In June 1864, the painter Édouard Manet was trying to recover from the brutality of the critics’ response to his Salon entries that January. This had followed on the heels of being treated as a laughingstock the year before when he exhibited a painting that became infamous in Paris, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), at the Salon des Refusés (the Salon of the Refused). Despite his desire to be accepted by the academic community, Manet found himself described as a radical artist, ignorant of the basic tenets of art. Somewhat bewildered, he was searching for a subject that could revive his reputation and ensure his admission into the next Salon.

What was the Salon?

In today’s art scene with its myriad pathways for exhibiting, the importance and power of the Salon is hard to comprehend. Begun in the early 1800s to show off the work of academic prize winners in the Louvre’s Salon de Carré (hence its name), by the 1860s it had become essentially the only exhibition in Paris that mattered. If you were a young artist, you had to be accepted to the annual Salon to receive any kind of notice. An academic jury consisting of members of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts and prizewinning artists from previous Salons served as either your gateway to a future in art or your roadblock. The judges expected paintings with historical, uplifting subject matter or scenes from mythology. All submissions were expected to be “skilled,” in other words, have a polished, finished appearance.

Unfortunately, acceptance to an annual Salon was only the first step. Where and how your work was hung in its many rooms also mattered.  In the 19^th century, artworks were displayed in rows stacked up along the walls. A small painting hung high near a doorway would never attract notice, while a work placed at eye level in a grand room could mean a great deal to an artist’s reputation.

The Battle

While preparing for the annual family vacation along the Normandy coast of France, Manet read in the Paris newspapers about an exciting naval battle of American ships that had just taken place off the harbor of Cherbourg. In one of the most important sea battles of the American Civil War, the Union’s USS Kearsage, which had crossed the Atlantic on a mission to sink one ship — the Confederate navy’s CSS Alabama — finally caught it.

The Alabama had been secretly built in Liverpool (the shipbuilders claimed it was a trader for Turkey) because the British government was officially neutral and had to conceal its support for the Confederacy. In reality, the speedy cruiser was designed as a raider to disrupt Union naval and merchant ships traveling between the United States and Europe. After adding its British-made guns in the Azores, it went directly into action. Its commission, according to Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate States Navy, was “to burn, sink and destroy the commerce of the United States.”

While Americans learn in school about the famous battle between the ironclads the Monitor and the Merrimack, the Alabama’s raids cost the Union far more in ships and dollars than anything the Merrimack (which the Confederates rechristened the CSS Virginia) was ever able to accomplish. Before the Kearsage found it, the Alabama had already sunk 65 Union ships. Its voyages took it all over the world, raiding American trading ships from Newfoundland to South Africa to the Indian Ocean. London papers celebrated its captain and his successes. Despite flying the Stars and Bars, at the time of this battle off the French coast the Alabama had never been in a Confederate port.  A dozen Union Navy ships had been searching for it fruitlessly for almost two years.

The Kearsage was able to trap the Alabama when its captain learned the Confederate ship was stuck in the port of Cherbourg for repairs.  The Union ship lurked offshore for days awaiting the Alabama’s attempt to escape. As soon as it slipped out and reached international waters, the Kearsage swooped in. First from a mile away, then from less than 500 yards apart, the ships circled each other, firing cannons as quickly as possible. Both boats would end up seriously damaged.

The battle was over in little more than an hour. The sinking Alabama was forced to surrender after a direct hit to its engine room paralyzed the ship and caused it to take on water. She went down to the bottom of the English Channel, taking more than 25 crewmen with her.

From the cliffs, French seaside vacationers watched the battle. Their number has been estimated to be as many as 19,000. For the onlookers, it was an exciting entertainment with cannons providing fireworks. Vendors sold refreshments, telescopes, and binoculars. Some spectators watched from hired boats to get closer to the thrills. A wealthy Englishman vacationing nearby brought his children out in the harbor to enjoy the battle on the family yacht. He ended up a participant in the event when he took aboard 41 survivors of the sinking Alabama, including its captain and officers. He later smuggled them across the Channel to England so they could avoid capture by the Union navy.

