It was in 1801, with the publication of Atala, recalled Chateaubriand, that ‘the noise I make in this world began. I ceased to be a private person and my public career began.’ The story of a graceful Indian girl, untouched by civilization in the virgin forests of the New World, was quite different from the classical literature of the Consulate and Empire, and critics were unsure whether to categorize it ‘among monstrosities or beauties; was it the Gorgon or Venus?’ It inaugurated the Romantic era, catching the public’s enthusiasm, with the characters from the novel exhibited at the annual Salon of the Academy of Fine Art, reproduced in engravings hung in coaching inns, moulded into wax dolls sold on the quais of Paris, or done up in feathers in the boulevard theatres.1 This public recognition was not only artistic. Along with the impact of the Genius of Christianity the following year, it propelled Chateaubriand towards a diplomatic career, election to the Académie Française in 1811, a peerage in 1815 and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1822. He became the model of literary success and wider public acclaim that was to be the envy of aspiring writers and artists who followed him.
Although Chateaubriand cultivated the Romantic style of the melancholy genius, misunderstood by and ill at ease in the world, literary or artistic success in fact required both the knitting together of patronage and connections and the manipulation of public opinion. There was no possibility of an artistic career outside Paris, and in Paris it was necessary to frequent salon society and to negotiate support among publishers, theatre directors and academicians. Romantic artists also needed a direct rapport with the public, to show themselves to be divinely inspired, although this might in fact involve begging support from the critics and mobilizing claques to lead the applause in the theatre.
The first generation of artists to follow in Chateaubriand’s wake, born around 1800, were in some sense sons of giants, either aristocrats who had survived the Revolution or Napoleonic generals. The fall of Napoleon in 1815 created opportunities for artistic careers to take off but it also left many feeling that with the collapse of France’s European power life would never be as exciting again. Alphonse de Lamartine’s father served in the royal bodyguard and was wounded defending the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, the day the monarchy fell, and Lamartine himself joined the royal bodyguard in 1814. After his love affair with the young wife of the seventy-year-old perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences was cut short by her death in 1817, he cultivated a solitary melancholy and published a volume of poems, The Meditations, in March 1820. They had ‘an unheard-of and universal success’, he told a friend.2 It provoked a ‘universal inebriation’, said Théophile Gautier, artist and chronicler of the Romantics. ‘Young people and women were enthusiastic to the point of adoration… Lamartine was not just a poet, but poetry itself. His chaste, elegant and noble nature seemed to rise above the ugliness and triviality of life.’3 This apparent unworldliness as far as his public were concerned sat with a very worldly pursuit of prospects and a career. In June 1822 he married an English heiress with a dowry of £10,000, to which his father added a château and town house in Mâcon, and embarked on a diplomatic career in Naples and Florence. He frequented the salon of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, a crossroads for Romantic writers and nexus of contacts. In 1825 he was invited to write a poem in honour of the coronation of Charles X, which led to the award of the Legion of Honour, and he was elected to the Académie Française in 1829, just before the July Revolution caused him, as a Legitimist, to resign from the diplomatic service.4
In 1816, at the age of fourteen, Victor Hugo wrote in his journal, ‘I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing.’5 He had a row with his father, a former general of Napoleon, who wanted him to enter the École Polytechnique, and he wrote poetry in praise of the restoration of the statue of Henri IV to its plinth on the Pont Neuf that won prizes. He frequented the salon of Sophie Gay in the Chaussée d’Antin, where Chateaubriand dubbed him ‘the sublime child’ and he married very young. He was also an habitué of Charles Nodier’s salon, where he established his reputation alongside Lamartine as one of the ‘two gods of poetry’.6 Nodier put Hugo forward, like Lamartine, to write an ode for the coronation of Charles X, and the award of the Legion of Honour reconciled him with his father. At Nodier’s he met Baron Taylor, the Brussels-born Englishman who was director of the Comédie Française, and used the connection to promote his play, Marion Delorme. Unfortunately, it portrayed a weak Louis XIII in a chaotic kingdom and was banned by Charles X, despite Hugo’s mission to the palace of Saint-Cloud in a bid to make the king change his mind.7 On the positive side, however, Hugo had a tame critic, Sainte-Beuve, who from 1827 created the myth of Hugo ‘born into the camps, brought up amid our warriors, crisscrossing Europe behind our flags’, now fighting battles and seeking glory through the arts.8 When he finally had a play, Hernani, set more tactfully in Charles V’s Spain, performed in February 1830 at the Comédie Française, a veritable ‘Romantic army’ of supporters was organized to mobilize applause and shout down those who opposed the liberties taken by the Romantics with the classical conventions. These were led by the former schoolfriends Gérard de Nerval, a young poet who had translated Goethe’s Faust in 1827, and Gautier, then a long-haired rapin or apprentice in an artist’s studio and undecided between painting and literature.9 Sainte-Beuve, true to form, told Hugo, ‘You will have your Austerlitz, your Jena. Perhaps Hernani is already Austerlitz.’10
In fact Hernani had been preceded by another dramatic breakthrough of the Romantic generation, Henri III and his Court by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas, like Hugo the son of a Napoleonic general, was greatly inspired by the Paris tour of a troupe of English players – Kemble, Kean, Macready and Harriet Smithson – who performed Shakespeare with extended sword-fights and death scenes in 1827. He was one of the inner circle of the Nodier salon, with a place laid for him every Sunday night, and he persuaded Baron Taylor to commission his play, a story of adultery and murder revolving around the Duc de Guise, his wife and her lover, for the Comédie Française. When it opened in February 1829 Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, in whose secretariat he worked, turned up with his aristocratic coterie and guaranteed a positive reception.11 After the July Revolution he had an even greater success with Antony, which transposed the drama of adultery and murder to modern times, and abandoned the rather mannered actors of the Comédie Française in favour of the more passionate actors of the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, the darkly menacing Pierre Bocage in the title role and Marie Dorval, then the mistress of Alfred de Vigny, as the mistress he stabs to death. ‘Never before had applause swept so directly from the audience to the actors,’ wrote Dumas, ‘and what an audience! The fashionable audience of dandies, the audience in the boxes, and the audience that does not normally applaud shouted itself hoarse and split their gloves with clapping.’12
Fame, of course, was rarely enduring and the competition for esteem was sharp. Lamartine never repeated the success he had with his Meditations. A woman in her thirties, reading his Harmonies in 1837, noted, ‘it does not have the same effect on me as the meditations. That was rapture, ecstasy; I was sixteen, how beautiful it was.’13 After Hernani, Hugo switched to the novel, publishing Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831. Mixing the religious and the pagan, the beautiful and the ugly, it confused those who expected something more uplifting from a novel set in a cathedral. Sainte-Beuve reminded Hugo that Lamennais had said that it was ‘not religious enough’ and described it himself as ‘lit from below by the grates of hell’.14 One reason for Sainte-Beuve’s cooler critique was his love for Hugo’s wife, Adèle, while Hugo was himself infatuated by the actress Juliet Drouet, who played in his Lucrèce Borgia at the Porte Saint-Martin in 1833.15 Dumas also took to writing historical novels, hoping to become a French Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott, publishing The Three Musketeers in 1844 and The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844–5. In order to maintain an impossible tempo of research and writing he relied on a friend of Gérard de Nerval who made a living as a teacher at the Collège Royal Charlemagne, Auguste Maquet. In 1845 he was accused by a certain Eugène de Mirecourt of running a ‘novel factory’ that turned out thirty-six volumes in 1844 and promised twice that in 1845; how could that be all his own work? Mirecourt argued that he was still the copyist who had worked in Louis-Philippe’s office, a dégrossisseur of what others wrote for him.16 Dumas sued Mirecourt and had him sent to prison for a fortnight. He was riding a wave of literary and financial success. He signed a contract for his complete works for 1.5 million francs in 1843, built the château of Monte Cristo at Le Port-Marly near Versailles in 1844 and a Théâtre Historique on the boulevard du Temple to stage his plays, beginning with La Reine Margot in 1847.17 He was at the pinnacle of his career and it did not matter to him if Delacroix, putting down Monte Cristo, sighed, ‘When you’ve finished reading it, you’ve really read nothing at all.’18
Some writers, acknowledged as kings of the canon now, had a much lesser impact on the public at the time. Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal, fitted uneasily into the Romantic generation. Born in 1783, his career was too closely linked to the Napoleonic era to afford him the right contacts. Between 1815 and 1821 he lived in Italy and London, making a career as a critic and writing about Italian music and painting. In 1821 he returned to Paris, forming a close friendship with Prosper Mérimée and frequenting the salon of Baron Gérard, the king’s painter, where Delacroix was a regular, and that of Madame Ancelot, which was known as ‘a local branch of the Académie Française’.19 He was not invited to the salon of Sophie and Delphine Gay, because he was considered too rude, and preferred the nocturnal salon of the Italian actress Madame Pasta, where the Milanese exiles met.20 He did not find state employment again until the July Monarchy looked more favourably on those with a Napoleonic pedigree, when he was made consul at Civita Vecchia near Rome. He was there when his novel Le Rouge et le noir came out in December 1830. Based on a true-life story of a young seminarist who became the lover of the mistress of the house where he was a tutor and then killed her, it managed only two editions of 750 copies each and was a resounding flop. Even Mérimée asked him, ‘Why did you choose such an impossible character? Read the late Boileau’s Art of Poetry.’21 Stendhal wrote to a friend ironically artistic genius and bourgeois culture in 1831 that Simón Bolívar had died. ‘Do you know from what? From envy at the success of the Rouge.’
