Chapter Six

Pressure Builds

(1876–1877)

The aim which we set ourselves is to complete the great renewal of 1789,” Georges Clemenceau announced, while running for office in early 1876. This meant, he told voters, the lofty goal of reestablishing “social peace through the development of justice and liberty.”1

Clemenceau had reentered national politics on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden, and he won his seat in the new Chamber of Deputies by an overwhelming margin, representing his home base in Montmartre. Here, as an emerging leader of the political Left, he tangled with moderates and arch-conservatives alike, winning for himself a reputation for tiger-like ferocity on behalf of the causes in which he believed, and emerging as one of the leading orators of the Chamber.

Clemenceau stumped tirelessly for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, as well as for expulsion of the Jesuits and the promulgation of free, secular, and compulsory primary education—the latter two items being key components in the ongoing battle over the separation of Church and state. Yet at this point in his fledgling career, Clemenceau’s particular concern was for those (like Louise Michel) who had been condemned for taking part in the Commune. Without a general amnesty, he told his fellow deputies, there could be no basis for a lasting social peace. Without such an amnesty, justice and liberty would be a sham. “Mere repression,” he argued, “will not prevent the recurrence of these crises which grow out of . . . the sufferings of the workers.”2

La Statue de la Liberté de Bartholdi dans les ateliers Gaget-Gauthier, rue de Chazelles (Victor Dargaud). Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

Not surprisingly, the radical republicans’ proposal for amnesty was rejected—despite the fact that Victor Hugo, now an elected member of the Senate, became its passionate advocate. The republic that conservative republicans had brokered with constitutional monarchists was not yet ready to accept such a radical idea. Moreover, the most extreme royalists were not yet even close to throwing in the towel. Their hope and expectation was that the Republic was only a temporary entity, and that MacMahon, as head of state for seven years, would be able to prepare the way for the eventual restoration of the monarchy—if not the clueless Comte de Chambord, who seemed to have delusions of absolute monarchy, then (in case of Chambord’s death) the Comte de Paris. They had lost one round, over the constitution, but they were quite prepared to go another, especially as the republican ranks were still fluid and shifting factions rather than parties, grouped around a number of individuals such as Jules Ferry, Léon Gambetta, or—at the left wing of the spectrum—Louis Blanc.

It was here, on the far left, that Clemenceau easily positioned himself, and it was from this vantage point that he was about to take part in the drama surrounding the monarchists’ last bid for power.3

* * *

In spite of Victor Hugo’s efforts, the journalist Henri Rochefort (a very public Commune sympathizer) had been deported, his fate decisively sealed once MacMahon came to power. In words recalling those he had used in Les misérables to describe Jean Valjean’s plight, Hugo now dramatically wrote, “Rochefort has gone. He is no longer called Rochefort. His name is Number 116.”4

Hugo need not have worried, for in actuality, Rochefort did not suffer very long in New Caledonia. Soon after his arrival, the resourceful journalist managed to hop aboard a ship bound for San Francisco. Eventually working his way back to Europe, he lived in and continued to publish broadsides from London and Geneva until he was eventually allowed back in France.

Louise Michel, on the other hand, proudly accepted her exile. With head high, she stood firm for her principles—even (and perhaps especially) when these propelled her directly into trouble. Upon arriving in New Caledonia, she immediately protested the separate quarters (and possibly better treatment) arranged for the women prisoners in the group. After winning that battle, she became a staunch supporter of the indigenous Kanak population, which had been pushed off its land to make way for French immigrants. With her usual energy, she learned enough of the language to appreciate Kanak culture and proceeded to collect Kanak legends, chants, and songs, which she dreamed of setting to native instruments. “I wanted to shake palm branches, create a horn from shells, and use the tones produced by a leaf pressed against the lips,” she later wrote. “In short, I wanted a Kanak orchestra, complete with quarter tones.” And as always she taught, both adults and children, filling the Kanaks’ heads, as one prison administrator acidly put it, with “pernicious doctrines” such as “humanity, justice, freedom, and other useless things.”5

When not engaged in political activism or cultural discovery, Michel found plenty else to occupy her, whether making extensive records of New Caledonia’s exotic flora and fauna or conducting scientific experiments, including an attempt to inoculate the native papaya trees.6 Despite the privations she undoubtedly suffered, she seems to have made her exile into a reasonably tolerable experience.

