Paris, Capital of the 19th Century

good afternoon everyone and welcome to the first lecture in our course series the stars of Paris it's always such a lovely feeling to come back on the first day of any course and I'm so grateful for all of you to come and join and spend your afternoon with us I do have to say I talked to a couple attendees in line and they're picking up their tickets and they said they were so excited for the course starting again and one of the people had recently been retired from the bps school system for 35 years so I just want to do a special shout out to her I don't know who her what her name is but congratulations and I'm so happy you can join us and thank you for your service and in a huge special thank you to Wilmington Trust who is generously sponsoring this course and the rest of the courses in 2019 it is very meaningful for us here at the museum this course was of course inspired by the upcoming exhibition toulouse-lautrec and the stars of Paris which opens on April 7th and runs until August 4th so this is designed to be a little bit of a prep course for that exhibition thank you so much for joining us here today and please join me in welcoming Finiti [Applause] thank you good afternoon and thank you for coming out on a snowy but sunny afternoon typical March Boston weather right okay so I'm just gonna get set up here my water and I know you won't mind if I switch glasses I got new glasses recently and I find that I can't read with them as well so I have these readers now okay so I just want to say that this invitation to talk at the MFA today about Toulouse Lautrec made me very happy I've been here a couple times before and I had a great time but this is special because this poster that you're gonna see in a second here see Kristen are you here someplace there we go okay so this poster sits above my computer at home and I hasten to add it's not the original but it come now Wellesley College has the original but I some for some reason can't talk them into lending it to me at any rate this is the famous publicity poster by Toulouse Lautrec for love you blush the white review and love you blush was an avant-garde literary journal which pay played a key role in Parisian artistic and political life in the late 19th century and it is incidentally the topic of my PhD dissertation which I have to admit was a while ago over 25 years but Toulouse Lautrec still feels like an old friend and I wanted to start with this poster and then talk about how the vibrant Paris of Toulouse Lautrec and his friends came about so in this poster all the elements of the new exciting Paris inhabited and observed by Toulouse Lautrec come together first of all it's an advertising poster for the journal this poster sure this is better okay sorry about that and glad you told me so this poster and others like it were plastered on buildings in Paris but at the same time the artists who created them were conscious of their posters being collectors items and offered them for sale to connoisseurs on that basis thus collapsing the distinction between high and low culture commercial and non-commercial art a lot of you blush in this poster as you can see was represented by an elegant fashionable lady who ventured out going shopping visiting friends taking in the sights of the city she was a symbol of the newly transformed Paris a Paris which afforded women freedom and movement now Paris according to German literary critic and sociologist Walter Benjamin was the capital of the 19th century what he meant by that was that Paris was not only the leading cultural and intellectual center the birthplace of the avant-garde and the capital of pleasure but that it was also the most modern city in the world now we Americans tend to associate all that's modern with the United States and that of course is true for most of the 20th century but during the years that preceded the first world war what the French call the Bell a book or the beautiful period and those are the years going roughly from 1880 to 1914 so during this time Paris was the capital of modernity and it also became the capital of modern French life it boasted the largest department store in the world the bull Marche perhaps you visited it in Paris and the bull mache easily eclipsed both Macy's and Fields France also had the world's largest press which sold 10 million copies daily on the eve of World War one reaching one out of two adults and that's really quite an impressive figure Paris was also the home of the wide tree-lined boulevards which housed shops cafes theaters and all that we associate with modern life in the big city its Eiffel Tower built in honor of the centennial of the French Revolution in 1889 was the tallest man-made structure in the world it was a perfect symbol of the new modern Paris built and steel it was a monument to the genius of French engineering and technology and this is the Paris that became the major stop on Americans world tours like the innocents abroad by Mark Twain and this is also the Paris immortalized in major American motion pictures like Gigi an American in Paris and funny face just a name three and these films the nostalgic nod to Paris of the past have shaped most Americans images of Paris or perhaps most Americans of a certain age including myself because I talked about these films in class a few weeks ago I'm teaching a course this semester on Americans in Paris and I think 2 out of 14 students had heard of these films so I'm trying to rectify it this lacunae and I have sent them to go see the films so that's the Paris that we have in our heads but what was Paris like before this transformation Paris in the early to mid nineteenth century witnessed the first Industrial Revolution in France the building of factories and railroads as well as the establishment of the rudiments of a modern banking system Paris however still remained a second-rate city surprising visitors from London with its backwardness it was dirty and insalubrious with waste thrown into the sin which was also the source of drinking water although work on sewers was begun under Napoleon the first Napoleon not much was done until the Second Empire of Napoleon the third Napoleon the third was the first Napoleon's nephew and he was Emperor of France from 1852 to 1870 so the sewers were begun in the mid nineteenth century and some of them were not even done until 1900 meanwhile cholera epidemics wiped out tens of thousands with a major epidemic in 1832 killing more than 18,000 Parisians mostly in port areas and so Paris remained until the second half of the nineteenth century a medieval city with dark dangerous streets and warns of houses immortalized in novels like Eugen Sue's lame East Avenue body the mysteries of Paris published from 1842 to 1843 and Victor Hugo's 1862 novel name is a hob so picture Jean Valjean wandering these old streets Paris's population exploded from 759 thousand to over a million from 1832 1846 that's a huge jump most of the poor lived in dingy overcrowded hubble's and one couldn't travel from east to west or north to south because there were no big streets to get through and Paris was essentially a series of little villages so you'd be born in one part of Paris and often you never left it people didn't go out to each other's houses it was hard to get there and they didn't go out at night since the city was plunged in darkness and often dangerous so in other words the image we have of Paris as a