1855: Brave New Global Capital
Il
est peu d'occupations aussi intéressantes, aussi attachantes, aussi
pleines de surprises et de révélations pour un critique [...] que
la comparaison des nations et de leurs produits respectifs.
[There
are few occupations for a critic as interesting, as captivating, as full of
surprises and revelations ... as the comparison of nations and their respective
products.]
Charles
Baudelaire, "Exposition Universelle de 1855"[1]
While
Paris's 1855 Exposition Universelle des Produits de l'Industrie et de l'Art represented a first for the French, it was by no
means the first World's Fair, nor was it the first French exhibition of art and
industry. It does, however, mark
the first of the series of Parisian Expositions Universelles and an important
break with its predecessors.
Between 1798 and 1855, Paris hosted 11 major expositions or fêtes at which exhibitors displayed manufactured products and artistic
works. The most important of these
exhibitions in terms of understanding the phenomenon of the Expositions
Universelles was the most immediate predecessor of the the 1855 World's Fair,
the Exposition nationale des produits de l'industrie agricole et
manufacturière [National
Exhibition of Products of Manufacturing and Agricultural Industry], held on the
Champs-Elysées from June 1st to July 31st, 1849. Some 5494 exhibitors vied for
space at this proto-World's Fair;[2]
3738 of them received medals.[3] This conspicuously high number of medal
winners (68%) set the practice as well as the tone for all subsequent fairs, at
which exhibitors more likely than not took home some kind of medal. This practice hardly suggests
excessively discriminating juries; rather, the overall effect was to both
legitimize industry in general and to include industry (and industrialists) as
a legitimate player in the enterprise known first as the nation and later as
the Empire. In 1849, that nation
was still nominally a republic (the Second, to be precise); two years later, le
Prince Président Louis
Napoléon Bonaparte would stage his coup d'Etat of December 2nd and, a year after that, proclaim the
Second Empire.
President
Bonaparte's speech at the award ceremony marking the end of the 1849 Exposition
is instructive, less for any forshadowing of the coup d'Etat to come than for his growing preoccupation with
workers and working conditions.
This preoccupation was to be accentuated and amplified in both the 1855
and 1867 Expositions Universelles.
At the 1849 exhibition, the Archbishop of Paris flattered the soon-to-be
Imperial ego, noting that
Votre
dessein, plusieurs fois manifesté, Monsieur le Président, est de
rouvrir dans le pays, avec le concours de l'Assemblée Nationale, les
sources les plus abondantes du travail et de frayer les voies les plus larges
de l'industrie et du commerce.
[Your
project, manifested several times, Monsieur le Président, is to reopen the most abundant sources of labor in
the country, with the help of the National Assembly, and to pave the widest
ways for industry and commerce.][4]
By
virtue of their magnitude, these "most abundant sources of labor"
would also necessarily be the cheapest.
Steamrolling from superlative to superlative, the Archbishop implied
that this hyperabundant labor pool would serve as the engine paving the
"widest", that is, least expensive, way for industry and
commerce. For his part,
Louis-Napoléon, addressing himself to the "captains of
industry" in the audience, validated the Archbishop's characterization of
the presidential agenda, making a brief révérence to clerical authority: "Lorsque dans vos
départements vous serez au milieu de vos ouvriers, affermissez-les dans
les bons sentiments et les saintes maximes" ["When you return to your
départements and find
yourself among your workers, encourage them with proper sentiments and holy
maxims."][5]
Inserting
himself into the place of his (male) listeners, le Prince President continued, going so far as to suggest the words that
provincial leaders of industry should speak to their workers when they return
home:
Impassible
devant les calomnies comme devant les séductions, sans faiblesse comme
sans jactance, je veillerai à vos intérêts qui sont les
miens, je maintiendrai mes droits, qui sont les vôtres.
[Impassive
before lies as before seductions, without weakness and without conceit, I will
safeguard your interests, which are mine; I will uphold my rights, which are
yours.][6]
This
rhetorical flourish works most revealingly in its progression from "your
interests" and "mine" to "my rights" and
"yours." What begins as
a magnanimous gesture of noblesse oblige in which "your interests" determine "mine" turns
expropriative when "my rights" ultimately determine
"yours." The author of
these words prefigures the author of the coup d'Etat by two years.
Placing
himself in the role of provincial patrons, flattering the Church, working to reassure the labor market —
clearly Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte believed in "working" his
audience. The promiscuity of
Louis-Napoléon's attentions derived less from a feeling of universal
goodwill than a conviction that everyone — even artists and writers
— would have a part to play in the coming national (and European)
order. As early as 1830, Louis-Napoléon,
flush with the tenets of the then-fashionable Saint-Simonianism, had spoken
gushingly, if somewhat unconvincingly, of a unified world in which art and
industry would happily co-exist:
Il
appartient aux lettres de célébrer les victoires de la science et
les progrès de l'économie.
La musique, la peinture, la sculpture seconderont les efforts de
l'éloquence et de la poésie, dans ces temples que l'architecture
aura renouvelés. Telles
sont les jouissances réservées à nos descendants lorsqu'un
culte nouveau, ralliant tous les hommes au pied des mêmes autels, aura
paru sur la terre.
[To
literature falls the task of celebrating the victories of science and the
progress of economics. Music,
painting and sculpture will validate the efforts of eloquence and poetry, in
temples restored by architecture.
Such are the pleasures reserved for our descendants when a new religion
will appear that will bring together all men before the same altars.][7]
The
majority of the "descendants" to whom Bonaparte refers would take
their places at the Imperial feeding trough in 1852 as older members of that
same 1830 audience. The future, as
the saying goes, is now. Or was
then.
London Calling: 1851
The
artists and writers to whom Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte referred in 1830
responded in predictably varied ways to London's Great Exhibition of the Works
of Industry of All Nations in 1851.
William Thackeray's response was typical of the sycophantic, adulatory
tone adopted by the majority of visitors to the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton's
innovative (and enormous) iron and glass confection and the centerpiece of the
Exhibition (fig. 1). Thackeray
waxed elegeaic in praise of
A
Palace as for a fairy prince
A
rare pavilion, such as man
Saw
never since mankind began,
And
built and glazed.[8]
The
"fairy prince" in question, in this case Albert, the Prince Consort,
held views which sounded remarkably similar to those of le Prince President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. The utopianism expressed by Prince
Albert harmonised perfectly with the Saint-Simonianism espoused by
Louis-Napoléon twenty years earlier. Although it is in fact Prince Albert speaking here, both men
could well have made the same pronouncement that
Nobody
who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era, will
doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition
which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history
points — the realization of the unity of mankind. [...] The distances which separated the different nations and
parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern
invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all
nations are known, and their acquirement placed within the reach of everybody;
thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even the power, of lightning.[9] On the other hand, the great principle
of the division of labor, which may be called the moving power of civilization,
is being extended to all branches of science, industry and art. [...] The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our
disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our
purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of
competition and capital.[10]
The
occasional detractors to what has been referred to as "the first great
utopia of global capital"[11]
in 1851 sounded simply curmudgeonly in the face of such relentlessly cheery
forecasts. And yet of course the
Crystal Palace did have its critics.
