The Europeans by Orlando Figes

Author:Orlando Figes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2019-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

This was the Paris of the flâneur – the idle stroller and anonymous spectator on the crowded boulevard, for whom, in the words of Baudelaire, it was ‘an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement … the fugitive and the infinite’.70 To sit in a café and watch the passers-by was a pleasure in itself.

Paris was a flurry of parties, balls and receptions for dignitaries, who came from all around the world for the opening of the Exposition Universelle. The hotels were overfilled, and many, like Turgenev, were installed in tiny rooms. Cafés, restaurants, night clubs, brothels worked around the clock and theatres doubled their performances to keep the tourists entertained: the Vaudeville revived its biggest recent hit, La Dame aux camélias; the Opéra gave the premiere of Verdi’s Don Carlos; the Théâtre Lyrique offered Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. Meanwhile, on 12 April, Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein received its premiere at the Variety Theatre with the star Hortense Schneider in its title role.

On his first evening in Paris, Turgenev went to see the operetta with some friends. He loved its energy and comic satire against war. La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was the biggest theatrical attraction during the Exposition Universelle, earning over 5,000 francs per night in ticket sales (by the time its first run ended on 30 November, it had received 200 performances and earned 870,000 francs).71 As a parody of petty royal power, the operetta had run into trouble with the French censors, who saw in its libretto references to Bismarck, the Romanovs and the Spanish queen, Isabella, and, not least, a satiric portrait of Napoleon III and his court; but once the action was removed to the relatively distant eighteenth century, it was free to go ahead. All the royal heads of state visiting the Paris Exposition went to see the opéra bouffe. The French emperor saw it on 24 April, and was seen to ‘laugh and smile, but also to wind the tips of his mustache – ever the sign of his perplexity’. Tsar Alexander II, informed that the court of Gerolstein was a parody of Catherine the Great, telegraphed ahead from Germany to his ambassador in Paris to reserve a seat for him so that he could check on it himself. Bismarck saw the operetta shortly afterwards, understood it as a parody of petty German kings, and found it very amusing. ‘That is right! That is exactly how it is,’ he was reported as saying. ‘We are getting rid of the Gerolsteins, there will soon be none left. I am grateful to your Parisian artistes for showing the world how ridiculous they were.’72

The sharpest edge of Offenbach’s satire was pointed at the stupidity of military generals pushing kings to needless wars. The message was timely. Tensions between France and Prussia were rising steadily. Prussia’s military defeat of Austria in 1866 had destabilized the European balance of power, according to the French, who feared the rise of a united Germany under Prussian leadership.

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