As time passed, Louis Napoleon was seen more and more as a study in contrasts, a mixture of opposites, at once naïve and calculating, sincere and full of schemes. “He was very much better than what his previous life and crazy enterprises led one to expect,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, who in a brief turn as foreign minister had the opportunity to observe the president at close hand.
As a private person he possessed some attractive qualities—a kindly disposition, humanity, gentleness and even tenderness, a perfect simplicity. … His power of concealing his thoughts, resulting from his conspiratorial past, was aided by the immobility of his countenance … for his eyes were as dull as opaque glass.
The president was, in addition, a notorious womanizer, a “grand coureur de femmes,” which was considered highly admirable by some, regrettable by others, and either way a common explanation for the half-asleep look. “His vulgar pleasures weakened his energies,” was all de Tocqueville had to contribute on the subject.
The one American who enjoyed anything like a friendship with the president was Dr. Thomas W. Evans, a sociable Philadelphian who had become the foremost dentist in Paris, due both to his professional skill— he was reputedly the first in Paris to specialize in gold fillings—and the fact that Louis Napoleon was his patient. To Evans, the president was a “charmer” whose “extraordinary self-control” and “seeming impassiveness” were greatly to his advantage. Rather than cold and calculating, Evans found him generous and affectionate. Those who spoke ill of him, according to Evans, were either his political enemies or people who did not know the man.
“My power is in an immortal name,” he himself was fond of saying, and indeed, except for the name, he would seem to have come out of nowhere and with almost nothing to qualify him for high position or to account for his popularity. Except in infancy, he had never lived in Paris. As a consequence of schooling in Switzerland and Germany, he spoke French with a slight German accent, and after years of exile in London, enjoyed a cup of tea quite as much as any Englishman.
Born in 1808, the son of the first Napoleon’s brother Louis Bonaparte, he had lived abroad with his mother during most of his youth, and in 1830, having tried and failed at a ludicrously inept attempt to overthrow King Louis-Philippe, he had been exiled to the United States, where he stayed only briefly before settling in London. (Like Louis-Philippe, he spoke English with ease and, as Thomas Evans had discovered, preferred conversing in English when he did not care to have others nearby understand what was said.)
In 1840, still trusting to his star, he had launched a second clumsy attempt at insurrection, but this time was sentenced to life imprisonment northeast of Paris in the medieval Castle of Ham, replete with moat and drawbridge. There, provided with a young companion, a laundress who bore him two sons, he spent five and a half years reading history, political theory, and military treatises. To those surprised by the range of his knowledge, he liked to say, “Do you forget my years of study at the university of Ham?”
Then in 1846 he shaved off his mustache and beard, disguised himself in the clothes of a workman, put a plank over his shoulder, walked out of the prison, and escaped to London to pursue his “destiny” still again.
His popular strength, as shown by his overwhelming victory in the presidential election of 1848, was mainly in rural France. Yet even in Paris, what opposition there was remained relatively quiet. In the time since the election, he had become more popular still. His name, he liked to say, was a complete program in itself. “It stands for order, authority, religion, the welfare of the people, national dignity. …” And this, after so much unrest and appalling bloodshed, was what people longed for—order above all.
As a leader, Louis Napoleon also had a marked gift for grand-style theatrics and display of a kind long missing in the life of the nation. Presidential balls at the Élysée Palace were now large and exuberantly lavish, with guests announced by title even though titles had been done away with by the constitution. Paris dearly loved a show, as he understood. At public appearances, he was commonly greeted with cries of “Vive l’empire! Vive l’empereur!”
The autumn of 1851 was particularly beautiful—like Indian summer at home, wrote a correspondent for the New York Times. The air was “soft and hazy, the sunlight rich and mellow.” The misery of so many was “crouching out of sight” no less than ever, off in the narrow, crooked streets, and being out of sight, was “as usual out of mind.” The well-dressed, well-fed populace filled the boulevards. The fashionable avenue of the ChampsÉlysées was as crowded as on the finest days of spring.
There was talk, of course, of political unrest, of hidden plots and coups d’état, and it seemed to matter not at all to the Parisians.
They eat, drink, and make merry, and make the most of the passing day. Future probabilities or possibilities are not allowed to interfere with the pleasures of present possession. This way of taking life is wise enough—for, remember, it is French life.
On the first day of December 1851, Louis Napoleon sent for his American dentist friend, Thomas Evans, who on arriving at the Élysée Palace found the president more than ordinarily affectionate toward him. There were, however, Evans later wrote, moments when it seemed the president had something he wished to talk about, yet did not.
At a formal reception at the palace that evening, he stood greeting his guests in his usual calm, attentive way, showing no sign that anything out of the ordinary might be on his mind. About ten he excused himself and went behind closed doors to join a small coterie of trusted fellow conspirators. As they gathered about his desk, he opened a bundle of secret papers bearing a single code word, “Rubicon.”