The most famous among these was John Ruskin, who described the Crystal
Palace years after it had been dismantled from its original site in Hyde Park
and transported to Sydenham:
Then
the Crystal Palace came [to Sydenham], for ever spoiling the view through all
its compass, and bringing every show-day, from London, a flood of pedestrians
down the footpath, who left it filthy with cigar ashes for the rest of the
week: then the railroads came, and expatiating roughs by every excursion train,
who knocked the palings down, roared at the cows, and tore down what branches of
blossom they could reach over the palings on the enclosed side. ... [W]ithout ever itself attaining any true aspect of size, and
possessing no more sublimity than a cucumber frame between two chimneys, yet by
its stupidity of hollow bulk, [it] dwarfs the hills at once; so that now one
thinks of them no more but as three long lumps of clay, on lease for building.[12]
More
provocative than his suggestion of a "cucumber frame", Ruskin's
evocation of visitors roaring at the local cows confirmed that the Crystal
Palace would not serve as the site of the "unity of mankind"
envisioned by Prince Albert.
Préparatifs
Cows
and cucumbers notwithstanding, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had nevertheless
set the standard — and begun inventing the tradition — from which subsequent
exhibitions could not afford to shrink.
This lesson was impressed most notably on the head of the French section
represented at the Crystal Palace, Count Léon de Laborde. Laborde's analysis of the Great
Exhibition and the French representation in particular was instrumental in
advising Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (after December 2nd, 1852 known as
Napoléon III) as plans for the first Paris Exposition Universelle were
formulated. Laborde's first
conclusion, based on comparisons drawn between France and other European
countries, was that the French arts, while momentarily superior to those of the
rest of Europe, were clearly threatened by the rapid progress being made in
arts education and practice elsewhere.
The rappel à l'ordre
and particularly the invocation of a decadence threatening national prestige
would become a common theme throughout all the Expositions.[13] In this France was not alone. Reports made by the United States
Commissioners visiting the Parisian Expositions Universelles warned constantly
of American inferiority, particularly in the arts.[14]
Another
of Laborde's conclusions was equally important in its implications for the
planning of the Exposition Universelle des Produits de l'Agriculture, de
l'Industrie et des Beaux-arts de Paris,
as it was officially titled.
Laborde stressed first of all the integration rather than the separation
of art and industry, both at the Crystal Palace and at all future exhibitions. This view coincided perfectly with
those of Napoléon III himself, and so it was hardly surprising that the
Emperor should appoint Laborde and others who had been influenced in one way or
another by Saint-Simonianism either to the Commission Impériale or the Sous-commission. The Commission
Impériale was headed by Prince
Napoléon, the emperor's cousin, known affectionately in the satirical
press as "Plon-Plon".
Much of the organizing work fell to the Sous-commission, which drew its
ranks from transportation, banking, armaments, construction, heavy industry,
the military and, to a lesser extent, academics, forming an fairly wide-ranging
cast of characters.
The
Commissaire Général,
Frédéric Le Play, was seconded in part by François
Barthélémy Arlès-Dufour, Michel Chevalier and Emile
Pereire. Le Play, who would
reprise his role for the 1867 Exposition, founded the Société
d'Economie Sociale in 1856 and argued consistently for social reform based on
the authority of husbands, landowners and the captains of industry — in
short, Napoléon III's favorite audience. Chevalier, an economist and Saint-Simonian, ardently
supported free trade and proved himself instrumental in engineering a
free-trade agreement between France and Great Britain in 1860. (Chevalier and Le Play were in addition
close personal friends; Chevalier's daughter eventually married Le Play's
son.) Emile Pereire, also known as
Jacob Emile Pereire — France's ambient, eternal anti-semitism encouraged
the occlusion of any overt indices of Judaism — comprised with his
brother Isaac the French equivalents of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Mellon and
J. P. Morgan. Les frères
Pereire would become synonymous with
railroads, shipping and especially banking during the Second Empire, supplying
the oil of credit that would grease the wheels of Haussmannisation.
Ironically, it was Haussmann's dubious credit arrangements, satirized by
Jules Ferry in his Comptes Fantastiques d'Haussmann (1869), that would ultimately prove to be his
downfall and the harbinger of the close of the Second Empire.
Other
members of the Sous-commission
included Ferdinand de Lesseps, who would achieve both fame as the chief
architect of the Suez Canal and notoriety as the failed planner of the Panama
Canal; the industrialist Eugène Schneider, whose fortune in armaments
helped propel him to a political career in the Empire; President Legentil of
the Chambre de Commerce de Paris; Louis Visconti, the Emperor's chief architect
who died in 1853; and General Arthur Morin, Director of the Conservatoire
Impérial des Arts et Métiers. Given the affinities and
affiliations of its organizers, there is little doubt that industry rather than
art should have played such a markedly preponderant role in organizing this
first Exposition Universelle.
Frédéric
Le Play's system of categorization determined how the hundreds of thousands of
exhibits would be organized and displayed. While exhibits for the London Crystal Palace Exhibition fell
under four categories (raw materials, machines, manufactured products and fine
arts) and 30 classes among those categories, Le Play expanded the
classificatory system in a way that reflected the intellectual heritage of the
Encyclopédistes. Rather
than four categories, Le Play envisioned eight:
1. industries devoted to the
extraction or production of raw materials, including mines, metallurgy and
agriculture
2. industries devoted to
mechanical engineering, including railroads, shipbuilding and industrial
machines used in weaving fabric
3. industries based on
physical or chemical agents or related to science and teaching, including
electricity, chemical dyes and food processing
4. industries related to
learned professsions, including hygiene, pharmacy, military arts and civil
construction
5. manufacture of mineral
products, including steel manufacture, jewelry, glassmaking and ceramics
6. fabric manufacture,
including cotton, wool, lace making and carpet weaving
7. furniture, decoration,
industrial design, printing and music, and — last but not least! —
8. fine arts.[15]
These
eight categories were subdivided into 30 classes, 251 sections and no fewer
than 3000 subsections. Heralded as
an advance over the classificatory system used at the Crystal Palace, the sheer
number of classes, sections and subsections in this first Exposition
Universelle helped explain at least in part how the Sous-commission kept itself busy. One wonders whether "Catalog Design and Manufacture for
Expositions Universelles" might not have comprised one of the subsections
of Group 8, which included printing.
Even
before Count Léon Laborde could file his final report on the Crystal
Palace Exhibition with Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, events and Bonaparte
himself moved quickly to organize the Exposition Universelle in response to
London's Great Exhibition. In
addition to appointing the Commission and Sous-Commission, le Prince
Président authorized the
formation on 20 October 1852 of the Société Anonyme du Palais des
Expositions Nationales. Four
members comprised the société: Bankers Jules-Joseph Ardoin, Etienne Roualle de
Rouville, Frédéric Ricardo and a lawyer, Victor-Amédée-Jérome
Lefebvre. Article 6 of the
articles of incorporation listed the fonds social as 13 million francs, derived from the creation of
130,000 shares at 100 francs each.
This new société
was as intime as it was anonyme: the total number of original stockholders was four:
Ardoin (43,100 shares), Rouville and Ricardo (43,000 shares each) and Lefebvre
(900 shares).[16] None of the investors saw a profit from
the Exposition, however. Quite the
contrary, in fact: The deficit was large enough to necessitate Government
intervention in the form of a buyout of the Palais de l'Industrie from the
original investors after the close of the Exposition.
