The Judgment of Paris (71 page)

Statue of Ernest Meissonier in Poissy

*Rochefort had returned to France, after an amnesty, in 1880. Six years earlier he had escaped from his captivity on New Caledonia by boarding a boat bound for San Francisco—an episode portrayed by Manet in
The Escape of Henri Rochefort
(1881). Before returning to Paris he lived for a number of years in London and Geneva.

POLITICAL TIMELINE

1804 (December) Napoléon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor of the French, assuming the dynastic title Napoléon I.

1805 (October) Napoléon is defeated by Britain's Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar.

1806 (October) Napoléon's Grande Armée defeats the Prussians at the Battle of Jena.

1807 (June) The French defeat the Russians at the Battle of Friedland in East Prussia.

1808 (December) Napoléon invades Spain.

1809 (July) Napoléon defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram, near Vienna.

1812 (June) Napoléon begins his invasion of Russia. (September) Napoléon enters Moscow after defeating the Russians at the Battle of Borodino; soon afterward the Grande Armée begins its long retreat.

1813 (October) The French are defeated by Coalition forces at the Battle of Nations near Leipzig.

1814 (April) Napoléon abdicates following the invasion of France by Coalition forces that now consist of the British, the Russians, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Prussians. He is exiled to Elba and the Bourbon monarchy is restored under Louis XVIII, the younger brother of the guillotined Louis XVI.

1815 (March) Beginning of the Hundred Days as Napoléon, escaping from Elba, returns to France. Louis XVI11 flees to Ghent.

(June) Defeat of Napoléon at Waterloo.

(October) Napoléon exiled to Saint-Helena.

1821 (May) Death of Napoléon on Saint-Helena.

1824 (September) Death of King Louis XVIII. He is succeeded by his brother the Comte d'Artois, who reigns as King Charles X.

1830 (July) The "July Monarchy" is born as Charles X is deposed when artisans and workers take to the barricades in Paris. The Due d'Orleans (descended from a younger brother of Louis XVI) is invited to take the throne as King Louis-Philippe.

1834 (April) Massacre in the Rue Transnonain in Paris as government forces ruthlessly suppress working-class insurrection.

1836 (October) Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoléon, makes an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Louis-Philippe.

1840 (August) Louis-Napoléon stages a second unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Louis-Philippe. Captured at Boulogne-sur-Mer and sentenced to life in prison, he will escape to England in 1846.

1848 (February) Riots and revolution in Paris (partly due to bad harvests) are followed by the abdication of King Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic at the Hôtel de Ville, with the poet Alphonse de Lamartine at its head. (June) Further riots, with barricades in the east and center of Paris. Some 1,500 of the insurgents are killed and 12,000 placed under arrest during what become known as the "June Days."

(December) Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, returning from exile in London, is elected to a four-year term as President of the Second Republic, with a majority of four million votes.

1850 (August) Death in England of the deposed King Louis-Philippe.

1851 (December) Backed by the army, Louis-Napoléon seizes personal control of the government in a coup d'état.

1852 (January) Louis-Napoléon promulgates a new constitution which confirms him in office for a period of ten years and gives him executive powers to command the armed forces, declare war and make laws.

(March) Decree banning gatherings of more than twenty persons.

(December) Exactly one year after his coup d'etat, Louis-Napoléon proclaims himself Emperor of the French, reigning under the dynastic title Napoléon III. The Second Empire is declared.

1854 (March) The Crimean War begins as France and Britain declare war on Russia.

1855 (May-November) Universal Exposition held in Paris.

1856 (March) The Treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War.

1859 (May) France declares war on Austria.

(June) French troops defeat the Austrians at the Battle of Solferino.

(July) France and Austria sign a peace treaty at the Conference of Villafranca.

1861 (April) American Civil War begins.

1862 (April) France declares war on Mexico.

(May) French troops defeated at Puebla.

(August) Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson defeat the Union Army at the Second Battle of Bull Run.

(September) Otto von Bismarck becomes Minister-President of Prussia.

1863 (May) French troops capture Puebla after a two-month siege; Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia is victorious at the Battle of Chancellorsville; candidates supporting Napoléon III win 250 of 282 seats in elections for the Legislative Assembly.

(June) French troops enter Mexico City. (July) Confederate forces defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg.

1864 (May) General Ulysses S. Grant begins his summer campaign against the South with the Battle of the Wilderness and the Battle of Spotsylvania.

(June) Union forces suffer heavy casualties at the Battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia; naval battle off Cherbourg between the U.S.S.
Kearsarge
and the C.S.S.
Alabama;
Austrian Archduke Maximilian arrives in Mexico City.

(September) The Franco-Italian Convention stipulates the withdrawal of all French troops from Rome, where they have been safeguarding the papacy; the International Working Men's Association is founded in London.

1865 (April) Civil War ends as General Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated.

(October) The United States demands the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico.

1866 (July) Prussia defeats Austria in the Seven Weeks' War; French troops begin their retreat from Mexico.

(December) Under the terms of the Franco-Italian Convention, all French troops leave Rome except for a garrison of volunteers protecting the pope.

1867 (January) Napoléon III announces a series of liberal reforms.

(February) The last French troops evacuate Mexico.

(April) Opening of the Universal Exposition in Paris.

