[In the following essay, an earlier version of which was presented as a lecture in 1996, Hannoosh examines Delacroix's conception of time, as seen in the Journal, and investigates the painter's reaction to the technological and industrial revolution occurring around him.]

‘Toutes ces aventures de tous les jours prennent sous cette plume un intérêt incroyable’ (All those everyday happenings become, under his pen, incredibly interesting).¹ As most readers have acknowledged since its first publication in 1893, Delacroix's diary is one of the richest writings on art and one of the finest examples of artists' writings in the literature of art history.² Yet as his observation, cited here, about the Mémoires of Saint-Simon suggests, the Journal, inserted into the time of the day to day, into the temporality of the present, also constitutes a work of extraordinary sociohistorical interest, furnishing an ongoing, often indirect, commentary on the culture of nineteenth-century France. Largely ignored in this context, these private meditations of a painter are, in both content and form, impressions of modernity, a special testimony—and writing—of history.

Like all diaries, Delacroix's is concerned with time: passing time, preserving time, recovering time, reflecting on time. The day-to-day progression which distinguishes a diary from all other literary forms, its inexorable sequence of dates, is the omnipresent mark of its insertion in time, which the writing attempts to fix or preserve from oblivion.³ Nineteenth-century France was obsessed with such personal writings—diaries and journals, memoirs, autobiographies, life stories. Most major artists and intellectuals wrote them—Chateaubriand, Berlioz, George Sand, Dumas, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Michelet, the Goncourt brothers, Gide, to name only a few—or they were had second-hand, as in the Memoirs of Napoleon, the Conversations of Byron, Dickens' autobiographical novel David Copperfield, all of which had considerable popularity right through the Second Empire. Clearly they participated in the great interrogation of self and identity, and the great emphasis on individualism, which marked European Romanticism. But they are also a symptom of and response to historical crisis, or at least historical transition: for, like the writing of history which also flourished at this period, autobiographical writing might be considered a means of controlling a history unleashed after the cataclysmic event of the French Revolution, the history we call modernity.

For the nineteenth-century imagination, the Revolution marked the beginning of history itself, the moment at which individuals entered historical processes, acted upon them, engaged with them, participated in them, changed them; pre-Revolutionary history might be considered less history than myth—an order outside of time, stable and unchanging, guaranteed by a figure of absolute authority whose individual, historical person was subsumed in the role of monarch. Into the void opened up by the Revolution stepped historiography at both the national and the private levels: on the one hand, so many Histories of France, of the Revolution, of the Empire (Michelet, Guizot, Thierry, Thiers, Quinet, Lamartine, Louis Blanc) to establish a national identity and history after the collapse of the old order;⁴ on the other, the plethora of personal writings to try to control, chart or interpret the course of a history which might seem ever to escape the individual's mental and material grasp. Some have seen such writing as the individual's protest against that new collectivity called society, the bourgeois individual's consciousness of solitude and isolation vis-à-vis an increasingly egalitarian collectivism, an affirmation of self which fears anonymity and is confused and overwhelmed by newly won liberties.⁵ These anxieties are indeed present in much nineteenth-century autobiography, as the writer seeks a unified identity, a temporal security, through writing and memory, faced with the menace of dispersion which time represents. In this very resistance, moreover, one can locate the power of the modern, which induces in the individual a fantasmatic sense of chaos and disorder that must be mastered and subdued, a nightmare which must be converted into dream.⁶

Yet as I shall argue here, a diary may also be seen less as the desperate protest of the individual against history, than as the individual's inscription in history, the place in which the two meet, engage, interact and define one another. The formal characteristics and material circumstances of diary-writing, as opposed to other autobiographical genres, ensure that traces of the history it interprets are left within the text. In its discontinuity, its arbitrary, conventional submission to the order of the calendar, its non-cumulative record of material, its lack of causality and narrative order, a diary must always, to some extent, escape the constructed unity of coherent narrative, however much the writing subject may wish to discover or impose it. This does not mean that the diarist does not create a persona; rather, that the conditions of writing permit, and sometimes impose, a sense of the haphazard, gratuitous, irrelevant, unintelligible. What motivates a remark, what relation there is among different remarks, is rarely made clear: a diary has no addressee except the author, and thus may forgo explanation or contextualisation. Thus it confronts a reader, including the diarist-reader, not just with recorded history, but with absent history, what is left out, what falls between the words, in those gaps which, as the young Delacroix once lamented, seemed to represent moments that had never existed.⁷ More than any other form, a diary proclaims this idiosyncrasy in the choice of recorded material, confronts one with eccentricity, makes overt the breaks, disjunctions and omissions. Indeed Delacroix's takes this to the extreme, making clear that things have been left out, by design, inadvertence or the sheer inadequacy of language to capture or translate his impressions.⁸ The Journal thus calls attention to what has been lost as much as to what has survived.

