Remembering and Remaking Christofle et Cie’s Second Empire

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, 1972

Late in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Parisian fine metalworking firm Christofle et Cie embarked on a project to remake some of its lost Second Empire objects. This effort to reconstitute artifacts of the recent past joined the firm’s ongoing interest in making goods for a market of new consumers to ensure the commercial and historical legacy of the firm. Although founded in the 1830s by jeweler Charles Christofle, the company flourished in the middle years of the nineteenth century, especially because of its considerable favor under Emperor Napoléon III and his government. The authoritarian and imperialist politics of the Second Empire (1852–70), however, was anathema in the Third Republic, which was established after the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. By the end of the nineteenth century, the art of the Second Empire was also aesthetically retardataire. When an installation of Second Empire furniture was exhibited in 1900, one critic challenged mocking spectators: “It is easy to laugh; nothing appears more ridiculous than the styles of our fathers, nothing as old as that which dates back thirty years.”¹ Why, then, did Christofle lavish attention on the symbols of power of an autocrat who was unseated in a humiliating defeat? I argue that the reconstruction of two of the firm’s most significant Second Empire commissions was both a process of mourning and a mode of historical thinking embedded in the larger project of writing a history of design in France. Examining the ways in which the firm remade and remembered its own products reveals the extent to which it understood the agency of the objects to tell their own material histories. I suggest that these works actively negotiated the social memory of the violent end of the Second Empire, forming—in the context of the Third Republic—a collective memory that turned objects into witnesses and secured a place for the firm in the history of design.²

The narrative of loss and recuperation that I trace animated the two objects that were to different degrees lost in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and informed exhibition and textual statements that recounted the history of French orfèvrerie (fine gold- and silversmithing). Loss is a sustaining theme of the historiography of metalwork, given metal’s vulnerability to melting.³ Royal edicts mandating the confiscation of fine metalwork in the name of patriotism ravaged collections for centuries. Even without war, metalwork’s fortunes were always in doubt. The long-standing French law of free coinage meant that anyone with precious metals of silver and gold could take them to a mint and demand their bullion weight in money. Yet, it was the calamitous environment of mid-nineteenth century politics, rather than direct monetary exchange, that unmade the two works.

After the abdication of the emperor in the Franco-Prussian War, a four-month siege of Paris ensued, which isolated the city and starved its citizens. The initial government of the Third Republic was the military Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale headquartered in Versailles and led by Adolphe Thiers, who negotiated humiliating concessions to Prussia, including a large payment and a parade down the avenue des Champs-Élysées. In the absence of an elected body to ratify the Treaty of Paris, a call for elections inspired a popular uprising that created the Paris Commune, a revolutionary government modeled on socialist and anarchist principles, that took over in March 1871. When the Versailles army marched on the Commune in May 1871, a series of deliberately set fires ravaged parts of the city. The already grim, and for many, lethal, circumstances of the year 1870–71 gave rise to catastrophic civic devastation, hasty trials, and punitive executions of known and suspected Communards. In the wake of these reprisals and political assessments, the makers of elite metalwork embarked on a campaign to remember, if not exactly to commemorate, the Second Empire. Art, architectural, and design historians engaging with questions of materiality have stressed that objects can help to trace deep, entangled histories.⁴ In the case of Christofle et Cie, a preoccupation with the material history of lost objects meant not only shaping meaning from materials but remaking them once again in potentially different material forms under different historical circumstances. While this could be understood as a politics of conservation, the process of restoration that it involved subverts the norm of direct technical intervention; instead, Christofle called on the circumstances of survival to perpetuate cultural memory.⁵

Commemorating the Hôtel de Ville Centerpiece

A large and impressive album bound in crimson leather, the cover stamped in gold, presents in images the various parts of a large metallic table centerpiece, or surtout de table, that was created for the Galerie des Fêtes, a grand official reception and dining room at the Hôtel de Ville (the main city hall) in Paris (fig. 1). The city of Paris, through its prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, commissioned this work from the goldsmithing firm Christofle to coincide with the completion of the building’s renovation and the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867.⁶ The set was officially designed by the city architect Victor Baltard, who completed additions to the Hôtel de Ville and was also in charge of municipal ceremonies, including planning state visits and banquets.⁷ The firm produced the central sculptural parts in cast bronze electroplated with silver and gold along with twenty candelabra and smaller compositions that embellished the ends of the table. Four large ceramic vases executed by the Sèvres manufactory were set in jardinieres and occupied either side of the central group. Place settings for 150 guests along with footed dishes for desserts and metallic baskets for flowers completed the commission.

The service and other ornaments were added to the long-standing expansion and restoration of the Hôtel de Ville, which had begun in the 1830s. Under Baltard’s tenure as city architect, he added new buildings to the complex, enclosed the courtyard, and created the curving courtyard stair that embraced a large fountain, which Baltard completed with Max Vauthier and the sculptor Auguste Jean-Baptiste Lechesne in 1855 (fig. 2).⁸ The central figural group of the centerpiece, intended for the table of the Galerie des Fêtes, reproduced in sculptural terms the motto and coat of arms of the city of Paris: Fluctuat nec mergitur, or “She is tossed by the waves but does not sink.” The heraldic device appeared on coins and seals from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, but Haussmann legally adopted it in 1853 to commemorate the first year of Napoléon III’s rule. Rendered in three dimensions to preside over the grand dining room, the seal imagery of vessel and tower-crown were incorporated into the composition of the figural sculptures. A crowned, female allegorical figure of the city of Paris is seated holding a scepter (fig. 3). In the full composition, she is elevated above a large boat by two pairs of classical caryatids personifying on one side Commerce and Industry, and on the other, Science and Art. The figure of the city of Paris is accompanied on the boat by the allegories of Progress, a male youth looking forward at the prow, and Prudence, a woman seated behind, near the rudder. This central group of figures gave physical form to the ideal of good government using the imagery of classicism and the language of allegory, which proliferated in official commissions.