One
of the first lessons learned in planning the Exposition was the amount of time
required for preparations. Barely
three years span the date of the original decree, 27 March 1852, and the
scheduled opening of the Exposition on 1 May 1855. (Delays caused the official opening to be postponed by two
weeks; still, many of the buildings and exhibits were not ready even then.) Without the intervention of world and
national events, it is highly unlikely that the Exposition could have opened on
time. Beyond the usual delays in
construction and installation, serious ideological opposition to both the
Emperor and the Exposition threatened continually to delay the festivities if
not undermine them altogether. The
outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 diverted resources, national attention and
Prince Napoléon himself, who insisted on serving in the war from April
of 1854 to February of 1855, when dysentery finally brought him back to
Paris.
Voices of Protest
In
addition to the delays caused by the outbreak of war, domestic entanglements
worked to impede the progress of the Exposition. While the new Empire enjoyed general support, particularly
among industrial interests and the middle class, its critics at home expressed
their dissatisfaction in often violent ways. There were numerous assassination attempts on
Napoléon III's life throughout the Second Empire. Ironically, one would-be assassin,
Pianori, was executed on the opening day of the Exposition, 15 May 1855. The
threat of violent assassination parallelled furtive but continual character
attacks throughout the period.
Victor Hugo, perhaps the most vocal and best-known critic of the Empire
and especially the Emperor, had been temporarily banished immediately following
the coup d'Etat in December
1851. For the duration of the
Second Empire, Hugo elected a self-imposed exile, migrating from Belgium to the
Channel Islands, beginning with Jersey and, when his protest activities there
became too controversial for local officials, eventually settling on Guernsey.
Hugo's
attacks against Napoléon III were aggressive, witty, occasionally
vicious but above all relentless.
The character of Hugo's diatribes illustrates all too well how close
allies one day can become the bitterest of enemies the next. Hugo's original alliance with
Louis-Napoléon soured by October of 1849 when Hugo was passed over for a
cabinet appointment and instead offered the ambassadorship to Spain, an
appointment he declined. The coup
d'Etat of 1851 threw Hugo irrevocably
into the camp of the republicans, and his famous speech to the Assemblée Nationale
in which he referred to le Prince Président as Napoléon le Petit earned him a temporary banishment.
While
in exile, Hugo kept busy attacking the new Emperor in prose (Histoire d'un
crime, 1852), poetry (Les
Châtiments, 1852-53) and
especially in pamphlets. His
"Napoléon le Petit" speech became the title of one
particularly vitriolic pamphlet, featuring such incendiary remarks as
"Louis Bonaparte est un homme de moyenne taille, froid, pâle, lent,
qui a l'air de n'être pas tout à fait réveillé"
["Louis Bonaparte is an average-sized man, cold, pale, and slow, who seems
not quite awake"] and "Avant le 2 décembre [1851], les chefs
de la droite disaient volontiers de Louis Bonaparte: C'est un idiot. Ils se trompaient. [...] C'est un livre où il y a des pages
arrachées" ["Before December 2nd {1851}, the leaders of the
right said willingly of Louis Bonaparte: 'He's an idiot.' They were wrong. {...} He's a book with torn-out pages."][17]
Despite
such venomous comments, Hugo's stature as a writer protected him to the
remarkable point that not only was he later invited to write the preface to the
official catalogue for the 1867 Exposition Universelle (see chapter on 1867
Exposition below) but his 1830 play Hernani was reprised in Paris in 1867 in unexpurgated form
specifically to coincide with the opening of the Exposition. Hugo's ceaseless protest activities,
meanwhile, had surprisingly little effect on popular opinion. The Emperor, the Empire, the Crimean
War and preparations for the first Exposition Universelle marched on.
World
events likewise marched on. While
the 1855 Exposition Universelle has been correctly characterized as the French
response to the Great Exhibition of 1851, it would be nevertheless incorrect to
consider that response as hostile.
In fact, just the opposite was true. Prince Albert's speech at the Crystal Palace extolling the
unity of all nations began to be realized, at least partly, as Paris prepared
to receive the world in 1855. The
philosophical Saint-Simonianism of advisors like Chevalier, Laborde and Le Play
saw its political expression in the abolition of tariffs between England and
France and the incentives to free trade that characterized the Second Empire
and began to unify capital on a European and ultimately global scale.
One
of the most visible signs of the rapprochement drawing England and France together was the official
visit made by the Imperial couple to London in April 1855 immediately preceding
the opening of the French Exposition.
(Queen Victoria would make a reciprocal visit to Paris and the
Exposition later in August of the same year.) Victor Hugo, never failing to capitalize on an opportunity,
used the occasion of Napoléon III's visit to England to publish another
pamphlet, "Victor Hugo à Louis Bonaparte,"[18]
an open letter "printed in the free English and French press" —
in fact, published on Jersey by the Imprimerie Universelle — to coincide with Napoléon III's
visit.[19]
Hugo's
increasingly acidic tone in his second pamphlet suggests probable frustration
with the negligeable effect of his previous pamphlet, "Napoléon le
Petit", on French public opinion.
The tone of this second pamphlet, with its use of direct address and
particularly the imperative ("Allez-vous-en. ... Je vous dis
de vous en aller. Vous
n'êtes pas à votre place ici" ["Go away. ... I am telling you to go away. You are not in your place here {in England"}],[20]
echoes that of many of the poems of Les Châtiments, published in 1853. One poem in particular, "Le Manteau
Impérial" ["The Imperial Mantle"], bears a striking
stylistic resemblance to the pamphlet.
The poet addresses himself to worker bees, the most recognizable
imperial icon, and orders them to attack cet infâme, the unnamed but unmistakably identifiable Emperor.
Like
the previous pamphlet, however, Hugo's second diatribe failed to incite public
opinion to any substantive action.
Despite the fact that his return to France after the fall of the Empire
and his funeral in 1885 would provoke massive public jubilation and grief,
respectively, Hugo's œuvre
failed to mobilize anything more than enthusiastic admiration and predictable
imitation. Although it is tempting
to link Hugo's verbal campaign against the Emperor to the series of
assassination attempts against Napoléon III, many of the would-be
assassins were motivated by the Emperor's own actions, such as his intervention
in the suppression of the Roman Republic in favor of the Vatican. Like his contemporary, Baudelaire, who
would comment extensively on painting at the 1855 Exposition, Hugo's fame was
tempered by the marginalization characteristic of most intellectuals and
artists.