Spanning the period which we have come to associate, through Walter Benjamin and via Baudelaire, with modernité—from the last years of the July Monarchy through the Second Republic and much of the Second Empire—Delacroix's later diary, in particular, is a writing of history which probes the experience of modernity; as such, it is a testimony to that modernity too. Unlike the early diary, it is no longer centred on the anguished self-exhortations of a young man at the beginning of his career. Now nearly fifty, an established yet still controversial artist, Delacroix has a far wider range of experiences, and explores them more freely. The rhetoric of self-consolidation, of timeless wholeness and individuality, of arresting a fleeting time and controlling a chaotic history, is drastically reduced and nearly abandoned altogether. Instead the self comes to celebrate, in both its theoretical reflections and its practice, the mobility and variety, the fragmentation and discontinuity, the waywardness and even contradiction, of its experience in time, and its experience of history.

On the level of content alone, in no other single text from this period or, arguably, any other, do we encounter so extensive and varied a picture of the public and private life of a society. Delacroix's distinctive position in this society—on the one hand, accepted by official circles, awarded important state commissions for public buildings, elected in 1857 to the French Academy; on the other hand, a radical painter, a close acquaintance of ‘scandalous’ artists like Baudelaire, Courbet and George Sand—brought him into contact with an extraordinary range of personalities from all walks of life. Significantly, for ten years he served on the Paris Municipal Council over which Haussmann presided, in which the daily life of the capital, including the famous programme of public works, was discussed and debated—a period for which most official records, destroyed in the fire at the Hôtel de Ville during the Commune, are now lost.⁹ He was part of numerous special government commissions, from the one in charge of the Universal Exhibition of 1855, to the awards juries of several annual Salons. He moved in ‘high’ social circles, such as the brilliant group of Polish expatriates to whom he was introduced by his friend Chopin, or, with a certain discomfort, that of the Bonapartes themselves. He frequented artists, critics and intellectuals—visiting Corot's studio and debating the value of an ‘improvisational’ method, commenting on the poses and movements of a somnambulist being shown about by Gautier, attending a private reading of Les Troyens at Berlioz's, ruminating on old age with an ever-effervescent Alexandre Dumas, discussing the vagaries of taste with the philosopher Victor Cousin, walking round the Botanic Gardens with the scientist Jussieu.¹⁰ He was entertained at the soirées of the bourgeoisie, complete with the séances and Ouija boards, the ‘ridiculously’ sumptuous décor, the proliferation of bibelots which were de rigueur in the 1850s.¹¹ He chatted with his colour merchant, settled bills with his suppliers, took a walk in the country with his peasant housekeeper. He regularly read several major newspapers and periodicals, and was an avid reader of contemporary literature, both French and foreign works newly available in feuilletons and pocket editions. He quotes Dickens, Emerson, Poe, Turgenev; reading extracts from Thackeray's Vanity Fair (4 March 1849) makes him hope that ‘everything this author writes will be translated’. He hears about the strange music and radical political ideas of that new composer, Richard Wagner (26 September 1855). The Journal carries the traces of all this activity, and in this sense offers a special, personal account—and example—of the history of an entire era, an invaluable source of the practices of everyday life at both the public and private level in the early period of European modernity, viewed through the eyes of an individual who experienced them first-hand and reflected on them at length.

Here I would like to explore how and to what extent the diary permits us to recover the time, and the times, of this early modern era, and what light it may shed on it. The exaggerated essentialism of my subtitle is deliberate, reflecting that optimistic, unbounded extravagance, that confident sense of limitless possibility, that hyperbolic expansivity which Benjamin associated with this period and by which he defined its modernity.¹² The diary provides the kind of detail and minutiae of daily life which sustained Benjamin's approach, seeking the reality of modernity in the shards and fragments of its material past—dolls to dioramas, gaslight to gambling—understanding that they had historical meaning precisely because of their fragmentary, apparently insignificant character, removed as they were from the continuity of history and resistant to assimilation into its narratives.¹³

The diary is an archive of sorts, but unclassified and unsorted, fragments of Delacroix's life, thought and work, calendrical pages following one after the other like papers in a carton. Interleaved among its pages, moreover, are the paraphernalia of modern existence—clippings from the newspapers (articles, advertisements, notices, reviews), recipes, addresses, train schedules, accounts and investments, pieces of contemporary life with no obvious explanation for their presence or their particular place. (It is telling that most of these items were left out of earlier editions, as being too trivial to matter.) The process of interpreting such a mass of disparate material leads one to a peculiar historical awareness, a consciousness of the resistance of the past, its reticence and uncommunicability, its difference, and distance, from ourselves. We confront, as Delacroix did, the reality of the gaps between the entries on a page, between the lines in an entry, between the words or names in a line. From what is said we puzzle over what is not said, what motivated the remark, or what ensued from it. We attempt to reconstruct a monument from the ruins, reweave the textual threads, fill in the picture. Yet perhaps, in those very interstices, lies modernity ‘itself’.