Soon after midnight, in the first hours of December 2, 1851, the surprise coup was under way.
Before daybreak more than seventy political figures, generals, and journalists had been roused from their beds and arrested. By dawn troops lined the boulevards and occupied the National Assembly, the railroad depots, and other strategic points. Proclamations put up on the walls of buildings proclaimed the National Assembly dissolved. The constitution Louis Napoleon had taken an oath to uphold had been done away with and a new constitution called for.
Everything had been considered. Soldiers posted at newspaper offices kept them from opening. Even the ropes of church bells had been cut so they could not be used to summon protest.
In a matter of hours, Louis Napoleon had made himself dictator. Later that morning he rode through Paris on horseback without incident. Not for another two days did protest flare, and it was quickly, decisively crushed, leaving hundreds dead.
Two weeks later, in a national referendum, the country voted overwhelming approval of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état.
Many were outraged. The American minister, William Rives, felt so incensed he refused to attend the president’s diplomatic receptions until gently reproved from Washington by Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Victor Hugo, who had thought well of the president at the beginning, fled to Belgium that he might speak his mind freely about “Napoleon the Little.” “On 2 December, an odious, repulsive, infamous, unprecedented crime was committed,” he wrote.
The author of this crime is a malefactor of the most cynical and degraded kind. His servants are the comrades of a pirate. … When France awakes she will start back with a terrible shudder.
Hugo would remove himself further to the English Isle of Guernsey, where he would live in exile for fifteen years.
The usual bustle of Paris resumed yet again, crowds in the streets taking up the familiar pace of business and pleasure. Many of those arrested were released. Newspapers resumed publication, though by a new decree anyone found propagating false news would be immediately arrested, which in effect meant no real freedom of the press.
Political discord and violence had been put to rest at last, it seemed, and for the greater part of the population, even in Paris, that was sufficient for now. When the words Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité were removed from the façades of pu
blic buildings, there was hardly a word of protest.
The following October, Louis Napoleon, age forty-four, was proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III, and the close of the year 1852 marked the official beginning of the Second Empire. To a large part of the nation, however, it was not until a bright morning in January 1853, when, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, he married the beautiful Spanish countess Eugénie-Marie de Montijo—and France once again had both an emperor and an empress—that the Second Empire was truly under way.
II
As for what he intended to do with his power, the new emperor was emphatically clear on one thing above all. He would make Paris more than ever the most beautiful city in the world and solve a number of intolerable problems in the process.
The great appeal of the city had long been what man built there. There was nothing stunning about its natural setting—no mountain ranges on the horizon, no dramatic coastline. The river Seine, as Emma Willard and other Americans had noted, was hardly to be compared to the Hudson, not to say the Ohio or the Mississippi. The “genius of the place” was in the arrangements of space and architecture, the perspectives of Paris. Now far more—almost unimaginably more—was to be built, and the perspectives to become infinitely longer.
No time was taken up with extended discussion. The emperor disliked discussion. He put a new prefect of the Seine in charge, a career civil servant and master organizer named Georges-Eugène Haussmann, and the choice proved decisive. On the day Haussmann was sworn in, the emperor showed him a map on which he had drawn in blue, red, yellow, and green pencils what he wanted built, and “according to their degree of urgency.”
The work would go on for nearly twenty years. Haussmann liked to call himself a “demolition artist,” and from the way great, broad swaths were cut through whole sections of the city, and entire neighborhoods leveled with little apparent regard for their history or concern for their inhabitants, it seemed to many that headlong destruction was truly his main purpose. On the Île-de-la-Cité, the historic center of Paris, the ancient slums clustered close to Notre-Dame would be leveled. Streets that Victor Hugo knew and wrote about in Notre-Dame de Paris totally disappeared. The Hôtel Dieu would be demolished without the least hesitation. “I could never forget the sinister air of that bit of river wedged between two hospital complexes with a covered walkway between them, polluted with evacuations of every kind from a mass of patients eight hundred strong or more,” Haussmann wrote. A resident population of some 15,000 people on the Île-de-la-Cité would be reduced to 5,000.
Broad avenues were to radiate from the Arc de Triomphe like the spokes of a colossal wheel. North from la Cité would run the new boulevard de Sébastopol, and south, the boulevard Saint-Michel. In a long east-west arc on the Left Bank, back from the river, a broad thoroughfare, the new boulevard Saint-Germain, would cut through the heart of the old Latin Quarter.
Haussmann was vigorous and opinionated, a broad-shouldered man, six feet two, who could be ruthless with anything or anyone standing in his way—as often said, just the sort who might succeed in such an ambitious and difficult task.