city of light only came about after the transformation of Paris in the latter third of the nineteenth century also worth noting is that there was a mixture of social classes in Paris in the earlier 19th century and often in the same buildings the higher up one went the poorer one was and so you'd have the garret rooms right up top the noble floors were the bottom ones and in addition many shopkeepers lived above their shops he also had at this time a mixture of types of buildings on the same street so you could find a modest wood and plaster home on the same block maybe two doors down from a much more elegant one in stone and I'm going to show you this image it is the a bus that a bhoot day it's in the second a twenty small or the second district and this is a photograph by photographer shallow mount Laville and sits in since it's an impasse obviously it's a dead end and you can't go anywhere but you see how narrow this is and 'mobile is a wonderful photographer and he was hired to document the transformation of Paris and his photos and scholars remain divided about mouseville and about the impact and intent of his work with some saying that he celebrated an old Paris that would die out and others saying that he encouraged through his photographs the urban reform movement that would destroy the old Paris now I myself fall in neither camp I think he was a photographer who was hired to do a job and who did it really quite beautifully and we're so lucky to have these photographs and I'll show you in a minute or two some more before pictures so worth noting is that if there was less of a variety of housing in the same place in Paris after the transformation of Paris you did see a mix of different classes social classes out on the boulevards and a mixture of genders but before this huge economic and social transformation could take place one needed industrial production which brought great wealth to the middle and upper classes the development of a modern banking system to raise the capital required for all the works in Paris and which also allowed for the establishment of department stores like the bull mache which was founded at this time and indeed by the mid 19th century the Bulls which is Francis Wall Street was the biggest money market on the continent and finally you needed railways to move people and goods but this industrialization also meant more people in the city and overcrowding and it's at this point that Napoleon the third Napoleon's nephew came to power in 1848 when he was elected president to the Second Republic in a in 1848 so the French decided they would try this American presidential style system it didn't work in 1851 he effected a coup d'etat and established himself Emperor for life although he was forced to abdicate in 1870 after the French lost the franco-prussian war Napoleon the third had travelled extensively and had lived in London and he wanted to create a pair that would rival London on the world stage he also sought to rebuild and tribute to his own glory indeed he saw the Roman Emperor Augustus as a role model and I have to pause here to say that there's a long tradition of French leaders leaving their imprint on the city so not only Kings who left us such royal squares as the blast Louis the 15th which has now become plaster that Gong called the square of harmony the square of harmony because during the French Revolution it housed the guillotine so you've got these royal squares but you also have Napoleon who left us various monuments commemorating his great victories in battle among them the Austerlitz bridge and the vaughn dome column as well as the Arc de Triomphe completed in 1836 and even today as you're walking around Paris and you look at some modern buildings has anyone been to the Pompidou Center yes okay so this is the museum built by the former president of that name and then you have the Opera of the bus D and the new National Library both of which were built by president Francois meet a home in the 1990s so Napoleon the third is part of a long French tradition however his restructuring of Paris was one of the largest urban renewal programs in the world he and his chief architect Baron Haussmann show you a photo that is Napoleon who is awarding Houseman a decoration for services rendered to the state and so Napoleon the third and Baron Haussmann who wasn't really an architect but really a civil servant transformed Paris truly making it the capital of the nineteenth century now since Napoleon the third was an authoritarian ruler he could affect change quickly and ruthlessly by appropriating buildings and and partnering with private firms to build elegant houses and shops and this of course drove up prices and pushed poor people out of the center of the city and I'll have more to say about that in a bit so what were the goals of Napoleon the third in Houseman I have to tell you have trouble pronouncing that word because I'm a French professor so I say Susman so in English I think it's Houseman first and foremost they wanted the circulation of people products and air movement to get rid of the congestion of the city Napoleon third one in Paris to become a cultural and economic capital a place visited by provincials and foreigners and as we said Paris did become a major stop on world tours there were also sociological reasons linked to aesthetic and economic ones to embellish Paris and this meant moving poor people out into the other districts or a whole decimal there 20 there have been historically 20 districts in Paris so this process of transformation pushed poor people out to the 18th 19th and 20th in the northeastern part of Paris so on the right bank and the 13th and 15th on the left bank and by the way Paris had 12 a whole G small or districts until 1860 when it expanded to 20 through the annexation of odo by C Grinnell and other areas including Moe Mountain and I'll have quite a bit to say about Moe Mountain a bit so the process that we know is hospitals a ssin doubled the area of Paris absorbing 1/2 million inhabitants at this time and finally there were political reasons Paris has historically been the center of the revolution so you've got the revolution of 1789 that's the one then there's one in 1830 which established a constitutional monarchy and then you have one in 1848 when ironically Napoleon the third came to power and the idea was that building the grand boulevards would make it easier to bring in troops and artillery to fight rebels so in other words it would be harder to erect barricades on the grand boulevards as opposed to the winding small streets like the little street you saw earlier advance this here so you've got a map of Paris and I'll talk about this in a second so Napoleon and Houseman built an east-west access from the plasterer dynasty on the east to the 8th while on the west also building the avenues around the a12 and as you know a12 means star and you've got all of the avenues that radiate out from it and they also constructed a north-south access with the boulevard Sebastopol which cuts through the ELA last day and becomes the boulevard San Michele on the left bank now the most radical change took place on the Ile de la Cite day and that's a site of Notre Dame and it was also the site of some of the worst slums in Paris in fact there were hundreds of small shacks or hubble's which stood in front of Notre Dom so you couldn't see the Cathedral and I've always thought that this was a bit of private