A full seven years after
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
made its appearance, most critics had not budged an inch in their appraisals. They still faulted Manet for inelegant brushwork, flawed perspective, undignified subjects, and a supposed insincerity of purpose that raised suspicions of an elaborate jape. Over the past few years he had even failed, in Castagnary's view, to produce forceful and convincing visions of modern life. As a frustrated Gautier complained, Manet seemed to be perpetrating the same outrages in Salon after Salon. A number of critics who had encouraged his efforts earlier in his career, like Castagnary and, to a lesser extent, Gautier, had by 1870 thrown their hands in the air. Each new Salon, Gautier despaired, "seems to prove that Monsieur Manet has resolved to die impenitent."
20
The gulf between Manet's canvases and the desires and expectations of many critics and jurors could clearly be seen in the choice of the Grand Medal of Honor for 1870. Tony Robert-Fleury, the thirty-three-year-old son of the Director of the École des Beaux-Arts, was given the Salon's highest award for
The Last Day of Corinth,
a sprawling scene from the pages of the Greek historian Polybius. A painter of historical episodes, often massacres, Robert-Fleury impressed the jurors with his depiction of what Polybius had called "the consummation of the misformnes of Greece," the sack of Corinth by the Romans in 146 B.C. "The incidents of the capture of Corinth were melancholy," Polybius, an eyewitness to these events, had reported.
21
The men were murdered, the women sold into slavery, the city walls turned to rubble, the buildings torched and—most disconcerting to Polybius—the works of art looted or destroyed. Robert-Fleury showed this tragedy unfolding amid weeping women sprawled before their mounted conquerors as a pall of black smoke rose over the devastated city. Though he was anything but a painter of modern life, his magnificent but terrifying canvas, with its depiction of a refined and resplendent civilization put to the sword, would bear a horrible relevance in 1870. The admiring visitors who clustered before
The Last Day of Corinth
could not have known that in this image of the past lay an appalling vision of their future.
T
O BE SURE, Paris in the early summer of 1870 did not look like a city on the brink of disaster. In May a new ballet,
Coppélia,
featuring music by Léo Delibes, was staged at the Théâtre Imperial de 1'Opéra. In June the Grand Prix de Paris was run for the eighth time; the winner by a length was Sornette, a mare whose name translates as "nonsense" or "idle chitchat." The women attending the races in Chantilly and Longchamp had paraded the latest fashions, including the "Chapeau Pomponnette," a bonnet adorned with roses and secured beneath the chin with a large bow. Pale turquoise soon became popular in homage to the livery of Sornette's owner, Charles Laffitte. Horseracing was not the only sport causing excitement. An eighty-three-mile road race from Paris to Rouen was inaugurated, with the competitors riding rubber-wheeled, pedal-powered contraptions known as
vélocipèdes,
for which a Frenchman named Pierre Lallement had received a patent in 1866. Victory went to an Englishman, James More, who completed the course in under eleven hours.
However, a few dark clouds appeared on the horizon in the summer of 1870. There was an outbreak of smallpox in Paris and a drought that led to a fire in the Forest of Fontainebleau, a rise in the price of bread, and the sight of congregations of the faithful carrying holy relics around their churches and praying for rain. Strikes afflicted an iron foundry in Le Creusot, north of Lyon, while riots in Paris resulted in overturned omnibuses, mass arrests and several deaths. Nonetheless, despite the unrest, the Emperor and Émile Ollivier had reason to feel encouraged since the plebiscite on his reforms had been won on May 8 by an overwhelming 7.5 million to 1.5 million. "I'm back to my old score," gloated Louis-Napoléon.
1
When the results were formally proclaimed in the Salle des États in the Louvre, the Emperor, dressed in his general's uniform, delivered a speech declaring that the plebiscite revealed "a striking token of confidence" in his leadership.
2
Many of the newspapers concurred, and across the Channel the editors of
The Times
praised him as "a wise, firm and provident leader."
3
Huge crowds turned out in the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs-Élysées to cheer
"Vive 'Empereur!" as
his carriage passed.