Indeed, a diary embraces the same tension between reality and writing that Michel de Certeau saw in the compound term—and concept—of historiography.¹⁴ De Certeau theorised the activity of the historian, who must attempt to draw from the fragmentary remains of the past that essential otherness which makes it the past, and which necessarily eludes the effort: ‘The other is the fantasm of historiography: the object it seeks, honors and buries.’ For de Certeau, the writing of history is an act of separation: of present from past, living from dead, self from other, us from them. In separation there is a sense of loss; for this the historian tries ever to compensate, aiming to know, to understand, to explain—and paradoxically destroying, in that very effort, the otherness on which historical consciousness is based. Historical understanding thus ‘silences the dead which haunt our present’,¹⁵ just as it seems to give them a voice; it represses those spectres of an ungraspable real, making them instead a projection of our desire and our fictions, an image of ourselves. Confronted with fragments of the past, we become conscious of our alienation from it, and simultaneously seek recovery, through understanding, explanation, interpretation: a ‘dialogue’ with the dead, which, if de Certeau is right, may paradoxically silence them forever and consign them to the tomb.

Yet de Certeau also described the historian's relationship with the past as an ‘uncanny and fascinating proximity’ (my emphasis). Indeed, I would argue that within the historical practice of loss and appropriation, a discontinuous, fragmentary work like the Journal, holding traces of the past, may be the site of another, more inchoate experience. This proximity, uncanny in its effect, is not only familiar but unsettling and troubling too. For in it we also encounter the unfamiliar and unexpected, exceptions to our rules, things that will not fit our picture, or perhaps any picture we can conceive. In that moment prior to interpretation, prior to the act of writing, history stands independent of us, and thus withstands us, resisting our attempts to rationalise it, to make it part of ourselves. Such moments may be profoundly frustrating and worrisome, when our ideas are made invalid and, for a short time, at least, nothing arises to take their place; but they are without doubt moments of discovery. And if the process of interpretation in the end comes to the rescue, to soothe the confusion, the experience nevertheless leaves behind a sense of that real which continues to resist: of what is not, and perhaps never will be, known. Historical consciousness may demand this kind of acknowledgement; such may be an essential part of our dialogue with the past.

In this context, a text like the Journal—abbreviated, indirect, laconic, unassimilated—may have a special historical value, preserving openly the traces of the modernity to which it bears witness. The picture which emerges is one of a society highly ambivalent about the experience, a society with collective phobias (I use the term cautiously) and fantasies about the implications of contemporary life, as we shall see. Sometimes the diary's most trivial details signal a historical or social phenomenon of far wider import. For example, the numerous jottings having to do with Delacroix's stocks and shares—in the newly formed private railway companies, in the canals backed by the State, in tontines (an arrangement in which at the death of any shareholder the benefits were spread among the rest)—reflect the radical change in nineteenth-century culture, so brilliantly and wickedly portrayed in fiction by Balzac, in which speculation, and in particular investment in new industries, became a major source of income for the middle class, a replacement for inherited wealth and a supplement to earnings from work.¹⁶ Like so many others who would soon swell the numbers of small shareholders, Delacroix first considers the possibility in 1847, during the economic crisis which would so contribute to the events of 1848. Later, as a brief jotting in 1853 indicates, he will likewise take advantage of what was at the time a highly popular and profitable option, the bonds issued in 1852 by the city of Paris to finance the grands travaux—subsequently dubbed, as one economic scandal succeeded another, ‘comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann’ and one of the factors in the downfall of the regime.¹⁷ Absent from our available editions, these insignificant notes show the level of participation of a certain class in economic affairs which later became ‘disembodied’, abstract, defined by their controversy, removed from the context which gave them legitimacy.

