The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (34 page)

At two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, February 28, in formal diplomatic attire, he appeared at the Hôtel de Ville, headquarters of the new government. A great crowd was gathered outside. Once inside, having been formally presented, he delivered his address, saying:

As representative of the United States, and charged with the interests and rights of my country, and my fellow citizens residing in France, and too far off to wait for instructions, I seize on the first opportunity to offer you my felicitations, persuaded that my government will sanction the course I thus adopt. Nor can I either fail to state to you that the remembrance of the alliance and ancient friendship which have joined together France and the United States is still living and in full force among us.

Cries of “
Vive la République des États-Unis
” went up among those gathered inside and out.

None of the European diplomatic corps had made such a move. The United States was first and alone in recognizing the new republic. The rest were awaiting instructions.

In Washington, Rush’s decisive role was roundly approved. President Polk assured Congress that the American minister to France had his “full and unqualified approbation.”

Paris continued “wonderfully, miraculously tranquil.” Elections to the National Assembly went ahead in perfect order. Visitors were returning to the city. The weather in late April and early May was as lovely as ever at that time of year. Back for another visit, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote
of the timeless beauty of scenes along the Seine, the “very civil and good tempered, polite and joyous” people of Paris.

Americans had long since read in
Galignani’s Guide
that the volatile populace of the city was easily led into “criminal excesses,” but also quick to recover, ever eager in the pursuit of pleasure. “Living entirely for the present, the Parisian soon forgets his afflictions, consoles himself with the amusements of the day, and is too gay to think of the future.” The one disturbing note to Emerson was the great number of trees that had been cut down during the February uprising to build barricades.

But, appearances and guidebooks to the contrary, all was not well. A government program of national workshops to provide bread and work for the unemployed had problems from the start. As Rush explained in a long report:

They did not and could not employ everybody. … The work was ill-done into the bargain, whilst the accumulating over-surplus of workmen who could not be employed at all were thrown as a charity upon the government. … This made up a heavy aggregate of expense to the government without satisfying the workmen. The consequence was discontent among the whole of them.

Unemployment grew steadily worse. Tens of thousands had no jobs and were suffering dreadfully, many starving. Children were starving. In the meantime, revolutionary fervor and violence were spreading rapidly across Europe, in Germany, Italy, and Poland.

Emerson departed on June 3. On June 23, riots in Paris flared into a full-scale, raging insurrection.

By decree the National Assembly conferred supreme authority— unlimited power—on the minister of war, General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac. Paris was declared in a state of siege and an additional 30,000 troops were rushed in from outside the city. The fighting turned savage, and General Cavaignac responded with brutal force, ordering the use of cannon and bayonet, and refusing to give the least quarter to the insurgents.

The archbishop of Paris, Denis Affre, asked permission to go himself
to the scene of the worst of the fighting, to try to mediate. “On his way he passed my door in his full clerical robes,” wrote Rush. When the archbishop climbed a barricade in clear view, the firing stopped for an instant on both sides, and then he was shot. He died the next day.

The “June Days of 1848,” as they were to be known, numbered four. “So vast and horrible a desolation wrought in the heart of a city by the hands of her own citizens the world has not witnessed,” reported the New York and London papers. Possibly as many as 5,000 were killed, including some 1,200 soldiers. Another 11,000 were arrested and thousands of these would be shipped off to Algeria. It made what happened in February seem only a minor disturbance.

(A young German writer and professed communist, Karl Marx, who had been living in Paris until ordered to leave a few years before, wrote that the February revolution was the “
beautiful
revolution,” the one in June, the “
ugly
revolution, the repulsive revolution.”)

With the fighting ended, Rush, like thousands of others, set off to view the “battlefield,” to find that, the battlefield being Paris, the dead and wounded had been taken away as they fell. Only the barricades and houses shattered by cannonballs or riddled by musket fire stood as evidence of the havoc and slaughter. The great boulevards looked like abandoned encampments. “Scattered wisps of hay and the litter of cavalry, horses tied to iron palisades, detachments of infantry, their arms stacked, the men lying down on straw, looking jaded, some asleep … such is the picture of these streets now,” wrote Rush.

What would come of it all was impossible for him to predict, knowing how much he had failed to foresee since his arrival.

None can understand a country or have full claim to speak of its future, but those who belong to it, or live in it long enough to catch its whole genius and characteristics. … How then can strangers hope to look into the veiled future of France?

Though the official state of siege would not be lifted until October, and thousands of troops remained a conspicuous presence, daily life resumed again and at a quickening pace. The National Assembly opened, and Rush
found himself back playing his part at diplomatic receptions or dining in splendor with the president of the assembly and members of the cabinet.

In November the first snow fell, whitening all of Paris. On December 10, the election for the first president of the Republic took place, and the winner by an enormous margin was Prince Louis Napoleon, who was hardly more than a name to most of the country, but the name was quite enough. He was opposed by General Cavaignac and the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine. Of the more than seven million votes cast, Louis Napoleon won over 5 million.