With its population now more than a million people and still growing, the city had urgent need of modern improvements. Its problems were many and serious. The old tangle of medieval Paris, the crowding, the filth, squalor, foul air and water could be ignored no longer if only for the physical health of the people. It was not that no notable progress had been accomplished in recent years. Much had been done for the betterment of city life under Louis-Philippe. But far more was needed.
The plan was to improve public health and reduce crime, improve the flow of traffic and commerce, provide better sanitation with a vast new sewer system, improve the city’s water supply, and provide more open space and clean air, as well as years of employment for tens of thousands of workers. It was true that straight, wide streets would be less suitable for building barricades and better for the rapid deployment of troops, or for directing artillery fire, as critics often said. But a free flow of traffic and a sense of grandeur were far more important to the planners. The making of a more splendid city was always the paramount objective. The longest of the boulevards planned, the rue Lafayette, was to run three miles in a perfectly straight line. Eventually seventy-one miles of new roads would be built.
Samuel F. B. Morse’s first telegraph.
Early daguerreotype of Paris, with the Pont des Arts in the foreground, the Pont Neuf and the towers of Notre-Dame in the distance.
Andrew Jackson by George P. A. Healy. Painted in Tennessee only days before Jackson’s death in 1845. Jackson was one of several prominent Americans painted by Healy at the request of King Louis-Philippe of France.
Webster’s Reply to Hayne by Healy.
William Wells Brown, fugitive slave, writer, and ardent abolitionist.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America.
P. T. Barnum and Tom Thumb.
Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
No American artist ever caused such a stir in Paris as Catlin, painter of the Plains Indians, who arrived with an enormous exhibition of his work and a troupe of Iowas, who performed their dances at the Tuileries Palace before King Louis-Philippe and his family, as portrayed in a painting by Karl Girardet.
George Catlin by William Fisk.
Little Wolf by George Catlin.
Napoleon III and Georges-Eugène Haussmann at the start of the remaking of Paris. Painting by Adolphe Yvon.
Empress Eugénie.
Dr. Thomas Evans, the popular American dentist who, at the fall of the Second Empire, arranged the daring escape of the empress to England.
Author Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Paris in 1853 to escape the fanfare over her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, felt at once the “dreamland” charm of the city, its people, its architecture and art. At the Louvre, Géricault’s vast, dramatic The Raft of the Medusa (upper right) seemed to “seize and control” her whole being.
The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, showing the victims of an 1816 disaster at sea.
The laying of the Atlantic Cable in 1858 changed transatlantic communication forever.
Second Empire opulence on display at the Grand Hôtel.
As the German army marched on Paris, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an American student of sculpture, decided he must leave.
Mary Putnam chose to stay, determined to pursue her medical studies no matter what.
With Paris under siege, Léon Gambetta makes his dramatic escape by balloon. As few people knew, the second balloon (right) carried two Americans, Charles May and William Reynolds.
A Soup Kitchen During the Siege of Paris by Henri Pille.
Rat Seller During the Siege of Paris by Narcisse Chaillou.
American minister to France Elihu B. Washburne.
A December 25, 1870, excerpt from the diary Washburne kept every day through the entire siege.
Paris aflame the night of May 23–24, 1871.
Communard corpses.
Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris by Jean-Louis-Victor Viger du Vigneau. Archbishop Darboy was arrested, imprisoned, and secretly executed on orders from the Communard Chief of Police Raoul Rigault.
Raoul Rigault dead in the gutter.
The Ruins of the Tuileries Palace by Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier.
Along the great boulevards new apartments would rise—whole apartment blocks of white limestone—none more than six stories high and in a uniform Beaux-Arts architectural style, with high French windows and cast-iron balconies. Sidewalks were to be widened. Streets and boulevards would be lined with trees and glow at night with 32,000 new gas lamps. Gaslight everywhere would turn night into day, making Paris truly la ville lumière.
And with the boulevards came such novelties as newspaper kiosks, public urinals, and cafés with their tables and chairs set outside on the sidewalks.
The emperor directed that the Bois de Boulogne, the vast woodland west of the city, must become a public park surpassing that
of any city, and include a magnificent approach, the avenue de l’Impératrice—the avenue of the Empress. Miles of new walking paths, flower beds, lakes, and a waterfall were part of the plan. And other, smaller parks were to be developed, such as the beautiful Parc Monceau.
“At every step is visible the march of improvement,” Haussmann wrote proudly in his diary. But the gulf between the rich and the poor grew greater, and as Haussmann himself acknowledged, over half the population of Paris lived still “in poverty bordering on destitution.”
The Louvre would be completed at last. New libraries were built. A new Palais de Justice would rise on the Île-de-la-Cité, and in time an all new Hôtel Dieu. For all that was lost to demolition on the Île-de-la-Cité, an essential part of the plan was to keep it the heart of the city, and much of historic importance was spared. With most of the dense slums removed, the glorious façade of Notre-Dame would stand in a wash of open light and in full view as it never had.