Lateral groups personifying the Seine and Marne Rivers extended the civic imagery (fig. 4), along with groups of the four seasons. Candelabra were placed at intervals between the major figural groups, and clusters of four accompanied each of the major ensembles. The theme of water, embodied by the figures of the Seine and Marne, and the frolicking tritons alongside the boat, continued in the plateaux, or bases on which the sculptural forms were placed. Tritons and putti made indirect references to a long history of French fountain sculpture, which was thoroughly revived in the Second Empire (fig. 5). Indeed, the fluvial theme of Baltard’s centerpiece directly echoed the elaborate fountain, which the Hôtel de Ville courtyard’s ceremonial double stair framed (see fig. 2).

The surtout served a long-standing purpose of using sculpture to ornament the surface of the table, animating the space of the room, especially for official ceremonial purposes.⁹ The fine metalwork, or orfèvrerie, assembled the multiple talents of sculptors, modelers, chasers, and other essential contributors whose artistic and artisanal intelligence together produced the surtout. The Christofle company employed Prix-de-Rome sculptors, such as Georges Diebolt, Charles Gumery (who modeled the figure of Paris), Jacques Maillet, Jules Thomas, Mathurin Moreau, and the finest modelers and chasers, who worked on this commission. Although Baltard designed the central group of Paris, it is likely that these artists interpreted his design (as Lechesne had for the courtyard fountain), adding subtle dynamism and probably the additional figures and the lively undulating tritons, in contrast with the resolutely stable image of Paris.

Napoléon III and others in his government and court prided themselves on their patronage and sought lively adornments for their well-appointed dining rooms where they held lavish formal dinners. These objects served a larger ideological purpose of conveying official support for the luxury arts while flattering the regime. The central part of the table centerpiece, featuring the figure of Paris, was on view at the London Great Exhibition of 1862, and it presided over a table in the Hôtel de Ville during the 1867 Exposition Universelle. At a dinner in June 1867 honoring Alexander II, emperor of Russia, and Wilhelm I, king of Prussia, the surtout commanded the table, drawing attention to its robust physicality and gleaming surfaces (fig. 6). Its main forms were depicted in careful, if exaggerated, detail in wood engravings and disseminated in the popular periodical L’Illustration.¹⁰ Like other Christofle creations for official purposes, the Hôtel de Ville centerpiece was a manifestation of the official dogma of the Second Empire and designed to impress both French and foreign viewers.

The album, which exists in at least four versions, goes beyond merely documenting the various parts of the centerpiece. It also acts to preserve a historical memory of the table service, for the metalwork disappeared along with the entire contents of the building, which was burned on 24 May 1871. The leaders of the Commune had assumed control over the local seats of government—the mairies of Paris—and occupied the central Hôtel de Ville in a symbolic act of claiming political authority. When the Commune was violently put down by the advancing army from Versailles, fires were deliberately set, destroying many official buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville and its contents (fig. 7). The album documents the main sculptural and decorative forms of the service, but it has a curiously opaque history. Four known copies share the same images and yet they are not identical.¹¹ All are albums of photographs depicting some original objects and the plaster models that were probably used to cast the figural groups, but some are bound in a different order, and captions are written in different hands. Some have a long watercolor foldout showing the intended arrangement for the placement of each piece on the table. All indicate that the surtout had been destroyed in the fire of 1871. Yet the precise date and circumstances of the albums’ production is unknown.¹² The edition was small and luxuriously produced, and therefore certainly intended for a limited audience that would appreciate the cultural import of the commission.

As a portrait of a metallic object, the album’s images and materials are surprisingly heterogeneous. Mounted on heavy blue pages with each leaf captioned in a calligraphic secretarial hand, the collection comprises different types of images that together constitute, or reconstitute, the service. There is no text aside from the inscription on the cover and the short captions indicating the artist and subject of each image. In the album held at the Getty Research Institute, like the example in the collection of the library of the Hôtel de Ville, the first page is a threefold watercolor drawing showing a color-coded plan of the arrangement, including the central grouping, and a hierarchical array of other parts, including the candelabra, jardinieres and baskets, and étagères and desserts. This plan is mounted beneath a panoramic albumen photograph of an illustration showing the setting in profile, indicating the various parts and their precise placement on a long table, a visual relationship akin to that of plan and elevation in architectural terms (see fig. 1). Individual photographs that depict each part of the service in warm, velvety tones follow. Christofle had long used photography to document its production and kept an archive of glass negatives of their designs. These photos were often of finished goods set against a blank backdrop or mounted on boards with captions and numbers, some in the same hand. Although photography was not an uncommon tool in decorative arts industries, and the photographic album was itself an invention of the Second Empire, the Christofle album of the Hôtel de Ville commission goes beyond merely documenting the parts of the destroyed centerpiece.¹³ Given the circumstances, I argue that Christofle purposefully created the albums to portray the centerpiece as an affective cultural artifact representing a shared sense of loss.