revenge on Haussmann's part when he was a young man he was a young law student he would have to cross into this part of town known for its lumps housing cut rope thieves and prostitutes Houseman cleared out all the hubble's in front of cathedral giving us the panoramic view that we have day he also established the eagerness eat day as an administrative center housing law courts and police headquarters so what better revenge could you get against criminals you replace their own haunts their old haunts pardon me with the machinery of the state and the law and as you can see in this next image you've got the KDS alfalfa before and after and the after picture that is a picture of police headquarters so as I said III think he really had to have had that in mind and put the police headquarters here on purpose so at the same time you've got architect vo Lela Duke who was restoring notre dom and the cathedral had been used as an arms Depot during the French Revolution and was in bad shape and there was even some talk of destroying it and thank goodness it was not destroyed Houseman ization also involved building grand boulevards like the Avenue AAHA go magenta boreal Voltaire Madeline and Houseman so there was even a Boulevard Haussmann but the joke was that Houseman was not able to finish it before the the Second Empire fell so let me show you okay so you see before and after and you can see all of the buildings that we associate with Haussmann's Paris the elegant buildings as well as the trees and you always have a perspective that you're looking at so Paris also witnessed the multiplication of green spaces an appalling the third loved London parks and he wanted to do the same thing in Paris so you've got the construction of the bokmal so in the Bakumatsu he the Bois de Boulogne to the west and the Bois de Vincennes to the east and Houseman also had trees planted to line the boulevards and in some cases they brought in fully grown trees and put them in you also had a sewer system which was built although it wasn't finished until the early 1900s and in 1900 you also had the construction of the Metro the subway finally you've got lamps you've got 30 mm gas lamps that replaced 15,000 oil lanterns and by 1877 electric lights supplanted the gas street lamps and of course Napoleon and Houseman also authorized the construction of the uniform buildings that we associate with Paris on the new wide tree-lined boulevards and I'm going to show you a painting which I bet you know if you've been to the Art Institute in Chicago it's one of my favorites it's guy butts the rainy day and you see how all these streets come together and you have the sense of space you also have the glistening macadam sidewalks you've got the host money in buildings and you've got elegant gentlemen and ladies walking in the city which is something you really couldn't do before so one of the crowning achievements of the new plan was a construction of the obeah Gavin yay yes is the next one there we go and this opiod Gagne became part of the neighborhood associated with the new Paris and a destination for entertainment and shopping and indeed the process of Hoffmann ization push the city center to the west of the city and one commentator noted I'm quoting this last little bevel with its big ways that open onto everything with these vast luxury stores these gigantic cafes the Grand Hotel and the Opera this is modern Paris so Napoleon the third and host Monde also connected the Louvre to the toilet palace and finally they built railway stations like the Gallagher Daniel and the gouging Noah thereby facilitating visits to the capital by foreigners and by provincial railway stations were a favorite subject of some of the painters of the time who liked to depict scenes of modern life money is one of them and in this slide we have Monet's Gaston dosa so you've got modernity in its glory in this image I think it's hard for us to imagine but Paris was a virtual construction site for 20 years and the only thing I've ever seen like it is when I went to Shanghai almost ten years ago and my understanding is that maps were out of date from month-to-month because of the construction so in my head this is what it must have been like now all these changes led to the tremendous growth of Paris by 1870 the population stood at 2 million and by 1914 3 million now the consequences of hospitals a ssin were thus of great import 20,000 houses were destroyed among them some of historical importance and a number of them dating from the Middle Ages and perhaps the most important consequence of this gentrification and let's call it what it was it was gentrification was that it increasingly pushed the poor toward the outskirts of the city especially toward those northeastern districts that I mentioned the 18th 19th and 20th and it's a process described brilliantly in various novels by emile zola among them lock you hay and knock you hey is translated as the kill so in other words Zola is using the language of the hunt to describe the process of speculation at this time so we've got the kill and he's also got l'assommoir which translates into the dram shop in which one of the major characters a washerwoman named Jeff Fez wanders the new streets of her old neighborhood and feels alienated from a world where she no longer belongs and I wanted to read you a short excerpt lost in the bustle of the wide footpath along the little plain trees Chavez felt alone and abandoned and the open spaces of those avenues stretching away down there made her stomach turn and to think that in all this flood of people where there must be so many who were well off there wasn't a single Christian soul to understand her and slip her a 10 sous piece yes it was too big it was too beautiful her head was spinning and her legs giving way under this endless surface of grey sky stretched out over such a vast space I mean it's really beautiful and poignant at the same time and as Chavez his experience illustrates workers could no longer afford to live in the center of the city while their wages went up by 30 percent during this time rents and living expenses went up by 45 percent so host maan and Napoleon the third just displaced the problem of class conflict and indeed it was these workers feeling cheated and excluded by and from the new beautiful city who participated in the civil war known as the commune which took place in the wake of the French defeat in the franco-prussian war in 1870 and which led to the abdication of Napoleon the third and I'd like to talk to you about that next because the events of the commune really transformed Paris excuse me okay so when Mark Twain visited Paris in 1867 he was much impressed by the modernity of Hoffman eyes Paris and he even attended the 1867 Universal exhibition held there to celebrate the achievements of Napoleon the third and I should say that when he was there he went to the exhibition he spent an hour there most of the time he spent there was gawking at Napoleon the third and his entourage if you haven't read innocence abroad you really should it's a lot of fun so this is 1867 then three years later this glittering world would come tumbling down when Napoleon the third was maneuvered I would say outmaneuvered by Prussian Chancellor Bismarck into declaring war and that would lead to the fall of the second empire on September 4th 1870 after decisive loss at the Battle of Sioux dome on the eastern border in the same day on