French Spoken Here

French Spoken Here
April 22, 2003
by John Bloom

NEW ORLEANS, La., April 22 (UPI) The city of New Orleans announced today that the French Quarter will be renamed the Freedom Quarter.

You didn't even come close to falling for that, did you? Too much French blood here, with almost 300 years of a love-hate relationship with Paris anyway.

In fact, New Orleans is so unimpressed by the boycott of all things French that they just opened a fascinating new mega-show at the New Orleans Museum of Art in honor of the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. Called "Jefferson's America & Napoleon's France," it tries to be scrupulously balanced about displaying the splendors of both countries, but the fact is that Napoleon had cooler stuff than Jefferson.

Take their respective chairs. In what is obviously intended to be the symbolic centerpiece of the show, Napoleon's throne is set next to the chair Jefferson used while serving as vice president to George Washington at Philadelphia. As chairs go, Jefferson's is fairly attention-getting, with an impossibly high back that curves all the way around the sides in a barrel shape, upholstered in plush red leather, with mahogany, maple and poplar woods used for the extremely short arms and legs. Even though it's called an "easy chair" by the curator, and even though it's very contemporary in design, it looks like it would swallow you up and pin your elbows to your sides.

A few feet to the left, we have what Napoleon sat in--a golden throne with lion's heads on the arms, all kinds of filigreed velvet and gold embroidery, laurels, garlands, crossed swords, and sculptural details invented by its creator, Francois-Honore-Georges Jacob-Desmalter. (The creator of Jefferson's chair, by the way, is "Unidentified Artist, American School, Mid-Atlantic Manufacturer.") Even though Napoleon's perch seems a little short and squat for a proper throne, and even though it's over the top in the pomp department, it looks very comfortable. (The velvet is stretched over any place that would tend to be cold or pointy.)

Obviously it's a lesson in republican extremes. Napoleon wasn't emperor yet at the time of the Louisiana Purchase--he was still calling himself "First Consul," to acknowledge the other two engineers of the coup d'etat--but he was well on his way to becoming the first popular demagogue of modern times and a man who wanted to rule over as much of the planet as possible. Jefferson, on the other hand, collected scientific gadgets--sextants, surveying devices, models of the solar system--and still held out hope of a decentralized nation of small farms and loosely regulated towns and states.

So how is it that Jefferson becomes the architect of Manifest Destiny while Napoleon simply withdraws all his land claims and the United States doubles its size without a shot being fired?

You won't get any clues from the paperwork or official ceremonies. The actual documents memorializing the Louisiana Purchase are about as exciting as the deeds, titles and loan papers you sign when you close on a house in the suburbs. Mostly it was hammered out by Robert Livingston, American minister to France, who committed to the $15 million purchase price without consulting anyone. (Paris was too far away to get his expense account approved, and he knew Jefferson would go for it.) The U.S. didn't have the cash, so it was borrowed from Belgian and Dutch banks.

What's strange about the story is that, throughout this time, the Louisiana territories were supposedly owned by Spain anyway. Spain had given back Louisiana to France on October 1, 1800, in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, which is also included in the show. Apparently secret treaties are more valuable than open treaties, because the Treaty of San Ildefonso is a thick book-length document bound in red vellum with golden borders and botanical decoration on the cover. The Louisiana Purchase documents look like hen scratches on parchment in comparison.

At any rate, because of the secret treaty, there had to be a charade ceremony in which Spain turned Louisiana over to France (November 30, 1803), followed three weeks later by France selling it to the United States (December 20, 1803). Those wily French invented the land flip 180 years before it was discovered by American savings and loan executives. The ceremony was in the Place d'Armes (today called Jackson Square) at the Cabildo., but apparently there was no artist present to record it. After all, it was just a real estate deal.

But what a real estate deal! French-haters should enjoy the fact that the Louisiana Purchase was a much bigger ripoff than buying Manhattan Island from the Indians for $21. The price ended up being 3 to 4 cents an acre. (It's hard to say exactly, because the boundaries were uncharted. It was the watershed of all the river systems that empty into the Mississippi from the west--basically a big pie- shaped wedge that has its point at New Orleans and spreads up to Montana and Idaho, including Denver and a large swatch of Texas.)

So why did Napoleon, who wanted to be king of the world, sell most of his empire for a song?

Apparently because he was a petulant little brat. He had just lost Saint Domingue, the most profitable parcel of real estate in the world, after a slave rebellion that led to Haitian independence, so when Jefferson asked to buy New Orleans, to secure American shipping routes, Napoleon said, "Oh what the hell, I'm sick of the New World, I'll sell you New Orleans and all the rest of Louisiana as well." Besides which, he needed the money to finance his European wars.