The album, like a collection of family photographs, depicts the entire group and the individual parts that compose it. Aside from the jardinieres and vases, the photographs show the models for the service rather than the finished cast pieces. The glowing white surfaces of the matte clay or plaster figures are set against dark backgrounds, enhanced in the photographic contrast, in line with the conventions for photographing sculpture.¹⁴ The photographs show both sides of the allegorical groups.¹⁵ Further, the name of each sculptor is indicated as the author of the composition. Thus, even though the entire commission was an object of applied art with many designs of nonfigural forms, including the ornamental friezes used around the foot, the images in the album stress the commission’s sculptural value. Recording the models with explicit attention to authorship implies the significance of the artistic labor of the sculptors who collaborated on the project and is in keeping with Christofle’s efforts to promote the high artistic merit of their work. Yet traces of manufacture remain. The original forms were probably made in clay and then cast in plaster, before being cast in bronze and then silvered. In some cases, the models were sectioned for casting before they were rejoined in the process of chasing. Other images in the album indicate chips and cracks, suggesting that the plasters had already been used at the time they were photographed. Even though it depicts objects rather than people, this largely photographic album adheres in its commemorative quality to the conventions of a visual biography, in which a life is constructed to engage viewers empathetically.¹⁶

Photography was widely deployed for commemorative and persuasive purposes in the aftermath of the conflagrations of 1871. The images of ruins, especially Jules Andrieu’s portfolio Désastres de la guerre (Disasters of the war) (see fig. 7), are far different from the elegant forms of the Christofle portfolio, but as art historian Alisa Luxenberg has argued, the haunting photographic documentation of the ruins of Paris was created for multiple reasons and found a wide audience in France and abroad.¹⁷ She observes, “photographs served as both historian and souvenir, fact and memory.”¹⁸ Unlike other images post-1871, especially those of the burned shell of the Hôtel de Ville itself, the photographs in the Christofle albums show wear, not overt physical destruction. Yet as ghostly models of a lost object, these images nonetheless play on the emotions of viewers. Jill Bennett has suggested that images possess a powerful experience of collective “sense memory,” suggesting that cultural pain can have a shared affect.¹⁹ Since the events of 1870–71 ruptured the social bond, the trauma was collective and lasting. Although there are strong overtones of mourning in the album, the preparatory forms of these images also convey the potential of futurity and the possibility of a version recast from original molds, which focuses the viewer’s attention on artistic value rather than politics. As a representation of a carefully constructed work of art, the Christofle album is a collection of pictures that enacts a collective sense of ownership.

The commemoration of this artifact was a potentially complicated endeavor in the years following the Commune. Christofle prided itself on its bourgeois patriotism. During the siege, the firm shifted its atelier production to making swords and bayonets, armaments to enhance street fighting.²⁰ The Prussian military tactic was to isolate Paris, making the city suffer and starving inhabitants of supplies from the countryside while strategically bombing parts of the city. Unemployment and raging hunger made the working classes the most vulnerable. During this time, Christofle paid its workers a minimal sum.²¹ Leaders of the firm later claimed that none of its employees participated in the insurrection, which was otherwise strongly supported by workers in the applied arts, especially those in furniture industries as well as bronze and jewelry-making foundries.²² Undertaking a memorial of this complex object during the Third Republic was thus not an obvious response to the molten anger of the early 1870s. While the centerpiece celebrated the wounded city of Paris, it also implicated the deposed emperor and the disgraced prefect. The centerpiece, like the urban renovations of the city, stood for the reviled Second Empire, which was notorious for its overspending and its affinity for spectacle—and thus, moral associations of superficiality. Since this album was created to honor the grandiose official allegory that Baltard and Christofle had produced together, the post-1871, anti-Communard politics of this position are clear.

The album employed the tropes of martyrdom in its evocation of the lost centerpiece, suggesting that the firm remembered its objects as victims. Bound in the rich crimson that dominated interior decoration of the 1850s and 1860s, the covers of the various copies read like a tombstone (fig. 8). The prominent designation of the object’s title, the firm name, and the designer’s name, along with critical information that the centerpiece was “destroyed in the fire of the Hôtel de Ville in May 1871” all suggest the conventions of memorialization.²³ Beyond the cover, the painstaking reconstruction of the whole and its parts in two-dimensional images bolsters the sense of the grandeur and impressiveness of the lost work. The tenor of recuperation and loss that underwrote the assembly of images was no doubt a result of authentic feelings of shock and dismay at the losses that mounted and the labor that was sacrificed. The albums, however, joined other memorial projects as part of an effort by Christofle to remember its objects as witnesses.

Preserving the Tuileries Centerpiece

In the aftermath of the terrible year of 1870–71, Christofle was also mourning the loss of another commission, one that had even greater significance for the firm. Napoléon III, following a long line of French kings and leaders, including his own uncle Napoléon, took special interest in the applied arts. He and the Empress Eugénie were keen patrons of fine goldsmithing firms, which enjoyed the favor of vast imperial commissions for the lavishly redecorated palaces. The Christofle firm, moreover, was committed to the imperial outlook of pursuing modern chemistry and technology alongside venerable artistic tradition to create their works. A commission of one hundred place settings and a central grouping was destined for the Tuileries Palace, the official Paris residence of the emperor and empress. The design centered the allegory of France raising two wreaths of victory between figures of War in a chariot and Peace driving a group of cattle (fig. 9). It also included groups representing Justice, Concord, Religion, and Force, as well as the major regions of France. Allegories of Agriculture, Industry, Science, Art, History, and Victory ornamented the candelabras and baskets that would have been placed down the length of the thirty-meter table. The imagery of a prosperous and victorious France was designed by sculptors Diebolt, Pierre-Louis Rouillard, and François Gilbert (who directed the project) to flatter the regime and to claim for the firm a key place in the history of official patronage. The Tuileries centerpiece, like the one created for the Hôtel de Ville, was prominently exhibited at Second Empire world’s fairs, which were opportunities for publicizing both the regime’s priorities and the economic importance of French luxury industries. This work, whose manufacture was covered in the press, was displayed at the first French Exposition Universelle in 1855 in Paris among a selection of fine objects produced for the emperor’s household in the special rotunda dedicated to the crown jewels, where it won a grand medal of honor.