While
literary culture in France has historically wielded considerable influence over
French cultural identity, as Priscilla Clark has amply documented in her Literary
France, that influence has occurred
mostly on a symbolic level.[21] Clark's analysis has illustrated the
prestige bestowed on writers and intellectuals, as evidenced by the substantial
number of monuments, streets, public buildings and spaces named for them. In terms of practice, however, writers
and intellectuals have always tended to produce more commentators and imitators
of themselves than actors on the social and political scenes. In much the same way that the
"real product" of capitalism is the need for more money, the
"real product" of literary culture is the need for readers and
writers, the consumers and producers of literature. Victor Hugo's brief political career as a member of
the Legislative Assembly (from May to October of 1849) parallelled Alphonse de
Lamartine's equally short-lived foray into national politics following the 1848
Revolution. Both poets exerted
considerably more influence over the evolution of poetry than politics, which
is not to invalidate their contributions to the political culture of their
time. However brief, the
intersection of literary and political culture during the period between the
1848 Revolution and the proclamation of the Second Empire in 1852 was
nonetheless remarkable. Nor was it
an isolated incident. Paul
Claudel's dual careers as poet/dramatist and diplomat (ambassador to Japan,
Belgium and the United States) provide a more recent example of the kinds of
overlapping of literature and politics not uncommon to France and at the same
time quite rare in other countries.[22] Such an intersection helps us to map
the specificities of French cultural life. One of the things that makes the Expositions Universelles so
interesting is the way in which they provide a "field" (both
literally as well as in Bourdieu's symbolic sense) on which these intersections
of different cultures — the political, the literary and the visual, to
name but three — are made visible.
Beginning with the very first Exposition Universelle, writers, painters,
politicians, journalists, architects and others participated actively and sometimes
vocally in the ongoing debate on the "state of the state of the
art(s)," especially in France but in the rest of the world as well. Starting with the official decree in
1852 proclaiming the Exposition, participants in the debate found their own voice
as they encountered the voices of others.
One
of the very first debates centered on practical questions of what to build and
where. It was not until 1854 that
construction began on the Palais de l'Industrie, the main building which would house
the majority of the industrial exhibits.
After considerable searching, Jean Viel was named chief architect and
Alexandre Barrault chief engineer.
Located on the current site of the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais,
the Palais de l'Industrie would occupy most of the space bounded by the Place
de la Concorde on the east, the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées on the
west, the Champs-Elysées on the north and the Seine on the south (fig.
2). Despite Laborde's
recommendation to integrate industry and the fine arts, fine arts exhibits were
housed in a separate building from the industrial exhibits, in a French
Renaissance-style Palais des Beaux-Arts, designed by Victor Lefuel and situated
on the Avenue Montaigne (fig. 3).
When it became apparent that the Palais de l'Industrie could not
sufficiently house all the exhibits sanctioned by the jury, a long Galerie
Annexe was constructed on the Quai Billy between the Cours la Reine and the
Seine. Situated halfway between
the Palais de l'Industrie and the Galerie Annexe stood the Rotonde du Panorama,
built in 1838, which housed displays of imperial jewels and decorative art
taken from various imperial residences.[23]
The
largest and most striking building of the Exposition was without a doubt the
Palais de l'Industrie. Smaller
than the Crystal Palace, it was nevertheless constructed of iron and glass, the
two relatively new materials featured so prominently in London. Laborde's admonition regarding the
relative fragility of France's supremacy in the arts was validated in the
battle over the design of the Palais de l'Industrie, however. Advocates of the new iron and glass
technology fought bitterly with more traditional partisans of ornament and
decoration. The result of this
debate was an iron-frame building clothed in stone, thus rendering its
innovative aspects totally invisible.
Meanwhile, the glass roof perched anachronistically atop the stone walls
of the Palais.
Visitors
to the Palais remarked on its "essential ugliness" despite the
palliative attempts of the sculptor Elias Robert to decorate the entrance to
the building.[24] Its glass roof made the Palais
particularly uncomfortable in the summer.
The use of muslin to block the sun proved only partly successful. The building stood on its original site
until it was demolished in preparation for the 1900 Exposition
Universelle. But before narrating
its destruction, we must first focus our attention on its opening and the
opening of the Exposition.
Ouverture:
15 May 1855
The
first Parisian Exposition Universelle opened in the afternoon of 15 May 1855,
two weeks behind schedule. Most of
the rest of the Exposition buildings were still not ready even then. The agricultural exhibits displayed
outside the city at Trappes near Versailles were not ready until 5 June;
visitors to the Rotonde had to wait until 25 June. The day of 15 May began ominously at dawn with the execution
of Pianori, one of Napoléon III's would-be assassins. The Emperor arrived at the Palais de
l'Industrie at one o'clock in the afternoon and pronounced, "J'ouvre avec
bonheur ce temple de la paix qui convie tous les peuples à la
concorde" ["I happily open this temple of peace which invites all
people to harmony."][25] Prince Napoléon, recently
returned from the Crimea and cured of his dysentery, then made a speech in
which he proclaimed: "Jamais il n'avait été donné
à un peuple de se montrer ainsi, dans le même instant, grand dans
la paix et puissant dans la guerre" ["Never has a people shown itself
to be at the same time great in peace and powerful in war."][26] From its opening moments, the
Expositions Universelles were explicitly linked to warfare and military
culture. The construction of a
nationalism based on a militaristic patriotism had been inscribed into the
"temple of peace".
Depending on the source, reports of the opening of the Exhibition varied
from the most glowingly self-congratulatory to the frankly cynical. The Moniteur Universel, the official organ of the Empire whose name bore a
coincidental resemblance to the Exposition Universelle, exclaimed with unironic
hyperbole that France was "là, comme ailleurs, couronnée de
victoires, et saluée reine par l'acclamation du genre humain"
["here, as elsewhere, crowned with victories and hailed as queen by the
acclamation of the human race."][27]
Other
sources displayed considerably less enthusiasm. A certain Fortoul noted that
La
cérémonie a été horriblement froide et courte. Le Prince Napoléon a lu un long
discours tout à fait vide.
L'Empereur, Président de l'Exposition, a fait une réponse
qu'il n'a pas voulu qu'on entendît, puis il a fait quelque [sic] pas et
lâché le public déconcerté qui était venu de
toutes parts pour voir nos habits brodés.
[The
ceremony was horribly cold and short.
Prince Napoleon read a long speech that was completely empty. The Emperor, President of the
Exposition, made a response that he did not intend to be heard, then took a few
steps, leaving the public, who had come from everywhere to see our embroidered
clothes, disconcerted.][28]
At
2:30, after staying barely an hour and a half, the Emperor and his entourage
left the Exposition. The hasty
departure may have been due to a case of Imperial ennui, or quite possibly one of the Emperor's many health
problems, which included severe hemmoroids and recurring bladder stones. Whatever the reason, the Emperor's
apparent lack of enthusiasm on opening day was carefully glossed over in
official accounts such as those found in the Moniteur Universel. The
ship of Empire sailed on, across waters that refused to be disturbed by the
protests of poets or by the distraction of the Emperor himself.
One
of the distractions occupying the thoughts of the Emperor and many other
visitors to the first Exposition Universelle in the late spring of 1855 was the
progress of the Crimean War. On
this issue as with many others, the dissenting voice of Victor Hugo, who called
the war a "catastrophe",[29]
was drowned out by popular sentiment.
A journalist visiting the Exposition on 15 September from Lyon described
in emotional tones an illumination,
a popular demonstration in which Parisians placed lighted candles in their
windows as a way of marking their support, in this case for the fall of
Sebastopol:
[U]ne
illumination peut-être sans exemple à Paris. [...] Dans les rues les plus écartées, comme au
centre de la ville, dans les quartiers aristocratiques comme dans les plus
pauvres ruelles des Halles, du Temple, du Marais et des faubourgs, depuis les
rez-de-chaussée jusqu'aux mansardes, des lanternes de Venise, des
lampions ou des chandelles entourés de papier. [...] cette manifestation n'en est que plus touchante de la
part de pauvres gens qui sacrifiaient un kilogramme de pain sur la mince ration
du lendemain, afin de brûler cinquante centimes de chandelle en l'honneur
de la chute de Sébastopol.