Balzac’s struggle for recognition was also tough but more rewarding. He had a brief career as a notary’s clerk, set up a printing business that collapsed in 1828, made no money from his 1829 novel The Chouans nor from his treatise on The Physiology of Marriage, and fell and concussed himself trying to get elected as deputy for Chinon in 1832. What he earned came from reviews and articles for the various journalistic enterprises of Émile de Girardin.22 His first literary success came with La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin) in 1831, a story revolving around an ass’s skin which grants wishes but shrinks with each wish made. Sainte-Beuve described it as ‘fetid and putrid, witty, corrupt, inspired, sparkling, marvellous in the way it threads tiny elements and makes them ring like a clinking of atoms’.23 Balzac began to appear on the town as a dandy, with a turquoise-pommelled cane, seen at the Opéra with other men of fashion such as Eugène Sue and lionized in the salon of Delphine de Girardin. Yet he did not have the stylistic qualities of Hugo, and his studies of modern mores did not usurp the public’s passion for the historic or the exotic. ‘Despite the popularity he was starting to enjoy with the public,’ wrote Gautier, ‘he was not acclaimed as one of the gods of Romanticism, and he knew it.’24 Neither did Balzac have the facility for production that Alexandre Dumas had. He struggled to build a vast interlocking Comédie humaine that would articulate the structure of modern society. Crisis point was reached in 1846, when the serialization of his Peasants in La Presse was interrupted to make way for that of Dumas’ La Reine Margot, which was about to be published.25 Costume drama had more appeal to the bourgeois reader than dark rural tensions, and Balzac himself now spent more time with his admirer and mistress, the Polish Countess Anna de Hanska, than with his books.
Between the Restoration and 1870 the market for books, newspapers, plays and music achieved a certain consistency and uniformity, which might be characterized as a bourgeois market. At the beginning of the century there was a wide gap between the small, elitist market for high culture and the mass market for popular culture. One market was extremely literate, fashionable and rich, the other semi-literate, traditional and poor. There was often an overlap between genres, with themes from popular culture being taken up and reworked for high culture, and vice versa, but the overlap of publics was much less. Developments over the next few decades however, such as urbanization, faster communications and the spread of elementary education, led to the growth of a market for the middle classes, in which both the elite and ordinary people could participate. The reading public, defined as literate people over the age of fourteen, grew from about 4.6 million men and 2.7 million women in 1801 to 9.8 million men and 8.0 million women in 1871. This was a highly positive development for the production of books, the number of which published in France rose from 2,547 in 1814 to 13,883 in 1866.26 It did not, however, necessarily mean a wider circulation for great works of literature, for the enthusiasm of the wider public was not necessarily for the novels of Stendhal and Flaubert, which goes a long way to explaining the frustration of writers with the undis-criminating taste of the bourgeois public.
‘There are only two hundred people in France who buy new novels,’ wrote Émile de Girardin around 1830, ‘and eight hundred cabinets de lecture which monopolize the distribution of books.’27 Under Napoleonic legislation all printers and booksellers had to have a brevet or licence, and in 1867 there were still only 4,000 bookshops for 36,000 communes. In the first part of the century novels were published in small runs of only a few hundred and cost 7.5 francs a volume. Since two octavo volumes was the minimum for a novel, a new novel cost at least 15 francs, about ten days’ wages for an average worker in 1827.28 Newspapers were similarly expensive. In 1824 there were thirteen main political dailies in Paris, with a combined circulation of 60,000. They were circulated to subscribers, who paid 80 francs a year for the privilege. The flow of political opinion, information and literary pleasure was thus restricted to an elite living in the major cities. This did not mean that the populations of small towns and the countryside were deprived of reading material, only that it was made available on an entirely different circuit. In the absence of bookshops colporteurs or chapmen travelled from town to town and village to village carrying a pack of pious works, almanacs, treatises of magic and tiny bestsellers covered in blue sugar-paper, reworkings of traditional epics, romances and fairytales, such as The Four Sons of Aymon, Robert the Devil and Geneviève of Brabant. To these were sometimes added the so-called ‘4-sou novels’ of hacks such as Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, derived from the Gothic horror novels of Ann Radcliffe. The colporteurs generally originated from the high Pyrenees, making a better living travelling the roads than on the mountain pastures, covering northern France in the summer, southern France in the winter. The books they sold, called the Blue Library on account of their covers, were produced by specialist publishers in the Champagne city of Troyes.29
Ways of bringing these two circuits together developed after 1830. On the demand side, the cabinets de lecture to which Girardin referred were commercial reading rooms which held all the newspapers and doubled as lending libraries. There were over 400 of these in Paris in the Restoration period, with the same number outside the capital. It was possible to borrow a single newspaper to read at home for 5 centimes a day or 2 francs a month, or read all the newspapers in the cabinet, on the spot, for 20 centimes a day. For 30 centimes books as well as newspapers could be read, and for 3 francs a month books could be borrowed.30 This clearly increased access to books and newspapers many times over. Newspapers were also sent out to the provinces by mail-post, to a radius in 1832 of 250 kilometres after one day, 400 kilometres after two days, reaching cities such as Bordeaux, and arriving in Marseille on the third day. Although there was always a local press, with three political papers of different political persuasions in the Dordogne in 1832, for example, newspaper reading was generally limited to the urban bourgeoisie in northern and eastern France.31
On the supply side changes in publishing also increased the availability of newspapers. Political caricature exploded after the fall of the monarchy in 1830 and Charles Philippon, a former apprentice in Baron Gros’ studio, launched the weekly Caricature (November 1830), with a lithograph folded into the paper, and the daily