Along with the incineration of the Hôtel de Ville, the imperial palaces were looted, ravaged, and burned in May 1871.²⁴ Like the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries Palace was an existing structure that became an object of Second Empire attention, newly completed and, as a residential seat, furnished at great expense under the budget of the Maison de l’Empereur. Finishing the splendidly appointed Tuileries, the long-standing residence of the French aristocracy, enhanced the Second Empire claims to legitimacy. But this spectacular effort, and its visibility as a symbol of the Second Empire power, made it a primary target during the Commune.²⁵ Communards claimed, “There is no filthier monument, one that recalls more horrors and infamies” and called for its destruction as a symbolic end to the Second Empire.²⁶ This vicious enmity made the Tuileries and its showy decor an obvious target. It was sacked and set ablaze in May 1871. After a long debate that revisited the politics of the Commune and the association of the Tuileries with monarchical and imperial France, the ruined structure was deemed anti-Republican and demolished in the early 1880s.²⁷

Unlike the building itself, the central parts of Christofle’s one-hundred place surtout de table executed for the Tuileries Palace was ultimately saved from the wreckage and restored. The architect Hector Lefuel, who had finished the structure along with the new wings of the Louvre for Napoléon III, combed through the smoking ruins to assess the damage. He amassed thirty-two hundred kilos of metallic debris, which he offered to Christofle; the firm bought most of it for ten francs per kilo. The repossession of the remains of a work that had bestowed exceptional prestige on the Christofle firm in the 1850s was more than an effort to reclaim the valuable raw materials. Using the gathered debris and the models in the company archives, Christofle embarked on a process of restoring parts of the Tuileries service. The company remade some of the lost parts to join with the repaired and resilvered central group, but they left visual evidence of the damage (fig. 10). Some figures have severed limbs, and most of the remaining candelabra have puckered and darkened surfaces. The ornamental friezes of their bases remain in a fragmented state with obvious losses that were not concealed or replaced. These deliberate artifactual traces bore witness to the high heat of the destructive Tuileries fire. In addition, Christofle recast some of the utilitarian serving dishes of the Tuileries service. The expense of recuperation and the labor of remaking was not slight. Like the album of the Hôtel de Ville centerpiece, the firm’s efforts to remember and remake its most glorious objects was also an attempt to collect and secure its legacy in the shifting context of the Third Republic.

Remembering, Exhibiting, and Writing

The effort to preserve the Christofle artifacts was entangled with the promotion of the history of French orfèvrerie in the second half of the nineteenth century. The key figure in this endeavor was Henri Bouilhet (1830–1910). The Bouilhet family was closely aligned through business and marriage with the Christofle enterprise. As an orphaned nephew of Charles Christofle, Henri Bouilhet was taken into the immediate family and ensured education and training as an engineer-chemist under Jean-Baptiste Dumas at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures and the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale. Bouilhet entered the firm equipped with new scientific knowledge of electrochemistry, which became a Christofle specialty. He ascended through the company, by all accounts an intelligent and hardworking figure dedicated to the firm and its founder. After the death of Charles Christofle in 1863, his son Paul Christofle and Bouilhet took over, as cousins, the shared management of Christofle et Cie. The Second Empire, then, marked not only the fortunes of the firm but also the career of Bouilhet himself.

Bouilhet used his scientific knowledge to promote the use of the new techniques of electroplating and electroforming (galvanoplastie) and developed a process for casting in the round that was used for monumental doors, large-scale sculpture, and copies of artifacts. He was also a witness to the company’s rising prospects under the patronage of Napoléon III. Just two years after Bouilhet entered the firm in 1851, Christofle was awarded its most important early commission, the Tuileries surtout for Napoléon III, for which some parts would be cast galvanically. The use of this process tested the possibilities for the meeting of art and industrial manufacture in a work of considerable public significance. According to Victor Champier, art critic and Bouilhet’s longtime friend and collaborator, Bouilhet’s attachment to this commission was not just technical, for Bouilhet also contributed sketches for some ornamental parts of the dish covers. Champier recounts Bouilhet’s treatment of the debris: “With a sort of piety, he applied himself to reassembling the shapeless fragments, to restoring the missing parts of the decoration fashioned in the past, and to bringing back to life the most important pieces of this famous Napoléon III centerpiece.”²⁸ Witnessing Bouilhet in the process of reconstruction, Champier recalled the care with which he assembled the parts and his emotional attachment to the task:

I had the occasion to see the eminent engineer in his ateliers in the rue de Bondy, while he presided over the patient and careful reconstitution. . . . The task made him radiant and reminded him of his ardor in his twentieth year. His dark eyes so vivid shone with pleasure and he, who was normally hardly loquacious, found ardent and colorful words to explain to me in his deep and resonant voice the first genesis of the work of his youth, which pleased him to bring back to life.²⁹

Champier’s repetition of Bouilhet’s devotion to bringing this work “back to life” suggests how critically it figured in his personal story. It also indicates that Bouilhet understood the centerpiece to be animated, or reanimated, after its “death.” Far from merely a technical intervention, then, the restoration of the centerpiece was a labor of personal conviction, and returning it “to life” was also an effort to recognize the work of many esteemed contributors, and to revisit the passage of time.