In the meantime, while Louise Michel was creatively coping with the rigors of life in New Caledonia, back in Europe César Ritz was entering on a dizzying succession of positions at luxury hotels, from Vienna to Lucerne, where he juggled the job of summer manager of the Hotel National (still in existence) with winter positions at several prestigious destinations on the Riviera, including the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo. Quite unlike the Communard exiles at the end of the world, his pampered guests quickly learned that wherever Ritz went, they would be assured of luxury, comfort, and scrupulous attention to their wants and needs, making a stay at one of “his” hotels truly a home away from home.

* * *

“I’ve seen Monet recently,” Edouard Manet wrote his brother during the summer of 1875, “and he’s absolutely broke.” Monet, in fact, was at the point where he was offering ten of his pictures “of one’s choice” for a pitiful thousand francs. “Not a penny left since the day before yesterday,” he wrote Manet, “and no more credit at the butcher’s or the baker’s.” Edouard, who was by no means flush at this time, was willing to put up five hundred francs if Eugène could match him, but he warned that Monet must not know that the money came from them. He added sadly, “I’ve tried other people and no one dares take the risk—it’s just absurd.”7

Unfortunately for Claude Monet and his cash-strapped colleagues, the Impressionists’ second exhibition, in April 1876, went no better than the first. Once again, Edouard Manet declined to participate, opting for his chances with the respectable venue of the Salon—which repaid his confidence by rejecting both of his submissions. Berthe Morisot, who continued to show her works with the group (while maintaining a highly proper and somewhat formal relationship with its members), wrote her aunt that Manet was taking his current setback with reasonably good humor. She then described the fracas the Impressionist exhibit stirred up.

Morisot’s husband, Eugène, had in fact been so livid over a malicious review by Albert Wolff in Le Figaro that he almost challenged the critic to a duel. Wolff (Morisot informed her aunt) characterized the artists as “five or six lunatics, one of whom is a woman,” although he singled out Morisot for her “feminine grace . . . amidst the frenzy of a mind in delirium.” This seemed to amuse Morisot, who appears to have been more exhilarated than disturbed by the experience. “Anyway,” she concluded, “we are being discussed, and we are so proud of it that we are all very happy.”8

Edouard Manet, in the meanwhile, had responded to the Salon’s turndown by deciding to exhibit these paintings in his studio and issue invitations to the press. This resulted in widespread coverage, including a scathing review by the same Albert Wolff that described Manet as “a delightful and amusing young man” who nevertheless had “the eye but not the soul of an artist.” Stung, Manet told his good friend Antonin Proust that “it would have been so easy to add to those two pictures the little touches so dear to M. Wolff’s heart! People fight each other for the things that critics like, as if they were pieces of the true Cross. In ten years’ time they won’t fetch tuppence.”9

Fortunately for Manet, his private showing brought him an enthusiastic new customer (and eventually model and lover), the beautiful Méry Laurent. It also brought him into contact with Wolff. Despite his distaste for the critic (“That creature gives me the creeps”), Manet recognized the importance of cultivating him and proposed to paint his portrait. Wolff agreed, but after the first few sittings was displeased by what he saw and refused to return. Nonetheless, Manet sent him an invitation to the Impressionists’ subsequent exhibit, telling him that “you may not care for this kind of painting yet, but some day you will.” In the meantime, Manet gracefully added, “It would be nice of you to say something about it in Le Figaro.”10

But as Manet’s brother, Eugène, wrote that autumn to his wife, Berthe Morisot, the art dealers were currently overstocked and “the entire tribe of painters is in distress.”11 Claude Monet had managed to sell only one of the eighteen canvases he showed at the April exhibit, but fortunately for a good price. Subsequently he spent an idyllic summer at the country home of a wealthy collector, Ernest Hoschedé, who admired his work. But others in the group were still facing financial difficulties. Edouard Manet had run through much of his inheritance several years earlier, having set up his own independent pavilion to display his paintings at the 1867 Universal Exposition, after being excluded from the exposition. Now, with financial success still elusive, he was cutting back on expenses and talking of giving up his studio. Most of his colleagues—with the exception of Berthe Morisot—were looking at similarly depleted coffers, and even Berthe Morisot’s husband was counseling prudence under the current “money situation.”

