The Invention of Paris (64 page)

So Paris was until then a city without images – as distinct from Amsterdam and Delft, Venice or Rome. There were certainly Parisian
vedute
, often quite charming, but these were designed for the tourists and were not considered works of art.
⁵
The ‘view of Paris' did not fit into any of the styles that the Salon recognized: neither history, not landscape, nor ‘genre' – the outdoor scenes of the latter being located in conventional frameworks. The only city whose representation was accepted in the category of landscape was precisely Rome, since it was considered the cradle of painting, and French artists, most commonly scholars at the Villa Medici, showed only picturesque ruins, timeless gardens, and an idealized countryside.

Yet though photography had no competition in Paris, it started in a documentary mode. The very nature of daguerreotype certainly contributed to this: its extreme definition and its lack of depth were somewhat like engraving. It was perhaps this fineness – in the dual sense of the term, precision of detail and sensation of a thin layer – that explains Balzac's superstitious fear, as reported by Nadar: convinced that ‘each body in nature is made up of a series of spectres, in endlessly superimposed layers', he thought that ‘every operation of the daguerreotype would surprise, detach and retain one of the layers of the depicted individual'.
⁶
The most frequent subjects also belonged to the documentary genre – the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Madeleine, the Hôtel de Ville, the Invalides, Notre-Dame in all its aspects, the Panthéon: the daguerreotypists worked around monuments whose unencumbered situation made for good lighting, rather than in the alleyways. Perhaps, too, these pioneers, who were for the most part former painters trained in the major studios, experienced a more or less conscious desire to recompose the hierarchy of genres, the monument being a more noble subject than the muddy backstreets of ‘gloomy Paris'.

In the years 1845–50, the photographic image underwent a complete change of nature, with the negative-positive system. A photograph was now ‘taken' on a paper negative, followed by ‘printing', likewise on paper,
which delivered the positive image. Not only could the picture be printed in several copies (whereas the copper plate of the daguerreotype was necessarily unique), but the result was very different.
⁷
The resolution was less fine, the image often even a little vague; the grain of the paper was visible, and above all, by playing with contrast in the course of printing, the photographer could accentuate the opposition between dark masses and lighter zones, characteristic of the narrow streets in which the light falls in geometrically regular patches. Parallel with this, the exposure time was shorter and the moving human figure now made an appearance. In 1851, Charles Nègre – who had come from Delaroche's studio, like his friend Le Gray, and Le Secq who introduced him to Meryon
⁸
– lived on the Île Saint-Louis. From his courtyard at 21 Quai de Bourbon, which he used as an outdoor studio, he took a photograph titled
Chimney Sweepers Under Way
, a frieze of three individuals walking east towards the rising sun. The only clear element in this photo is the dark grey stone of the island's parapet. In the distance, the Quai des Célestins on the other side of the river offers an irregular line of roofs and a tight rhythm of dark windows in the bright aureole of the houses. In the foreground, the almost white pavement is a little burned by the printing. Of the three individuals, the one who walks ahead is scarcely taller than the top of the parapet; this is a child, needed in the team to climb up the chimneys. He wears a cap and looks towards the river, so that his features cannot be seen. Behind him, the two other figures are men, each carrying a bag on his shoulder, their faces blackened by soot and darkened even more by the visors of their caps. From a technical point of view, the characters are too dark, not very clear, and the printing is too contrasted. But it is precisely this vagueness and the violent opposition of values that give this image a mysterious novelty. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, neither in engraving nor in painting, whose subtlest
sfumato
was never as disturbing as the vibration of photography in this brief and marvellous period of innocence.

The writers and artists of the time were fascinated, despite a certain reticence on principle. The great Nadar – the only person to have photographed, over a span of thirty years, the four members of that relay team of genius: Delacroix, Baudelaire, Manet and Mallarmé – recalls that people toured photographers' studios as they nowadays do galleries of contemporary
art. These were grouped on the boulevards between Rue de la Paix and the Madeleine: Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines (a façade of glass and metal that was heavy with history, and destroyed by Crédit Foncier in the early 1990s to install a shoe shop), the Bisson brothers and Le Gray a little further up towards the Madeleine:

The Bissons' shop raised great excitement. It was not simply the extraordinary luxury and good taste of the establishment, nor the novelty and perfection of its products, that halted the passerby; there was a no less lively interest in contemplating through the plate-glass windows the illustrious visitors who followed one another on the velvet covers of the great circular divan, passing the proofs of the day from hand to hand. It was really like a meeting place of the Paris intellectual elite: Gautier, Cormenin Louis, Saint-Victor, Janin, Gozlan, Méry, Préault, Delacroix, Chassériau, Nanteuil, Baudelaire, Penguilly, the Leleux brothers – everyone! I twice saw there another amateur who was equally essential in his way, M. Rothschild – Baron James, as people called him – who was very affable but by this time could no longer manage to appear young. And these leading figures of Paris society, when they left the Bissons', finished their tour by going on to the portraitist Le Gray.
⁹

Although place was slowly made for the new invention among other artistic practices – from 1859, photography was exhibited in the same building as the Salon – the major work of Paris photographers in the nineteenth century was the result of a technical and documentary commission. In 1865, the municipal administration decided to have photographed the old roads that were going to be demolished, and entrusted this work to Charles Marville. With a reputation as an illustrator (he had been involved with Huet and Meissonier in a famous romantic edition of
Paul et Virginie
), his beginnings in photography dated from the 1850s, in particular with studies of clouds at sunset in the sky above Paris – and it was certainly by choice that this cultivated man sought to rival the colours of Constable and Delacroix on this subject, with his nuances of grey. The task presented to him was unprecedented: to describe what was going to be destroyed, with the aim of demonstrating that what was about to disappear was not worth the trouble of being preserved. But Marville showed the silent charm of what others liked to see as disturbing and unhealthy. Without any quest for the picturesque, without the
least resort to an aesthetic of poverty, he simply used the resources of photography in a way that much later would be described as ‘objective' (Marville was to the streets of Old Paris what Sander would be to the people of Cologne in the 1930s). He placed his camera very low, almost at street level, so that the paving stones occupy a large surface, with a perspective effect that evokes the theoretical drawings of Renaissance Italy.
¹⁰
Often glistening with rain, the street reflects the light of early morning or evening, when beautiful shadows accentuate the reliefs and contrasts. And although there are no human beings in his pictures, he uses the writing that was omnipresent in Paris at this time – signs and advertisements painted on walls – to give an impression of the comic or melancholy. In Rue de la Monnaie, where the only sign of human presence is a cart with a cover like a Magritte head, there is a ‘Librería española' with a sign of the siege of Sebastopol; on Rue de la Tonnellerie, above the old pillars of Les Halles, an advertisement advises the treatment of ‘glazings on the breasts (and elsewhere)' with ‘Cosmétique Liébert' (remember Birotteau!), while the other wall of the same corner building has a ‘keeper of horse- and hand-carts'. There are the ‘Russian baths' on the Place Saint-André-des-Arts, the ‘Dunkirk oysters warehouse' on Rue Mondétour, the ‘Demolition material for sale' on the Passage des Deux-Soeurs, and ‘Henriat, tiler and stove-setter' on the Cour du Dragon – all activities that Marville catalogued on the eve of their disappearance without any detectable sentimentality, the effect being all the more striking.

The 425 photographs that Marville took between 1865 and 1868 are the only major visual souvenir that remains of a Paris that has completely disappeared. They are there in every detail, these streets of the Île de la Cité that existed already in the days of François Rabelais or even François Villon. They are the streets that Victor Hugo paced while writing
Notre-Dame de Paris
, those of Charles Nodier, Aloysius Bertrand, Gérard de Nerval: Rues de Perpignan, des Trois-Canettes, Cocatrix, des Deux-Ermites, des Marmousets, Saint-Landry, Haut-Moulin, Saint-Christophe – where, on the shop facing the foundlings hospital of Les Enfants-Trouvés, a noticeboard indicates that ‘on the coming 15 October the edge-tool workshop will be transferred to 20 Rue Zacarie'. The demolition was under way: the old corner posts, the little shops, the paving whose irregularity was fashioned over centuries, the bars, the cant walls with bay windows, the lampposts, the signboards, the courtyards – this whole world would disappear to make
way for the Prefecture of Police and the Hôtel-Dieu, the most sinister of Paris hospitals, which is saying a great deal.