The Emperor's poor health, however, was still a cause of concern. In May he had been visited by his old friend Lord Malmesbury, who was shocked to find him "prematurely old and broken."
4
In the first week of June the papers were reporting that he was "slightly indisposed with a touch of rheumatism," and a few days later gout was disclosed.
5
A specialist in bladder diseases confirmed the secret diagnosis of a bladder stone. Then on the first of July a team of five doctors, including an eminent surgeon who had once operated on Garibaldi's foot, examined the patient to decide if he was fit enough to risk a lithotripsy. Chastened by the recent death of Adolphe Niel, they quickly decided against it.
With the Emperor ill and infirm, the events of the next fortnight unfolded with astonishing speed and a dreadful implacability. On July 2, the day following the examination, the Spanish Prime Minister, Juan Prim, announced that he had found a replacement for the unpopular Queen Isabella II, deposed in the "September Revolution" of 1868. After scouring the royal houses of Europe, Prim had decided to offer the Spanish crown to a Hohenzollern prince named Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, brother of the King of Romania and a distant relative of King Wilhelm of Prussia. The choice did not sit well with Louis-Napoléon. Though he too was distantly related to Prince Leopold, who was the grandson of Napoléon Bonaparte's niece, Stéphanie de Beauharnais, he was worried that the Prussians, with a Hohenzollern ensconced on the Spanish throne, together with their recent territorial advances in Central Europe, would in effect have France surrounded. As the French Foreign Minister, the Due de Gramont, phrased it, the coronation would "disturb the European equilibrium to our disadvantage."
6
On July 9, therefore, the French ambassador to Prussia, Comte Vincent Benedetti, met four times with King Wilhelm, who was taking the waters at the resort town of Ems, near Koblenz. Prince Leopold could not accept the throne without first asking permission from the head of the Hohenzollern family—namely, King Wilhelm—and Louis-Napoléon made it clear, through Benedetti, that he wished the King to withhold his consent. When Wilhelm politely acceded to his wishes, Prince Leopold withdrew his candidature on July 12, a move hailed by Ollivier as a triumph for France and a humiliation for Prussia. Yet not everyone in France was delighted at this peaceful outcome, in large part because of the way Otto von Bismarck had affronted the French by refusing to hand over territories along the Rhine as payment for French neutrality in the war that Prussia fought against Austria in 1866. "The country will be disappointed," Louis-Napoléon cabled Ollivier, "but what can we do?"
7
The Emperor was correct. The press, the public, the politicians, even the Empress Eugénie (who had supposedly exclaimed "This is my war")—all were not a little disgruntled that there would be no war to check the territorial advance of what Alexandre Dumas
père
had called the "Prussian Terror." Almost the only person in France who did not desire a war with Prussia was, it seems, the Emperor himself.
8
Louis-Napoléon nevertheless agreed with the decision taken by Ollivier and his Cabinet to have Benedetti—in a deliberately provocative move—press the King of Prussia for a further guarantee. On July 13, accordingly, Benedetti approached the seventy-three-year-old Wilhelm on the promenade at Ems, asking him to repudiate forever the possibility of a Hohenzollern accepting the Spanish crown. Wilhelm sternly refused, then gave instructions for a telegram recounting this latest twist—the famous "Ems Telegram"—to be sent to Bismarck, his Minister-President. Bismarck was as eager for a war with France as the French were for a war with Prussia. Having over the past four years given a burly embrace to most of Germany's thirty-eight disparate duchies, princedoms and city-states, he believed a crisis such as a Franco-Prussian conflict would unite the remaining states, including Bavaria and Württemberg, into a single power under the leadership of Prussia. He therefore seized on the strategy of editing the telegram to make the King's words seem more defiant and insulting than in the original, then publishing the doctored text in the newspapers. Wilhelm's original telegram had stated that he had nothing further to say to Benedetti because word had arrived in Ems that Prince Leopold was withdrawing his candidature. Bismarck cunningly omitted this reference to news of Leopold's withdrawal, thus making the King's refusal to grant a further audience to Benedetti look like a direct result of Benedetti's request—and an insult to France. Bismarck predicted that the amended telegram would serve as "a red rag to the Gallic bull."