(June) The Emperor Maximilian is executed by Mexican republicans led by Benito Juárez.

(September) Giuseppe Garibaldi escapes from custody and marches on the Papal States.

(November) French troops, dispatched into Italy toprotect the pope, defeat Garibaldi at Mentana.

1868 (May) Napoléon III relaxes laws on the censorship of the press; new journals, hostile to his regime, abound.

1869 (June) Elections for the Legislative Assembly result in opponents of Louis-Napoléon claiming more than forty percent of the vote; strikes and violence at La Ricamarie.

1870 (January) Émile Ollivier becomes Minister of Justice in what he christens the "Liberal Empire"; Victor Noir is killed by Prince Pierre Bonaparte.

(May) Napoléon III wins a plebiscite on his reforms by a wide margin.

(July) The Spanish Prime Minister Juan Prim announces that Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant relative of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia, will assume the Spanish throne; the Ems Telegram; France declares war on Prussia.

(September) Napoléon III surrenders after defeat at Sedan; the Third Republic is declared; the Italian army enters Rome after French troops are forced to withdraw; the Siege of Paris begins.

1871 (January) Kaiser Wilhelm is crowned Emperor of Germany at Versailles; France surrenders to Prussia.

(February) Following national elections, Adolphe Thiers becomes Chief of State (and later President) of the Third Republic.

(March) Execution in Montmartre of Generals Lecomte and Clement-Thomas; founding of the Paris Commune.

(May) Treaty of Frankfurt officially ends the Franco-Prussian War; defeat of the Communards during "Bloody Week."

(July) Rome becomes capital of a unified Italy.

1872 (July) Death of Mexican President Benito Juárez.

(September) The so-called "Alabama Claims" are settled as a tribunal meeting in Geneva orders Britain to pay $15.5 million to the United States as reparations for the damages inflicted on American shipping by British-built raiders such as the C.S.S.
Alabama.

1873 (January) Death of Louis-Napoléon in England.

(May) Adolphe Thiers resigns as President, to be succeeded by Marshal MacMahon, the Due de Magenta.

(September) The last German troops leave French soil.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the many people who assisted me with my research and writing. Charlotte Hale, Paintings Conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, provided information about the damage done to
Friedland
by Charles Meissonier's fencing sword. Dr. Ivan Gaskell at Harvard University informed me about the location of Vermeer's
The Astronomer
in the 1860s. Philip J. Dempsey supplied me with a number of books and arranged for me to view some of the paintings in the collection at Wildenstein & Co. in New York. Michele Lee Amundsen did a superb job of tracking down the illustrations for the book. Assistance with a number of translations was gratefully received from Anne-Marie Rigard. Earlier versions of the manuscript were read and critiqued by Susan Adams, Mark Asquith, Michael Sims, and my agent Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson.

Special thanks must go to George Gibson, my editor in New York, who was a source of unfailing support as well as of numerous stimulating inquiries and wise observations. He and my editor in London, Rebecca Carter, with whom I've also had the good fortune to work on three consecutive books, were instrumental in helping the manuscript find its shape. I can only hope their patient labors have been requited.

I am grateful to a number of scholars and art historians from whose researches I have benefited enormously. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Albert Boime, Marc J. Gotlieb, Robert H. Herbert, Constance Cain Hungerford, Patricia Mainardi, Jacqueline du Pasquier, Agnes du Pasquier-Guignard, Jane Mayo Roos, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Juliet Wilson-Bareau.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife Melanie for her love and support over the course of the past three years.

NOTES

Chapter One: Chez Meissonier

1
For Poissy's population and industry, see the entry in volume 12 (1874) of Pierre Larousse, ed.,
Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX' siècile,
16 vols. (Paris, 1866—77).

2
Stéphanie Tascher de la Pagerie, quoted in Constance Cain Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier:Master in His Genre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 121.

3
Quoted in John W. Mollett,
Meissonier
(London, 1882), p. 8.

4
For Meissonier's indefatigable working habits, see Vassílí Verestchagín, "Reminiscences of Meissonier,"
Contemporary Review
75 (May 1899), p. 664; and Valery C. O. Gréard,
Meissonier: His Life and Art,
trans. Lady Mary Loyd and Miss Florence Simmonds (London, 1897), p. 85.

5
Henri Delaborde, quoted in Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 345.

6
Charles Yriarte, "E. Meissonier: Personal Recollections and Anecdotes,"
The Nineteenth Century
43 (May 1898), p. 825.

7
Ibid., p. 826.

8
Albert Wolff,
La Capitale de Tart
(Paris, 1886), p. 182.

9
Quoted in Marc J. Gotlieb,
The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 9.

10
Quoted in Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 839. An author in his own right, Alexandre Dumas
fils
(1824-95) was the son of Alexandre Dumas
père
(1802-70), creator of
The Three Musketeers.

11
L'Illustration,
February 7, 1891, quoted in Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
p. i.

12
For information on Meissonier's property I am indebted to Agnes du Pasquier-Guignard," La 'Grande Maison' de Poissy: L'Installation a Poissy," in
Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective
(Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 1993), pp. 64—70. Pasquier-Guignard reports that Meissonier had his Paris apartment at least as late as October 1860; however, it is probable that he maintained the residence during the early 1860s.

13
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 191.

14
Quoted in ibid., p. 133.