Charivari (December 1832), whose prints were integral to the text. These were still quite expensive, the first at 52 francs a year with 600–1,000 subscribers, the second at 60 francs with 1,000–1,400 subscribers in 1834, but copies were available in fifty cabinets de lecture and 130 cafés in 1835, waging a war of ridicule on the regime with the help of artists such as Daumier who famously portrayed Louis-Philippe’s face as a pear; and both publications were constantly harassed by the press laws until forced to close after the September laws of 1835.32 Responding to that political clampdown Émile de Girardin, the husband of Delphine Gay who nevertheless permanently struggled for fortune and recognition, founded La Presse in 1836. Selling at 40 francs a year, half the price of the existing dailies, it dealt more in business than in politics, tapped a new income stream by selling advertising space, and above all launched the romanfeuilleton or serialized novel, taking Balzac’s La Vieille Fille as its first serial.33 This brought new novels to the attention of the non-book-buying public and boosted newspaper circulation, turning women for the first time into newspaper readers. Sainte-Beuve observed that Balzac’s works appealed in particular to women aged between twenty-eight and thirty-five, exploring as Balzac did the question of the arranged marriage. However he also condemned as ‘industrial literature’ what he saw as the perversion of writing for what was in effect the contemporary equivalent of the soap opera.34 The practice of the serialized novel was imitated by other papers, which competed for the most popular writers. Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris was serialized in the Journal des Débats between June 1842 and October 1843 for a fee of 26,500 francs while after a bidding war his Wandering Jew went to Véron’s Le Constitutionnel for 100,000 francs, boosting its circulation from 3,600 in 1844 to 25,000 in 1845–6.35
Despite the success of La Presse it did not become the paper with the widest circulation. It had the reputation of being on the side of the government, especially after Girardin, challenged on the subject of his illegitimate birth during a circulation war, fought a duel with the republican Armand Carrel, editor of Le National, on 22 July 1836, and killed him.36 Le Siècle, with a circulation of 34,000 in 1845–6, as against La Presse’s 22,000, was more radical and anticlerical in tone, and circulated in cafés where popular opposition to the government was fomented and which became the bases for political banquets in 1847 and political clubs in 1848. It educated the crowd that Tocqueville witnessed invading the National Assembly on 15 May 1848 and whom he called Montagnards. They spoke a curious jargon, he observed, that was ‘neither the French of ignorant people nor that of the educated’, using ‘swear words but also grandiloquent expressions… a constant stream of abusive and jovial comments… I think they have developed their attitudes in cafés and sharpened their wits on newspapers alone.’37
In the theatre, as in the publishing market, there was a hierarchy of genres, and this was formalized by Napoleon for political reasons. The function of the theatre was to entertain, but it was also a vehicle for political comment and criticism. During the Revolution the politics of the theatre had often run out of control and Napoleon reasserted order with a decree of 1807 which arranged the theatre according to type of production and placed it under close supervision.38 At the top of the pile was the state-subsidized theatre, the Théâtre Français, otherwise known as the Comédie Française, where classical tragedy and the great comedies of Molière were played, the stage of tragic actors such as Talma and Mlle Mars.39 The Odéon performed Molière’s prose plays, such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and added Shakespeare in 1827. Below these were the tolerated popular houses, each allotted its own genre. The Porte Saint-Martin Theatre was allowed to perform melodramas, the Théâtre de la Gaïté pantomimes, watched by ‘fat, good-humoured market women, laughing fit to burst and fanning themselves with six-sous fans they had bought at the theatre itself’,40 while the Variétés and the Vaudeville were given over to farces. At the very working-class Funambules mime king Jean-Gaspard Bureau played Pierrot in harlequinades six times a day and nine times on Sundays, for 4 sous a throw.41 The flea-pits of the popular quarters of Paris were at the bottom of the heap, strung out along the boulevard du Temple, commonly known as the boulevard du Crime on account of the dark gallows humour of its repertoire and the amount of blood shed on stage.
The strict hierarchy devised by Napoleon was gradually subverted by the evolution of genres and the changing tastes of the public. The mannered, declamatory style of the Comédie Française was not adapted to the passion of the new Romantic plays and fell out of favour with writers and the public. Juste Olivier, a budding Swiss man of letters visiting Paris in 1830, saw Hernani there, and found Mlle Mars ‘a little too old, at fifty-one’ to play the leading lady.42 Alexandre Dumas, frustrated with the failure of Mlle Mars to give him the expression he wanted for the adulterous wife in Antony, moved his play to the Porte Saint-Martin and hired the thirty-three-year-old and more passionate Marie Dorval.43 The Porte Saint-Martin, whose public of shop-assistants had hounded out the English touring company performing Othello in English in 1822, throwing apples and coins, now became the preferred venue for Dumas and Hugo. It steadily became more bourgeois, attracting a mixed audience from the beautiful ladies of the Chaussée d’Antin, hiding behind their fans, via the middle classes to a section of the literate working classes.44
There was much circulation of material and actors between the different theatres and there was a downgrading or trickle-down effect whereby material from the elite theatres was reworked for the more popular ones. Pastiches of Hugo’s Hernani were being performed at the Vaudeville and Variétés in 1830, poking fun at the Romantics, within a very short time of the first performances for which the Romantic army was mobilized.45 Similarly an actor such as Frédéric Lemaître went from the Porte Saint-Martin to the Folies Dramatiques on the boulevard du Crime in 1834 to star as gentleman crook and popular hero Robert Macaire. ‘He parodied himself,’ wrote the theatre critic Jules Janin, ‘and the public applauded the wit of this man who now repudiated his glorious past.’46 There was also, however, a capillary action by which material and actors moved up to more respectable theatres. Marie Dorval, who had played opposite Lemaître at the Porte Saint-Martin, went on to play Phèdre at the Opéra-Comique in 1842, a tragic role for which she was however ill suited. Henri Monnier, a pupil of Gros who had excelled in artists’ studio productions, invented and played the character of Monsieur Prudhomme, the quintessential bourgeois, for the Vaudeville in 1831, and took it revamped as the Grandeur and Decadence of Monsieur Prudhomme to the Odéon in 1853. It was a caricature of the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie itself. Prudhomme, for Gautier, was ‘the synthesis of bourgeois stupidity. How his fat lips drop leaden aphorisms which make one terrified of common sense.’47
The embourgeoisement of the theatre reached its climax in the middle of the century. The theatres of the boulevard du Crime were demolished in 1862 during the Haussmannization of Paris, an attack on a genre which was always feared for its ability to nurture violent emotions. The Comédie Française struck back after 1838 with the discovery of a brilliant tragic actress, Élisa-Rachel Félix, known simply as Rachel, the daughter of a Jewish pedlar from Switzerland who made her debut playing Hermione in Racine’s Andromaque and pursued a vertiginous but brief career.48 ‘Racine and Corneille were revived among us as during the great century of Louis XIV,’ recalled Dr Véron, director of the Comédie Française, ‘a feverish popularity surrounded the young tragedian and old tragedy.’49 Rachel’s greatest role was Racine’s Phèdre, ‘the mere announcement of this tragedy,’ noted one critic, ‘no matter how frequently repeated, sufficing to attract half the playgoers of Paris to the doors of the Théâtre Français’.50 Exhausted by tours of the United States and Egypt, she died in 1858 aged only thirty-seven.
