Creating French Culture
From Empire to Democracy

This painting is at the heart of a series of studies on the misfortunes of war and Napoleon's retreat from Russia, which was to result in Géricault's most famous lithograph, Return from Russia. In the middle of the icy plain a one-armed grenadier leads the exhausted horse of a blind cuirassier. The pain, resignation, and despair on their faces summarize this horrible disaster, survived by only a handful of Napoleon's soldiers.

Daphnis and Chloë, a novel by the third-century B.C. Greek writer Longus, has been illustrated often throughout the centuries. In 1793, Pierre Didot the Elder, the scion of a dynasty of printers that revolutionized the aesthetic of the book in France, asked Pierre Prud'hon (b. 1758–d. 1823) to illustrate the novel. Prud'hon's three drawings were supplemented by six from François Gérard (b. 1770–d. 1837). The copy exhibited here was produced for Imperial Marshal Andoche Junot (b. 1771–d. 1813).

Champollion's five-volume Egyptian Pantheon drew heavily on his deciphering of hieroglyphics. For each god he provided abundant, accurate, and detached testimony of the classical authors, philological discussions, and excerpts from hieroglyphic texts, accompanied by drawings. Folio 88 reproduces the principal symbols of the Egyptian goddess Hathor whose motto on four columns is “lady of the offerings, eye of the sun residing in its disk, mistress of the heavens, spirit of all the gods.”

This set of four sketches by Charles Philipon (b. 1800–d. 1862), executed probably in 1831, begins with an accurate portrait of King Louis-Philippe (1830–1848) whose face the caricaturist gradually transformed into a pear. The pear, as a symbol of the soft, corpulent king, met with immediate success. Louis-Philippe, the so-called “Citizen King” was a favorite target of republican caricaturists until censorship was reinstated in September 1835.

Charles Marville, like Baldus, turned to photography from painting early in the Second Empire. Commissioned by the city of Paris, Marville began in 1858 to photograph the old streets destined to disappear during the urban renewal directed by Baron Georges Haussmann (b. 1809–d. 1891). He also photographed the City Hall. In this print of the oldest, central part of the façade, the richly sculpted Renaissance décor seems carved out by the light from the street lamps.

Hugo wrote Les Misérables, of which this is the autograph manuscript, between 1848 and 1861, to draw attention, as he noted in the preface, to “the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by hunger, the wasting of the child by night.” The work succeeded in drawing attention to the working conditions of women and children. Immediately successful, the novel inspired a stage version, parodies, an American film in 1909, and, more recently, a celebrated musical.

The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's (b. 1813–d. 1901) Aïda (March 22, 1880 at the Paris Opera) benefitted from the advice of Auguste-Edouard Mariette Bey (b. 1821–d. 1881), the famous Egyptologist. The scenery and costumes were designed with the greatest archeological precision. Exhibited here is the model for Scene I, Act I: a hall in the king's palace. The entranceway in the middle leads to the hall of judgment, the gallery on the right to the prison of Radamès.

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew falsely accused of treason, was sentenced to lifelong internment on Devil's Island. In January 1898, the famous writer Emile Zola, convinced of Dreyfus's innocence by mounting proof of a military cover up, drafted an open letter to President Félix Faure, denouncing the military establishment. The government filed suit against him, which, as Zola had predicted, ensured that “the truth is emerging and nothing can stop it” (folio 33).

In this collection of “Jewish stories” by Clemenceau (who became one of the falsely accused Captain Dreyfus's staunchest defenders), candid accounts of the Jewish condition, collected during trips to Central Europe, counterbalanced more fanciful portraits (Baron Moses, Mayer the friendly crook). To illustrate the stories, Toulouse-Lautrec observed life in la Tournelle, the Jewish quarter of Paris. The original binding exhibited here is soberly Art Nouveau.

The conception and composition of Pelleas and Melisande, the only opera Debussy completed and one of the major works of the twentieth century, well illustrates the latent conflicts between dominant cultural authorities and an artist aware of the revolutionary character of his work. The autograph manuscript of the orchestra score exhibited here was used in the first performances and for the first edition of the orchestra score published in 1904.

The theme of this volume of Proust's masterpiece is homosexuality, depicted through the experiences of the two main characters, Charlus and Albertine. Cities of the Plain fills seven of the twenty notebooks Proust used for the revised copies of the latter parts of the novel. The notebook displayed here corresponds to the beginning of Cities of the Plain II, which opens (fol. 14) with a high-society party given by the Princess of Guermantes.