Inserted throughout the Journal are clippings from the newspapers, that other modern phenomenon whose name it shares, covering a wide variety of topical subjects: for example, that cause célèbre of 1856, the trial in London of the surgeon Palmer condemned to hang for a poisoning which the accused consistently denied, and around which crystallised all the debates about capital punishment; the displacement of the native population in California as a consequence of the gold rush, an article which leads Delacroix to a long tirade against the barbarism of the supposedly civilised Europeans; Richard Burton's travels in Africa; the new five-thousand mile telegraph line from Sardinia to Calcutta, which reduced a separation of thirty-six days to a couple of minutes; and many more. Such articles, often reprinted from distant foreign papers in a review of the world press, reveal the effect of truly ‘mass’ media on a society increasingly in communication with the rest of the globe, avid, like our own, for immediate knowledge and information.

Traces of this communications age appear everywhere in the diary. Trains carry Delacroix through the provinces on visits to his friends and family, to spas, to holidays on the Normandy coast, to Belgium to see the paintings of Rubens, the speed and ease making it ‘really tempting to travel’ (6 July 1850). In 1853 there would be a high-speed service between Paris and London, a mere thirteen hours via Folkestone and Boulogne. When Delacroix had last gone to London, in 1825, the journey had taken nearly three times as long. He never took the new train between London and Paris, but Queen Victoria did, when she visited the French capital for the Universal Exhibition of 1855, as we shall see later. But trains did allow Delacroix to commute to a country cottage on the outskirts of Paris, in a pattern repeated by so many of his contemporaries, and which would forever change the landscape and initiate the modern suburb. The new chain of railway station bookshops, and the special cheap series initiated by Hachette to stock them, introduced him to recent foreign literature translated into French: in a jotting in 1860 he reminds himself to check at the station for this series, containing Jane Eyre, The Professor, Shirley, ‘by Currer Bell, alias Miss Bronte, 2 fr. 50 a volume’.

Modern travel, by train or omnibus, was for Delacroix a time of observation, the space of thought. Riding home from work on his library murals at the Assemblée Nationale, he says: ‘J'ai observé dans l'omnibus à mon retour, l'effet de la demi-teinte dans les chevaux comme les bais, les noirs, enfin à peau luisante’ (I noticed in the omnibus as I was coming home the effect of the half-tone in horses with a shining coat). He then goes on to formulate a means of producing this effect, and concludes that ‘in a bay-coloured horse it is very striking’ (4 February 1847). One is led immediately to wonder about the relationship of this passing observation to the spectacular bay-coloured horse on which he would be working over the following few months, the central horse of the Attila and his barbarian hordes overrunning Italy and the Arts at one end of the library. Similarly, on the train from Strasbourg to Baden-Baden (25 September 1855), he writes: ‘Jolie route qui me rappelle Anvers et la Belgique. Traversé le Rhin. … Belles montagnes, de loin se confondant presque avec l'horizon’ (Lovely route which reminds me of Antwerp and Belgium. Crossed the Rhine. … Beautiful mountains, from afar almost blending with the horizon; original emphasis). The sight of the mountains then leads him to a long discussion of the works of Shakespeare, which, like nature, may consist of an accumulation of disparate details, but nevertheless constitute a unified whole for the mind. ‘Les montagnes que j'ai parcourues pour venir ici, vues à distance, forment les lignes les plus simples et les plus majestueuses; vues de près, elles ne sont plus même des montagnes: ce sont des parties de rochers, des prairies, des arbres en groupes ou séparés; des ouvrages des hommes, des maisons, des chemins, occupent l'attention tour à tour’ (The mountains that I went through coming here, seen from a distance, form the simplest and most majestic lines; seen close to, they are no longer even mountains, but rather parts of rock, meadows, trees in groups or separate, houses, roads, all occupying your attention by turns). These reflections will later become part of a projected article on the sublime, which he associates with a ‘modern’ aesthetic of unity in fragmentation, disproportion and irregularity.

Travel is also the occasion of flânerie which, like that of Baudelaire and Poe, involves both the pleasure of detachment, and self-exploration and discovery. Watching the world go by at the station, he writes:

J'arrive à la gare à huit heures et demie au lieu de neuf heures et demie. … Je passe cette heure sans m'ennuyer à voir arriver les partants. Je sais attendre plus qu'autrefois. Je vis très bien avec moi-même. J'ai pris l'habitude de chercher moins qu'autrefois à me distraire par des choses étrangères telles que la lecture, par exemple, qui sert ordinairement à remplir des moments comme ceux-là. Même autrefois, je n'ai jamais compris les gens qui lisent en voyage. Dans quels moments sont-ils donc avec eux-mêmes; que font-ils de leur esprit, qu'ils ne le retrouvent jamais?

