The Judgment of Paris (39 page)

The festivities of the Universal Exposition had been conducted under the dark shadow of further events implacably unfolding in Mexico. The last French troops had departed from Veracruz on the eve of the Exposition's opening; the inevitable occurred within a few short months, and by June news reached Paris that Maximilian was in the hands of the Juaristas. Since Juárez was known for taking bloody reprisals against his enemies, appeals for clemency—by figures such as Queen Victoria, King Wilhelm of Prussia and Czar Alexander II of Russia—were widespread, insistent and immediate. Even two grizzled radicals sympathetic to Juárez's cause, Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi, pleaded with him to spare the Emperor's life. But these entreaties fell on deaf ears, and on June 19 the thirty-five-year-old Maximilian was executed by firing squad on the Cerro de las Campanas, the "Hill of Bells," in Querétaro, a hundred miles north of Mexico City.

Word of Maximilian's death had reached Louis-Napoléon on the morning of the first of July, a few minutes before he left his palace in Saint-Cloud to attend the prize-giving ceremony at the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Even as he was making his speech extolling the greatness of France, a pro-Juárez newspaper in Mexico was taking a different perspective on his empire: "Napoléon III ought to be satisfied with his handiwork," reported the
Boletin Republicano.
"The death of the Archduke and of those who adhered to his cause ought to weigh heavily on the humbug who from the Imperial throne of France seeks to govern the world."
¹

The death of Maximilian did indeed weigh heavily on Louis-Napoléon, whose court immediately went into mourning. It weighed even more heavily on Empress Charlotte. She had come to Paris in the summer of 1866 in an attempt to persuade Louis-Napoléon to keep troops in Mexico in order to bolster her husband. "He is the principle of evil on earth," she declared when he refused.
²
Eventually she returned to Trieste, to her beloved Miramare, where the news of her husband's death deranged her mind. She was escorted by her brother back to Belgium, to the moated Château de Bouchout, where she lived for sixty more years, hopelessly insane, comforted by a doll she called Maximilian and consumed by a passionate hatred of Napoléon III as the devil incarnate.

Among the most popular canvases shown each year at the Salon were those dealing with recent historical events. Over the years Parisian audiences had crowded the space before depictions of contemporary episodes such as Jacques-Louis David's
Death of Marat,
Géricault's
Raft of the "Medusa,
"and Delacroix's
Massacre of Chios.
This latter canvas, winner of a gold medal at the Salon of 1824, portrayed the horrific genocide on the Aegean island of Chios in 1822, when as many as 20,000 islanders were slaughtered by Turkish troops at the start of the Greek War of Independence. More recently, at the 1866 Salon, Tony Robert-Fleury, the son of Joseph-Nicolas, had enthralled Salon-goers with his
Warsaw, 8 April 1861,
showing the massacre of Polish nationalists by Russian troops. The work was so compelling that it was said no Russian could pass through the Palais des Champs-Élysées without risking attack.

The execution of Emperor Maximilian at the hands of the Juaristas appeared to cry out for a similar treatment. The artistic possibilities of Maximilian's death were pointed out by, among others, the critic Jules Clarétie, writing in
L'Indipéndance beige
less than a week after the news reached Paris: "What a terrible denouement to the most incredible of adventures! Tragedy is certainly not dead, and the theater of the future is there, bloody and outlined in full, a subject somber and dramatic. Shakespeare could not have imagined a more shocking fifth act."
³

Even as these avowals were being broadcast in the newspaper columns, at least one painter was busy crafting a scene recording Maximilian's bloody end. Édouard Manet took time away from his pavilion in the Place de l'Alma to begin his own version of the incident. He may have been hoping to finish
The Execution of Maximilian
(as he would call his work) on time to hang it in this ill-fated exhibition. A representation of such a topical event, the shocking deed about which all of Paris was talking, could not help but boost attendance figures in his lonely gallery. However, the work would be no half-measure, for he purchased a huge canvas, eight and a half feet wide—the largest he had ever tackled—and then set to work in his studio.

Details of the execution were still sketchy, but Manet began working from the available newspaper reports, including an account in
Le Figaro,
published on July 8, purporting to be a transcription of a report in a paper in New Orleans that had been transcribed, in turn, from a Mexican newspaper. These researches may have been risibly shoestring compared to those of Géricault or Meissonier, but Manet was prepared for the task in one vital respect: he had witnessed violent death at close quarters. During Louis-Napoléon's sanguinary coup d'état in December 1851, he and Antonin Proust had found themselves in the midst of the fighting, watching in horror as a cavalry charge swept along the Rue Laffitte and soldiers gunned down protesters outside the Café Tortoni. Afterward the two young men had gone to the cemetery in Mont-martre, where the victims were laid out under a covering of straw, with only their heads showing for purposes of identification. The scene, according to Proust, "left a terrible impression on us."
⁴

Manet was inspired as well by one of the greatest of all examples of pictorial reportage, Francisco de Goya's
The Third of May, 1808.
Painted a half-dozen years after the fact, Goya's masterpiece captured the terror of the moment when French troops, having installed Napoléon's brother Joseph on the Spanish throne, executed by firing squad the
guerrillas
(as they came to be known) who had fought against the French occupation of Madrid. Manet had seen the painting in the Prado in 1865, and its ghastly and unnerving imagery—the merciless fusillade, the bodies sprawled on the barren hill outside the nocturnal city—was already scorched into his imagination before events in Mexico dramatically recalled it.