[An
illumination without precedent in Paris {...} in the most far-flung streets of the city as well as the
city center, in aristocratic neighborhoods as well as in the poorest streets of
Les Halles the Rue du Temple, the Marais and the Faubourgs [Saint-Antoine and
Saint-Honoré], from the street level to the rooftops, [burned] Venetian
lamps, lanterns and candles with paper shades. {...} This
demonstration is even more touching for the enthusiastic participation by the
poor, who sacrificed a kilogram of the next day's bread in order to burn 50
centimes' worth of candles in honor of the fall of Sebastopol.[30]
This
account suggests somewhat considerable ideological distance between Hugo, the
self-avowed champion of the downtrodden and the working classes, and those
classes themselves. As John Ruskin
had already noted scornfully, these same masses flocked to the Exposition
Universelle as they had to the Crystal Palace, to catch a glimpse of new
machines, exotic products and other people, including their own leaders. Sometimes, as during the opening
ceremonies on 15 May, those leaders disappointed the crowds who turned out to
see them. At other times, they
provided a spectacle altogether as satisfying as any exhibit of art or
industry.
Paris
in the summer of 1855 saw a nearly steady stream of European and non-European
rulers come to visit the Exposition.
The most famous of these was Queen Victoria, who arrived on 24 August to
an enthusiastic welcome by the Emperor and the French public. The meeting between Napoléon III
and Queen Victoria at the Exposition provided not only an echo of
Napoléon's previous visit to London in April but also a rare glimpse of
two empires meeting both literally and symbolically. Their joint visit to the Exposition that day served as a
visual metaphor for the work of colonization currently being undertaken —
vigorously and on a global scale — by each. Busily dividing the spoils, the former rivals pause
momentarily to potlatch:
Les
augustes visiteurs sont entrés dans l'exposition anglaise, pour faire
une courte halte dans l'Inde.
.... [S]ur quoi
arrêter de préférence son regard, quand on n'a qu'une
minute à consacrer à l'admiration? On admire en bloc, et les deux grands souverains se disent
sans se parler: "A vous, Reine, les Indes: à vous, Empereur,
l'Afrique à civiliser! Le
monde silencieux ne troublera pas notre glorieux labeur tant que nous resterons
unis."
Ils
passent et s'avancent vers l'Australie.
[The
august visitors {Napoléon III and Queen Victoria} entered the English
exhibit to make a brief stop in India.
... {H}ow to choose what to
look at, when one has only a minute to admire it? They admire the whole thing, and the two monarchs say to
each other without speaking: "To you, Queen: India"; "To you,
Emperor: Africa to civilize! The
silent world will not trouble our glorious labors as long as we are
united."
They
pass and proceed towards Australia. [31]
Faint
praise at least has the virtue of damning quietly. Behind the amusingly syrupy observations of the contemporary
visitor quoted above lies more than a grain of truth. Napoléon III and Queen Victoria are in fact engaging
in a kind of potlatch that resembles a competitive safari of sorts. The game consists of acquiring as much
foreign territory as one can and then displaying it in the most opulent
framework possible. This logic
would be played out repeatedly over the years as the Expositions Universelles
became more specialized and would reach its most blatant expression in the
Exposition Coloniale de Paris of 1931.
Royal
visitors to the first Exposition Universelle arrived in Paris from places far
beyond the boundaries of Europe.
While few of them could match the imperial ambitions of Napoléon
III and Queen Victoria, all of the other augustes visiteurs excited considerable scrutiny on the part of the
French press. Few of them enjoyed
as much attention as Abd El-Kader, the former ruler of Algeria, one of France's
oldest, largest and most economically vital overseas territories (its land mass
was divided into administrative départements parallelling the French system.) In the course of what might
appropriately be termed the first Algerian war, Abd El-Kader entered into
history by proclaiming a jihad or
holy war against the French in 1832 when he was named sultan. As France slowly tightened its grip on
Algeria during the long war, Abd El-Kader was finally captured and forced to
surrender in 1847. Incarcerated
for five years, he was finally released on Napoléon III's orders in
1852.
His
visit to Paris and the Exposition Universelle became the focus of considerable
public attention. Abd El-Kader's
presence in Paris on 25 September echoed Queen Victoria's visit of a month
previous. In both cases former
enemies buried their differences under expressions of good will and
magnanimity. The French attitude
towards the former sultan corresponded more to the paternalistic condescension
displayed towards workers than the honors bestowed on full trading partners
such as the British, however. Algeria
had, after all, finally fallen under complete French control.
The
accounts of the Emir's visit in the French press tended to reflect as well as
form this official posture of condescension. Abd El-Kader appears more childlike than regal in one particular
account:
Les
armes surtout furent de sa part l'objet d'un examen très attentif [...] On lui présenta aussi un pistolet revolver
d'Amérique dont le jeu excita vivement son attention. [...] On dirait réellement qu'Abd-el-Kader, homme d'un sens
droit et plein de loyauté, a modifié ses goûts et ses
habitudes depuis qu'il a vu la France.
[...] On assure que son
langage même s'est modifié et qu'il a quitté le style
imagé des Orientaux pour la concision et la clarté de
l'Occident.
[Weapons
were the object of his attentive scrutiny. {...} He was
presented with an American revolver whose functioning attracted his excited
attention. {...} One could honestly say that Abd
El-Kader, a man of good sense and full of loyalty, has modified his tastes and
habits after having seen France.
{...} It is assured that
even his language has changed and that he has abandoned the colorful style of
the Orientals for the concision and clarity of the West.[32]
The
image of the savage child dumbfounded by the marvels of civilization gives way
to the highly theatricalized scene of "the conversion of the
infidel", particularly in the last sentence. The egregious racism of phrases like "the colorful style
of the Orientals" works in tandem with the narrativizing strategy that
legitimates the colonial enterprise.
La mission civilisatrice
takes its ideological roots from such scenes such as the account of Abd
El-Kader's visit. The "taming
of the Orient" could only be made possible by a requisite taming of the
Oriental. The Rue du Caire, a
reconstructed pastiche of an "oriental" streetscape from the Maghreb
that would appear in later Expositions, provided the architectural equivalent
of this taming of the Oriental.
Looking
eastward from Paris rather than southwest, "Orientals" of a different
sort found themselves subject to French "civilizing." Defeated Russians at Sebastopol,
captured and brought back to Paris, found themselves treated to the same brand
of paternalistic condescension shown the Emir of Algeria. It would appear that the price of
defeat at the hands of the French included a free visit to the Exposition
Universelle in Paris. Emprisoned
Russian officers were allowed to attend the Fair free of charge — the
one-franc entrance fee was waived in this special case — before being
returned to their stockade.
Whether the fairgrounds became a gilded cage for these visitors or
whether it was a question of exchanging one prison for another depends on how
one views public spectacles such as world's fairs.