The restored Tuileries centerpiece, apart from commemorating the fine workmanship, also embodied the firm’s own history. The restoration of the remaining parts was likely completed by the early 1890s, for it was donated in 1891 to the nascent Musée des Arts Décoratifs to perpetuate the memory of Charles Christofle. According to Champier (writing with or for Bouilhet), the company “hoped to reconstitute some of the most important pieces and to save from oblivion a work that had been the glory of their father.”³⁰ The twinning of the reconstituted historical artifact with a commemorative effort to honor the deceased Charles Christofle gave the Tuileries centerpiece a testimonial quality that surpassed its association with the ignoble demise of the Second Empire. Remade, the injured forms suggested the glory of France and its tradition of fine metalworking, which, true to their original purpose, continued to perform a splendid public role.

Bouilhet’s part in the project of promoting the Christofle firm dovetailed with efforts by others on behalf of the applied arts in France, and specifically the increasingly public outlook of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. Formed in the 1860s, the Union Centrale had emerged from a private organization of designers and manufacturers who advocated for the interests of their members. Following the British example of the Museum at South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), the organizers aimed to collect and exhibit both contemporary and historical artifacts and to create a library of design that would suit the interests of skilled artisans. According to art historian Rossella Froissart Pezone, those early ideas were transformed in the late 1870s into a strategy for display that ultimately divided Union Centrale leaders over whether to privilege the history of a material (something the makers favored) or the uses to which that material might be put, which the collectors advocated.³¹ Debora Silverman has suggested that the organization, which had changed its name from the Union Centrale des Beaux Arts Appliqués à l’Industrie to the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in the 1880s, shifted its emphasis away from the industrial manufacturing of the 1860s toward the investments of government ministers, collectors, and elite producers to venerate the ancien régime. A catalyst of this transformation, she argues, was the artistic losses of 1870–71 and the election, in 1874, of a new administrative council within the Union Centrale, which included Bouilhet.³² Silverman stresses the resurgence of interest in works held in private collections amid the campaign to create a museum for the Union Centrale, yet, as she also documents, the group had a long-standing interest in mounting retrospective exhibitions dating to the mid-1860s.

As vice president of the Union Centrale, Bouilhet and his colleagues pursued a series of retrospective exhibitions that highlighted specifically French luxury industries, such as costume (1874) and textiles and tapestry (1876). In the 1880s, they held exhibitions on the elemental arts of metal; the arts of wood and fabric (furniture and textiles); the arts of fire (stone, ceramics, and glass); and a recapitulative exhibition in 1887. The displays of techniques and juxtapositions of contemporary and retrospective works in the 1880s included a broad selection of French applied arts. While these exhibitions garnered attention for manufacturers and created cohesion among the collectors and supporters for the idea of a museum of French design, the museum had yet to find a permanent home. Before the Musée des Arts Décoratifs finally opened in the Pavillon de Marsan in 1905, the grandest and most thorough history of French design and manufacture to date was presented in the temporary but widely viewed Musées Centennaux et Rétrospectives (Centennial and Retrospective Museums), a series of medium-specific exhibits, mounted in conjunction with the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900.

The impulse to display a national history of craft and manufacture alongside the newest production owed to the Janus-like sentiment of the turn-of-the-century fair, which was poised to look both forward and backward from 1900. The centennial exhibits were a cumulative material summary of the previous one hundred years of French production, which was presented in individual exhibitions of painting and sculpture, photography, pharmacy, transportation, and especially the applied-arts industries. In short, the classes of new objects on view at the international exhibition had historical counterparts in the Musées Centennaux. The displays were intended to show the public “the product, its fabrication, and its history.”³³ François Carnot, a politically well-connected special delegate, organized the displays, working with the French juries of each class.³⁴ Thus, the specialists of each material or type curated their own selection and wrote the narrative of the historical works in catalogs that each French jury published independently.

In addition to painting and sculpture, on view were embroidery, costume and fashion, toys and dolls, lighting, ceramics, photography, a survey of public life in Paris, and public works.³⁵ Several classes combined to produce a museum of furniture and decoration that included full interiors, which art and design historian Anca Lasc has argued acted as a series of immersive period rooms.³⁶ While some of the Musées Centennaux displays were included in the French section in the Grand Palais, other classes, such as furniture and silversmithing, were shown on the Esplanade des Invalides. Together, these retrospective assessments claimed for France the expertise and artistic lineage of manufacture that served to polish its reputation internationally. Lasc has argued that the furniture displays of the Musées Centennaux constituted a visual argument for a nationalist rhetoric of continuity in design, linking the past spatially with the present. Shown under the banner of progress, a rhetorical trope of nineteenth-century expositions, these displays also made an argument for a history of French design that transcended politics and time. The project of juxtaposing exhibitions of both recent and historical objects surely attracted consumer interest for the new goods on view, but this endeavor to recount the history of French design was undertaken above all with devotion to the memory of the past.

The centennial display of silver- and goldsmithing, Class ninety-four, included more than eleven hundred objects from the eighteenth century onward, with special emphasis on the nineteenth century.³⁷ Positioned behind the presentation of new work (by some of the same firms), the historical forms were shown as the ancestors of the present. The historical objects, however, were also active and vigorous intercessors in a history of the material and the politics of the age. Because some committees rejected the premise that a survey of their medium could logically begin in 1800, some classes instead anchored their exhibits in earlier times. For the Class ninety-four displays, there was a case of eighteenth-century girandoles and candelabras, including works by the eminent father and son, both royal silversmiths, Thomas and François-Thomas Germain. Neoclassical vessels from the Empire period, a selection of Froment-Meurice objects from the Louis-Philippe era, and a healthy selection of Second Empire artifacts represented the mid-nineteenth century. In the Second Empire display, the large silver presentation cup in the form of a boat dominated. Commissioned from Fannière Frères by Empress Eugénie, the cup was offered to her cousin, the diplomat-turned-land-speculator Fernand de Lesseps upon the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 (fig. 11). The Second Empire display also included a group of objects that Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc designed for the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris, which were executed by the religious metalworking firm Poussielgue-Rusand. At the center of the entire retrospective exhibit, on a large table, sat the restored parts of the Tuileries centerpiece, lent by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The effort to remake the centerpiece, which bore the traces of its destruction, had preserved not only the memory of the Second Empire and its material opulence but also the preeminence of the firm and its place in a history of French artistic production in metal. It joined the Suez cup and the Notre-Dame reliquary as material witnesses of important French monuments that gave the image of the Second Empire a retrospective honor. Reconstituted and exhibited in these circumstances, the centerpiece played a theatrical role in the staging of French design as a collective national endeavor that exceeded the artifacts of a deposed elite.