On New Year’s Day, 1849, the new president moved into the Palais de l’Élysée on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Though more modest than the Palace of the Tuileries, and a bit shabby, the Élysée, as everyone knew, had been a favorite residence of the Emperor Napoleon. At a first grand ball at the Élysée in February, it was taken as no small matter that the servants were wearing the green and gold livery of the emperor.

The flow of Americans into Paris continued all the while, their numbers including the usual range in age, vocation, interests, social standing, purpose, and wherewithal—students, journalists, writers, social reformers, salesmen, merchants, tourists, the young, the old, the ambitious, the in-disposed, the idle rich. But there was a notable change to be seen in the increasing number of American women. One of these, a New York literary critic and ardent feminist named Margaret Fuller, decided all who came to Paris from her country could be classified in three distinct “species.”

The first she called the “servile” American, whom she considered “utterly shallow,” all but worthless.

He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee house gossip. …

Then there was the conceited American, “instinctively bustling and proud of he knows not what” and “profoundly ignorant.” Still, she thought this a creature not without hope.

And third was the artist, the “thinking American,” the one she approved of and with whom she felt a common bond.

[He] recognized the immense advantage of being born to a new world … yet does not wish the seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new climate and a new culture. …

But plainly there were new arrivals distinctively different from any who preceded them and who would make way for others like them to follow. And Margaret Fuller was herself of this different variety, in that she was the first American woman of great talent as a professional writer to visit and describe Paris. A Bostonian by birth and upbringing, she had begun her career working with Ralph Waldo Emerson, editing the Transcendentalist publication the
Dial
, before joining the staff of the
NewYork Tribune
. At age thirty-six, she was at last seeing Europe, a desire of long standing, and filing “letters” to the
Tribune
, a number of which were carried on the front page. Much, though not all, about Paris charmed her. She wrote of “passably pretty ladies with excessively pretty bonnets, announcing in their hues of light green, peach blossom and primrose the approach of spring.” But the men “sauntering arm-in-arm” were another matter.

The air, half military, half dandy, of self-esteem and
savoirfaire
, is not particularly interesting, nor are the glassy stare and fumes of bad cigars, exactly what one most desires to encounter when the heart is opened by the breath of spring. …

Hearing Chopin perform at the piano was to hear his music for the first time, she wrote. In the Library of the Chamber of Deputies, she feasted her eyes on the original manuscripts of Rousseau.

I saw them and touched them—those manuscripts, just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon—yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive with which his soul has pervaded this century.

She met and conversed with George Sand, whom she greatly admired. She “takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts,” and had “every reason to leave her husband—a stupid, brutal man.” The “brilliant shows” of Paris days and nights were entrancing, but of the French overall, she was not so sure. “French people I find slippery,” she confided in a letter to Emerson, though she knew that with her limited command of the language it was difficult to “meet them in their way.”

“It is too plain that you should conquer their speech first, which is to unlock such jeweled cabinets for you,” Emerson responded.

When a French tutor told her she spoke and acted like an Italian, it suited her fine, since she was on her way to Italy and thus might find herself more at home there.

Margaret Fuller would meet and marry a penniless Italian aristocrat, Angelo Ossoli. On a voyage to New York in 1850, she, her husband, and their small son would die when the ship went down in a storm off Long Island, within sight of land.

Another American who amply qualified for Margaret Fuller’s third category was Richard Morris Hunt, the student who had found himself carried along with the mob on the day of the February bloodshed. Hunt was the first American to be admitted to the school of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts—the finest school of architecture in the world—and the subsequent importance of his influence on the architecture of his own country can hardly be overstated.

He was, in addition, one of the earliest of the American children brought to Paris by wealthy parents to improve their education, specifically in the arts. Richard, who grew up in Brattleboro, Vermont, had arrived
in Paris first in 1843, at sixteen, with his four brothers and sister and widowed mother. The family fortune had come from land speculation in New England. His father, a member of Congress, had died of cholera in Washington during the epidemic of 1832.

Ambitious to become an architect, Richard had prepared for the famously difficult entrance examination at the École des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of a noted French architect, Hector-Martin Lefuel. When he failed the exam, he resolved to try harder. The second time, he passed.

Meanwhile, his brother, William Morris Hunt, who had thought he wanted to be a sculptor, switched to painting after seeing a picture in the window of an art store. It was a portrait called
The Falconer
by George Healy’s friend Thomas Couture. “If that is a painting, I am a painter,” William is said to have exclaimed. He became Couture’s first American student, and his favorite.

The two Hunt brothers were both slim, dark-haired, good-looking, and socially at ease. William, the older by three years, was the more witty and theatrical, but also short-tempered. Each was genuinely fond of the other. They enjoyed each other’s company and for some years shared a bright, fifth-floor apartment at 1 rue Jacob, a short walk from the École des Beaux-Arts.