Chapter Four

The Moral Order

(1873–1874)

By 1873, Paris was on its way to becoming the city it had once been, before the Année Terrible took its toll. From one end to the other, structures that had been bombarded or burned were being rebuilt, while in a corresponding Herculean effort, thousands of trees were being planted to replace those that had been chopped down for fuel during the siege.

To the north, near the Louis XIV gateway of Saint-Martin, the grand old Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin—the scene of many triumphs for Victor Hugo’s plays before its incineration during a Commune gun battle—was already restored and back in business. In the center of town, all two thousand tons of Napoleon Bonaparte’s impressive Vendôme column—destroyed by Communards as a detested symbol of Empire—had been pieced back together, topped by a statue of Bonaparte looking like Caesar (an interesting choice for the Republic, which could have opted for a more contemporary rendition of the statue, as it had been during the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, or no statue at all).

And then there was the Hôtel de Ville, torched by the Communards in a fire so intense that it took more than a week to extinguish. Reduced to rubble, with only its stone shell remaining, the ruin presented a mammoth challenge to the architects who now undertook to rebuild it. The process would take more than a decade. Along the way, the young Auguste Rodin—still supporting himself with work as an ornamental craftsman—carved one of the 110 statues of eminent Parisians that embellish its exterior. Rodin’s contribution was the sculpture of d’Alembert.1

During the restoration of Paris, the government made some thought-provoking choices, including the statue of Bonaparte atop the Vendôme column, where it chose the version favored by Napoleon III and the Second Empire. Yet the new government hesitated at restoring the Tuileries Palace. As with the Hôtel de Ville, a stone shell of the palace remained, making restoration possible, albeit exorbitant. Still, the palace—the royal and imperial residence ever since Napoleon Bonaparte—was such a vivid symbol of monarchy and empire that the Thiers government hesitated. Torn between whether to demolish the ruins or restore them, it procrastinated. In the end, the blackened shell remained an eyesore for years.

Thiers was similarly undecided about the basilica of Sacré-Coeur, whose proposed site on the Butte of Montmartre would be, at the very least, controversial. Archbishop Guibert was looking for government backing for the proposed basilica, including the right to expropriate the desired properties on top of Montmartre. Thiers procrastinated. After all, the basilica’s most fervent supporters were those who just as fervently supported the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy—an aspiration with which he had little sympathy. But by the time favorable legislation reached the National Assembly, Thiers had been ousted from power and replaced by the arch-conservative royalist Marshal MacMahon. By this time as well, a quarter of the members of the National Assembly had taken the vow to build, in Paris, a basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Although there was some debate in the Assembly, it was no surprise when a law passed, 382 to 138, authorizing the Archbishop of Paris to purchase (by requisition) the desired property for the proposed basilica of Sacré-Coeur.

The blood of martyrs, including (and especially) those martyred by the Commune, was about to be expiated by the royalist right.

L’Hôtel de Ville en reconstruction (Victor Dargaud, 1850–after 1913). Oil on canvas, 1880. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

* * *

Edmond de Goncourt could be nasty. Witty, yes, but nasty. His friends, including Emile Zola, were frequent targets, but those he did not count among his friends drew his worst barbs. Adolphe Thiers was among the latter group. Goncourt avidly listened to his good friend Edouard de Béhaine’s account of a dinner with Thiers and then ripped off the following in his journal: “Béhaine came away appalled by the senile, sententious ramblings of our great statesman.”2

This unfortunate dinner occurred in January 1873. Thiers was, of course, notoriously ambitious, vain, self-opinionated, and cantankerous, but few, including Thiers himself, could have predicted his fall from power in May. After all, it was he who had negotiated successfully with Bismarck for the progressive withdrawal of German troops from France, in tandem with France’s reparations payments (Bismarck’s original position had been to insist on keeping the entire contingent of German troops on French soil until the last payment was received). Better yet, following the success of the second loan, in 1872, Thiers was able to promise that the final reparations payment would be made in 1873—a dramatic accomplishment, since this meant that it would be paid ahead of the 1874 deadline, even if only by a few months. The French were overjoyed at this news, which signaled the imminent departure of their detested German occupiers. Basking in public acclaim, Thiers was judged to be politically invulnerable.