The historical sensibility that informed the Musée Centennal exhibition project also prevailed in the images, reports, and catalogs. Objects and displays from the Musées Centennaux were featured in the Exposition’s illustrated portfolios called Le Panorama, which was issued as a popular serial of the official photographs.³⁸ The final reports produced by each jury were far more scholarly. Some of these were straightforward lists of objects and their lenders, along with general descriptions of the history of the subject. Others were lavish productions that included extended essays, narrative histories, and photographic images of the individual objects and their display in 1900.³⁹

The most ambitious texts went far beyond documenting works produced between 1800 and 1900; they also expanded the historical context to become standard historical works on the subject.⁴⁰ Bouilhet’s final report on the Centennial exhibition of Class ninety-four was integrated into an exceptionally complete, three-volume illustrated L’orfèvrerie française aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles.⁴¹ This effort dwarfed the exhibition itself and became a definitive account of French metalwork and, beyond that, Bouilhet’s own final contribution to the field of applied arts.⁴² While the cover and title page of all three volumes indicate that the text was written by Henri Bouilhet “after documents gathered for the Musée centennal,” the scholarship was nonetheless highly collaborative and intertextual. Bouilhet’s narration of a history of French production drew from firsthand knowledge as well as sources by critic Paul Mantz, authors Henry Havard and René Ménard, and other histories of metalwork that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁴³ Champier, secretary for the Union Centrale, a member of the Musées Centennaux commission and of the jury for Class ninety-four as well as editor of the Revue des arts décoratifs, wrote long parts of the text and managed its publication.⁴⁴ This, then, was a collective effort to recover a history of French metalwork from its origins to the present.

Beginning in the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, the text describes the historical uses of fine metalwork, its techniques, and its patrons. It moves quickly to the eighteenth century—by page forty of the first volume. Volumes two and three comprise the period of 1800–1900, with the Second Empire straddling these accounts. The story of the Christofle firm is integrated into this history, and images of its output dominate the illustrations of the final two volumes. Some of the text is identical to sections published elsewhere under Champier’s name and drafts in his archive. These include the critical selections on Christofle that Champier, rather than Bouilhet, penned.⁴⁵ Bouilhet’s history of French orfèvrerie exploited images and the possibilities of photomechanical reproduction. The three volumes present a lavishly illustrated history, incorporating line drawings, wood engravings, and photographs. Along with an extensive description of the commission for the Tuileries and Hôtel de Ville centerpieces, the catalog includes images of these works in numerous successive, full-page photographs (fig. 12). The images of the Hôtel de Ville centerpiece are identical to those that appear in the albums. The project of writing a history of design in images and objects therefore preoccupied the leaders of the Christofle firm who repossessed, remade, and ordered the historical accounts of their objects.

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Bouilhet’s efforts to write the history of his own métier dovetailed with efforts to preserve French prestige in the final years of the nineteenth century. From the vantage point of 1900, with its resplendent art nouveau exhibits, the historical trajectory of French metalwork seemed destined for an optimistic future. Yet, even while reassuring readers and exhibition viewers of continuity, the visceral upset of the devastation of the 1870–71 era is unmistakable in the account of fine metalwork production from the third volume of L’orfèvrerie française:

It will be one of the astonishments of history, the prodigious rapidity with which it arose from the disasters of the terrible year. Disasters had piled up. To the ruins and mourning of the most appalling of wars were added the worst scourges: the tearing of internecine struggles, the underlying anguish of the occupation by the German army of the mutilated patrie, the obligation to pay the victor an enormous indemnity of five billion, finally the agitations of the political parties which could not bring themselves to accept the Republic, as a system of government succeeding the Empire. In the midst of such a troubled situation, we saw, as if by magic, the luxury industries flourish again. In the workshops, where the craftsmen, returning from the battlefields, hastily resumed their tools, there was a veritable fever of activity.⁴⁶

Like the nationalist rebirth of the French patrie, the dramatic return of the metalworking industry was juxtaposed against disaster and ruins. By exhibiting and writing their works into a history of French design, the Christofle firm cast their lost objects in a discourse of survival that ensured continuity of the firm’s reputation and put it above the censured politics of the Second Empire. Well aware of the historical potential of the object, Bouilhet and/or Champier conclude their history with a suggestion of the potential of metalwork to reveal something deeper about the past:

The industry, whose history we have attempted to trace, and the fluctuations of two centuries reflect perhaps more than any other the physiognomy and the state of the soul of successive generations whose needs it served. Art is the powerful beacon that illuminates its route, regulates its evolution, and transforms itself according to the changing idea of society. . . . Aside from the general causes that influence taste and fashion, and which determine the principal character of decorative art of the time, one must consider the quantity of smaller phenomena and secondary causes, so to speak, whose succession and union create little by little a larger movement and sometimes provoke unexpected and decisive results.⁴⁷

As artifactual witnesses, the two centerpieces and their material journey can be read alongside this statement. The damaged relics testified to the ostentatious fashion and historicizing taste of their era as well as to the smaller phenomena of specific artistic collaborations, and finally to the brutal historical vicissitudes that ultimately required remaking them once again. By remembering and remaking Second Empire objects, whether in metal, in photographic albums, or in text, Bouilhet and his colleagues reclaimed not only the objects themselves but also their testimonial value. They then deployed them to tell a history of their production that made larger claims for a splendid French tradition of design and craftsmanship, which they expected to persist. For the Christofle company and for later scholars, a deliberative regard—in line with the one evoked in this article’s epigraph by Vladimir Nabokov—reveals how the circuitous histories of material objects continue, like a mise en abîme, to inform our own attempts to analyze and write histories of objects and eras.

