For the Soul of France by Frederick Brown

Author:Frederick Brown [Brown, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59292-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

A photograph of the Palace of Industry, which covered much of the Champ de Mars at the Exposition Universelle of 1867.

“French is the language least heard on Paris streets,” declared one chronicler, and this polyglot horde was indeed ubiquitous. It filled the Théâtre des Variétés when Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein opened there on April 12. It fed its eyes on women high-kicking at dance halls (to which it found its way by following a guide titled Parisian Cytheras). It oohed at fireworks in the Tuileries Gardens and aahed at gorgeous carriages in the Bois de Boulogne, where Society paraded its wealth every afternoon. Gravitating to light, to movement, to fanfare, to novelty, it did not neglect Paris’s venerable monuments but often glimpsed them en passant, as did Mark Twain, who wrote in The Innocents Abroad: “We visited the Louvre, at a time when we had no silk purchases in view, and looked at its miles of paintings by the old masters.” Old masters couldn’t quite compete against Charles Blondin waltzing on a tightrope with blazing Catherine wheels fastened to his body. When the aerialist performed in a suburban pleasure garden, the horde of visitors flowed away from Paris like the sea at ebb tide. And when in October they left Paris for good, laden with silk from the great textile mills at Lyon, the image graven on their minds was more likely to be of machines in the Palace of Industry than of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in Manet’s little pavilion.

The Palace of Industry occupied the Champ de Mars. Looming above gardens and grottoes laid out by Adolphe Alphand, architect of the Bois de Boulogne, this industrial-age Colosseum was an immense iron-and-glass oval whose bulk dwarfed the minarets, the pagodas, the domes, the cottages, the kiosks built to represent various nation-states. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, the Palace of Industry did not outlive the abuse heaped on it by those who lamented France’s “Americanization;” but while it stood, it advertised more comprehensively than any American structure the materialist worldview against which Pope Pius IX had inveighed in The Syllabus of Errors.

Had Pius ever seen the Palace, its six concentric galleries might have put him in mind of Dante’s Hell, especially by day, when a roar of machinery drowned the hubbub of the crowd and vapor from steam engines billowed toward the glass roof. To tour these mile-long galleries was, if one believed in progress, to rejoice in man’s victory over nature or, if one did not, to witness the spectacle of pride running before a fall. Here industrial Europe displayed itself at its most vainglorious. There were machines of every order and dimension: textile machines, compressed-air machines, coal-extracting machines, railway equipment, electric dynamos, hydraulic lifts. There were locomotives and large-scale models of those railroad stations that enshrined the nineteenth century’s architectural historicism. There was a show on the history of labor, where working-class visitors (those who could afford the price of admission) were given to understand that they did not

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