But his very success proved to be his undoing. After the loan was on course for repayment, and negotiations with the Germans virtually complete, Thiers did not seem quite as necessary as before. On May 24, those who detested Thiers for his commitment to a republic, however conservative, stage-managed his fall from power. In his place, the Assembly elected Marshal MacMahon, a staunch supporter of the monarchy, the ruling classes, and the Church. The following day MacMahon announced that “with the help of God, the devotion of our army, which will always be the slave of the Law, and the support of all loyal citizens, we shall continue the work of liberating our territory and of re-establishing moral order in our country.”3

In the words of Thiers’ biographers, this was “the first round of a struggle that would last for the next six years.”4 In fact this struggle, which involved monarchy versus republic, Catholic Church versus secular state, and the role of the army, would last for many years to come.

* * *

“Moral Order” became the defining phrase for the new government, and counterrevolution was in the air. It was now forbidden to commemorate the revolutionary date of July 14. Busts of Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, disappeared. And in August 1873, Louise Michel was taken from prison and, with other condemned Communards, herded onto a train to New Rochelle. From there they were shipped to the French colony of New Caledonia, on the other side of the world.

The voyage lasted four difficult months, with more misery to come. Still, on looking back on the experience, Michel wrote that she “wasn’t bitter about deportation, because it was better to be somewhere else and so not see the collapse of our dreams.”5

* * *

A succession of twelve theaters had housed the Paris Opera, all of which proved unsatisfactory or simply burned. But in 1858, Napoleon III decided to build a truly palatial opera house, one in keeping with his vision for a revitalized and opulent Paris. Of the 171 architects who vied for the prize, the young and virtually unknown Charles Garnier emerged as the winner, based on his frank recognition of this structure’s basic purpose. His Opera, now called the Opéra Garnier or Palais Garnier, would showcase the audience by providing a glittering backdrop for the social encounters that constituted the true heart of a night at the Paris opera.

Construction began in 1862 and continued for years, hindered by the discovery of a water table directly beneath the building as well as by war and the Commune uprising. But after the worst was over and Paris had begun to rebuild, Garnier’s opera house remained an unfinished hulk. The new republic squirmed at the implications of pouring yet more money into this embarrassing reminder of the Second Empire, and made no move to complete it. There even were those who proposed tearing the place down and using the site for Sacré-Coeur.

Then, in the autumn of 1873, a devastating fire destroyed the opera house on Rue Le Peletier. By this time, the government was in the hands of the royalist right, which was less sensitive to the political implications of this paean to wealth and grandeur. And in any case, Paris demanded an opera house. In response, Garnier gathered an enormous workforce and set to work. Once again, as 1873 rolled into 1874, his great opera house was the site of feverish activity.

* * *

“Here’s the letter I’ve had from Monet,” Edouard Manet wrote his friend, the collector and art critic Théodore Duret, in the spring of 1874. “My rent has cleaned me out and I can’t do anything to help him. Can you give the hundred francs to the bearer of the picture?”6

As 1874 opened, Edouard Manet had gone through much of his inheritance and was experiencing significant financial difficulties, but Claude Monet’s financial situation was far worse. Although 1873 had been a reasonably good year for him, his primary client remained his dealer, Durand-Ruel, who was unable to sell most of Monet’s paintings. In addition, expected inheritances from Camille’s and Monet’s fathers had amounted to little. By 1874, Monet’s work had yet to find a receptive audience, and Durand-Ruel had reached the brink of bankruptcy and could afford no more lifesaving purchases. In desperation, the artist now turned to an idea that he and some of his cohorts had floated as early as 1867—that of entirely bypassing the official Salon, which had treated them shabbily, and giving their own private exhibition. Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, and Berthe Morisot agreed to join.

Only Edouard Manet refused to go in with them. After years of ridicule and rejection he had at last tasted success at the 1873 Salon with a painting called Le Bon Bock (The Good Pint), featuring a large, cheerful-looking fellow nursing a pipe and a tankard of beer. The public immediately identified the subject as French Alsatian, and the painting quickly gained appeal as a symbol of France’s recent loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. But Manet failed to understand the cause for this particular success, and although sympathetic with his fellow painters, he insisted on maintaining his ties with the Salon, regardless of the way it had treated him in the past.

The prominent photographer Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar, agreed to let the group use his studio free of charge, and they went forward with high hopes. These were quickly blasted by a hostile reception bordering on hysteria, including warnings that this art form was so inherently vile that it threatened pregnant women and the moral order. Most of the painters in the group were by now hardened to this sort of response, although never before at quite so high a pitch, but the sheer nastiness of the experience must have been especially difficult for Berthe Morisot, whose former art teacher took it upon himself to write a warning to her mother. “One does not associate with madmen except at some peril,” he informed her. “All of these people,” he added, “are more or less touched in the head,” and “if Mlle Berthe must do something violent, she should . . . pour some petrol on the new tendencies.”7