September 4th the 3rd Republic was declared at City Hall now if you've been to Paris there's a small street called la who'd you get to except on the street of the 4th of September and it commemorates the Declaration of the Third Republic and next time you go check it out alright so the 3rd Republic the dates you have them on your sheet but I'll be happy to give them to you 1870 to 1940 so it's the longest-lived of the french republics but it was born in defeat the franco-prussian war and it also ended in defeat the arrival of the Nazis in 1940 so soon after the fall of the Second Empire in the declaration of the Republic later in September of 1870 the Prussians besieged Paris until the end of January 1871 and Paris at this time was unrecognizable it was no longer the City of Light but plunged into darkness after rationing forced the government to limit Gaslight and one of the newspapers wondered this lugubrious city without illuminated windows open cafes and gaiety is it still Paris good question so gas lighting which had extended the interior to the exterior and had literally fuelled Boulevard life gave way to Paris in which boulevards with all their entertain and cafes reverted back to streets used by pedestrians of all classes to get from one place to another rather than as a destination in of themselves various theaters around the city including the Odeon theatre became hospitals and the Gaffney Opera House became an arms depot it's hard to imagine that beautiful building as an arms depot but it was so many of the places that pleasure henceforth had utilitarian uses and I'm gonna show you this image by easy dog pills and you can see soldiers who are washing their clothes in a fountain at the blastp gun so the fountain is no longer decorative but quite useful for these soldiers Elihu Washburne the American Minister de France who was one of the few remaining foreigners in the city during the siege spoke about the temporal and spatial anxiety of Parisians or a suffocation due to a lack of food and light and the simple feeling of being suspended in time and space and if you get the chance you should really read his writings they're collected and also there is the book by David McCullough and he has an entire chapter on on Elihu Washburne so the blood of Wallonia was no longer a park but rather a place for grazing animals many of which were eaten by the end of the siege that's when food became very scarce except for Americans because they knew about canned goods so by December of 1870 food was so hard to find the Parisians were forced to eat the animals in the zoo including castor and pollux the famous elephant's house there okay it's gonna get better or worse depending indeed some of the more chic restaurants featured menus such as this one and if you read French it lists stuffed head of donkey elephant consomme and roasted camel and some Parisians extolled the virtues of rat pate and in the David McCullough book he cites one commentator noting seeing the difference between brewery rat and a normal rat I have to tell you once you read those descriptions you will become a vegetarian promise all right so the siege of Paris came to an end by January 1871 after the Germans began using Krupp can cannons to blast their way through and so Paris was forced to surrender the French were forced to accept defeat giving up the two provinces of Azaz and Lujan and to pay a hefty indemnity adding insult to injury the Prussians who had used the war as an excuse to unite the German states into a German Empire had Emperor Wilhelm the first crowned at Versailles the site of former French glory that must have hurt so when the new French government which had alienated many Parisians not only by capitulating to the Germans when many had wanted to continue fighting but also by moving the capital from Paris to Versailles now remember Paris is a centre of revolution we talked about 1789 1830 1848 the FSI of course is associated with the monarchy so this government makes the people of Paris especially the poor people of Paris angry and when the vets I government as it was known sought to disarm the poorer sections of the city notably mo mouth which had raised money for cannons by public subscription a skirmish broke out and during the confrontation combatants were killed on both sides and instead of negotiating with the rebels the leader of the Versailles government a politician named Adolf Chia besieged Paris once again the result was a bloody civil war known as the commune in which more than 20,000 people were killed and I know we always talk about all the people who died during the French Revolution and the terror and so forth this number is greater than those who died during the terror and another 50,000 people were sent into exile the commune arts were a disparate group of individuals they wanted workers rights free education for all and even women's rights and their name is a reference to the commune of Paris now the commune is a smallest unit of government in France and it's a reference specifically to the commune of Paris led by don't dome during the French Revolution who had pushed back the Austrian invader so obviously the commune had revolutionary associations and and was happy to have those associations historians today see the events of the commune in part as a revenge of the poor people pushed out by Haussmann's gentrification and I'm going to come back to the subject of Mo Mountain a bit because it was one of Toulouse Lautrec s-- stomping grounds the events of the commune to the destruction of key monuments after the commune arts began a scorched earth policy as the vsi troops made incursions into the city setting the tweeny palace symbol of royal power on fire and okay there you go it doesn't exist anymore but of course there's a subways stop right marking the spot and actually it it looks it doesn't look so bad in this picture but the inside was a shambles and palace stood on those grounds for a while and then it was eventually taken down so the commune ARDS also burned parts of the ballet while the royal palace which housed a number of government ministries right near the Louvre thereby putting some of the paintings in danger and the commune arts also burned down the medieval city hall so the structure that's the city hall today was built afterwards and as a historian I'll say how sad I am about that because the Old City Hall housed historical documents from the early 19th century so those of my colleagues who work on the earlier period have a harder time because those records have disappeared and they also toppled in the Napoleonic statue on top of the valle dome column and painter Gustave Courbet responsible for this event was later charged with paying restitution and so ended his life in exile in Switzerland because he couldn't afford to pay so you see this image here it's the Napoleonic statue that was on top of the von dome column and he's dressed as a Roman Emperor and you have commune ARDS all around they toppled that statue it was later put back up so the last big battle of the Civil War was in the banish a cemetery has anyone been there a few yeah it's off the beaten path but it's really worth going there because of all of the tombs of famous French people and for for people who loved rock it Jim Jim Morrison exactly exactly and I my favorite is Oscar Wilde's tomb which is covered with kisses people go and kiss you know put on lipstick and then kiss the tomb so anyway it