(7 November 1855)

(I arrive at the station at 8.30 instead of 9.30. … I spend the hour without becoming bored, watching the travellers arrive for their trains. I know how to wait more now than I used to. I live very well with myself; I've adopted the habit of trying less to distract myself by other things like reading, for example, which is usually used to fill those sorts of moments. I have never understood people who read while travelling. When can they be with themselves? What do they do with their mind, that they can never be alone with it?)

In the train he has another of the quintessential experiences of the mythology of modern life, the intense, chance meeting with a passante:

La jeune dame que je croyais sous la tutelle de l'homme silencieux et désagréable du coin en face d'elle. La langue de la jeune personne se dénoue, à ma grande surprise, dans la salle de la douane, pour s'adresser à moi avec une amabilité extrême. Mon âge et le chemin de fer de Corbeil m'empêchent de donner suite à cette charmante ouverture.

(27 July 1860)

(The young woman whom I thought to be under the wing of the silent, disagreeable man in the opposite corner of the compartment. Lo and behold, the young person opens her mouth, to my great surprise, in the waiting-room of the customs office, to speak to me in the most amiable way; my age and the railway prohibit me from following up on this charming adventure.)

But rapid and far-reaching communications had their disadvantages too, reflecting and encouraging further the ‘fever for movement’ that Delacroix, and so many after him, associated with modern life. Returning to Paris from the fashionable Second Empire resort of Plombières in 1857, he considers the bustling crowd at the station in Epinal, where he picks up the Eastern railway:

Ce chemin n'est qu'ébauché, les cloisons ne sont pas posées, et déjà des myriades d'allants et venants s'y pressent. Il y a vingt ans, il y avait probablement à peine une voiture par jour, pouvant convoyer dix ou douze personnes partant de cette petite ville pour affaires indispensables. Aujourd'hui, plusieurs fois par jour, il y a des convois de cinq cents ou de mille émigrants dans tous les sens. Les premières places sont occupées par des gens en blouse et qui ne semblent pas avoir de quoi dîner. Singulière révolution et singulière égalité! Quel plus singulier avenir pour la civilisation. Au reste ce mot change de signification. Cette fièvre de mouvement dans des classes que des occupations matérielles sembleraient devoir retenir attachées au lieu où elles trouvent à vivre, est un signe de révolte contre des lois éternelles.

(31 August 1857)

(The route is only just laid out, the partitions are not yet in place, and already myriads of comers and goers are hastening to it. Twenty years ago, there was probably not even one coach per day, to convey ten or twelve people leaving this little town for important business. Today several times a day there are convoys of five hundred or a thousand. The first seats are taken by people in workers' smocks and who don't even seem to have the means to pay for their dinner. What a curious revolution, what a curious kind of equality, and what an even more curious future for civilisation. In any case this word is changing in meaning. This fever for movement among classes whose material occupation would seem to keep them tied to the place from which they derive their living, is a sign of revolt against eternal laws.)

This question was extremely topical: the movement of populations from country to city was of course one of the main demographic effects of industrialisation. Delacroix had addressed the issue already in 1853, after reading an article in the newspaper about new mechanical farming instruments: steam picks, diggers and ploughs. The government was considering instituting a policy of pre-emption to create a kind of proto-agribusiness, whereby gigantic private companies would take over the small parcels of land, unsuited to industrial farming, which dominated French agriculture, and would give the farmers shares in the company in return. The model for such a policy was the railways, for a similar procedure had been followed in buying up the land needed for the lines. Delacroix there lashes out against a policy destined to create a disinherited class, driven from their farms and villages into new towns, condemned, as he sees it, to watch helplessly the fluctuations of their investments, without the possibility they had had previously, in times of economic depression, of remedying the situation through hard work. The rhetoric is conservative but the issue crossed political lines, as the newspaper article Delacroix cites suggests: some on the left made similar arguments, adding ironically that the free-market government of Napoleon III was now putting in place the socialist programme of property reforms which had been crushed after the 1848 Revolution. Alienation of labour, laissez-faire economics, mechanisation of work, speculation, the substitution of ‘false’ paper shares for ‘real’ property, distance from the ‘authentic’ world of nature: these concerns, treated simultaneously by a very different analyst of modern industrial society, Karl Marx, are documented here throughout, suggesting a profound anxiety about an increasing emptiness, a sense of oppression by the experience—like the rhetoric—of nothingness and lack.