Not
every visitor to the Exposition was "emprisoned" in Paris,
however. The agricultural
exhibition at Trappes outside of Versailles regularly drew many thousands of
visitors, among them the Emir of Algeria and his entourage. According to contemporary accounts, the
expériences agricoles at
Trappes fascinated the Arab visitors even more than American revolvers:
[C]e
qui donnait un caractère particulier à cette fête des
travaux de l'agriculture, c'était la présence de plusieurs chefs
arabes. [...] Ces Arabes, presque tous chefs de
tribus puissantes, portant pour la plupart la décoration de la
Légion d'honneur, ont suivi avec le plus vif intérêt toutes
les opérations qui ont eu lieu.
Ils se sont montrés fort touchés des égards dont
ils ont été l'objet.
[...] Rien n'égalait
leur surprise et leur admiration à la vue des procédés si
ingénieux et si variés des nations civilisées, et qui
laissent à si grande distance les procédés primitifs de la
culture arabe. On pouvait lire ces
impressions diverses sur ces visages, habituellement sévères et
impassibles, tant ils prenaient d'intérêt aux expériences
qui s'exécutaient devant eux.
[What
gave a particular character to the agricultural festival was the presence of
several Arab leaders. {...} These Arabs, nearly all of them
powerful tribal leaders, most of whom were wearing the medal of the Legion of
Honor, followed with the keenest interest all the exercises that took
place. They were extremely touched
by all the attention paid to them.
{...} Nothing could compare
with their surprise and their admiration at the sight of the varied and
ingenious processes of the civilized nations, which leave the primitive
processes of the Arab world so far behind. One could see the various impressions on their faces, known
for their severity and impassiveness, now transfixed before the exercises
demonstrated in front of them.][33]
While
certain of the French congratulated themselves on the glories of national
agriculture, others took a distinctly less charitable view. At the same time that the Arab
chieftains were reportedly expressing surprise and admiration at Trappes,
Flaubert was finishing the comices agricoles or agricultural fair scene in the fictitious bled of Yonville in Madame Bovary, published in 1857. The scene could (and, I would argue, should) be read as a
parody of the entire culture of the Expositions, which Flaubert himself would
define in his archly satirical Dictionnaire des idées reçues as "sujet de délire au XIXe siècle" ["object of
madness in the 19th century".][34]
The
site of the comices agricoles in
Yonville looks remarkably like a setting for an exposition. The mairie has been decorated with four banners reading "To
Commerce," "To Agriculture," "To Industry" and
"To Fine Arts," mottos which would be inscribed above the gates to
future Expositions. While it is
tempting to infer from Flaubert's listing these banners in this particular
order a criticism of provincial philistinism, their order accurately reflects
in fact their order of importance to the good citizens of Yonville. The genius of this scene is the
alternation of Emma's seduction by Rodolphe with the interminably insipid discours pronounced by Monsieur le Conseiller Lieuvain, the rural equivalent of Prince
Napoléon, who drones on and on in praise of the Emperor and local
farmers while handing out a seemingly endless supply of medals.
The
crowd at Yonville, far from appearing as enlightened as the one at Trappes,
more closely resembles the livestock exhibits, which also receive their own
share of medals. Flaubert's
descriptions of cattle and pigs blend into his descriptions of the audience in
much the same way that Rodolphe's seduction of Emma blends into the Lieuvain's
speech. The comic effect produced by the juxtaposition of country
folk who resemble farm animals with pompous public officials parallels the
ironic distanciation of the seduction scene. Rodolphe and Emma, physically separated from the crowd and
ostentisibly observing the proceedings from the second storey of the mairie, are in fact the only two beings not caught up in the
spectacle. Men, women, children,
cows and sheep all take in Lieuvain's words with the same hypnotic (and
catatonic) fixation.
Like
the most successful of parodies, Lieuvain's speech rings remarkably true to the
original overblown discours officiels
such as those that visitors to the Expositions Universelles would have
heard. Lieuvain begins his speech
with a long tribute to the Emperor, who, with a firm and steady hand, guides
the chariot of the State while at the same time commanding respect for peace,
war, industry, commerce, agriculture and the fine arts (in that order). After briefly evoking unspecified
moments of past violence, a veiled reference to the revolution of 1789, peasant
uprisings such as that in the Vendée in 1793 and the relatively recent revolution of 1848, Lieuvain
pauses to cast his gaze around him.
Much like Prince Albert in 1851, he sees nothing but progress and
prosperity:
Partout
fleurissent le commerce et les arts; partout des voies nouvelles de
communication, comme autant d'artères nouvelles dans le corps de l'Etat,
y établissent des rapports nouveaux; nos grands centres manufacturiers
ont repris leur activité; la religion, plus affermie, sourit à
tous les cœurs; nos ports sont pleins, la confiance renaît, et enfin
la France respire!
[Everywhere
commerce and the arts flourish; everywhere new paths of communication are
establishing new connections, like so many new arteries in the body of the
State; our great manufacturing centers have resumed their activity; religion,
more strengthened, beams in every heart; our ports are full, confidence is
reborn, and finally France breathes easily again!][35]
In
exactly the same way that the festivities of each Exposition would receive
ample and glowing coverage in the Parisian press, the hyper-bourgeois
pharmacist Homais composes a similarly laudatory article for the local
newspaper, Le Fanal de Rouen. Homais's style offers a second-degree discours, containing many of the same kinds of platitudes that
characterize Lieuvain's speech and marked with the same paternalistic
condescension found in nearly any official speech of the day. Homais pays particular attention to the
awards ceremony and fantasizes the lucky farmer's return to his humble home:
Le
père embrassait son fils, le frère le frère,
l'époux l'épouse.
Plus d'un montrait avec orgueil son humble médaille, et sans
doute, revenu chez lui, près de sa bonne ménagère, il
l'aura suspendue en pleurant aux murs discrets de sa chaumine.
[Fathers
embraced sons, brothers embraced brothers, husbands embraced wives. More than one man displayed his humble
medal with pride and, no doubt, returned home and, standing next to his good
wife, tearfully suspended it on the discrete walls of his little thatched
cottage.][36]
In
reality, however, the experience of nearly all the Expositions Universelles
showed that when they could be induced to attend the Fairs at all, workers and
peasant farmers returned home more confused and mystified than overcome with
grateful emotion. For their part,
the Homais, Lieuvains, Prince Napoléons and Napoléon IIIs
persisted in their erroneous conviction that the awarding of medals and the
construction of special exhibits such as workers' housing would have the effect
of winning the support of the laboring classes. Those same classes failed to be enticed or won over by such
obviously condescending gestures.
Likewise,
not all of the French press waxed ecstatic before the entrance to the Palais de
l'Industrie. As the official
Imperial newspaper, Le Moniteur Universel maintained a consistently and predictably approving tone that would be
echoed by many of the provincial papers such as the imaginary Fanal de Rouen. But a
number of newspapers, including the influential Revue des Deux Mondes, were remarkably candid in their criticism of the
Exposition. Ernest Renan, whose
secular humanism shocked and scandalized many of his readers, correctly
observed in the Journal des Débats that the last people who would want to see agricultural exhibits would
be farmers: "[Q]uoi de plus
prosaïque que le labourage pour un charretier bas-normand qui ne voit et
qui n'estime dans son œuvre de chaque jour, que les 25 sous qu'elle lui
apporte?" ["What could
be more prosaic than plowing for a carter from lower Normandy, who can only see
in his everyday work the 25 sous he earns from it?"][37]
Renan
raises an extremely important point, one that is essential to any understanding
of the Expositions: If farmers and workers could not be interested in seeing
themselves represented, who would?