Much of the other half of the Paris public, meanwhile, would be at the Gymnase Theatre, where Rachel had begun her theatrical career in 1837. This had been founded in 1820 and was known as the Theatre of Madame because it received the patronage of the Duchesse de Berry, whose husband was assassinated that year. The theatre was dominated by the talent of Eugène Scribe, a silk-merchant’s son who wrote 182 plays for the Gymnase Theatre, 107 in the 1820s and 68 between 1830 and 1848, accounting for 40 per cent of its productions. Like Dumas, he employed a number of collaborators to achieve this vast output, characterized by a tight plot, witty interaction and a fast pace. There was no political content but only gentle social satire, portraying the ambitions, rivalries and foibles of different elements of contemporary society.51 ‘The whole middle class and the distinguished part of society does not dream of anything better,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve in 1840. ‘One emerges neither too moved, nor too disoriented, as befits our contemporary passions and our affairs.’52 Scribe represented what was best about bourgeois theatre, offering a mirror for bourgeois society but offering no criticism, providing entertainment rather than literature.
The musical world also had its own hierarchy. At the popular end, in the first half of the nineteenth century, were the working-class singing clubs or goguettes, of which there were 300 in Paris in 1818 and 500 in 1836. A few, like the Lice, were closed to women, others were more familial, places where the populace went to drink, laugh and sing. Often the songs were political – republican, Bonapartist or socialist in sympathy – those of Béranger being particular favourites. His popular song, ‘Le Drapeau’, for example, celebrated the tricolour flag of the Revolution and Empire that was banned after the Restoration. Goguettes flourished in the revolutionary ferment of 1848 but after that the authorities clamped down, authorizing only sixty of them in 1849.53
More salubrious, but equally successful, were the popular concerts that took off in Paris under the baton of French rivals of Johann Strauss. While high society danced at the Opéra or in the gardens of the Tuileries palace, Philippe Musard presented winter waltz nights at the Salle Valentino in the rue Saint-Honoré from 1833 and promenade concerts in a marquee on the Champs-Élysées from 1837, with an entry fee of 1 franc to keep out the rabble. Facing competition from Strauss in Paris he plied most of his trade in London after 1838. Meanwhile the director of concerts at the Turkish Garden was Louis-Antoine Jullien, whose father had been music director of the Papal Guards and who had been both a sailor and a soldier before undergoing a brief training at the Paris Conservatory and launching his concerts with the quadrille from The Huguenots. Where Musard was buttoned up, Julien was a showman, with seductive moustache and yellow gloves, an inveterate duellist and always in debt. Like Musard, he pursued his career in London after 1840, opening a space for Jacques Offenbach, who had written walzes for Jullien and made his reputation with operetta in the Second Empire.54
Until then, French comic opera was dominated by Eugène Scribe, who was not only a playwright but also a librettist, writing for the composers Daniel Auber and Adolphe Adam. Auber synthesized the Italian and French traditions and had a particular success in 1830 with Fra Diavolo, about the Neapolitan friar–bandit who had given Bonaparte’s forces such a hard time. ‘M. Scribe has created a kind of comic opera that is his alone,’ wrote Gérard de Nerval in 1844. ‘M. Auber sets this kind of literature to a fitting music which everyone is sure to like, and this witty and harmonious partnership brings forth a host of pleasant successes which will cease only when one of them dies.’55 In fact Scribe’s collaboration with Adam was equally successful, with such hits as the 1836 Postillon de Longjumeau, for which Jacques Offenbach played in the orchestra as a cellist. A third composer with whom Scribe worked was Giacomo Meyerbeer, of German-Jewish origin, who came from the Milan opera to stage Margaret of Anjou at the Opéra-Comique in 1826. Together Scribe and Meyerbeer developed a French grand opera, characterized by rich historical settings, lavish production and massive orchestration, produced not at the Opéra-Comique but at the more prestigious Opéra. Robert the Devil, staged in 1831, took a traditional folk story and made it into a vast medieval pageant, complete with dancing nuns, while The Huguenots, a Protestant–Catholic Romeo and Juliet set at the time of the St Bartholomew massacre, was put on in 1836. Combining material and musical extravagance, grand opera appealed to a broad bourgeois public. Robert the Devil completed 500 performances in 1868, and The Huguenots reached the same landmark in 1872.56
Fine art, like the theatre, had a political dimension. The state was the most powerful patron of architecture, sculpture and painting, using them to dramatize its legitimacy. It was not a free medium, but was constrained by the artistic conventions laid down by the Academy of Fine Arts. In general this body required high-quality drawing, heightened colour and impeccable finish. It subscribed to an eternal and universal concept of beauty which could best be explored by taking models from the Ancient world or Ancient mythology. The artistic equivalent of the Opéra or Comédie Française was the Salon or exhibition held annually in the Louvre, an arena in which the great battles of artistic schools and individual reputations were fought out. The selection of works of art for the Salon was made by a jury, the composition of which was also a battlefield. During the Revolution access to the Salon was supposed to be equal, but even the artists demanded some kind of selection. Under the Empire the government took a leading role, then selection was devolved on to the Academy of Fine Arts, chaired until 1830 by the director of the Musée du Louvre. The public flocked to the Salon, especially for the opening. In 1830 Balzac described the ‘immense crowd’ around two paintings exhibited by an artist fresh from studying in Italy. ‘People were almost killing each other to get to the front. Speculators and great lords offered piles of gold coins, but the artist obstinately refused to sell, or to permit copies.’ Daumier caricatured the throng of the bourgeoisie in a number of lithographs. The critics also had their say, publishing their verdicts on the winners and losers in a wide range of reviews and newspapers.57
Under Napoleon the Salon was almost eclipsed by the permanent exhibitions in the Louvre, which displayed for his own glory and the edification of the public the artistic treasures that he had sent back to Paris in baggage trains during his various conquests, from Italy to Germany and Spain. In order to legitimate his new Empire he secured the support of Jacques-Louis David, who had signed Louis XVI’s death-warrant and choreographed the festivals of Robespierre’s Republic, and commissioned him to execute a series of huge paintings for his palaces, depicting his coronation in Notre-Dame and the distribution of eagles of victory to his troops. The first was exhibited in the Salon of 1808, the second in that of 1810, and David was paid a fee of 77,000 francs. After Austerlitz Napoleon marked his victories by having a triumphal arch built at the Carrousel, at the entrance to the Tuileries, starting the Arc de Triomphe at the Étoile, which remained unfinished at his fall, and erecting a column on the model of Trajan’s column in the place Vendôme, in honour of the Grande Armée, unveiled on his birthday, 15 August 1810.58 To define his leadership and represent his military prowess and domination of Europe Napoleon harnessed the talent not only of David but of his pupils. David had painted Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint-Bernard in 1801, but his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros followed Bonaparte’s Army of Italy in 1796 and submitted the portrait of Bonaparte at Arcola to the Salon of 1799. Gros portrayed Napoleon as a king with a healing touch in Napoleon in the Pest-house of Jaffa, exhibited in 1804, and as a great military leader in his 1808 Battle of Eylau, foregrounded by the frozen bodies of men and horses. François Gérard provided the first portrait of Napoleon in imperial robes in 1805, and he triumphed with his Battle of Austerlitz, exhibited in the Salon of 1810. In the same Salon, from which Napoleon bought twenty paintings for 47,000 francs, Girodet exhibited the ferocious Revolt of Cairo, showing French soldiers putting down Mameluke rebels. Ten years younger than this cohort of David’s pupils, Ingres nevertheless worked alongside them, producing his own portrait of the emperor in imperial garb in 1806, before winning the Prix de Rome and going to work in Italy.59
Under the Treaty of Vienna the art treasures plundered by Napoleon had to be returned to their place of origin. The Prussian army occupying Paris in July 1815 organized the return of art works to the German states, Metternich took care of Italy and the Duke of Wellington acted on behalf of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands. Even the restored King of Spain wanted his Murillos back. So upset was the director of the Louvre that he resigned in October 1815.60 The Louvre had to fall back on French painting, and in any case for political reasons the restored monarchy was keen to demonstrate the continuity of national art since 1789 and powers of royal patronage equal to those of Napoleon. Military painting was frowned upon as too gruesome, recalling the generation of war that was now over. David was exiled as a regicide to Brussels in 1816 and died in 1825, but his pupils Girodet, Gérard and Gros reinvented themselves as painters of the glories and sufferings of the monarchy and for the time being dominated the jury of the Salon. For the Salon of 1817, for example, Gérard exhibited The Entry of Henri IV into Paris, foreshadowing the restoration of the statue of Henri IV to its plinth on the Pont-Neuf in 1818, while Gros submitted his Departure of Louis XVIII for Ghent, marking the moment when the king learned of Napoleon’s return from Elba. Gros was made a baron not by Napoleon but by Charles X.