Following its postwar boom, France by the mid-1870s was beginning to experience an economic downturn, partially due to the huge strain that the war indemnity put on its economy, but also in response to worldwide financial instability. Throughout France, a long economic slowdown had begun. But despite the worrisome concern that the economy presented, the issue that continued to absorb the nation was the question of the Church, and its role in the new Republic.

* * *

While still in office, Thiers had prudently sidestepped the issue of whether or not to support the pope’s territorial claims. But soon after Thiers’ departure, Archbishop Guibert published a pastoral letter warning of divine retribution on those governments that allowed Rome’s occupation by a secular Italian government. It stirred up a hornets’ nest, not only at home but abroad, where it created significant dangers for France by uniting Germany and Italy on the question. The pope only exacerbated the problem by promoting Guibert to Cardinal.

During the years following the Commune, the French government—although dominated by conservative Catholics—had refrained from directly going to the pope’s aid. But while steering clear of this inflammatory issue, the government continued to be a willing partner with the Church on a wide range of other subjects, such as nominations for French bishoprics and exemptions for ecclesiastics from conscription, as well as provisions allowing Catholics to establish their own universities.

This troubled a good many Frenchmen. But what especially aroused the ire of secular republicans, and more than a few Catholics, was the prospect of the basilica of Sacré-Coeur hovering over Paris, with its symbolic rebuke of the nation’s sins, paid in blood with the defeat of 1870 and the subsequent Commune uprising. Cardinal Guibert was not deterred by this opposition nor by the daunting physical obstacles that now faced his mammoth undertaking. In the spring of 1876, he consented to allow Sacré-Coeur to be built on its Montmartre site and gave the go-ahead for construction to begin on its necessary stilt-like underpinnings. Work commenced, despite the huge financial outlays that would be required. Not only would the basilica now take far longer than expected to construct, but the accompanying fund-raising would continue for decades.

* * *

While Sacré-Coeur was beginning to go up (or at least starting to put down its roots), work was beginning in another part of Paris on a very different sort of structure—one that embodied a range of meaning more in keeping with republican sympathies.

Originally, Bartholdi’s statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (his monument’s formal title) was intended to be presented to the United States in 1876, on the occasion of its centennial. But with the final model not even approved until late 1875, this now was impossible. Instead, with only six months to go, Bartholdi and Viollet-le-Duc decided to send the statue’s colossal arm and torch for display at the upcoming Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Strained to meet even this deadline, twenty skilled artisans went to work on the project, laboring ten-hour days for seven days a week. Yet despite the pressure, they did not finish until June. It was July before this enormous segment (some thirty-seven feet in length) was crated up and sent to Philadelphia, where it arrived in August. There, Bartholdi supervised its assembly and installation, and watched with considerable pride as it was unveiled before crowds of properly impressed Americans, who eagerly paid to climb to the top of the torch for the view.

Following its successful Philadelphia debut, the huge arm then went to New York City, where it continued to attract crowds in Madison Square Park. Eventually (in 1882), it would be crated up and returned to Paris, to be incorporated into the rest of the statue. But in the meantime, its purpose was to drum up interest and stimulate fund-raising—for, as Laboulaye had planned from the outset, this entire effort was to be funded privately. The French were to raise the funds for the statue, while Americans would pay for the pedestal and installation expenses.

Consequently, although Bartholdi did not travel throughout the length and breadth of America on this visit as he had in 1871, he managed to take in much of the East Coast, wooing potential donors every step of the way. He even talked up potential New York contributors while in town for the unveiling of his statue of Lafayette, which the French government had commissioned. Somehow, in the midst of all this activity, he found time to wed a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne-Emilie Baheux du Puysieux, whom he had met on his first visit to the States in 1871.

In February 1877, Congress and the president warmly accepted Liberty Enlightening the World as a gift from the French people, guaranteeing the New York Harbor site as well as funds for the statue’s maintenance. Bartholdi quickly moved on to the next step—getting Liberty’s head finished in time for Paris’s Universal Exposition, scheduled for 1878. This, too, would be an enormous task, but Bartholdi was already demonstrating his stellar publicity skills, creating a diorama of the statue standing in New York Harbor for visitors to the Tuileries gardens. Today, this diorama awaits visitors to Paris’s Musée des Arts et Métiers, in the pedestal of a scale replica of Liberty.