Everyone else, of course.
Small wonder, then, that Naturalism, with its voyeuristic tourisme
chez les pauvres, would eventually
come to enjoy so much success a generation later. This same kind of logic can be applied to the rise of
ethnographic exhibits later in the century and the rise of colonial exhibits,
and even entire colonial exhibitions, such as the Exposition Coloniale of 1931,
to follow.
One
of the first nodes in the debate over cultural identity as articulated at the
Expositions forms around the question of representation. What is being represented, and who is
the intended audience? An
official, Imperial response might be "Progress, for everyone", but
the specific content of the exhibits — machines, industrial processes,
farmers, farming methods, colonies and colonial peoples — highlights
specific fragmented and for the most part "marginal" cultures. These "marginal" cultures are
not limited to ethnographic samples of French farmers or colonies but also
include scientific, technical and industrial culture. To say that France is representing itself to itself is
partly true, but it would be even more accurate to say that what is being
represented is France in all its minutiae (recall the eight categories, 30
sections, 251 sections and 3000 subsections of the Exposition). The majority of visitors to the fairs
were not farmers and certainly not Algerians; rather, it was the middle class
who flocked to the Expositions to be entertained or distracted. While pedagogical concerns were always
part of the official rationale for the Fairs, the organizers soon learned that
the majority of the public would rather spend its money being distracted than
edified.
In
his "Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third
Republic", Charles Rearick notes the mistrust of festivals in general on
the part of the lower classes, citing the proverb "après la
fête on gratte tête" ["after the fair you scratch your
head"].[38] Louis-Ferdinand Céline would
also describe typical petit-bourgeois
antipathy towards the Expositions in his Mort à Crédit.[39] Part of this mistrust stemmed from the
efforts of Exhibition organizers, particularly later in the century, to prevent
any spontaneous mass assemblies or displays of emotion. The opening and closing ceremonies, the
remise de médailles and the
occasional musical pageants were all carefully orchestrated to avoid the
creation of too many potentially volatile and unmanageable crowds.[40]
Many
of the visitors to the 1855 Exposition returned home with mixed emotions. Despite Baudelaire's enthusiasm for
world's fairs in general (cf. chapter epigram above), both he and Ernest Renan
found the popular and official enthusiasm for this first Exposition Universelle
to be unfounded. The problem
stemmed from conflicting notions of progress. While evidence of technological and material progress was everywhere
apparent, Baudelaire and Renan preferred higher, moral ground and found the
Exposition deceptively lacking.
Looking at the Expositions Universelles in their historical context,
Renan characterized them as unworthy successors to previous public spectacles
such as ancient sporting events or pilgrimages:
Aux
jeux antiques, aux pèlerinages, aux tournois, aux jubilés ont
succédé des comices industriels. Deux fois l'Europe s'est dérangée pour voir
des marchandises étalées et comparer des produits
matériels, et, au retour de ces pèlerinages d'un genre nouveau,
personne ne s'est plaint que quelque chose lui manquât. ... L'erreur n'est pas de proclamer l'industrie bonne et utile,
mais de l'exalter outre mesure et d'attacher trop d'importance à
certains perfectionnements.
... [L]e progrès de
l'industrie n'est nullement, dans l'histoire, parallèle à celui
de l'art et de la vraie civilisation, puisque les deux sociétés
où l'art s'est élevé à la plus grande hauteur, la
Grèce antique et l'Italie de la Renaissance, sont restées
étrangères aux raffinements industriels.
Le
travail professionnel et l'industrie sont des choses bonnes, et par
conséquent honorables; mais ce ne sont pas des choses libérales.
L'utile n'ennoblit pas: cela seul ennoblit qui suppose dans l'homme une valeur
intellectuelle ou morale.
Voilà
ce que ne comprennent point assez les personnes qui, frappées des grands
progrès industriels de notre temps, s'imaginent que de tels
progrès signalent une révolution dans l'esprit humain. Ces personnes prennent l'accessoire de
la civilisation pour le principal; si la philosophie de l'histoire leur
était plus familière, elles verraient que la perfection des arts
mécaniques peut s'allier à une grande dépression morale et
intellectuelle. ...
Il
ne semble pas que beaucoup de personnes soient sorties du palais de
l'Exposition meilleures qu'elles n'y étaient entrées; il faut
même ajouter que le but de MM. les exposants n'eût pas
été atteint si tous les visiteurs avaient été assez
sages pour dire en sortant: "Que de choses dont je peux me passer!"
[Industrial
fairs have replaced ancient games, pilgrimages, tournaments and jubilees. Twice now Europe has set out to see
merchandise displayed and compare material products, and, returning from these
new pilgrimages, no one has complained that they found anything lacking. {...} The error is not in proclaiming industry good and useful,
but in exalting it beyond all measure and attaching too much importance to
certain successes. {...} Progress in industry is in no way
historically parallel to that in art and true civilization, because the two societies
in which art reached its apogee, ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, remained
outside of industrial refinements.
Professional
work and industry are good things, and consequently honorable ones, but they
are not liberal things. What is
useful does not ennoble; only that which supposes an intellectual or moral
value in man ennobles.
This
is what remains misunderstood by people who, struck by the great industrial
progress of our time, imagine that such progress heralds a similar revolution
in the human spirit. These people
are mistaking the accessories of civilization for the principal material. If they were more familiar with
history, they would see that perfection in mechanical arts can bring with it a
great moral and intellectual decline.
It
would not appear that many people left the Palace of the Exposition any better
than when they entered it; one might even go so far as to say that the
intentions of the exhibitors would not have been met if all the visitors had
been wise enough to say on leaving: "So many things I can do
without!"][41]
Baudelaire,
for his part, cannot resist a swipe at American materialism in his own
criticism of the Exposition for its moral deficiencies. In a more probing critique than
Renan's, Baudelaire recognizes the rhetorical strategies at work in the mass
displays of goods. Remarkably, his
analysis leads directly to a critique of one of the fundamental mechanisms of
capitalism — and certainly the linchpin of consumer culture —
namely, the creation of demand where none existed previously:
Demandez
à tout bon Français qui lit tous les jours son journal dans son
estaminet, ce qu'il entend par progrès, il répondra que c'est la
vapeur, l'électricité et l'éclairage au gaz, miracles
inconnus aux Romains, et que ces découvertes témoignent
pleinement de notre supériorité sur les anciens; tant il s'est
fait de ténèbres dans ce malheureux cerveau et tant les choses de
l'ordre matériel et de l'ordre spirituel s'y sont si bizarrement confondues! Le pauvre homme est tellement
américanisé par ses philosophes zoocrates et industriels, qu'il a
perdu la notion des différences qui caractérisent les
phénomènes du monde physique et du monde moral, du naturel et du
surnaturel. Si une nation entend
aujourd'hui la question morale dans un sens plus délicat qu'on ne
l'entendait dans le siècle précédent, il y a
progrès; cela est clair.