It must have been a challenging situation for Morisot, who had always been hesitant about marketing her artwork. “I did not dare to ask him whether he would buy some of my work,” she had earlier written her sister Edma, after a prominent Paris dealer complimented her on one of her watercolors. The thought of undertaking a commission recommended by Manet made her tremble. “I know my nerves,” she wrote Edma, “and the trouble I should have if I undertook such a thing.” Somewhat later, she wrote that she had sent a seascape to the dealer Durand-Ruel but had not yet heard from him. “I am eager to earn a little money,” she added, “and I am beginning to lose all hope.” Being a woman made her goals even more elusive. “What I see most clearly,” she told Edma, “is that my situation is impossible from every point of view.”8 And yet she was driven to create—and to succeed.

Morisot’s mother did not make matters any easier. “Yesterday,” Morisot told Edma, “my mother told me politely that she has no faith in my talent, and that she thinks me incapable of ever doing anything worthwhile.” Madame Morisot corroborated this in a subsequent letter to Edma: Berthe, she wrote, “has perhaps the necessary talent . . . but she has not the kind of talent that has commercial value or wins public recognition.” More than this, “when a few artists compliment her, it goes to her head.”9

Manet was one of these artists, while Edgar Degas was another. Neither was a fool, and Degas in particular was constitutionally unable to pay a false compliment to a woman—an act that would have been quite beneath him. A member of the haute bourgeoisie,10 much like Manet and Morisot, Degas came from a wealthy banking family whose wealth had quite suddenly evaporated, thanks in large part to enormous business debts run up by Degas’ brother in New Orleans. This devastating news had only recently surfaced, forcing Degas to realize that he would henceforth be dependent on sales of his own artwork to support himself.

Conservative by upbringing and cynical by nature, with as witty and biting a tongue as Edmond de Goncourt, Degas was not a natural colleague for the little group that now took the name “Impressionist” (a name that originated with one of the group’s detractors, who had howled in derision at Monet’s painting, Impression, Sunrise, and thus inadvertently labeled these artists for the ages). Degas did not like either the Impressionist name or the scandal associated with the exhibit. Closer to Manet than to those who had dared to exhibit, Degas did not even like some of the artists who were his colleagues-in-arms. In particular, he did not care for Monet’s landscape painting or his penchant for painting out-of-doors.11 Yet despite Degas’ surprisingly traditional tastes and his decidedly prickly nature, he joined forces with this group of rebels, taking a leading role in organizing this and subsequent exhibitions.

Still, notoriety and publicity do not by themselves pay the bills, and the Impressionists’ first exhibit was a financial bust. Soon Monet was evicted by his landlord, with no place to go until Manet found him another house in Argenteuil.12 The two men then painted together for most of the summer—out-of-doors, with Renoir frequently joining them. Much to Manet’s amusement, Monet fitted up a boat for a studio, with a canvas awning stretching from cabin to stern, under which he set up his easel. Manet painted him there as he worked, developing his use of small, separate brushstrokes to capture the fleeting effects of light on water.

Manet, in fact, was overwhelmed with admiration. “There is not one . . . who can set down a landscape like [Monet],” he enthused. “And when it comes to water, he’s the Raphael of water.” Claude Monet had, at least for the moment, brought Edouard Manet out of the studio, and it was during these bright summer months that Manet came closest to the vision of his younger colleague. “That’s what people don’t understand yet,” Manet explained to his good friend Antonin Proust, a journalist and associate of the prominent republican politician Léon Gambetta. “That one doesn’t paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure; one paints the effect of a time of day on a landscape, a seascape, or a figure.” That winter in Venice, he told another friend, “They’re so boring, these Italians, with their allegories. . . . An artist can say everything with fruit or flowers, or simply with clouds.13

* * *

Water had always been a central feature of life in Paris. The Seine courses through its center, cradling (in Victor Hugo’s words) the Ile de la Cité and dividing Left Bank from Right. Until dams and other man-made devices controlled its flow, the Seine was a broad and shallow river that flooded regularly, leaving wide bogs and marshes along its lowland banks. But it was also a river whose level lowered significantly during the dry summer months, leaving behind a muddy detritus of shallow pools and ooze. It was to avoid the Seine’s floods that Paris’s Roman conquerors built their homes and forum on the Left Bank hill now called Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. To supplement their undependable and inconveniently located water supply, they built a lengthy aqueduct that brought in water from the south.

This aqueduct subsequently deteriorated and disappeared as the Roman Empire crumbled. Parisians had to fall back on Seine water, although by this time a growing number were digging wells—especially on the Right Bank, where the water table was close to the surface. This water seemed clean but unfortunately was not. The very fact that it lay near the surface meant that it received the run-off from Paris’s notoriously muddy and filthy streets, as well as seepage from its open sewers.

Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone draw a connection between the quality of the water they drank and the epidemics that regularly swept the city. Instead, for centuries, they merely drank up, with the more finicky either filtering the liquid or simply allowing it to settle before quaffing.

Before that, Paris had employed an extraordinary number of devices to step up its water supply, including aqueducts that tapped the springs of Belleville and Ménilmontant (never very productive) and the huge Samaritaine water pump on the Pont Neuf (dismantled in 1813) and its sister Notre-Dame pump on Pont Notre-Dame (removed in 1858). Along the way, steam pumps had their day, as well as Napoleon Bonaparte’s grand Canal de l’Ourcq, which served as a navigation system as well as a supplier of drinking water.

By the 1830s, several entrepreneurs had decided to take a new approach. With sublime optimism and an unfettered can-do spirit, they proposed to tap into the pristine aquifer that lay deep below the city’s surface. The idea was that this aquifer, caught between layers of impermeable rock and clay, could be reached by drilling. Unlike a regular well, an aquifer—if tapped in just the right place—spurts upward. Fortunately, Paris was sitting at the center of a huge geological basin containing an aquifer of formidable proportions. Prodded by the inspector general of mines and the city’s mayor, the municipal council approved a large sum to tap this underground reservoir by drilling a series of artesian wells within city limits.

The first of these, the puits de Grenelle (at what is now the intersection of Rues Valentin-Haüy and Bouchut, 15th), encountered innumerable hardships until, after eight years and a depth of 538 meters, a sudden whistling sound pierced the air and a column of water dramatically shot up. Work then began on a well in Passy (at present-day Square Lamartine, 16th), one at Place Hébert (in the Chapelle quarter, 18th), and another on the Butte-aux-Cailles (13th). The one in Passy reached water after six years, but the one at Place Hébert suffered a serious cave-in and did not become operational until 1888. The well on the Butte-aux-Cailles (interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War as well as by internal squabbles) did not become operational until 1904.

By this time it had become obvious that the Paris aquifer was not inexhaustible, as each additional well had noticeably depleted the force and flow of the others. But any disappointment over the artesian wells was significantly lessened by success elsewhere. By the 1870s, Paris had become the beneficiary of one of Baron Haussmann’s most daring—and successful—ideas.

Even before becoming the most powerful man in Paris, next to the Emperor himself, Haussmann had taken a great interest in the problems associated with public water. By the time he became prefect of the Seine, water in Paris not only was in short supply, but also was notoriously foul and smelly. Although water’s role in spreading epidemics was not yet widely known, Haussmann nevertheless became convinced that something had to be done. With his intrepid engineer Eugène Belgrand, he set to work to create a vast system of covered aqueducts and reservoirs to convey and store vast quantities of pure spring water from afar.

The work began during the 1860s, while Haussmann was still in office, and then was suspended during the war. But once Paris was free of hostilities, the huge job of bringing water to Paris continued, even without Haussmann to prod it forward. By 1874, water from the Vanne began to reach the city (water from the Dhuis had already arrived by the late 1860s, but was disrupted during the war). Scarcely more than a decade later, the entire system was completed. Certainly one of Haussmann’s finest achievements, this is the water system that, with modifications and updates, still supplies Paris today.

* * *

The building and rebuilding of Paris continued. The Right Bank arm of the Pont de Sully, on the eastern tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, went up between 1873 and 1876 (its Left Bank arm was completed in 1878). Further to the west, a cast-iron Pont de Grenelle replaced a wooden roadway in 1874.

And both the opera house and Sacré-Coeur continued to go forward, in odd juxtaposition with one another. To begin with, the design for Sacré-Coeur—much as with the opera house—was to be decided by competition. But far more significantly, Archbishop Guibert had made the decision that Sacré-Coeur would be magnificent—an aspiration certainly shared by its far-worldlier rival. No modest structure for Guibert. He had chosen the highest elevation in Paris for this visible assertion of the Church’s power and presence, and he had no question but that the basilica should draw eyes from every point throughout the city—a visual manifestation of the new Moral Order.

Here is where the two structures dramatically parted company, with Guibert emphatic that there should be no element of “vice or impiety” in the design. Unlike the Opéra, which epitomized everything that he and his colleagues detested, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur should radiate grandeur but not flamboyance. Above all, it should be a monument to white-robed purity.