* * *

Zola’s masterpiece L’assommoir began to appear in serialized form in 1876 and in book form in early 1877, accompanied by scandalized gasps from the reading public, which was shocked by the crudity of its language and the wretchedness of its characters’ lives. Manet, however, was enthralled; he proceeded to give the title Nana to his painting of the courtesan Henriette Hauser, naming it after the daughter of the alcoholic laundress Gervaise Lantier in L’assommoir. Zola had not yet even begun to write his novel Nana, but the references in Manet’s painting were clear. When the Salon (presumably scandalized) rejected it, he brashly showed it in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, virtually on the doorstep of the Opéra Garnier, where it created a succès de scandale.

Zola, of course, appreciated the value of scandal in promoting his novels and was adept at creating it. “First of all,” he told a group that included Gustave Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt, “I took a nail and with a blow of the hammer I drove it one inch into the public’s brain; then with a second blow I drove it two inches in.” That hammer, he acknowledged, consisted of the many self-serving articles that he wrote, “which are just so much charlatanism to puff my books.”12

Yet Zola, who could be so brutally honest about himself and the world around him, was also susceptible to great bouts of mawkish self-pity, whether about his poverty-stricken youth or the suspicion with which he felt he was now regarded. “It is strange,” noted Goncourt, who was bitterly envious of Zola’s success, “what a whiner that fat, pot-bellied young fellow is.” When Goncourt, Flaubert, and Ivan Turgenev told Zola point-blank that he had no reason to complain, Zola burst out that the trouble was that he would never receive any kind of honor in recognition of his talent, and that “for the public, I shall always be a pariah, yes a pariah!”13

Although this embarrassing confession would turn out to contain something of the truth, at the time it left his colleagues feeling both bemused and irritated.

* * *

Once again, in the spring of 1877, the group of avant-garde painters now known derisively as the Impressionists launched another exhibit—their third. As before, the male members of the group corresponded formally with Berthe Morisot about the exhibit’s preparations, and as usual, the event stirred up considerable hostility. Edouard Manet, who did not participate, had asked the critic Albert Wolff to approach the exhibit with an open mind—but Wolff, not surprisingly, had responded with his usual scathing criticism.

But the Impressionists were not the only artists in town that spring who were creating a stir, for at the age of thirty-seven, Auguste Rodin was about to make a splash in the Parisian art scene.

Of course, Rodin had no intention of creating a scandal when he submitted his sculpture The Bronze Age to the Salon in 1877. He had begun work on the statue several years earlier, while in Belgium, and used a Belgian soldier as his model. Following his trip to Italy, he finished the work and proceeded to show it at a Belgian exhibition. Here it aroused admiration as well as a disturbing undercurrent of suspicion. How could anyone, his critics asked, create such a sculpture without casting it from life—that is, without creating a statue from plaster casts taken of the model? Rodin was deeply disturbed by this charge, which called his artistic integrity as well as his ability into question. He offered to bring his model before experts to show “how far removed an artistic interpretation must be from a slavish copy,”14 but the issue continued to dog him when, in 1877, he submitted the slightly altered statue to the Salon under the title of The Bronze Age.

The Salon’s jury accepted Rodin’s creation, although many of its members found it disturbingly different from the static sculptures they were more accustomed to seeing. As this vibrant sculpture from an unknown sculptor started to attract attention, the rumors once more started to circulate that Rodin had not actually sculpted the work but had cast it “from life.” The scandal blazed throughout artistic circles, with talk of withdrawing the sculpture from the Salon, and one prominent member of the Institut even claimed that the statue had been cast from a corpse. Appalled, Rodin offered to bring his Belgian model before the jury, stripped to the buff if need be, but Belgian military authorities refused to grant the soldier permission to leave the country. Next, Rodin decided to produce photographs of his model. But at this point, fortunately, several prominent artists came to his defense, including some Belgian artists who had watched him create the controversial sculpture.

Rodin won the battle, and having won, benefited from the ugly controversy that had at first threatened his career. Whether or not Oscar Wilde was right in observing that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about, Rodin now found a public that was aware of him and his prodigious talents. Although his years of hardship were not over, he had passed a critical divide in his career. Three years after the controversy, the French state extended the equivalent of its blessing and purchased a bronze cast of The Bronze Age for the Luxembourg gardens. It now stands in Paris’s Musée Rodin.

