the Morisots’ family doctor, a M. Dally, came to dinner in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, having recovered dead bodies and tended to the wounded at the Place Vendôme. He was visibly shaken. Berthe, too, was alarmed—and specifically anxious about Tiburce. These latest events had plunged the whole family back into a state of fear and uncertainty. Berthe confessed as much to Edma. Listening to M. Dally, she wrote, “brought back the siege to me as if I had never come out of it. Life has been a terrible nightmare for six months, and I am surprised that I am strong enough to be able to bear it.”

PEOPLE EMERGING FROM TRAUMA, or from prolonged periods of crisis—of “stuckness”—are often ready to make great changes. Their experiences have given them a profoundly altered idea of what is at stake in their lives. Depending on how much damage they have sustained, and on what their circumstances were before, they may be moved to rewrite the narratives by which they had previously lived. So it was with Berthe Morisot. After living through a four-month siege, an artillery bombardment, a brutal winter, serious illness, and the very real threat of starvation, she was ready to reexamine everything. It wasn’t necessarily that she was suddenly clearheaded. Her health was poor, her worries had deepened, her predicament was still full of unknowns. But her correspondence from this time is impressively cool and self-contained. She was ready to make a new declaration of purpose.

That she did so in a March 23 letter to Edma, her one true confidante, is as unsurprising as it is poignant. This first part of Berthe’s letter was focused on present circumstances. It offered no hint of the conclusion to which she had come. Topographically, Saint-Germain-en-Laye is elevated, and the Morisots’ temporary refuge there had a terrace, allowing them to see across a stretch of the Seine that doubles back on itself, snaking toward the fort at Mont-Valérien. Thiers and his Versaillais forces controlled the fort. They were trying to intimidate the Communards, so cannons boomed “around the clock,” wrote Berthe, giving off smoke they could see from the terrace.

The contending forces were nominally different, but how little had actually changed since January, when the Germans had commenced their bombardment! News from Paris was reaching the Morisots intermittently, but it was like those wisps of smoke: evanescent, possibly significant, but in the end impossible to decipher. Some of the people coming from Paris reported that its inhabitants were starving. Others said the city was surprisingly peaceful. If “everyone is fleeing,” Berthe surmised, it suggested that “life there is not pleasant.” But she could not know anything for sure. She had learned that Passy, their old neighborhood, remained intact. She was hopeful about the fate of the Rue Franklin house. But she had also just heard that Thiers’s Army of Versailles was planning to bomb the Trocadéro from Mont-Valérien. That couldn’t be done, she reported, without causing damage to Passy. So “we are philosophically awaiting the outcome of all this.”

There was more, however, that Berthe wanted to say. To Edma, she could be truthful; their special rapport permitted forthrightness. And yet Berthe’s love for Edma also required her to exercise tact. She wanted to write about nothing less than her dreams for herself, but she could not do it without tacitly registering that, until very recently, Edma had shared those dreams. Now, instead of being an artist, Edma was a wife and mother whose painting days appeared to be over. Even so, Berthe had to say what she had to say, knowing that perhaps only Edma would truly hear it. Reading the letter, you can almost hear her taking a deep breath.

Striking a brisk, even urgent tone, Berthe first asked if the conditions at Cherbourg were conducive to work. The query, she admitted, was self-interested: she wanted to go and stay with Edma, and she wanted to paint. “This may seem an unfeeling question,” she wrote, “but I hope that you can put yourself in my position, and understand that work is the sole purpose of my existence.”

For a woman painter in the late nineteenth century, just to write such a sentence took extraordinary courage. To write it while seriously ill, after a siege, and as a civil war that had forced her family to flee their home was breaking out, was nothing less than astounding.

Berthe elaborated. The countryside around Saint-Germain-en-Laye was lovely, she noted, but she was not interested in painting with amateurish intent, as she perhaps had in the past. Nor did she want “to work just for the sake of working. I do not know whether I am indulging in illusions, but it seems to me that a painting like the one I gave Manet could perhaps sell, and that is all I care about.”

The message—although it was buried in a newsy, somewhat melancholy letter to a beloved sister—was clear: Berthe planned to pursue painting as a profession. It was a statement of frank and unapologetic ambition by a young woman who would go on to be regarded as the most groundbreaking female artist of the nineteenth century. Neither the intimacy of the correspondence nor the coolness of the utterance, nor its humility and self-awareness (“I do not know whether I am indulging in illusions”), can disguise the sense of a new, armor-plated resolve.

TIBURCE HAD SENT WORD from the Grand Hôtel that Saisset’s supporters were awaiting reinforcements. The Morisots’ servant delivered some civilian clothes and linen to him and reported back to Cornélie and her husband that they “were a large contingent and well-armed.” In fact, however, no reinforcements arrived. Instead, the sides negotiated, and Tiburce was assigned to carry the communications back and forth between the various parties. (“He seems to have won considerable respect,” wrote Madame Morisot: “his fellow officers come to take orders from him.”) In the end, Saisset’s small force was allowed to depart for Versailles, and a decision was made to hold citywide elections on March 26. The vote, when it was counted, left no doubt that Paris had rejected Thiers and his conservative National Assembly.

Thiers had effectively guaranteed this outcome, not only by his unpopular actions in Paris but also by his open discouragement of voting. He was adamant that what had happened was an insurrection on which no election could confer legitimacy. In any case, more than half a million mostly middle- and upper-class residents had left the city after the siege, so it was no surprise that the results skewed toward candidates supported by the working class. A wide spectrum of left-wing radicals and reformers won clear majorities. And so on March 28, to the accompaniment of bugles and drums, the Paris Commune was officially proclaimed. A large crowd gathered to witness the announcement, and a contingent of National Guardsmen marched by the platform, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, where the ceremony took place.

Goncourt, writing in his journal that day, declared that government was “passing from the hands of the haves to those of the have-nots.” He did not intend this remark as an endorsement. Authority was passing, he continued, “from those who have a material interest in the preservation of society to those who have no interest whatever in order, stability, or preservation.” His verdict was scathing. And yet large numbers of Parisians drew tremendous moral satisfaction and genuine hope from the Commune’s establishment. They had endured a winter of fear, frustration, and terrible scarcity. Suddenly they had a sense of renewed potential.