Marville's images are sometimes used to illustrate Baudelaire's Paris. This is acceptable, on condition that the possessive case simply denotes the era and nothing more. Baudelaire never expanded on the charm of old stones, and if you want Baudelairean images of Paris – a legitimate search with someone who wrote of ‘glorifying the cult of images (my great, my sole, my original passion)' – it is not in Marville's photos that you should look, but rather in Manet. In France, however, the official history of nineteenth-century art is so compartmentalized that the relationship between Baudelaire and Manet is most often described in a very curious fashion.
¹¹
You can often read that Baudelaire ‘did not understand' Manet, that he preferred Constantin Guys. I suspect in this haste to trip Baudelaire up the reflex of museum curators against someone whom they well sense would not have been on their side. They forget, or pretend to forget, that when Baudelaire wrote Manet the letter that is so often cited, replying to the painter who complained of not being understood: ‘What you demand is really crazy. People tease you; their jokes annoy you; no one knows your real worth. Do you think you're the only man in that position? Do you have more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? But they were jeered at, weren't they? It didn't kill them. And to avoid turning your head, I'll add that those men were models, each in his own way, and in a very rich world, whereas you, you're only the first in the decline of our art'
¹²
– that when he sent these murderous lines he had not seen
Olympia
. He had seen
Lola de Valence
, and wrote on the corner of a tablecloth the famous quatrain on the ‘pink and black jewel'. He had seen
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
in the same year as he wrote
The Painter of Modern Life
, as well as
Music in the Tuileries
, that first image of Paris showing the city as a theatre for flâneurs.
¹³
But he was unable to see
Olympia,
as for a year then he had taken himself off to Brussels, and his question in the same letter – ‘is it really a cat?' – is a hiccup of astonishment that such a Baudelairean motif had made its appearance in the painting. Baudelaire was unable to ‘understand' Manet because he did not have time to, because he was unable to see any of the masterpieces of Manet's maturity. When he was brought back to Paris, his mind was destroyed. Manet came to see him every day at Dr Duval's clinic, and the only moments that the sick man showed any signs of contentment were when Mme Manet played him extracts from
Tannhäuser
on the piano.

Olympia
is a ‘Paris painting'. The only person to have said this at the time was a certain Ravenel, in
L'Époque
, a newspaper of the republican opposition: ‘A painting of the Baudelaire school, executed by someone who is largely a follower of Goya; the strangeness of the girl from the suburbs, one of Paul Niquet's daughters of night, of
The Mysteries of Paris
and the nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe. Her look has the bitterness of a premature creature, her face has the disturbing perfume of a
fleur du mal
.' It was perhaps this that explains the most violent ‘rain of insults' that had ever been provoked by a painting – a body that recalls the horror of the morgue, a skeleton dressed in a layer of plaster, a courtesan with dirty hands and rough feet, a picture drawn with charcoal on the edges and pomade in the middle, and that toad-like hand placed over her sex. These metaphors of dirt and disease, the repeated references to plaster, sweat and charcoal, reveal a fear and hatred of the poor, especially those poor who do not know their place. We need to remind ourselves what the ‘normal' nude was at that time. Two plates in a book by T. J. Clark show side by side the canvases bought by the state after the Salon of 1865 – Schutzenberger's
Europe enlevée par Jupiter
,
Le Sommeil de Vénus
by Girard, a pupil of Gleyre,
L'Enlèvement d'Anymoné
by Giacomotti, Prix de Rome for 1854, and
La Perle et la vague
by Baudry: soft white thighs, ecstatic pose, drapery flying in the sea breeze.
¹⁴
In the midst of these sad obscenities that mark the final decadence of a genre, just imagine the effect produced by Victorine Meurent, her velvet ribbon, her Black servant and her cat, and you will understand the fury of those whom Thoré was addressing in his ‘Salon de 1865': ‘Who encourages a mythological and mystic art, the Oedipuses and Venuses, or the madonnas and saints in ecstasy? Those whose interest it is that art should mean nothing, and have no bearing on modern aspirations. Who encourages the nymphs and erotic scenes à la Pompadour? The Jockey-Club and Boulevard des Italiens. And who buys these pictures? The traders and rich winners of the Bourse.'
¹⁵