This continuity and national perspective did not go unchallenged. Artists committed to Bonapartism celebrated the heroism of the National Guard who had defended Paris against the advancing Allies in 1814 and that of the soldiers of Waterloo. Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, who had been one of those national guardsmen, depicted a Grenadier of Waterloo. Horace Vernet organized a private exhibition after his Barrier of Clichy, showing the same defence of Paris by the National Guard, and his Soldier of Waterloo were rejected by the Salon of 1822. The use of lithography meant that these iconic pictures could be reproduced on a mass basis and sold to veterans of Napoleon’s armies. Closely associated with these Bonapartist circles was Théodore Géricault, who returned from two years in Italy to produce a powerful lithograph of The Retreat from Russia in 1818. The following year, moved by the scandal of a shipwreck caused by a reckless noble captain bound for Senegal and the cutting adrift of survivors on a raft, Géricault submitted his dramatic Raft of the Medusa to the Salon. Representing a few desperate survivors among a pile of corpses on the raft waving at a passing sail, echoing the Last Judgements of Michelangelo and Rubens, it was variously heralded as a work of genius and a gratuitous descent into horror.61 The Salon of 1819 indeed marked a turning point. There was a breakthrough of ‘young artists who wanted to dethrone David and overthrow his school’, said the art critic Delécluze, himself a former pupil of David, ‘the nude was proscribed, the beautiful rejected, and the choice of subjects from Antiquity absolutely condemned.’62 Prompted by Romantic poets and writers such as Lord Byron and Walter Scott, artists turned to the Middle Ages for an inspiration that was chivalric and religious. The so-called Troubadour school was in vogue, epitomized by the acclaim received by Louis Hersent for his Abdication of Gustave Vasa, a poignant rendering of a good Swedish king enjoining his people to preserve the unity he has built up. Even Ingres broke with the Antique in the period 1812–26, inspired by Raphael and enjoying success with his Vow of Louis XIII, exhibited in the Salon of 1824, recalling the moment in 1637 when the king committed France to the protection of the Virgin Mary in the hope of being granted an heir.
The Romantic offensive continued through the 1820s. An artistic revolution was under way, as Romantic painters preferred life and movement to precise drawing, individual character and local colour to eternal beauty, and real historical context to the world of An tiquity and mythology. The movement was spearheaded by Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix, who was inspired by Géricault and mortified by his early death in 1824, painted not to display beauty but to express physical and mental anguish, his paintings full of movement, sensuality, exotic colour, executed with bold brushstrokes rather than the conventional fine finish. He owed much to Byron, and to contemporary events such as the Greek struggle for independence against the Turks with which Byron was involved. His Scenes from Massacres at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824, portrayed the death and enslavement of Christian Greeks. The Salon of 1827 saw a head-on clash of Romantic painters and the classical school, the flame of which was now taken up by Ingres. Ingres exalted the Ancient world in his Apotheosis of Homer, in which his beloved Raphael and classical writers Corneille, Racine, Molière and La Fontaine paid homage to the great storyteller. Delacroix on the other hand exhibited a powerful painting drawn from Byron of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus waiting for death, surrounded by his harem, slaves and horses who are about to be engulfed in a funeral pyre.63
In art as well as in literature, the Revolution of 1830 represented a triumph for Romanticism. Delacroix combined allegory and contemporary event in his Liberty Leading the People. He threw himself into a series of pictures inspired by Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Walter Scott and Chateaubriand. The jury that controlled the Salon, dominated by lesser-known artists of the generation of David’s pupils, were keen, however, to defend the canons of the classical school against the Romantics. In 1836, for example, they rejected Delacroix’s Hamlet, which was pointedly bought by the heir to the throne, the Duc d’Orléans.64 Reviews such as L’Artiste dedicated themselves to campaigning on behalf of the Romantic school.65 In time, however, the tide moved against the Romantics. In 1841 Ingres returned from Rome, where he had been director of the French school at which winners of the Prix de Rome studied, to preside over a revival of interest in harmonious line and beauty, articulated now less by reference to classical Antiquity than to mythology and the Orient. Whereas the Oriental themes of Delacroix were executed with passion, the odalisques or slaves in Turkish harems painted by Ingres were an excuse to study nudes that were both sensual and serene.
The July Monarchy was keen to move beyond the battle between classical and Romantic art, preaching a juste milieu between order and movement, monarchy and the heritage of the French Revolution, and a national greatness that was articulated by a succession of regimes, royal, republican and imperial. Louis-Philippe converted the Château of Versailles into a national museum, with the motto ‘To all the Glories of the Fatherland’ over the entrance. The Hall of Battles was given over to paintings of fifteen centuries of French glory, from the victory of Clovis on the battlefield of Tolbiac (496) to the triumph of Napoleon at Wagram (1809). Romanticism and classicism were reconciled by inviting Delacroix to paint the battle of Taillebourg (1242) and Gérard to submit his Entry of Henri IV into Paris as well as a study of Austerlitz. Horace Vernet, a rebel after 1815, was tamed by Charles X with the Legion of Honour in 1825, and became Louis-Philippe’s artist of choice. He was entrusted with the last three battles of Jena, Friedland and Wagram, and also brought to the Hall his Bouvines and Fontenoy, painted for Charles X.66 When the French armies enjoyed a rare bout of glory after 1815 by subduing the Algerian leader Abd-el-Kader, Vernet was called upon to represent this victory in a vast panorama 21 metres long, exhibited in the Salon of 1845. The juste milieu of the July Monarchy was also expressed by an eclectic style that combined the best of classical and Romantic. The talking point of the Salon of 1847 was The Romans of the Decadence, another monumental painting, nearly 5 metres by 8, by Thomas Couture, a pupil of Gros. Its theme was classical and it was highly composed, but its subject was not the glory of Rome but its decline, a salutary tale for the French bourgeoisie, and the forms of some of the draped bodies echoed those on the Raft of the Medusa, albeit in languid ecstasy rather than death. Ingres and Delacroix, wrote one critic, ‘are no longer the young generation… They have established their style; we must bow to them and pass them by.’67
The Second Empire censored the political press and took a broad view of the need to protect public order and public morals. The economic boom with which it coincided and which it tried to foster by railway building, urban development and free trade, was designed to have a depoliticizing effect on a bourgeois public which had more disposable income but less patience and preferred to be entertained rather than challenged. Political repression and bourgeois philistinism bred a frustration in a new generation of writers who wished to challenge the narrow and materialist values of the bourgeois society that was now dominant. However, artists challenging dominant mores ran the risk of provoking the ire of the state, which did not hesitate to prosecute writers who were held to transgress these norms.