all is also the site of the Civil War of the last battle of the Civil War and so members of the commune had been hiding out among the tombs and that battle ended in the execution of commune arts by the Versailles troops against the wall of the cemetery and it was an event that took place during the last week of the insurrection in May of 1871 it's May 21st to 28th and it's known for obvious reasons as bloody week and this event has been marked in the collective memory of the left I'm going to show you this slide so even today this is a recent photo Communists and socialists make pilgrimages there in May and they lay wreaths and flowers on the site so it's still a part of French memory of the left so the commune arts were not without a sense of humor they took revenge against here the French politician who ordered the siege of Paris dismantling his house brick by brick here's a before picture and look what they did to it afterwards so tear was not popular in Paris and for many years there was no Street in Paris named for him but there is one small one today it dates from the early 20th century in the sixteenth County small but despite all this Paris was resilient by the end of 1871 cook stores was organizing visits to Paris to see the ruins and by 1875 when Henry James visited the city it had returned to its former glory and now we come to the Paris of the belly book the beautiful period from 1880 to 1914 and that is the Paris of Toulouse Lautrec now one thing I want to say and I say this to all my students who are in my belly book class that the term is obviously retrospective and nostalgic no one who lived there said oh yes I live in the midday book it was actually the term that dates from the beginning of World War two so from about 1939 to the occupation and I can imagine that for the French who were suffering from the occupation the period from before World War one would seem beautiful and nostalgic and I should also add that the period was not beautiful for everyone think about miners who work long hours or servants who work for the people who are having a good time during the Benny book they worked long hours for little pay however for those who could afford it the Paris of the belly book was a Paris pleasures and entertainments the center of the European avant-garde that we generally associate with toulouse-lautrec a key law was passed in 1881 establishing freedom of the press and this law along with improvements and technology particularly in the production of newspapers and images led to the emergence of a mast press and with it national opinion and you have this image it's by Swiss artist faded I don't know it's called the age of paper and so what do you see you don't see anybody's faces you see a group of men upper-class men with their nice hats and they're reading newspapers and they're reading in a cafe and that's a public Democratic space as opposed to the private aristocratic space of the salons so anyone can go to a cafe for the price of a drink and they are reading actually different newspapers which are actually talking to each other creating a sense of national community now the Republicans and with a little are of course when seized power in 1870 also undertook huge projects to build roads and construct railways and and constructing railways and roads facilitated the process of moving goods including newspapers thereby creating a national economy the department store which I mentioned earlier was rather like the Republican schools founded at this time because it was a process of homogeneous ation so while schools forged a national identity around patriotism and the speaking of French and I'll pause here to tell you that 25 percent of French people did not speak French in 1850 they spoke local dialects especially in Brittany and in the South in hovels and so one way of creating national unity was by creating these compulsory schools where people were young kids were forced to speak French so you've got that homogeneous ation through the schools and then you've got the department stores as well what they do is teach members of the more modest classes how to dress and how to furnish their houses like members of the upper Bush y'see and you have a drawing here of the bull mache which as I said earlier was the largest department store in the world and just to get an idea of how big it was it sent out one and a half million catalogs per years all over the world one and a half million is very large so this belly book period thus marked not only the emergence of mass democracy but also of mass culture both of which had a leveling effect on French society now the pillars of this mass culture were the penny press the boulevard Theatre and the cafe but rest' by the department store all of these institutions were not only housed on the boulevards together they created the new boulevard culture which privileged the visual scene and being seen and turned all of Paris into what one historian has called a city of spectacular realities that is everyday events turned into public entertainment everything from visits to the morgue and I know that's gruesome but people did go to the morgue Madame Tussauds Wax Museum even watching a dentist pulling at patient's teeth in the street that also does not sound like fun especially for the person whose teeth are being pulled so one author of this time said the boulevards are not only the heart and head of Paris but also the soul of the entire world I have to stop there and say that that's very French the thinking that Paris is the center of the world I can't tell you how many quotes I have like that including one from Victor Hugo so the Betty book period witnessed the flourishing of popular entertainments among them cabarets and music halls the subject of a number of Toulouse Lautrec works and more about that in a minute and even the colonies became a source of visual consumption as the public visited recreations of African villages an Algerian casbah model of the Cambodian Angkor Wat temple at the World's Fairs and I'm going to show you this is the Algerian casbah from the 1889 World's Fair so you've got World's Fairs in 1889 and 1900 which attracted 30 million and 15 million visitors respectively and the record for the for the most number of people at a World's Fair after 1900 was Expo 67 so 1967 in Montreal so for the 1889 World's Fair as we saw earlier the Eiffel Tower was constructed becoming the tallest structure in the world although a visiting Thomas Edison would I it and claim that Americans soon would do the French one better and that's very American if the other thing was very French this is American so here I have two different slides you've got on the one side you've got eiffel on top of his tower and then a panoramic view from the Eiffel Tower so the tower was an ode to progress in technology and while its inventor Eiffel thought it beautiful a number of conservative artists and writers did not calling it a bad Yankee dream among them writer Guy de Maupassant who claimed that he liked climbing the tower because it was the only place in Paris where he couldn't see it fun guy so for the 1900 World's Fair there were such iconic buildings as the gold ballet you see here was built and then the ballet here and if you're interested Thomas Edison filmed scenes from the 1900 World's Fair you can find you can find the clip on YouTube it's a lot of fun also my favorite bridge in Paris I don't know if you have a favorite