Édouard Manet read the newspaper reports and knew he had found his next subject. Unlike most Frenchmen (their nation was never known as a great naval power), the artist had some real knowledge of the sea. When he was 16, after many arguments, he convinced his parents to allow him to seek a naval commission (rather than follow his father into law). To gain experience and prepare for the exams, he booked passage on the Havre-et-Guadeloupe, bound for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The long voyage ended with Manet spending several months in Rio. During his time at sea and in South America, he sketched constantly. Onboard, he even became a drawing instructor to the other sailors. Much to his family’s dismay, the outcome of his voyages would be Manet’s determination to not be either a lawyer or naval officer, but an artist.

Excited by his subject, Manet worked quickly. His large oil painting, The Battle of the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama, was finished in July, less than a month after the event.  At its center, one sees the Alabama burning and beginning to sink. At the bottom, a small French boat is preparing to take on some survivors. The victorious USS Kearsage is hidden by smoke on the left, proudly flying the Stars and Stripes. Off in the distance at the right, one can see the wealthy Englishman’s yacht, soon to take the captain and his officers to safety.

Manet is often called “the father of Modern Art,” but is Manet’s approach in this painting “modern?” The colors are naturalistic and not terribly inventive, and the subject matter – a naval battle – was a standard academic subject. However, the high horizon of the picture is a distinctly modern approach to a seascape, probably influenced by the Japanese prints that had begun arriving in Paris and capturing the enthusiasm of the art world. What is most modern is the exciting brushwork seen in the ocean, clouds, and smoke that would later be the hallmark of works called “impressionistic.”

Still, it is hard not to conclude that Manet’s painting of the naval battle, done entirely from his imagination, is not much more than a talented painter’s approach to a scene from another nation’s civil war; a Romantic entertainment for a French audience seen from a safe distance. It was, indeed, something Manet could reasonably expect would be acceptable in a future Salon.

What Manet could not possibly know is that this painting would take on new meaning very soon. The comfortable lives of Parisians were about to dramatically upended by what Manet’s beloved Goya called “The Disasters of War.”

Prelude to War

Three years later, in 1867, the French celebrated the successes of their Second Empire with a world’s fair that drew 9 million visitors. The Exposition Universelle was held to bring in crowds from around the globe to see the results of a nearly twenty-year process to turn Paris into a modern city.

In 1848, Napoleon III came to power with the promise of ‘making France great again.’ Two years later, after installing himself as Emperor, he authorized Baron Haussmann, a ruthless government administrator, to begin his most ambitious project — a gigantic program of urban renewal in Paris.

Fascinated with building, the Emperor met with his deputy almost every day to strategize and make plans. Tens of thousands of workers were hired. Entire medieval neighborhoods were torn down, their foul sewers replaced with modern, hygienic systems. Instead of hundreds of tiny, narrow streets (some only 3 feet wide), the grand boulevards of the Paris we know today, like the wide, tree-lined Champs-Elysée, were built along with many public parks across the capital. The new network of boulevards and parks served to provide open air and easy movement around the city.  Napoleon III wanted to ensure that no citizen of Paris had to walk more than 10 minutes to get to a park.

But the street design had another purpose — to allow the French military to act quickly to prevent the neighborhood rebellions that had plagued Paris since the Revolution.  The narrow streets of the old neighborhoods made it easy for revolutionaries to set up fortified barricades that blocked police and soldiers, like those seen in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People from 1830. That masterpiece celebrates a rebellion that ended the reign of King Charles X and inspired Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. No wonder that, according to Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III’s secret mission for urban renewal was “…the gutting of old Paris, of the neighborhood of riots, and of barricades, from one end to the other.”