Alexandre Dumas fils came up against the authorities with his Dame aux camélias, the story of a courtesan, Marguerite, who falls in love with one of her lovers, Armand. First published as a novel, it was adapted as a play but was censored by the interior minister of the Second Republic, which was then dominated by royalists. Dumas went with his father to try to secure an audience with the minister, but to no avail. The situation improved when the Duc de Morny, one of the masterminds of the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, himself became interior minister. He took a much less cen sorious view, and the play opened at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris on 2 February 1852. In fact, the play did not really challenge social norms but rather reinforced them. Marguerite is visited in Act III by her lover’s father, who tells her that she is a ‘dangerous person’ who cannot marry his son. He has two children to marry, and his daughter, ‘young, beautiful, as pure as an angel’, is due to marry into ‘an honourable family which wishes that everything in my family is honourable too’. Besides, a marriage between his son and Marguerite ‘would have neither chastity for foundation, nor religion for support, nor a family as its fruit’.68 Rather than threaten bourgeois hypocrisy, Marguerite sacrifices herself, dies, and releases Armand for a successful career and traditional marriage.
The challenges posed by Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were considered more serious. Baudelaire was in revolt against his own family as well as against society. His father, a civil servant under the Empire, died when he was five, and his mother remarried an establishment figure, a major-general and ambassador who was appointed an imperial senator in 1853. Charles contracted venereal disease at eighteen, dropped out of the law faculty at nineteen and having attacked his stepfather at a dinner party was put on a ship for Calcutta. Coming into his father’s inheritance at twenty-one, in 1842, he pursued the life of a writer in Paris, calling Sainte-Beuve his uncle, and becoming a disciple of Théophile Gautier (whose reputation as a poet was made with his 1852 Émaux et camées) and a friend of Maxime du Camp.69 Gautier admired his almost British reserve and called him ‘a dandy lost in bohemia’,70 He established himself as an art critic, and was a great admirer of Delacroix. Covering the Salon of 1846 he judged that while Hugo was a worker, Delacroix was a creator. ‘His works are poems,’ he wrote, ‘naively conceived, executed with insolence, shaped by genius… while the one takes only the skin, the other snatches the entrails.’71 In 1857 Baudelaire buried his stepfather and published Les Fleurs du mal. Gautier remarked that it betrayed a sense of the ‘original perversity’ of man but that ‘more than once, with a powerful movement of the wings, rises towards the bluest regions of spirituality’.72 Other did not agree, and the authorities took the view that the work was immoral, obscene and irreligious. Baudelaire was brought before the Tribunal de la Seine and fined 300 francs, one and a half times his monthly income. Fortunately, he had contacts in high places and on appeal to the empress his fine was reduced to 50 francs.73 After this he gave more time to art criticism, defending the work of Delacroix and Manet.
One writer who sympathized deeply with what Baudelaire was attempting was Flaubert. Flaubert congratulated him on rejuvenating Romanticism and said he was ‘like nobody else’. ‘You celebrate the flesh without loving it, in a sad and detached way I like. You are as hard as marble and as penetrating as an English fog.’74 Flaubert, son of the chief surgeon at Rouen hospital, and the same age as Baudelaire, also dropped out of law studies in Paris, after failing in his first-year examination. In 1843 he met Victor Hugo, and was disappointed to find the great man so ordinary. That same year, after a carriage accident, he began to suffer epileptic fits. His closest friend from his brief student days, Maxime du Camp, said that ‘this illness ruined his life, making him solitary and wild’.75 Following his father’s death in 1846 he came into his inheritance, and was able to spend most of his time on the family’s country property at Croisset in Normandy.76 With du Camp he toured Brittany in 1847 and undertook a voyage en Orient taking in Egypt and Turkey in 1850, after which he hesitated between writing something exotic, such as Une Nuit de Don Juan or ‘Anubis, the story of a woman who wants to be seduced by God’, and something that explored provincial bourgeois life in all its ordinariness.77 His Madame Bovary was serialized in La Revue de Paris, which du Camp edited, in the autumn of 1856. The novel explored the dreams and frustrations of a doctor’s wife in Normandy, and rather than dress up sex or death in any distant or invented setting it laid it bare in the heart of the French bourgeoisie. As with Les Fleurs du mal some passages were deemed an affront to ‘public and religious morality’ and Flaubert was brought before the courts by the government. The prosecution argued that the book glorified Madame Bovary’s adultery and elided her sexual desires and religious yearnings. The defence argued that it was a work of social criticism, demonstrating what happened to a farmer’s daughter who was educated above her station and was married for reasons of social advancement rather than for love. The prosecution said that the book would corrupt female readers, the defence that Madame Bovary’s death would serve as a warning to them. Some critics also thought that the novel was too brutal in its realism. ‘The son and brother of distinguished doctors,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve, ‘Flaubert wields his pen as others wield the scalpel. Anatomists and physiologists seem to be everywhere.’78 Many readers, on the other hand, using the same metaphor, were moved by the truthfulness of Flaubert’s portrayal of the predicament of contemporary women. ‘I have not stopped crying since yesterday about this poor woman and have not been able to sleep at night,’ wrote Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie of Angers. ‘Monsieur, where did you gain this perfect understanding of human nature? It is like a scalpel applied to the heart, to the soul. Alas, it is the world in all its ugliness.’79 Flaubert was acquitted, he was acclaimed as the leader of the Realist school, and Madame Bovary, now published in hardback by Michel Lévy, became an instant success.80
Writers who attacked the moral and religious basis of the Empire might still be socially acceptable to it. In an attempt to avoid trial, Flaubert mobilized contacts in high places including the poet Lamartine, the emperor’s cousin ‘Plon-Plon’ (Prince Jérôme-Napoléon) and ladies-in-waiting to the empress. In the 1860s he was a guest at the leading literary and artistic salon, presided over by another cousin of the emperor, Princess Mathilde, who was separated from her husband Prince Demidov and had found a new calling as a patron of the arts. The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, who had also been tried on an obscenity charge in 1853, recorded that at the empress’s in January 1863 they and Flaubert ‘formed an odd-looking group; we were almost the only three people there without decorations and the government of the Emperor, whom we could almost touch with our elbows, had dragged all three of us through the police courts for outraging public morals. The irony of it all.’81 In fact they were happier in the cafés and restaurants of Paris which provided a more democratic if male-dominated form of sociability. In 1862 the Goncourt brothers founded a dining society of Realist writers that met on Sunday nights, twice a month, at Magny’s restaurant. It included Sainte-Beuve, now happy to denounce Victor Hugo as a ‘charlatan’, Turgenev, Taine, Renan and Flaubert. George Sand was invited on a few occasions but said little and told Flaubert, ‘You are the only person here who does not frighten me.’82
The social connections that linked the writers of the Realist movement did not, however, necessarily bring public recognition. George Sand may have been shy in the restaurant but she enjoyed a wider public. In 1869 Flaubert published L’Éducation sentimentale, featuring a mirror-image of one of Balzac’s heroes, ‘a man of every weakness’, who blends perfectly into the bourgeois milieu by dint of education, manners and fortune, but fails to pursue a career and fails to win the woman he loves, while the tumultuous events of 1848–51 simply pass him by. The novel was at best widely misunderstood and at worst condemned by the critics as an attack on bourgeois ideals. There were only two isolated voices of praise. Émile Zola defended Flaubert by underlining his ‘nervous analysis of the smallest facts, a notation of life that is both meticulous and alive’.83 George Sand argued, positively, that it was the fault of contemporary society if it was ‘in fact mediocre, ridiculous, condemned to see its aspirations continually aborted’.84 However, she was a friend and had the delight at the same time of seeing her play, L’Autre, become a box-office success at the Opéra-Comique. Flaubert, who saw it himself early in 1870, told Sand, ‘what a pretty work, and how one loves its author!’85 The fact that a masterpiece was damned by the critics while a play of which nothing has since been heard was praised to the rooftops says a great deal about the bourgeois society that was the market for literature, drama and music in the nineteenth century.