bridge but I do mine is the Pont Alexandre wha it's that baroque gold bridge Alexander the third bridge and that was also constructed at this time and it was to commemorate the franco-russian friendship Treaty of 1896 so consumption visual and otherwise also took place on the grand boulevards where the major newspapers were housed next to cafes and indeed newspaper offices contain their own cafes where members of the public could read newspapers as for the cafe it was a prime spot for people-watching and some contemporaries likened this experience to the entertainment of the theatre and similarly the glittering shop windows of the department store offered spectacles for sale as an American visitor to Paris noted of the department store it's as good as a play to stand at the window this shop and watch people inside so this visitor doesn't even have to pay to to get something out of the department store the belly book was not only the golden age of the press but also of the boulevard Theatre and these two institutions worked in symbiosis the newspapers advertised the latest plays and highlighted the smallest details of as actors and actresses lives and I'm here to tell you that People magazine did not invent anything new so this is the beginning of the age of celebrity culture and that's a topic that you'll be exploring next week with my friend professor Catherine Clark but I do want to say one or two things about it actress Sarah Bernhardt who regularly played to sellout audiences portrayed national heroes like Joan of Arc whom she portrayed two different times the second time when she was well over 60 I know I'm really impressed so she would get on stage and say I am a young maid of nineteen and everybody would clap and she'd bring the whole house down so in this image she's all she's playing Napoleon's doomed son the eaglet the father being the eagle and Napoleon's son died of tuberculosis in exile at the age of 21 but perhaps the greatest theatrical success of the Bene book was Edmund ho stones cereno de Bergerac with the great actor coconut portraying the lead role this play celebrated its 1,000 performance in 1913 and made its author a national hero and the first celebrity author so my students could relate to this I said well he's a JK Rowling of his time and they got it so the theater was a place for crafting heroes in forging national identity the French public weary of political quarrels disheartened by a lack of glory due to the loss in the franco-prussian war and fearful of technological cultural and social changes including the rise of the women's movement the rise of the socialist movement they increasingly sought refuge in the fictions of the theater and the press the theater as we've seen often presented historical heroes like Napoleon and Joan of Arc as for the press it promoted both real-life and fictional heroes real-life heroes and the sensational news stories that it published above the fold and fictional ones and the serialized stories published below the fold so this is the Golden Age of the theater in every sense of the term and as you know two's no trek depicted many scenes in the theater and as one historian has written Paris during the belly book was a stage a vast theater for herself and all the world and what he meant was not only the role the theater played in French national life at the time but also to the theatricality of belly book life and this painting by Jean Bello is unfortunately in a private collection I really like it because it depicts the theater it's the Teatro de Velde and it's a typical Parisian scene of the time you see the Morris column the : melis which contains advertisements you've got men and women milling in the street and basically enjoying the life of the city and I'm gonna show you this one which you probably know and this is the bubalu mouth by Pisa ho and again you see the boulevard you see the Omnibus as you see the trees the hustling in buildings people bustling around and in general enjoying the life of the city even in their daily activities so the theatricality of life at this time isn't limited to the theater and to performances in the theater but also to politics in the 1890s Paris was a site of many bombings by self-styled anarchists one of which was thrown into the Chamber of Deputies and that's the lower house of parliament and another at the cafe of a busy railroad station and it all ended the assassination of president said decaf no in 1894 so this is a time of political and social unrest with the rise of minors strikes in 1880 in the 1880s pardon me in the 1890s and remember these were folks who were working long hours for little pay no protection and a lot of their strikes were defensive strikes to have their wages kept the same and not cut and it was also marked by one of the greatest of French conflicts an event that remains imprinted in French memory even today and I'm talking about the Dreyfus Affair have you heard of the Dreyfus Affair yes okay good it's the subject of an entire talk and since I wrote my first book on the Dreyfus Affair I've talked about it quite a lot and they don't have that much time but I do want to touch upon it today so the broad outlines in 1894 a German Jewish sorry army captain was accused of selling secrets to the Germans and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana subsequently his family and friends found out that he'd been falsely accused and that there'd been a military cover-up this one court case a military court case became a huge affair of national opinion centered less on the guilt or innocence of one man but rather a debate about the nature of French identity itself so was the true France a modern industrial society the country of the French Revolution which had granted equal rights to Jews or was it a rural and pass a pastoral Catholic nation in which reason of state triumphed over the violation of an individual's rights the affair divided friends and families and a pitted for the most part the conservative forces of the church and the army against more progressive Republican ones it's more complicated than that and as I said my first book I spent a lot of time complicating the story because that's what we do as historians so I wanted to indicate in that book how porous the two groups were and not just monolithic blocks but it's absolutely true that those are the broad outlines that have sketched out so the affair was in large part propelled by the press as we saw and that vital don't image earlier of men reading newspapers in the cafe in fact the affair was a first event of the mass media in France so unimaginable without having a national press because it was the whole debate was carried out in the press and incidentally you also need a public that can read and we talked about those republican schools earlier as for two news vote rex role in all this it's true that he had made some anti-semitic caricatures in common with many of his colleagues at this time nevertheless who use Lautrec was closely associated with the avant-garde journal love you blush the white review with which I began my talk and unlike his mentor Edgar de Gouw 2news no track didn't break from his friends at the journal whose editors were Jewish and most of whom were fervent partisans of Dreyfus but it's fair to say that the affair would divide artists and writers so you've got Dada cézanne Renoir who are all against Dreyfus anti Dreyfus arts while Monet Pissarro via Bona the