... Mais où est, je
vous prie, la garantie du progrès pour le lendemain? Car les disciples des philosophes de la
vapeur et des allumettes chimiques l'entendent ainsi: le progrès ne leur
apparaît que sous la forme d'une série indéfinie. Où est cette garantie? Elle n'existe, dis-je, que dans votre
crédulité et votre fatuité.
Je
laisse de côté la question de savoir si, délicatisant
l'humanité en proportion des jouissances nouvelles qu'il lui apporte, le
progrès indéfini ne serait pas sa plus ingénieuse et sa
plus cruelle torture; si procédant par une opiniâtre
négation de lui-même, il ne serait pas un mode de suicide
incessamment renouvelé, et si, enfermé dans le cercle du feu la
logique divine, il ne ressemblerait pas au scorpion qui se perce lui-même
avec sa terrible queue, cet éternel desideratum qui fait son
éternel désespoir?
[Ask
any good Frenchman who reads the paper every day in his bar what he means by
progress, and he'll tell you that it's steam, electricity and gas lighting,
miracles which were unknown to the Romans, and that these discoveries fully
validate our superiority over the ancients. This is how clouded his poor head is and how he has so strangely
confused the material and spiritual orders! The poor man has been so Americanized by his zoocratic and
industrial philosophers that he has lost all notion of the differences that
characterize the phenomena of the physical and the moral world, of the natural
and the supernatural. If a nation
interprets morality today in a more refined sense than it did a century ago,
then there is progress, that is certain.
{...} But where, I ask you,
is the guarantee of progress for tomorrow? The disciples of the philosophers of steam and matches
interpret it in this way: They only see progress in the form of an infinite
series. Where is that
guarantee? It only exists, I say,
in own's own credulity and fatuity.
I
won't even raise the question of whether, in refining humanity in proportion to
the new pleasures it brings him, infinite progress might not in fact be its
most ingenious and cruelest torture, whether in proceding from a headstrong
negation of itself it might not be an eternally renewed form of suicide, and
whether, caught up in the fiery circle of divine logic, it might not come to
resemble a scorpion stinging itself with its terrible tail, this eternal desire
which forms its eternal despair.[42]
Beyond
the typically Baudelairean masochistic obsession with death and
self-destruction, one finds a particularly pertinent interrogation of the link
between desire and despair. The
transformation of one into the other results from the alchemy of
self-deception, specifically the willingness to believe in infinite progress
and the mistaking of material for moral advancement.
This
criticism ran exactly counter to the message of unlimited growth which was then
being put forth by the Emperor.
According to Napoléon III, such growth results inevitably from a
conception of history whose positivism parallels a hierarchized conception of
power emanating from the Divine and passed on through the Great Scientists:
Au
milieu de tant de merveilles, l'esprit se trouve saisi d'un orgueilleux
vertige: il faut se rappeler que tout nous vient d'en haut, que tous ces
prodiges de la science et des arts qui embellissent la vie de l'homme sont la
récompense que Dieu, dans sa justice, accorde au travail assidu. Mais, de même qu'il a voulu que
les siècles succédassent aux siècles, il a voulu aussi que
les génies, comme un noble héritage, succédassent aux
génies: Sthal, Schneel, Priestley, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Richter,
Wendsell, Volta, Dalton, Davy, Wollaston, Berthollet, Bergmann, Vauquelin,
Chaptal, Berzélius, Gay-Lussac, ce sont vos œuvres
accumulées, c'est votre souffle inspirateur transmis de l'un à
l'autre, ce sont les résultats de vos puissantes recherches, de vos
savantes leçons.
[Amidst
so many marvels, the mind is seized by a proud giddiness. We must remember that everything comes
to us from above, that all the wealth of science and the arts that enrich our
lives is the reward that God, in His justice, grants to hard work. But, in the same way that the centuries
follow one another, He has also willed that geniuses follow one another in a
rich heritage: Sthal, Schneel, Priestley, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Richter,
Wendsell, Volta, Dalton, Davy, Wollaston, Berthollet, Bergmann, Vauquelin,
Chaptal, Berzélius, Gay-Lussac, this is the accumulation of all your
works, this is the breath of inspiration handed down, these are the results of
your powerful research, your wise lessons.][43]
The
cult of great men did not originate with Napoléon III, nor was he the
first to populate a Pantheon with scientists. The notion of Science-as-religion derives clearly from
Saint-Simon and arguably from the Encyclopédistes of the 18th
century. Victor Hugo would later
perpetuate the cult of the artistic genius in his poem "Les Mages";
Baudelaire would make a similar gesture in his "Les Phares", even going
so far as to single out Hugo himself for praise in "Le Cygne". Inherent in the cult of greatness, in
both its scientific and artistic variations, is the belief in transcendence. Much like Newton's law of the
conservation of motion, genius, according to this logic, is never lost but
continually transmitted across time.
Where Napoléon III differs from Hugo and Baudelaire is over the
question of whether one can assign a moral dimension to science. Where Hugo finds both continuity and
morality in the sequence of "great men" from Moses through
Michelangelo and others, Napoléon III sees the same spark of genius in
science and, because of its association with divinity, an accompanying morality
in the parade of scientists he elicits.
Significant in all three cases is the international dimension of
genius. While this is less
surprising coming from Hugo and Baudelaire, one might have expected
Napoléon III to vaunt French scientists over international ones. Another explanation, though, might have
the Emperor depicting French scientists as fully entitled partners in the
prestigious arena of world science.
Given that this first Parisian Exposition Universelle was staged at
least partly in response to London's Crystal Palace Exhibition, such an
explanation appears valid. If we
accept the premise that France succeeded in showing the world that it had
indeed caught up with Great Britain in the race to industrialize, the question
of whether the Exposition was absolutely profitable remains unanswerable. From an ideological standpoint, the
Exposition clearly advanced the cause of French nationalism and gave the French
direct proof of their viability — and thus entitlement — on the
global stage. For those happy few
exhibitors whose careers were either launched or firmly established as a result
of publicity and Imperial commissions, the bilan was certainly healthy. But if we broaden the question of "national
benefit" beyond the strictly economic and strictly political, the
after-effects of the Exposition were less clear-cut. The dissent found in many sources in the popular press
suggests at least some disappointment if not outright discouragement. Such disappointment nearly always
turned on the question of public morality and the disparity between material
and moral progress.
La
Revue des Deux Mondes echoed
Baudelaire's and Renan's criticisms, raising the question of just how
profitable, in both the material and the moral sense, the Exposition would
ultimately prove to be:
On
se tromperait d'ailleurs si l'on croyait qu'un essor de l'industrie, comme
celui auquel nous assistons, est un phénomène susceptible de se
prolonger, et contenant en germe des empiétemens [sic] indéfinis.
... Entre l'industrie libre et l'industrie
officielle, il n'y a ni identité ni rapprochement possibles; les prix,
les qualités, les moyens d'exécution diffèrent: c'est
comme deux mondes opposés.
... En somme,
l'exposition des machines appliquées à la locomotion n'a pas tenu
toutes ses promesses, et de la part d'une industrie aussi importante, on
pouvait espérer des efforts plus sérieux. Non-seulement [sic] il n'y a lieu de
signaler aucune découverte capitale, rien de ce qui laisse une trace
durable dans l'histoire de la science et de l'art, mais le champ le plus
modeste des améliorations n'a pas même été agrandi
d'une manière sensible.