9
He could not have judged his prospective enemy more astutely. "Everyone wants to eat Prussians," Théophile Gautier observed of the jingoistic crowds in Paris following the telegram's publication. "If anyone spoke in favor of peace, he would be killed on the spot."
10
Within days the Due de Gramont was announcing that a state of war existed between France and Prussia.
In 1806 the French under Napoléon had defeated the Prussians in a six-week campaign, trouncing them with such aplomb at the Battle of Jena that the philosopher Hegel had been moved to celebrate Napoléon as the "world soul." In 1870 all signs indicated that the outcome would be otherwise. The French military attaché in Berlin had recently made a chilling observation: "Prussia is not a country which has an army. Prussia is an army which has a country."
11
King Wilhelm, a professional soldier who spent his adolescence fighting the Grande Armée, was able to field an army of 500,000 men with 160,000 reserves, numbers that could virtually be doubled when he called on the other German states in the Confederation.
12
Louis-Napoléon, on the other hand, had at his disposal only 3 50,000 men, 60,000 of whom were occupied in Algeria with 6,000 more protecting the pope in Rome.
13
Yet despite the size and strength of the Prussian war machine, the French were strangely confident of victory. Their soldiers were equipped with the
chassepôt,
the most advanced rifle of the day, a weapon unveiled at the Universal Exposition in 1867. They also had a more secret—and deadly—invention called the
mitrailleuse,
a machine gun with twenty-five rotating barrels that could fire 150 rounds a minute.
Ollivier had announced in the Legislative Assembly that he was declaring war "with a light heart."
14
The Minister of War, Marshal Edmond Leboeuf, assured his countrymen that the war against the Prussians would be a "mere stroll, walking stick in hand."
15
In the days following the announcement, Parisians marched along the boulevards chanting
"Vive la guerre."
A soprano named Madame Sasse sang the
Marseillaise
in the streets dressed in the costume of the "Goddess of France," while another singer, Mademoiselle Therese, belted it out in the Théâtre-Gaieté in the costume of a waitress. Crowds besieged the enlisting offices, and a troop of soldiers paraded with a parrot trained to squawk "To Berlin!"
"It is in this frivolous spirit," an English newspaper reported, "that the nation which pretends to consider itself the most civilized in the world enters upon a war the terrible consequences of which few dare trust themselves to contemplate."
16
One of the few who dared was Gautier. "Who knows," he asked nervously, "what measureless conflagration will devour Europe?"
17
The French headquarters for the war against the Prussians became Metz, a city on the River Moselle that lay within striking distance of the Rhineland. Its attractions included a Roman aqueduct and a Gothic cathedral. More to the point, it had thick defensive walls and a powerful fortress known, because it had never been captured, as La Pucelle ("The Virgin"). Metz had not been taken by the enemy, in fact, since it was plundered in the middle of the fifth century by the forces of Attila the Hun. In the summer of 1870 its residents prepared themselves for battle with the modern-day Huns led by Otto von Bismarck.
Ernest Meissonier arrived in Metz at the end of July, within a fortnight of the declaration of war. He had abandoned both
Friedland
—which he believed himself close to finishing at last—as well as his studio in Poissy and, in a repeat of his expedition to the Italian front in 1859, set off on Lady Coningham, his beloved mare, for the 175-mile journey In his luggage was a supply of sketching materials as well as official papers impressively announcing him as "Monsieur Meissonier, on special service."
18
He was hoping to record a French victory such as Solferino or, better yet, Jena or Friedland. Emma had been very much against the enterprise, attempting to dissuade her husband, by then a fifty-five-year-old grandfather, from risking his neck for the sake of a painting. But Meissonier was adamant. "Don't worry that I will let myself get intoxicated by the smell of powder," he wrote home to her. "It isn't the horrible things of war that I want to paint, it's the life of the soldier, the strange and picturesque behavior of which one cannot have any idea when one hasn't seen it."
19