latter two who were associated with larvae Blanche they were Pro Dreyfus refuse' so momot was the focus of some of the political and cultural effervescence of the time it was both a place of pleasure in a crime and it also had revolutionary associations remember that the events of the commune began here Mon mouse' was a working-class in which bohemian writers and artists rubbed shoulders with anarchists criminals and prostitutes while Mamata was annexed into Paris in 1860 and we talked about that earlier it was still far enough away from the center of Paris to seem like a village it also had not been transformed by the process of a hospital you had windmills that dotted the landscape and it still felt like you were in the country rents were also cheaper here and it became a haven for artists like 2news Lautrec who had their studios here and actually Toulouse Lautrec came to Paris in 1882 and he studied with an artist called Louie Bona and Louie Bruna had his studio here so in 1880 a law was passed prohibiting the closing of any cafe for political reasons leading to the growth of numerous cabarets dance halls and drinking establishments as you may know the Moulin Rouge the site of the scandalous can-can was founded here in 1889 and I want to show you this painting it's at the Moulin Rouge by Toulouse Lautrec and in this image we see prostitutes we see performers who come here and then and and you also have bourgeois men who are in attendance to find their pleasures and in fact members of the upper classes came here they were slumming and one of them happened to be the Prince of Wales the one from way back when not the cream just want to make that clear so one of the most famous cabarets in mo mouth was motion WA or the black cat and here you must know this poster right by Stein 'ln and the black cat was a symbol of sexuality and of danger and it was a cabaret and it also had its own newspapers and it was founded by a man named Claude of sally's and he was quite a character his guests or clients were either greeted with insults like when you get out of prison or where's the girl you were with the last time you were here or exaggerated politeness he had a man in a Swiss Guard costume greet his guests like royalty on one occasion he announced his own death and how to wake for himself at his cabaret solis invited young bohemian artists to hang their paintings in his establishment and singers like a a steed pull to perform but solis often exploited them now pool eventually defected from Lucien WA and founded his own cabaret mu merely don't and you might recognize him from this poster by Toulouse Lautrec right so there you have Bou own you notice iconic red scarf his hat and his cape so both Solis and Paul and Paul sang songs that talked about the downtrodden and the poor but and they saw themselves as announced as Outsiders opponents of the establishment and of the bourgeoisie but the irony of these Bohemians was that in seeking to escape the commercial culture of the bourgeoisie they availed themselves of advertising and publicity techniques for self-promotion in the case of Poole and studies they grew rich from their counterculture exploits with boo owned buying a Country Estate to which he retired living the good life until his death at age 73 now I should say that these two men were exceptions a lot of the bohemian artists of mo mouth were poor and down and out and died poor so you've got them on Mount of cabarets but you also have the iconic cyclic Church which was built by Catholics to excavate the crimes and national divisions of the commune you see the church under construction mo mata was also reputed to be the site of the martyrdom of Frances patron saint soundin e construction of the sacre-coeur which began in 1875 was not completed until 1914 and the church was not consecrated until 1919 so after World War one the irony of its location was not lost on the denizens of mo Malka cabarets who mocked the religious pilgrims who henceforth flocked the site rubbing shoulders with disabused mo Malthus for Clemens so it's this Paris that's the capital of the 19th century - which tourists flocked and which became a symbol of French modernity and I want to leave you with this last image of Paris and this is a photograph by UGA from 1912 and it depicts parent Parisians at the Blessed of St looking at the solar eclipse Wellesley College is really lucky to have this photograph and they did an exhibition of their photographs a few years ago and asked me to pick any one out of their collection to talk about it and I chose this one and I hope you'll see why anticipating total darkness city leaders had ordered the gas lamps lit adding to the eerie glow of the city enterprising young hawkers selling dark glass discs registered record sales while the manufacturer Bell know distributed them free of charge thereby gaining a lot publicity for himself tourists flocked to Paris by the thousands and their numbers swelled to socially diverse crowds that congregated as in this photo on Parisian squares rooftops café terraces and unencumbered spaces offering large vistas so watch a also gives us a snapshot of the era portraying the vibrant life of the city and the shared community of its inhabitants illustrated by the diversity of Ages genders and classes so you notice the respectable bourgeois lady there is a young girl you've got shop workers who are identifiable by their white coats and you've got middle-class men identifiable by their bowler hats and one of the people there is holding a newspaper which helped to forge a national community and was an emblem of the age the Paris of the betty book the Paris of to do so Trek was a place to see and be seen the recently urbanized capital had been transformed into a vast stage which not only afforded nightly entertainments in the theaters cabarets and dance halls depicted by two news Roadtrek but also in the everyday spectacles of daily Modern Life from the shop windows on the tree-lined boulevards to the cafe's of major hotels where spectators could watch passers-by the way of life symbolized by these pleasure seekers of the Bene book was to survive just another two years only to disappear in the trenches of the First World War thank you we have microphones on either side of the room if you have any questions for Vinita today and I'm gonna switch glasses now so I can see you could you explain again how the Communist of war of the commune ended what happened to Louie the Napoleon the third and adolfs here sure okay so Napoleon the third abdicated in the middle of the franco-prussian war on September 4th 1870 and he so he was off the national stage you had a declaration of a republic and the and then a government that negotiated with the Germans and a government that then signed a treaty making Parisians many of whom were workers and who were very patriotic and who wanted to continue fighting angry and that government also moved the seat of government from Paris to Versailles which is a symbol of Morel power and what that government tried to do was try to disarm various parts of Paris that were the poorer sections of Paris and momulla being one of them the problem was when they were trying to disarm the people they got mad because they had actually paid for those cannons than they sawed saw them as theirs so skirmishes broke out there was violence there was there were dead people on both sides the problem is this is that the French leader at the