Pauvres peuples abusés, vous ne trouvez pas le bonheur dans l'absence du travail; voyez ces oisifs condamnés à traîner le fardeau de leurs journées et qui ne savent que faire de ce temps que les machines leur abrègent encore. Voyager était autrefois une distraction pour eux: … voir d'autres climats, d'autres mœurs, donnait le change à cet ennui qui leur pèse et les poursuit. A présent ils sont transportés avec une rapidité qui ne laisse rien voir; ils comptent les étapes par les stations de chemin de fer qui se ressemblent toutes: quand ils ont parcouru toute l'Europe, il semble qu'ils ne soient pas sortis de ces gares insipides qui semblent les suivre partout comme leur oisiveté et leur incapacité de jouir. Les costumes, les usages variés qu'ils allaient chercher au bout du monde, ils ne tarderont pas à les trouver semblables partout.

(6 June 1856)

(Poor, misguided people, you do not find happiness in the absence of work. Look at these idle ones condemned to carry the burden of their days, and who do not know what to do with all that time that machines are saving for them. Travelling used to be a distraction for them: … seeing other climates, other customs, made up for this ennui which weighs on them and pursues them. At present they are transported with a speed which allows them to see nothing. They count the stages of the journey by the railway stations, which all look alike; when they have crossed the whole of Europe, they seem not to have left those insipid stations, which dog them like their lack of activity and their inability to enjoy anything. The customs and different habits they went to the ends of the earth to look for, it won't be long before they find them the same everywhere.)

Not least of the fears was the danger of modern transport, a material risk exacerbated, as this passage suggests, by suspicions about social and cultural levelling, loss of identity, even (in other sources) transmission of disease.¹⁸ A typical mention in the Revue britannique in October 1853—‘The establishment of the railways, in France and abroad, has been marked by such frequent and terrible catastrophes that they have seemed to outweigh, in public opinion, the unquestionable advantages of the new system of locomotion’—is matched by this simple, unassimilated diary entry in 1855: ‘M. de la Ferronnays me dit à propos du danger des chemins de fer, que les administrateurs lui ont dit souvent qu'il valait toujours mieux voyager de jour’ (7 November 1855) (M. de la Ferronays tells me, concerning the danger of the railways, that company administrators have often told him that it is always better to travel by day).

Technology was a frequent source of public and private anxiety. An unexplained remark on 16 November 1857—‘Les poêles de fonte chauffés jusqu'à devenir rouges, quand ils sont neufs, peuvent asphyxier comme le charbon’ (Cast-iron stoves heated to red-hot, when they are new, can asphyxiate like coal)—corresponds to recurrent, gruesome reports in the press over the preceding decade about the dangers of asphyxiation, notably by gas. One needs no better metaphor for the fantasmatic conception of technology's power over the thinking and acting person.

Delacroix was nevertheless fascinated by technology. He experiments with the new art of photography, having himself photographed and his own paintings photographed, doing photographs of his own which he then takes with him on his travels to draw from, and which will inform his own paintings.¹⁹ He had dealings with the major photographers of the day—Nadar, Baldus, Petit, Martens—whose names occur in the Journal.²⁰ In Brussels in 1850 he quotes from an article about American attempts to photograph the sun, moon and stars:

On a obtenu de l'étoile Alpha, de la Lyre, une empreinte de la grosseur d'une tête d'épingle. La lettre qui constate ce résultat fait une remarque aussi juste que curieuse: c'est que la lumière de l'étoile daguerréotypée mettant vingt ans à traverser l'espace qui la sépare de la terre, il en résulte que le rayon qui est venu se fixer sur la plaque avait quitté sa sphère céleste longtemps avant que Daguerre eût découvert le procédé au moyen duquel on vient de s'en rendre maître.

(13 August 1850)

(They obtained from the star Alpha, in the constellation Lyra, an imprint the size of a pinhead. The letter which presents this result makes a remark as correct as it is strange: that is, that in so far as the light from the daguerreotyped star takes twenty years to reach the earth, the ray which ended up being fixed on the photographic plate had left its celestial sphere long before Daguerre had discovered the means to capture it.)

The comment makes the point about the difference between ‘universal’ and ‘modern’ time, which changes so quickly, and so rapidly brings new developments, that the light had left its star long before photography was even thought of.

Elsewhere he notes a new kind of heating-stove which might do well in his flat, a new gadget for making Seltzer water, a do-it-yourself technique for molding bas-reliefs; a new type of treated bandage for aches and pains, burns, corns, bunions and chilblains, a new model of English toothbrush; he remarks wryly on the bizarre philosophy behind a new American invention, life insurance; he worries about the effects of smoking and notes down a less noxious type of cigarette, made from green tea; he worries, as we all do, about climate change. Heavy machinery transforms the ‘natural’ human environment, creating a utopian ‘new world’, as with the massive system of capstan and pulleys which moved the 24,000-kg Châtelet column so as to align it with the new arrangement of boulevards: ‘Je vois au conseil un modèle d'une machine destinée à transporter à une vingtaine de mètres plus loin la colonne de la place du Châtelet. On vient de planter à la place de la Bourse des marronniers énormes. Bientôt on transportera des maisons; qui sait, peut-être des villes’ (5 February 1858) (I see at the Council a model for a machine designed to transport the Châtelet column about twenty metres over. Huge chestnut trees have just been brought to the Stock Exchange square. Soon they will transport houses—who knows, perhaps even whole cities).