The strangest aspect of this exhibition is that this, the most dramatic aspect of the whole story, receives short shrift. Partly it's because there aren't many paintings or objects available from the Haitian slave rebellion. There's one intriguing painting of Francois-Dominique Toussaint, known as "L'Ouverture," the slave general who led 100,000 in revolt in 1791, then set up a rebel government and army that kicked out the British, then repulsed 60,000 French troops, killing 50,000 of them and leading to the treaty that established Haiti in 1803. (Unfortunately, Toussaint himself was kidnapped and spirited away to a prison in the French Alps, where he died in confinement after 10 months of freezing temperatures and malnourishment.) The painting shows Toussaint on the back of a raring steed, sword drawn, eyes flashing, dressed in a uniform much like Napoleon's.

Obviously when you put together a high-concept exhibition like this, you think of who looks good on a coffee mug, so the curators chose to make it a Jefferson vs. Napoleon thing, but Toussaint is the one who drove down property prices. If it had not been for this strange confluence of events in the tropical regions of America, who knows how many more wars would have been fought before the United States took its permanent shape?

At any rate, "Jefferson's America & Napoleon's France" is more concerned with objets d'art than with history, and in that department the French clearly win. The most popular gallery--although, if you're male, it might make your eyes glaze over--is devoted to the gowns, diadems, paintings and lavish household objects relating to the emperor's wife, Josephine. There's also quite a bit of French martial excess, everything from ceremonial swords to processional standards to busts of the emperor. And, stretching the theme about as far as it will go, there are three galleries devoted to French fashions of the time (the scandalous Empire bodice did cross the ocean), the French salon (including Madame Recamier's actual love couch!), and the sort of precious personal articles that the French excel at.

Of course, the corresponding American objects are not that different, since most American statesmen were Francophiles--Jefferson had lived in Paris and loved it there--and since the city of Washington itself, under construction at the time, had a French designer and was Parisian in both plan and architecture.

What's missing from the exhibit is any sense of what existed in these vast lands that were purchased in 1803. (Of course, at the time of purchase, they were still being mapped by Lewis and Clark, who wouldn't report back until 1806.) There ARE some remarkable ceremonial robes and paintings on leather from Plains Indian tribes, brought to the U.S. on loan from the Musee des Beaux- Arts et d'Archeologie in Besancon, France. And there's a remarkable gallery devoted to the Ursuline order of nuns, who arrived in New Orleans in 1727 and, like most New Orleanians, were baffled by the purchase and a little scared.

Since the entire population of New Orleans tended to be either French, Spanish, Creole or free African, there was no dancing in the streets when the city became the property of the U.S. The Ursuline mother superior, Soeur Therese de St. Xavier, was so alarmed, in fact, that she wrote a letter to Jefferson expressing anxiety over the order's property now that they were part of what was essentially a Protestant nation.

Jefferson's reply, written in his own hand, has been preserved by the sisters to this day, and in it he says, "The principles of the constitution and government of the United States are a sure guarantee to you that [the property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana] will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to it's own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority. Whatever diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any, and it's furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up it's younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under. Be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give it."

And yet you get the impression that the sisters needed Jefferson less than he needed them. Their mission was to educate young women. Already, by 1750, the literacy rate for females in New Orleans was 71 percent, higher than all schools in New England, and the figure included slaves, who were taught by the sisters in spite of orders to desist.

It's a much more inspirational part of the exhibit than, say, "Virtual Monticello," a room in which you don virtual-reality goggles and peer into Jefferson's library. Perhaps because the Louisiana Purchase is such a strange historical event--it's a land deal, and yet it's tied up with slavery, Old Europe, the New World, democracy, despotism, and New Orleans itsel-- the curators were forced to constantly go far afield to bring us back to the point.

Let me try to sum up that point:

The French had cooler stuff than we did. Trying to protect their cool stuff, they screwed up their revolution and ended up with a tyrant in charge who had a moment of insanity and sold us the largest parcel of land that's ever been available anywhere on the planet. We had no idea what we had bought, but the people living on it were French, Spanish, Creole, free black and Indian. Let's leave it right there, because if you fast-forward 100 years, we've wiped out all those people and we're trying to protect our cool stuff. That's why vast numbers of Americans will go to an exhibit where the cool European stuff of 200 years ago is more interesting to us than our own.

Are you following this? If not, "Jefferson's America & Napoleon's France" runs through August 31. Laura Bush gives the introduction on those portable headsets that you wear while you're wandering the galleries. You see what 200 years can do? If she's not embarrassed to be a Jeffersonian, then no one is.

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