time TF he should have negotiated with them he decided he was a military guy and he wanted to have another siege so he besieged Paris again so against his own people and the Communist they're really a disparate group of people are some are working-class some are artisans it's really hard to say that their working class and the way that we understand today because France wasn't really fully industrialized that the I'm but you've got a group of people many of whom were pushed out of Paris by host Monde and really felt left out and in some ways it's a revenge that's what historians think and I didn't mention this in my talk but some also think of this as a big party that carnival so being in charge of all of these buildings but obviously it was a very violent incident and it is a civil war in which more people die than in the French Revolution and we always think of the French Revolution and it left its mark on Paris because you've got all these buildings that don't exist anymore that is that mmm-hmm back to Paris well I didn't want to bore you with a lot of political history and I do talk about it and when I teach this in my classes but basically what happened at the beginning of the Third Republic the people in power not really Republican they they just say okay we'll go along with the Republic and then we'll blame the Republic for signing this treaty with with the Germans and so most of them are conservative types they're monarchists or they're Bonaparte us you know for for Napoleon the third what happens is finally by 1879 you have elections and Republicans take place take power in both houses of parliament but that's a process that takes some time you're welcome I think Christian there's someone there's a gentleman up here there sorry there's someone on the microphone she's standing right here in the middle sure hi I ever since reading of Robert Caro's biography of I have never been able to shake the comparison between him and and the work that he did and that of Barron I was mm-hmm do you want me to ask a more specific question than that or have I already gotten you thinking about the parallels and we do share your you maybe you could ask me a more specific question well in balance unbalance not necessarily having been such a great thing on the other hand I I don't hear that much criticism about Baron Haussmann I mean yes of course he forced poorer people out of the city but the city is what's transformed it really did become the City of Light and a place that tourists still flock to to this very day well you know it's it's tough because I'm a historian I'm not gonna stop good to say I think one thing or the other I think you're absolutely right that it is this beautiful city that we admire today and you really got rid of disease and and crime in many ways but I think we're still living with the effects of pushing poor people out into the suburbs if you think about the Bonior the suburbs outside of Paris today the other thing is it depends on who you read I'm teaching this course that I mentioned earlier on Americans in Paris with a colleague and my colleague had students read art historian TJ Clark on hospitals a ssin and he's a left-wing historian he cites all of the critique of the destruction of an old Paris where people knew their neighbors and they lived right where they worked and so the emphasis was very much on this nostalgic Paris so it depends on who you read if you really push me on balance it we made Paris the kind of city that we want to go to today so yeah you when you mentioned the cholera epidemics in in Paris and it kind of related it to the sewers it reminded me of what was happening in London in in terms of the Thames and cholera and the and the fact that it took Londoners a really long time to figure out that it was water exactly and not miasma and all that right it was the same thing happening in Paris was there any sharing of information between the two cities or was you know I don't know of any sharing of information but it was the same miasma theory and not realizing that had to do with water and even in 1900 so you've got that World's Fair is supposed to be celebrating French progress people were dying in poor parts of Paris even in 1900 because of cholera until they finished all of that sewer work so I'm thinking that maybe they didn't do a lot of sharing of information can you say more about toulouse-lautrec and his anti-semitic remarks and whether it did he evolved to not be you know an anti-semite er here's here's the thing is if you look at a lot of the sketches from this period including from artists like Pisa who went on to defend Dreyfus there are a lot of anti-semitic tropes in them because if you were on the Left criticizing wealthy bankers was linked to anti-semitism that was your kind of shorthand and it was it was really common currency at the time in a way that you know we find shocking today what happened in the affair is that those on the Left who expressed such anti-semitic views including emile zola and he is the big defender of Dreyfus they moved away from that and so anti-semitism was increasingly adopted by the right now to do so Trek is an interesting figure because while a lot of his colleagues that they'll have you launched the the journal that was founded by two young men of who whose parents were polish and who were French and Jewish they all of those the writers and artists associated with the journal were very much engaged in the Dreyfus Affair and engaged in fighting anti-semitism and signed petitions and and went to meetings and Toulouse Lautrec doesn't he doesn't really appear on any of the petitions or or any of the documents and part of it I think has to do with he comes from an aristocratic background where anti-semitism was common currency but at the same time if he doesn't say anything in public about it he's also he showing by by still maintaining his friendships with the writers and the founders of the Hoover branch that he that he is on there's on some way in some ways on on their side but as I said anti-semitic caricatures abound in the art of this time I've heard that the commune is one of the least digested elements of French political history wow that's a that that's a good question I think it would take me a long time to answer it but I can I can start you know the thing about the yellow vest phenomenon is that there are some people who are urban but it's also a rural phenomenon but it but there is the element of those folks in rural areas that have been left behind who no longer have any hospitals or schools and who feel really excluded from the world of what they would see as elite politics and represented by president Macomb who was the economic minister so I think there are elements of that there and but you've got folks from the left and folks from the right and increasingly you also have anti-semitism among some of the members of the yellow vests so I'm not sure they're you you could say it's exactly the same but I see certain parallels especially this idea of being excluded from the wealth of the country you're welcome thank you so much for coming today and thank you to Vinita her on the collection thank you for coming you

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 7,357

Rating: 4.9322033 out of 5

Keywords: paris, art, fine art, art history, french art, european art, haussman

Id: xOpzK7hPeyk

Length: 79min 40sec (4780 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019