It was not that Flaubert lacked a good publisher for his novels, rather that the eye of publishers in the Second Empire was on the expanding demand for information and entertainment. The careers of the Lévy brothers and Louis Hachette demonstrate the dramatic changes that took place in book publishing after 1840. Simon Lévy was a Jewish pedlar from Alsace who came to Paris in 1826, selling theatre programmes and the texts of plays running in Paris before opening a cabinet de lecture in 1836. His son Michel set up as a music publisher in his own right in 1845 and, having taken the side of Alexandre Dumas against accusations of running a ‘literary factory’, secured the right to publish the complete works of Dumas, which appeared as thirty-eight volumes at 2 francs each in 1847. The success of that year led to Michel and his brothers Calmann and Nathan putting 50,000 francs each into a family publishing business, and they acquired rights to the works of both George Sand and the playwright and librettist Eugène Scribe in 1855. In 1857 they published Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in a first edition of 6,000, at 1 franc each, and a second edition in 1858, but their all-time bestseller was Ernest Renan’s 1863 Life of Jesus, which sold 140,000 copies in the first year and a half and made them enough money to open a new bookshop on the place de l’Opéra in 1871.86 For his part Louis Hachette, having dropped out of law studies, developed a publishing niche in school textbooks for the expanding school system and soon became king of the textbook, publishing fifty-four titles in 1833–9. Another sector of his market was the publication of dictionaries, culminating in Littré’s dictionary of 1863. In 1851 he visited the Great Exhibition in London and returned to Paris determined to establish himself as the French W. H. Smith. Just as the main railway system was being completed and with the powerful patronage of the Duc de Morny, with whom he co-owned a paper-manufacturing business, he negotiated an exclusive right with railway companies to set up station bookstalls. He developed a whole library of colour-coded paperbacks as train-journey reading, retailing at between 50 centimes and 1 franc 50, avoiding anything political or immoral and including the popular children’s stories of the Comtesse de Ségur. Hachette also acquired the right to distribute newspapers through station bookshops, and by the time of his death in 1865 newspaper sales were bringing in more than book sales.87
The press likewise responded quickly to the commercial and communications revolutions. The heavy censorship of the political press after the 1848 Revolution encouraged press barons to develop a more informative, entertaining kind of newspaper. Hippolyte de Villemessant, the illegitimate son of an aristocratic mother who sought redemption in Legitimism and commercial success, acquired Le Figaro in 1854, and turned it into the society paper of the Second Empire which ‘relates Paris to Paris’.88 When press censorship was relaxed in 1867 he successfully merged the literary-gossip dimension with American-style political reportage, and the paper had a healthy daily circulation of 47,000 in 1868.89 One of his journalists, Henri Rochefort, the son of a Legitimist marquis who was introduced to republicanism by his father-in-law, broke with Villemessant and in 1868 launched his own paper, La Lanterne, in response to the more liberal press laws. Satirical and scurrilous, it caught the mood of growing opposition to the Empire in Paris and sold 125,000 copies on its second Saturday, before the government clamped down. He had already fled to Belgium to take refuge with the Hugo family, who dubbed him ‘the proud archer’, before the government sentenced him to a year in prison.90
Very different from both these papers was Le Petit Journal, launched in 1863 by Polydore Millaud, who originated in the Sephardic Jewish community of Bordeaux and sought his journalistic fortune in Paris after 1836. Tabloid in design, selling for a mere 5 centimes, Le Petit Journal was distributed along the railway network and expedited to towns and villages by a network of itinerant paper-sellers who replaced the colporteurs, killed off by government restrictions since 1849. It not only served a popular audience in town and country that was no more than semi-literate but taught it to read. Non-political, it provided a wealth of information and entertainment from stock-market prices to reviews and reports of criminal trials, with faits divers or human-interest stories a new selling point. Its editorialist, who went under the trade name of Timothy Trimm, provided comment on the issues of the day from Easter celebrations to military service, answered readers’ letters and was careful to avoid a Parisian focus. The novels it serialized were far from high literature, concentrating on Rocambole, the mysterious righter of wrongs of Ponson du Terrail’s Drames de Paris, and the Monsieur Lecoq detective stories of Émile Gaboriau. The line between fact and fiction was not always closely drawn, and news, human interest and the detective story came together with the Tropmann affair, the case of a murder of parents and six children in the Paris suburb of Pantin. Circulation was 357,000 on 23 September 1869, the day the crime was announced, and rose when each body was found and the culprit apprehended, reaching 594,000 on 15 January 1870, the day of his execution.91
In the musical world the Second Empire was keen to eliminate any political opposition and to encourage pure entertainment. The goguettes were closed down and effectively replaced by the café-concerts, which multiplied after 1850 and reached their apogee around 1865. Making money out of the drinks they sold, they attracted a varied clientele of students, bohemians, the elegant and foreign tourists. Politics was replaced by sex, in terms both of the sauciness or obscenity of the songs sung and of the prostitution that was plied there. Some of the café-concert singers acquired star status, such as Thérésa, a former seamstress with a brief acting career who sang at the Alcazar and Eldorado. She competed for fame with the great actress of the day, Hortense Schneider, claiming that Schneider ‘was called the Thérésa of the theatre, while I was called the Schneider of the café-concerts’.92
In the theatres the public of the Second Empire began to tire of the pompous extravagance of Meyerbeer’s grand opera, favouring instead the smaller-scale, lyrical and intimate. Charles Gounod, who had fallen under the spell of Lacordaire when he won the Prix de Rome in 1839, became director of the Foreign Missions church in Paris and was briefly a seminarist at Saint-Sulpice in 1847–8. Now he turned from sacred music to opera and had Faust, based on Nerval’s translation, performed at Léon Carvalho’s Théâtre-Lyrique in 1859. It found itself in competition with Meyerbeer’s latest work, The Pardon of Ploërmel, with a Breton and religious theme, at the Opéra-Comique. Georges Bizet, who saw both productions, thought Meyerbeer’s ‘rather boring’ and Faust ‘splendid. Gounod is the most complete of French composers.’93 It was no easy task to judge the taste of the opera-going public. Bizet won the Prix de Rome in 1857 but his Pearl Fishers, produced at the Théâtre-Lyrique by Carvalho in 1863, was regarded as too Wagnerian and had to be alternated with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro to keep up box-office receipts. Even more of a flop was Berlioz’s Trojans, which he could not get accepted by the Opéra and which became another Carvalho production in 1863, but lasted for only twenty-one performances.94
The career of Offenbach beautifully illustrates the way in which popular music was upgraded and grand opera subverted in order to produce a new genre, the operetta, which exactly matched the musical taste of the French bourgeoisie in the Second Empire. The son of a bookbinder and synagogue cantor from the Rhineland, Offenbach came to Paris in 1833 for Conservatory training, worked his way up through the orchestras of the boulevard du Temple and the Opéra-Comique, and became leader of the Comédie-Française orchestra in 1850. The Paris Exposition of 1855, which brought five million visitors to the capital, prompted him to write to the minister in charge, Achille Fould, asking for permission to open a theatre putting on ‘a show in good taste, where until now there have been only more or less uncouth parades’.95 The outcome was the small-scale Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, which enjoyed the backing of Le Figaro newspaper, and made an impact with a send-up of The Huguenots, Ba-Ta-Clan, in 1856.96
More success came with Orpheus in the Underworld which parodied Greek myth and with it the court of the Second Empire, and opened at the Bouffes in 1858. Offenbach now moved on to the Opéra itself, with a ballet called Papillon in 1860, but the forum of his greatest triumphs, after theatres were accorded far more freedom in 1864, was the Théâtre des Variétés. La Belle Hélène, another spoof of Greek myth, starring Hortense Schneider, was described by La Vie Parisienne as encapsulating ‘the present, our society, us, our beliefs, taste and gaiety’, confident enough in itself that it could poke fun at the Ancients.97 The Paris Exposition of 1867, which attracted eleven million visitors, was a showcase of French industrial progess as well as French culture. Two Schneiders were in view. Eugène, who announced that a French locomotive had been bought by the British, and Hortense, who played the lead in The Grand Duchess of Gérolstein, a story of love and war set in a diminutive German state which became the talk of the town and was attended by Napoleon III, the Prince of Wales, Bismarck and Tsar Alexander II.98 Gérolstein was familiar as the duchy of Rodolphe, hero of Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, and illustrated how Offenbach was taking over popular tropes just as the somewhat violent boulevard theatres were being demolished by Haussmann. At the same time, however, the witty and playful operetta displaced heavyweight opera as the favourite genre not only of the bourgeoisie but of high society, fantasizing about soldier Fritz, General Boum, Baron Puck and the Grand Duchess just as an altogether more militaristic Germany was about to bring Parisian gaiety to an end.