* * *

“Clericalism!” thundered Léon Gambetta to the assembled members of the Chamber of Deputies. “That is the enemy.”15

The date was May 4, 1877, and Gambetta—the son of a Genoese father and a French mother—had been the flag-bearer for secular republicanism ever since the Second Empire, which he had heartily opposed. With the fall of that empire, he emerged as a leading member of the new Government of National Defense, strenuously opposing capitulation to the Germans and daringly escaping Paris by balloon in order to organize an army to come to the city’s aid. Following Thiers’ peace treaty with the Germans, Gambetta left France in disgust, thus missing the entire Commune uprising, but upon his return to France and to French politics, he made it clear that he now embraced a more moderate form of republicanism. Naming this the policy of “opportunism,” he became the leading figure of the so-called Opportunist republicans, playing an influential role in the passage of the Constitution. According to Gambetta’s plan, he and his followers would bide their time, waiting for a more propitious moment to press their case.

But it soon looked as though this moment might never arrive—at least if MacMahon and his royalist followers had their way. As MacMahon’s government moved further and further to the right, the clerical issue became the rallying point for the government’s opponents. In what probably was a bid to divide the opposition, MacMahon appointed a moderate republican, Jules Simon, as his prime minister, but Simon did not perform to MacMahon’s satisfaction, failing to crack down on anticlericalism and allowing what the right wing regarded as an unconscionable degree of freedom of the press. On May 16, 1877, MacMahon sacked Simon (who technically resigned).

The coup d’état, or violent overthrow of an existing government, had hardly been unknown in France during the previous century. Indeed, Napoleon III had come to power scarcely twenty-five years before in just such a raw display of power, and the fear now grew that MacMahon and his supporters were preparing to follow in his footsteps. Le seize mai—the sixteenth of May, the date on which MacMahon sacked Simon—quickly became a rallying cry for those who opposed the MacMahon government and, with considerable justification, feared the worst.

Instead of a coup d’état, MacMahon’s associates risked a general election—a daunting prospect given the amount of opposition that they now faced. With little appreciation for the nature of that opposition, they put off the elections for many months, during which they embarked on a series of actions that amounted to mass arm-twisting—prosecuting newspapers, threatening owners of republican meeting places, dismissing “unreliable” local officials, and forbidding circulation of opposition circulars and propaganda while conducting their own massive propaganda campaign. Their actions, which betrayed more than a whiff of desperation, merely united the previously fragmented opposition, of which Gambetta now took command.

Confronting the aristocrats and clerics who made up the bulk of MacMahon’s supporters, Gambetta’s republicans for the first time were able to face down the right wing’s politics of fear, which since 1789 had associated republicanism with disorder and crisis. Staying remarkably on message, Gambetta’s followers turned the tables on their attackers, arguing that the republicans were the real conservatives, the preservers of peace and the protectors of prosperity.

Even Adolphe Thiers, who well remembered his ouster at MacMahon’s hands, joined with Gambetta to oppose the monarchist right. Thiers’ death at the campaign’s height removed a key figure from the fray, but Victor Hugo, who had damned le seize mai as a “semi-coup d’état,” now joined the political battle by publishing the first volume of his account of the coup d’état of 1851, which he pungently titled the Histoire d’un crime (History of a Crime). “This book is more than topical,” Hugo told his public. “It is urgent. I publish it.”16

He shrugged off rumors that the book would be banned, and, indeed, MacMahon’s associates did not have the nerve to take on this aged man with the almost godlike reputation. The book was therefore free to make its mark, reminding even those voters who did not read it of the dangers that MacMahon’s candidates represented.

Voters turned out in overwhelming numbers for this impassioned election of October 1877 and gave a ringing endorsement to the republican candidates. Even then, MacMahon clung to his office (to which he was legally entitled), but the Chamber of Deputies refused to deal with him without significant concessions on his part. Putting the situation succinctly, Gambetta famously warned MacMahon to “se soumettre ou se démettre” (“submit or resign”). In the end, MacMahon reluctantly accepted the conditions and limitations that allowed him to stay on, while the republicans under Gambetta pressed to consolidate their victory.

After all, they did not yet have control of the Senate. But elections for one-third of the Senate’s members were coming up in early 1879. And despite the Senate’s reputation as a bastion of conservative power, the republicans intended to win.