In addition to the millions of visitors, The Exposition Universelle of 1867 welcomed more than 50,000 exhibitors from around the globe. In its guide, the French novelist Victor Hugo captured the celebratory spirit of the Fair: “Down with war! Let there be alliance! Concord! Unity!..”

In the hall that exhibited the “useful arts,” visitors could see the latest inventions – like the elevator, which fairgoers lined up to ride. But there was one exhibit that seemed out of tune with Hugo’s call for peace. The Prussian company Krupp displayed a huge cannon capable of firing 1,000-pound shells. The sign explained it was for the defense of their coastline. Little did the fairgoers suspect that those guns would be bombarding Paris three years later.

It would take a series of political miscalculations by the French government and competing political factions within it to bring this to pass. Their missteps – none of which were inevitable — would drive the French first into a disastrous war with the German states, followed by a civil war in Paris’s streets. What Victor Hugo would later call “The Terrible Year” began in 1870.

The Franco-Prussian War

Despite the image France portrayed in their world’s fair in 1867, the imperial government of Napoleon III was in the midst of a political crisis.  The nearly paralyzed Legislature was split into factions, between the Emperor’s Bonapartists, Bourbons aiming to restore their dynasty, two groups calling for a republic (one moderate, one radical), along with other factions. Paris itself was mostly under the control of supporters of a new republic. Like many young intellectuals, Manet, Degas, Morisot, and the other young impressionists and writers in their circle were all fervent Republicans.

As his popularity waned, the Emperor began looking for a foreign victory to boost and unify the country. While his generals were supremely confident, unbeknownst to him, the morale of the army was low. Across the country, France was plagued by small rebellions that the army had to put down. Many soldiers resented that they were being called on to protect Napoleon III’s government from its own people. The national leadership in turn began to distrust ordinary soldiers and suspect that too many were sympathetic to the Republican opposition. In case of an internal rebellion in the military, the government chose to limit army resources.

Meanwhile, the neighboring Prussian army was growing and well-funded. In 1866, to the surprise of the French, Prussia defeated Austria. While France had been the dominant force on the continent for most of the 19^th century, the balance of power in Europe was shifting.

Then in 1868, after a revolution in Spain, it appeared that a Prussian prince was about to take their throne. This turn of events was intolerable to the French. They protested to the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, who did back down. But this did not satisfy the French.

Angered by Prussian imperialism, this international incident unified the French people — as Napoleon III hoped. To build on their renewed patriotism, his government pushed its luck by demanding that the Prussian king swear in writing that Prussia would never try such a takeover again.

It was then that President Otto van Bismarck decided to trick the French into a war. On behalf of Prussia, he sent a response that he later described as “a red flag to the Gallic bull.”

The French government and its people took the bait. Insulted by the letter, citizens took to the streets and called for war.  Overconfident, the nation of Napoleon could not imagine anything but a quick victory over the Prussians.

Thus, an entirely avoidable war was declared on July 19, 1870. Parisians celebrated in the street, convinced that their army would soon be in Berlin.

From the start, the confident but unprepared French armies met a bewildering series of defeats. When they lined up along the border in Alsace-Lorraine, they found a half million Prussian soldiers waiting for them. By August, half the French army was surrounded and the other half in retreat. Their Napoleonic tactics proved to be outdated, and their firepower was no match for the huge cannons of the Prussians, so recently displayed at the Paris Exposition Universelle. In September, Napoleon III, who led the forces himself at the disastrous Battle of Sedan, was taken prisoner by the Prussians and forced to abdicate.

Rather than surrendering to Prussia, the French government announced the end of the Second Empire and declared itself a republic. The Imperial family secretly fled from the Tuileries Palace and were soon in exile across the Channel. Angry crowds broke into government buildings and tore down any symbols of the failed Empire they could get their hands on.

Like so many of the French, Manet and his fellow artists were jubilant. They had long waited for this day. But their celebration would be short-lived because the new Republic’s armies did no better against the Prussians than those led by their fallen emperor. The enemy armies were now converging on Paris. It was time to prepare its defense.

End of Part One