The great event of the artistic season, during the Second Empire as before, was the annual exhibition of the Paris Salon. The jury drawn from the Academy of Fine Arts mediated between the government and the bourgeois public, excluding any works that went against an aesthetic canon which favoured paintings that were religious, historical, mythological, pastoral or sentimental, inspired by classical or Renaissance art, and more recently by the Orient. Whereas the movement to keep out in the 1830s was Romanticism, in the 1850s it was Realism, the portrayal of modern life in all its grimness, and depicting peasants and workers rather than aristocrats and bourgeois. The defeat of the Revolution of 1848 destroyed the illusions of many artists and drove them to examine the reality of the world around them that had brought dreams of social emancipation to nothing.
Gustave Courbet had enjoyed no success under the July Monarchy, with only three of the twenty-two pictures he submitted accepted by the jury. At the Salon of 1849 he won a gold medal for his After Dinner in Ornans, and as a medal-winner he now gained the right to exhibit every year, bypassing the jury. In 1850 he provoked controversy with the unyieldingly severe Stone-breakers and Burial at Ornans. The art critic Champfleury, who took up the defence of Realism, asked, ‘Is it the artist’s fault if material interests, small-town life, sordid egoism, provincial narrowness have clawed their faces, dimmed their eyes, furrowed their brows, made their mouths stupid? Many bourgeois look like that. M. Courbet paints bourgeois.’ A contrary view was put by the aged Delécluze, who wrote, ‘Never, perhaps, has the worship of ugliness been so openly practised.’99 Again, at the Salon of 1853, Courbet exhibited his Bathers, which portrayed not nymphs in some ethereal glade but flesh-and-blood women of generous proportion climbing out of a river. At a private view the empress thought they looked no different from the plough-horses exhibited in the next painting. The authorities had their revenge at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Courbet submitted his Burial at Ornans but had no special privilege for this festival. He was turned down, and erected a tent for his own private show, under the banner, ‘Realism. Gustave Courbet’.100
The artists who were favoured by the Academy at this moment were those who continued the classical school such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau. Bouguereau won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1848 and studied in Italy for four years, while Gérôme travelled in Italy in 1843–4 and after 1857 made several journeys to Egypt. Under the Empire Bouguereau accepted commissions to decorate public buildings, churches and town houses, typically with allegorical figures representing music and love. His paintings, of a photographic realism and highly finished, were nevertheless of purely imaginary mythological idylls, featuring nymphs and fauns moulded like Greek statues. Gérôme’s first paintings were in a neo-Greek style but after he discovered the Orient he specialized in slave-markets and Arab street scenes, and painted a series imagining Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt.101
In 1863 there was another challenge to this school of painting. For the Salon of that year Gérôme presented three paintings which were all accepted: Greek Comedians, A Turkish Butcher in Jerusalem and a historical work, Molière Breakfasting with Louis XIV. Édouard Manet, however, presented Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which subverted paintings such as Raphael’s Judgement of Paris by moving the scene from a mythological setting to a modern river bank and putting his carefree nude in the presence of dressed men. His new style of painting depicted modern life in the form of cafés, the theatre, bullfights, railway stations, street-scenes, the racetrack and the seaside, rather than beauty or ideals clothed in some timeless and escapist form. The composition was sometimes randomly cropped at the edges and used a rougher surface rather than the perfect design and glossy finish beloved of the Academy. So many paintings of this kind were rejected by the Salon jury in 1863 that the emperor exceptionally authorized a ‘Salon des Refusés’ to be arranged to show them.102 The artists whose works were turned down were not social misfits or social rebels but of bourgeois background, possibly even more exalted than Gérôme, a jeweller’s son from Vesoul, and were formally trained at the École des Beaux Arts. Manet was the son of an official in the Justice Ministry, while Édouard Degas was the son of an Italian banker and American mother, who, like Baudelaire and Flaubert, had abandoned his law studies. Socially, although Gérôme was a regular at the salon of Princesse Mathilde while Manet met the likes of Baudelaire and Émile Zola at the Café Guerbois in the Grande rue des Batignolles (now the avenue de Clichy), Manet had also toured Italy where he met up with Émile Ollivier, whom he caricatured in 1860, and was visited in his workshop by the Goncourt brothers. Generationally, the painters of modern life were a decade younger that the academic artists, but the main source of antagonism was aesthetic and political.
The new artists had an ambivalent relationship with the Salon, for they could not afford to forgo the recognition it provided. Manet’s Olympia, which was accepted by the Salon of 1865, poked fun at the stylized nude of paintings such as Titian’s Venus of Urbino by painting a reclining prostitute, accompanied by a black cat and black servant, obviously awaiting a client. In 1866, however, more of Manet’s pictures were rejected from the Salon and Zola took up his cause. In a series of articles in L’Événement in April–May 1866 he defined the works of Manet and his circle as ‘a corner of creation seen through a temperament’.103 By the end of the Second Empire Manet’s pictures called into question not only the canons of the Salon and the Academy, but the politics of the regime. While Gérôme hailed the establishment of a French empire in Indo-China for the Salon of 1865 by painting a line of Siamese ambassadors crawling to the thrones of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, Manet chose to depict The Execution of Maximilian, the ill-fated prince the French government tried to impose on the Mexican people, who expressed their thanks by shooting him. The thanks of the regime naturally went to Gérôme, who was sent as one of the official party for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, while Manet was told that his Execution would be rejected by the Salon of 1869 if it were submitted.