The public competition for best design took place between February and June 1874, with seventy-eight architects exhibiting their plans in the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Elysées. Here, for five months, Parisians crowded one another to glimpse and discuss the proposed designs. Few of these plans embraced an outright Gothic vision—the site itself was inhospitable to the traditional cross shape, with its requisite lengthy nave. Also, unlike the traditional east-west axis, this structure would clearly maximize its site to best advantage if it faced south.

In the end, the judges awarded the prize to Paul Abadie, who had acquired a reputation in the Périgord for restoring churches in an idealized and fantasy-infused fashion. His design, a multidomed concoction in which Romanesque and Byzantine mixed and merged, offended architectural purists but in general won the hearts of the basilica’s supporters. Most winning, as far as the latter were concerned, was Abadie’s intention of building the basilica from a kind of stone (travertine) that would remain pristine forever, actually becoming whiter with age.

It was exactly what Archbishop Guibert had in mind.

* * *

It would be several more years before Clemenceau would be able to express his profound opposition to Sacré-Coeur in any politically meaningful fashion. In the meantime, he was hard at work on behalf of Paris’s poor from his seat on the city council, where he proposed urgently needed reforms for the city’s impoverished children. Infant mortality in Paris was on the rise, he pointed out, and he made good use of his medical credentials to argue that sick children should be sent to the country rather than to overcrowded city hospitals, where the danger of infection was especially high.

He also urged that everything be done to help indigent or unwed mothers keep their children, including subsidizing them rather than wet nurses (as was the custom) to nurse their children. Together, he believed, such changes would not only help prevent the abandonment of children, but it would reverse the upward trend in infant mortality—a particular concern what with France’s loss of population during the war and, especially, the Commune.

Meanwhile, in a part of town that had little occasion to think about poverty, Edouard Manet’s younger brother, Eugène, was courting Berthe Morisot. Eugène, who was a far quieter and less dandified version of his brother, was not an artist but certainly was gifted with artistic sensibilities. He also was quite taken with Berthe, and during a seaside visit in 1874, took the opportunity to tell her so.

What did Berthe Morisot think about this? Was she in love with Eugène’s brother, Edouard? Was Edouard in love with her? Edouard certainly seems to have been attracted to her, but then again, he was attracted to many women—though few could have aspired to the combination of beauty, intelligence, and artistic ability that Berthe Morisot possessed. With typical reserve and propriety, Morisot kept her feelings to herself. Yet a whiff of almost school-girlish pleasure emerges from an 1871 letter to her sister Edma, in which she writes that Manet “thinks me not too unattractive, and wants to take me back as his model.” But she immediately retreats into her private shell. “Out of sheer boredom,” she adds, “I shall end by proposing this very thing myself.” And then she changes the subject.14

But Eugène did not seem to regard his older brother as a rival, insurmountable or otherwise. After his return to Paris in the summer of 1874, Eugène wrote tender letters to Berthe, who remained at the seaside. “I wandered through every street in Paris today,” he told her, “but nowhere did I catch a glimpse of the little shoe with a bow that I know so well.” And then he added, “When shall I be permitted to see you again? Here I am on very short rations after having been spoiled.” Berthe’s reply must have satisfied him, because he wrote, “Thonjoun, you overwhelm me. A letter bearing compliments, without periods or commas—that is indeed enough to cause even a stronger man than I to lose his breath.” Thonjoun, he added, is a Turkish endearment meaning “my lamb.”15

Apparently Eugène was not without competitors, although he did not seem especially daunted by them. “Your letter has relieved me,” he went on. “I had begun to fear that X, Y, and Z had gained some ground.” And then he charmingly dismissed these rivals (certainly none of whom could have been his brother): “X, Y, and Z may pay you compliments,” he told her, “but they will never pay homage to you with the delicate praise that is due to goddesses.”16

This sweet courtship led to marriage in December 1874, in the appealing neighborhood church of Notre-Dame de Grâce de Passy. It was a quiet family affair, with the bride wearing simple street dress in deference to her father’s death only a few months before. The couple then settled down in the apartment that Madame Morisot gave them, on Rue Guichard—in the same privileged Passy neighborhood in which Berthe Morisot had been raised, and in which she would spend the rest of her life.

Curiously, Morisot described herself on her marriage certificate as having “no profession.” Perhaps this was a product of the modesty and reticence of her upbringing, because she never abandoned her commitment to her career. Unlike her sister, who reluctantly left off painting when she wed, Berthe Morisot—with the assistance of her devoted Eugène—would continue to expand her professional horizons after marriage. And in what was perhaps an unexpected sign of modernity, she would continue to sign her paintings with her maiden, or professional, name.