Amy F. Ogata is professor of art history at the University of Southern California.

Notes

I began thinking about the material afterlife of the Second Empire as a scholar at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in fall 2015 and thank the GRI Scholars Program for that opportunity. All translations from the French are mine.

1. Musée Centennal des Classes 66, 69, 70, 71, 97: Mobilier et Décoration à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris; Rapport de la Commission de l’Installation (Saint-Cloud: Belin, ca. 1900), 51, https://archive.org/details/gri_33125009323458/mode/2up. ↩︎

2. Maurice Halbwachs, “The Reconstruction of the Past,” in On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 46–51; and Éric Brian, “A Theorist of Collective Memory,” in The Anthem Companion to Maurice Halbwachs, ed. Robert Leroux and Jean-Christophe Marcel (London: Anthem, 2021), 5–16. ↩︎

3. Allison Stielau, “Liquid Metaphors and the Politics of Melted Metal,” West 86th 28, no. 2 (2021): 319–26. ↩︎

4. See, for example, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); Peter H. Christensen, Precious Metal: German Steel, Modernity, and Ecology (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022); and Helen Hills, ed., Silver: Transformational Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). ↩︎

5. New attitudes toward conservation and its histories underscore the ways in which cultural artifacts are also products of technical interventions. See Peter N. Miller and Soon Kai Poh, eds., Conserving Active Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). ↩︎

6. For the history and iconography of the commission, see Claudia Kanowski, “Le surtout de table de la ville de Paris,” Paris et Île-de-France: Mémoires publiés par la Fédération des Sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 44 (1993): 175–205. ↩︎

7. Christopher Curtis Mead, Making Modern Paris: Victor Baltard’s Central Markets and the Urban Practice of Architecture (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012), 77. ↩︎

8. David Van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91. ↩︎

9. Marcia Reed, ed., The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015). ↩︎

10. Some twenty candelabras, four large Sèvres vases, and one hundred twenty pieces for flowers, fruits, and dessert completed the ensemble. See Henri Bouilhet, L’orfèvrerie française aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (1700–1900), vol. 3, L’orfèvrerie française aux XIXe siècle: Deuxième période (1860–1900) (Paris: H. Laurens, 1912), 42. ↩︎

11. Similar but not identical albums exist at the Bibliothèque du Conseil de Paris, the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville, the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris, the Christofle et Cie archives in Paris, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. ↩︎

12. The depiction of plaster models in the photographs is the greatest rationale for a post-1871 dating of the extant albums, assuming the metallic object was completely lost. Baltard, who died in 1874, is not noted as deceased in the Getty album, but Diebolt (d. 1861) and Gumery (d. 1871) are. Claudia Kanowski argues that the slightly different text, and date of 1867, on the cover of the version in the library of the Hôtel de Ville indicate that it may have been a presentation copy. Kanowski also suggests that the company sought a second commission for the centerpiece in the 1880s to replace the centerpiece lost in the fire. Kanowski, “Le surtout de table de la ville de Paris.” ↩︎

13. Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 23. ↩︎

14. Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke, introduction to Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), 1–32. ↩︎

15. One side of the Summer and Winter composition is depicted with a surface sheen, and could possibly be a metallic object, or one of plaster with a coating of graphite. Surtout de table de la Ville de Paris, éxecuté par Mrs. Christofle et Cie d’après les dessins de Mr. Vor. Baltard, member de l’Institut, et détruit dans l’incendie de l’Hôtel de Ville en mai 1871, ca. 1872, GRI, 2023.R.7, unpaginated. ↩︎

16. Catherine Whalen, “Interpreting Vernacular Photography: Finding ‘Me’—A Case Study,” in Using Visual Evidence, ed. Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009), 78–94; and Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki, eds., Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). ↩︎

17. Alisa Luxenberg. “Creating Désastres: Andrieu’s Photographs of Urban Ruins in the Paris of 1871,” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 1 (1998): 113–37. See also Éric Fournier, “Les photographies des ruines de Paris en 1871 ou les faux-semblants de l’image,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 32 (2006): 137–51. ↩︎

18. Luxenberg, “Creating Désastres,” 115. ↩︎

19. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). ↩︎

20. Henri Bouilhet 1830–1910 (Paris: G. de Malherbe, ca. 1910), n.p, https://archive.org/details/henribouilhet18300boui/. ↩︎

21. Marc de Ferrière le Vayer, Christofle: Deux siècles d’aventure industrielle, 1793–1993 (Paris: Éditions Le Monde, 1995), 215. ↩︎

22. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso, 2015), 52–65. See also Gonzalo J. Sánchez, Organizing Independence: The Artists Federation of the Paris Commune and Its Legacy, 1871–1889 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 78. Sánchez indicates that 748 artisans were supporters of the Commune and the artists’ federation. ↩︎