There was perhaps no event more representative of this era than the Universal Exhibition of 1855, that celebration of industry and agriculture for the new consumer society. After the stunning success—political and financial—of the London Great Exhibition of 1851 held at the Crystal Palace, the France of Napoleon III, not to be outdone, planned to host the subsequent one. What had been the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations became, in French hands, the Universal Exhibition, extending the industrial emphasis of the earlier British concept to include the fine arts, and implying, in so doing, the internationalism of Paris, the universal reach of French influence and culture.²¹ Delacroix participated in this event in more guises than anyone else, thus providing a useful perspective on the issues surrounding it. His role as a municipal councillor involved him in decisions concerning the funding of the event, the buildings erected for it and the festivities surrounding the lavish visit of Queen Victoria to the capital to view it; he served on the Imperial Commission established at the start to direct and oversee the Exhibition as a whole; he was a member of the international committee charged with the Fine Arts section, and also the admissions and awards juries; as one of the leaders of the French school of painting, he was commissioned by the government to paint a special picture, his Lion Hunt, now partly destroyed;²² and he was one of a select few to be invited to hold a special exhibition, gathering together thirty-six paintings spanning the range of his career and the wide variety of genres in which he had produced. Although there is not sufficient space here to deal thoroughly with the issues concerning the Universal Exhibition raised in the Journal—its celebration of materialism, its pretentions to progress and enlightenment, the visual and verbal rhetoric of the sacred employed for it, its status as a middle-class dream of self-expansion—two brief examples may be telling.

One of the main concerns surrounding the event was that of privatisation. For the first time in France, the buildings—the Palais de l'Industrie and the Palais des Beaux-Arts—would be built not by the government but by a private holding company; in return the government consented to provide the land and to allow the company to charge admission, another first. These issues turn up in the Journal too and take on a particular cast. Having industry finance the building on land given by the government was all well and good, except that the land belonged not to the government, but to the city of Paris; and Delacroix, as a municipal councillor, would have taken part in the discussions. In 1854, walking in the area where they were building the Fine Arts pavillion, he notes:

J'ai trouvé la place de la Concorde toute bouleversée de nouveau. On parle d'enlever l'Obélisque. Périer prétendait ce matin [at the Council meeting] qu'il masquait! On parle de vendre les Champs-Elysées à des spéculateurs! C'est le Palais de l'Industrie qui a mis en goût. Quand nous ressemblerons un peu plus aux Américains, on vendra également le jardin des Tuileries, comme un terrain vague et qui ne sert à rien.

(10 May 1854)

(I found the Place de la Concorde all torn up again. They are talking about taking away the Obelisk. Périer claimed this morning [at the Council meeting] that it blocked the view! They're talking about selling the Champs-Elysées to speculators! It's the Palais de l'Industrie that started it. When we come to be a little more like the Americans, they'll sell the Tuileries Gardens, as a vacant lot which serves no purpose.)

The free-market economic policies of the Second Empire and the urban projects to which they were linked were extremely controversial. Walking home one evening with his old friend Pierret via the Champs-Elysées, which were being completely transformed, he recalls the experiences of their youth in precisely the same place:

Etait-ce bien le même Pierret que j'avais sous le bras? Que de feu dans notre amitié! que de glace à présent! Il m'a parlé des magnifiques projets qu'on fait pour les Champs-Elysées. Des pelouses à l'anglaise remplaceront les vieux arbres. Les balustrades de la place ont disparu; l'obélisque va les suivre pour être mis je ne sais où. Il faut absolument que l'homme s'en aille, pour ne pas assister, lui si fragile, à la ruine de tous les objets contemporains de son passage d'un moment. Voilà que je ne reconnais plus mon ami, parce que trente ans ont passé sur mes sentiments … mais je n'ai pas encore eu le temps de me dégoûter de la vue des arbres et des monuments que j'ai vus toute ma vie. J'aurais voulu les voir jusqu'à la fin.

