The heart of the political power of the Second Empire was represented by the Tuileries Palace, home to the city’s main salon and the residence of Empress Eugénie, a fervent Catholic, who entertained journalists, writers and conformist critics; notably Octave Feuillet. Also based at the Tuileries Palace was the fearsome Examination Committee for Public Works, or Censorship. This commission, which acted under the direct guidance of the Emperor and Empress, protected the morality and ‘good behaviour’ of society through the policing of theatrical works; a driver of habits and customs that had a powerful influence. The Louvre, as well as being a museum, was also the location of the large annual exhibition of works of art: the first exhibitions of paintings in the history of modern art were organised in the Salon Carré at the Louvre, hence the definition of Salon. Access to the Salon was subject to meticulous scrutiny of the artistic works by the jury, which was also politically orientated. Not far from the Tuileries, on the Left Bank of the Seine, were the headquarters of the Institut de France, which in turn hosted the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Académie had forty members, including fourteen painters, eight sculptors, eight architects, four engravers and six musicians¹. Members were elected for life and were themselves responsible for electing future academicians. Generally, the election of a candidate took place once every fifty years or so, effectively to conclude and reward an illustrious career. Cases of exceptional rejections were frequent: Delacroix, for example, was rejected five times before being admitted. The Institut, and in particular the Académie des Beaux-Arts, enjoyed exclusive authority based on admissions and rewards for artists at the Salons, as well as the appointment of teachers at the École des Beaux-Arts and the control of the large public commissions.

¹ Cfr. H.& C. White, La carrière des peintres au dix-neuvième siècle, Flammarion, Paris 1991.

Nonconformist places stood in opposition to the central places of political and cultural power. The Empress’s salon was primarily in opposition with the drawing room of Princess Mathilde, cousin of the Emperor Napoleon III. Princess Mathilde was more liberal than Empress Eugénie, who was often accused of being a “bigot”. Mathilde hosted artists and intellectuals who were not always tied to the original power or prominent on the cultural scene. Among the most frequent visitors to her salon were Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Taine and Renan. Within a few years, Princess Mathilde assumed the role of patron and protector of the arts, helping her friends to obtain positions of power (Sainte-Beuve’s appointment to the Senate), the opportunity for their plays to be staged at the theatre (as in the case of the Goncourts’ Henriette Maréchal, performed at the Théâtre-Français) and official recognition (the Legion of Honour for Flaubert and Taine)². It was precisely the failure of the Goncourts’ play, Henriette Maréchal, performed at the Théâtre-Français just six times, that saw the sphere of power of the Empress opposing the writers under the patronage of the Princess. The play was in fact the victim of a carefully planned conspiracy by the group linked to the Empress’s salon that, through the intervention of the Censorship and deliberate chaos in the auditorium, led to the failure of Henriette Maréchal and thus of the failure of the Goncourt brothers at the theatre under the sponsorship of Princess Mathilde. The official Salon was in opposition to the first ‘Salon des Refusés’, the leading event of the Second Empire. In 1863, the high number of rejections of paintings by the official Salon jury pushed Napoleon III to organise an alternative exhibition at the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Élysées. This was the watershed of the Parisian artistic system: among the paintings on display, the first landscape painters and some ‘realist’ painters (Pissarro, Cézanne and Manet were among the celebrated artists of this exhibition) finally found a place there; the first full-on attack by ‘modernity’ to a system that had perpetuated the same models of art for too long. Among the unconventional places, Café Momus, the historical base of the Bohémien artists, must surely be included. This café, not far from the Île de la Cité, was immortalised by Henry Murger in his novel Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851). The bohemian artists represent the most nonconformist members of the Parisian cultural system: they despise ‘bourgeois’ tastes and the ‘bourgeois’ clientele, they are devotees of art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art), outside of the economic system that governed the publishers, the press and the art market. Infatuated with the life of the romantic artist, they stubbornly sought independence and autonomy.

² Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1992, p. 82.

The Paris of the Second Empire was dominated by one central attraction: the theatre. Among the symbolic places that marked the twenty years of the Second Empire, theatres linked to early productions have left their mark in modern dramaturgy or theatrical history of Paris: the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, which in 1851 hosted the first performance of Labiche’s Une Chapeau de Paille d’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat), the first ‘vaudeville of movement’, a new iteration of this popular comedic genre; the Théâtre du Vaudeville, which in 1852 held the premiere of La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils, apex of the bourgeois drama as guardian of moral pedagogy, and the only play of its kind to survive well beyond the years of the Second Empire; the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisien, which in 1858 hosted the first ever ‘operetta’, Offenbach’s enduring play Orphée aux Enfers; and the Théâtre-Français, which in 1865 hosted the first performance of Henriette Maréchal by the Goncourt brothers, a play consigned to the history of theatre not so much for the work itself as for the conspiracy that brought about its failure with such excessive and resounding clamour. Within the theatrical system, the work of the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques is not to be lef out of the collective management of copyright, a symbol of the growing power of successful theatrical authors.

The Dîner Magny is a symbolic place in the Paris of the Second Empire, representing not merely a restaurant, but a coterie of key importance. At the initiative of Gavarni, a friend of the Goncourts, writers and artists of the calibre of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Flaubert, Maupassant, Goncourt, Renan, Berthelot, Taine, Claretie, Ivan Tourgueniev and Paul de Saint-Victor met for dinner at Magny’s twice a week from late 1862 onwards. The Goncourts leave space in their Journal to chronicle the evenings at Magny’s: the discussions, the debates, the impressions. This tradition, inaugurated during the Second Empire, would also continue during the Third Republic at Chez Brébant.