23. In the Hôtel de Ville copy, Baltard’s affiliation with the Institut de France as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts is noted, but unlike other copies where this is indicated on the cover, it is in the text underneath the plan of the table. ↩︎

24. Alexandre Gady, “La disparition des palais, 1870–1892,” in Palais Disparus de Napoléon: Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Meudon (Paris: Mobilier National, 2021), 465–76. ↩︎

25. Quentin Deluermoz, Commune(s) 1870–1871: Une traversée des mondes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2020), 233–38. ↩︎

26. Le Père Duchêne, no. 3 (10 Floréal An 79) (30 April 1871), 65. ↩︎

27. Louis J. Ianoli, “The Palace of the Tuileries and Its Demolition,” The French Review 79, no. 5 (2006): 986–1008. ↩︎

28. Victor Champier, “La vie et l’oeuvre de Henri Bouilhet 1830–1910,” preface to L’orfèvrerie française, by Bouilhet, vol. 3 (Paris: H. Laurens, 1912), xvi. ↩︎

29. Champier, “La vie et l’oeuvre de Henri Bouilhet 1830–1910,” xvi–xvii. ↩︎

30. Bouilhet, L’orfèvrerie française, 3:303. ↩︎

31. Rossella Froissart Pezone, “Controverses sur l’aménagement d’un Musée des arts décoratifs à Paris au XIXe siècle,” Histoire de l’art 16 (1991): 55–65. ↩︎

32. Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 109–33. ↩︎

33. Stéphane Dervillé, quoted in Henri Bouilhet, Musée Centennal de la classe 94. L’orfèvrerie française à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900, à Paris [. . .] Rapport du Comité d’Installation, M. Henri Bouilhet, rapporteur (Saint-Cloud: Belin, 1908), 2. ↩︎

34. François Carnot, engineer and cultural administrator, was the son of Sadi Carnot, who was president of the Republic between 1887 and 1894, when he was assassinated. ↩︎

35. Since each class had its own retrospective exhibit, there were also displays on the history of public works, such as bridges and canals as well as railroads and stations. See Musée Rétrospectif de la Classe 29: Modèles, plans et dessins de travaux publics à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900, à Paris (Saint-Cloud: Belin, ca. 1900), https://archive.org/details/museeretrospecti00expo_0/mode/2up. ↩︎

36. Anca I. Lasc, “Paris 1900: The Musée Centennale du Mobilier et de la Décoration and the Formation of a National Design Identity,” in Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity and Exchange, ed. David Raizman and Ethan Robey (New York: Routledge, 2020), 109–29. ↩︎

37. Bouilhet, Musée Centennal de la classe 94, 8. ↩︎

38. Le Panorama nos. 26–30 (1901) were devoted to the Musées Centennaux. The masthead indicates that issues grouped multiple classes together and lists them as: No. 26 Les moyens de transport, les instruments de musique l’alimentation; no. 27 Les tissus, soieries, broderies, le mobilier de 1780 à 1880; no. 28 Le mobilier (suite), les arts du métal, le chauffage, l’agriculture; no. 29 Le costume de Louis XV à Napoléon III, les parures de la femme et ses objets de toilette; and no. 30 Les armes de guerre et de chasse, le luminaire, la coutellerie, les jouets, la céramique et la verrerie. ↩︎

39. Musée Centennal de la Classe 72: Céramique, à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris, Rapport du Comité d’Installation (Paris?, n.p., 1900), https://archive.org/details/museecentennald00expo/page/n7/mode/2up; Musée Centennal de la Classe 12 (photographie) à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris: Métrophotographie & chronophotographie (Saint-Cloud: Belin, ca. 1900), https://archive.org/details/museecentennalde00expo/mode/2up; and Musée Centennal de la Classe 87: Arts, chimiques et pharmacie (matériel, procédés et produits) à l’Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900, à Paris (Saint-Cloud: Belin, ca. 1900), https://archive.org/details/musecentennald00expo. One compilation examines the history of Paris rather than applied arts: Charles Simond, Paris de 1800 à 1900: Les Centennales Parisiennes; Panorama de la vie de Paris à travers le XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1903), https://archive.org/details/lavieparisiennet02simo. ↩︎

40. See, for example the three-volume history of French toys and games: Henry d’Allemagne, Musée rétrospectif de la classe 100: Jeux (Saint-Cloud: Belin, 1903). ↩︎

41. Bouilhet, L’orfèvrerie française aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (1700–1900), 3 vols. (Paris: H. Laurens, 1908, 1910, 1912). ↩︎

42. The final volume, which covered the years 1860 to 1900, was produced and corrected by Bouilhet but was published in 1912, after his death in 1910. ↩︎

43. Henry Havard, L’orfèvrerie (Paris: Delagrave, 1891); Henry Havard, Histoire de l’orfèvrerie française (Paris: Quantin, 1896); Paul Mantz’s series “Recherches sur l’histoire de l’orfèvrerie française,” published between 1861 and 1863 in the Gazette des beaux-arts; René Ménard, Histoire artistique du métal (Paris: Rouam, 1881); and Ferdinand de Lasteyrie, Histoire de l’orfèvrerie [. . .] (Paris: Hachette, 1875). ↩︎

44. Victor Champier papers, Los Angeles, GRI, 940020, boxes 3 (manuscripts and notes on “Orfèvrerie”) and 6 (correspondence with Henri and André Bouilhet); see finding aid: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa940020. ↩︎

45. Victor Champier papers, GRI, box 3, folder 7. Champier collaborated with Bouilhet on Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs projects in the 1880s and onward. ↩︎

46. Bouilhet, L’orfèvrerie française, 3:101–2. ↩︎

47. Bouilhet, L’orfèvrerie française, 3:122. ↩︎