Manet began working swiftly and purposefully in the month of July, making a series of sketches and then rapidly spreading paint onto his immense canvas. He took his basic composition from Goya, placing the helpless victims on the left of the canvas and the members of the firing squad discharging their weapons on the right. A half-dozen Mexicans in sombreros and flared trousers—his own interpretation of their clothing—were placed in a threatening huddle from which they dispatched Maximilian and his two faithful generals, Miramon and Mejía, in a great puff of smoke.

Work did not go as well as Manet might have hoped. He seems to have been uncertain how to portray the faces and gestures of Maximilian and his generals. He lacked photographic evidence of their features as well as—more critically—the ability (and also perhaps the desire) to communicate either physical movement or strong emotion. Goya's victims in
The Third of May, 1808
were shown bug-eyed with terror, clutching their hands in white-knuckled prayers or throwing their arms wide in desperate appeals to their executioners. But such emotional vehemence was not for Manet. The subjects of his paintings—the deadpan Victorine Meurent, his grim-looking parents, his meekly expressionless Christ—all did without melodramatic passions and frantic physical paroxysms. Such histrionic gestures were the hallmarks of great painters of the Romantic movement such as Goya or Delacroix; Manet favored a greater subtlety. Most of his paintings possessed a static quality in which the blank facial expressions and minimum of physical movements betokened an emotional detachment on the part of painter and subject alike.

Manet's difficulties were soon compounded as more reliable reports of the execution making their way to Paris gave eyewitness testimony that contradicted his portrayal, which suddenly appeared fanciful and inaccurate. The Mexicans had not worn sombreros and flared trousers but—according to an authoritative account published in
Le Figaro
on August 11—a "uniform that looks like the French uniform." Subsequent reports revealed that the executioners wore gray kepis and tunics, belts of white leather, and trousers of a dark material. This new information, combined with an account in
L 'Indipéndance beige
of how Maximilian and his two generals had held hands as the bullets ripped into them, persuaded Manet to abandon his gigantic canvas. He therefore bought an even larger canvas, one more than nine feet wide, and started all over again.

By the middle of August, Manet was distracted from his work—which he must have realized he could never complete in time for exhibition in his pavilion—when he left Paris for a holiday in Boulogne and then Trouville.
⁵
He visited the latter resort in the company of Antonin Proust, who for the previous three years had been publishing an antigovernment newspaper called
La Semaine.
Manet may have been hoping to repeat the success Gustave Courbet had enjoyed in Trouville two years earlier, though unlike his visit to the seaside in 1864, on this visit he appears to have done no painting at all. In the event, his holiday abruptly ended on the first of September when a telegram arrived from Paris reporting that Baudelaire had died the previous day. He and Proust immediately caught the train back to the capital for the funeral.

"I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine," Baudelaire once wrote to his mother.
⁶
Few would have argued with the poet, and his death, when it finally came, must have been a release. He was laid to rest in the cemetery of Montparnasse on the second of September. A heat wave in Paris meant his body was interred after only two days, barely giving Manet time to return from the Normandy coast. He was buried in a family plot beside his stepfather, Général Jacques Aupick, a successful and highly distinguished man whom a few horrified Belgians apparently believed Baudelaire had murdered and then consumed.

Two years earlier, in a self-pitying letter from Brussels, Baudelaire had complained that he was "alone and forgotten by everyone."
⁷
To be sure, many of his works were still unpublished at the time of his death, while all of his published poems, including
Les Fleurs du mal,
were out of print. Nonetheless, more than a hundred people attended the funeral mass; and most of them, despite the heat, followed the hearse to the cemetery, Manet, Nadar and Fantin-Latour among them. Théodore de Banville delivered the eulogy, but he was interrupted by a sudden thunderstorm triggered by the extreme heat. The ceremony concluded amid torrents of wind and rain.

Though long expected, Baudelaire's death was a heavy blow to Manet in what had already been a discouraging year. He must have glimpsed, in the poet's controversial and ultimately thwarted career, a tragedy threatening to repeat itself in his own frustrated artistic quest. Soon after his trip to the cemetery he took time away from
The Execution of Maximilian
to begin, perhaps as a tribute to his friend, or perhaps simply as a meditation on fame and death, a work entitled
Burial at La Glacière.
Probably painted at least partly
en plein air,
this smallish work, only twenty-eight inches wide, shows a huddle of black-clad figures following a hearse through La Glacière, a poor district a short distance southeast of Paris, named for a series of ponds that habitually froze in winter.
⁸
Manet placed in the background, in silhouette, a number of Latin Quarter monuments, such as the neoclassical domes of the Panthéon and the monastery of Val-de-Grace, as well as the bell tower of the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. He seems deliberately to have contrasted the humble cortege and anonymous grave in La Glacière with these grand architectural monuments housing (in the case of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont) a shrine to Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, and (in the case of the Panthéon) the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau. He probably knew, furthermore, that interred in Val-de-Grace were the hearts of twenty-six members of the French royal family, including those of the son and grandson of Louis XIV.

Charles Baudelaire (Nadar)

The scene is therefore ironic but also poignant, emphasizing the dizzying chasm between worldly distinction and the nameless obscurity into which, like Baudelaire, the humble resident of La Glacière was about to be lowered. This polarity was actually engraved (as Manet would have been aware) on Baudelaire's tombstone: the plaque marking the family plot loftily proclaimed that Jacques Aupick was a Général, a Senator, an Ambassador to Constantinople and Madrid, a member of the Général Council of the
Département
of the North, and a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor; meanwhile three terse lines inscribed beneath simply recorded that his stepson Charles Baudelaire had died in Paris at the age of forty-six. No mention was made of his career as a poet.
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