(14 December 1853)

(Was it the same Pierret that I had at my side? What passion there used to be in our friendship! what iciness at present! He told me about the grandiose plans they have for the Champs-Elysées. English-style lawns will replace the ancient trees. The railings in the square have disappeared; the obelisk will soon follow, to be put heaven knows where. Man must absolutely depart this life so as not to witness, fragile as he is, the destruction of all the things contemporaneous with his momentary passage on earth. See how I no longer recognize my good friend, because thirty years have stifled my feelings. … But I have not yet had the time to grow weary of the sight of the trees and monuments which I've seen all my life. I would have liked to see them right to the end.)

‘La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur d'un mortel’: but perhaps what the changing environment of the city presented most alarmingly was what we most ignore in Baudelaire's famous line, the image of one's own death, the only place of rest for the heart of a ‘mortal’. If modernity, in Benjamin's terms, sought to hide this reminder of death through an emphasis on the new, the ruse was nonetheless understood by some. As in the poem, modernity is here (like its image the city) a space of exile, where the individual is removed from the ‘community’ of people (his friend Pierret) and things (his familiar surroundings) which defined his existence, his being, his happiness: he has ‘not yet had time to grow weary’ of them, he ‘would have liked to see them right to the end’.

Privatisation was seen to belong specifically to the British who, as Delacroix acknowledged, carried it off well; but as he also saw, it was not for the French. Invited, at a meeting of the committee in charge of the Universal Exhibition, to the reopening of the Crystal Palace—which in one of the technological feats of the century had been dismantled after the 1851 Exhibition and moved from Hyde Park to its new site at Sydenham—he writes:

Ces Anglais ont refait là une de leurs merveilles qu'ils accomplissent avec une facilité qui nous étonne, grâce à l'argent qu'ils trouvent à point nommé et à ce sang-froid commercial, dans lequel nous croyons les imiter. Ils triomphent de notre infériorité, laquelle ne cessera que quand nous changerons de caractère. Notre Exposition, notre local sont pitoyables; mais, encore un coup, nos esprits ne seront jamais portés à ces sortes de choses, où des Américains dépassent déjà des Anglais eux-mêmes, doués qu'ils sont de la même tranquillité et de la même verve dans la pratique.

(7 June 1854)

(Those English have rebuilt there one of their marvels, which they accomplish with an ease that astounds us French, thanks to the money that they find whenever they need it, and also that hard-headed business sense which we think we're imitating. They win out over our inferiority, which will never change unless we entirely change our character. Our Exhibition, our locale, are pitiful; but once again, we will never be inclined to these sorts of things, in which the Americans are already overtaking the English themselves, endowed as they are with the same stability, and the same verve in practical matters.)

Britain represented, like the USA today, the values of a modern industrial society: laissez-faire economics, technological superiority, substantial private giving, private enterprise. The regime of Napoleon III was following this model; Delacroix's reaction—admiration from afar, refusal at home—suggests the complexity of the issue, the questions of national tradition involved in the new globalisation. Finally, on 30 June 1855, having visited the Exhibition, he remarks on the effects of the new policy of paid admission:

Je déjeune comme un vrai bourgeois, sous une espèce de treille dans un petit café dressé tout fraîchement dans l'attente de ce public qui vient si peu à cette glaciale Exposition, dont tout l'effet est manqué, grâce à ces prix disproportionnés de cinq francs et même d'un franc, qui ne sont pas dans nos habitudes.

(I have my lunch like a real bourgeois, under a kind of trellis, in a little café newly set up in the expectation of that public which in fact hardly visits this desolate Exhibition; its whole effect has been wrecked, thanks to the exorbitant price of five francs, and even one franc, which we are not used to.)

Despite the official report of the ‘success’ of this new policy, and the show made of charging an ‘equitable’ price so as to benefit workers,²³ Delacroix's account of its unpopularity and its effect in depressing attendance is supported by the figures: 1,358 visitors on a five-franc Friday, and 14,463 on a one-franc Saturday, compared to 58,000 on a twenty-centime Sunday. Later, the top fee had to be lowered to two francs.

In another example, the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in August, Delacroix's testimony puts into perspective, sometimes comically, the versions available elsewhere. On 18 August, the day of their arrival, he leaves his work on the murals at Saint-Sulpice and heads for home:

Point de voiture. Paris est fou ce jour-là. On ne rencontre que corps de métiers, femmes de la halle, filles vêtues de blanc, tout cela bannière en tête et se poussant pour faire bonne réception. Le fait a été que personne n'a rien vu, la reine étant arrivée à la nuit. Je l'ai regretté pour toutes ces bonnes gens qui y allaient de tout leur cœur.

(Not a cab to be found. Paris is crazy that day. All you meet is hordes of corporations of workers, market-women, girls in white dresses, the whole lot holding banners over their heads and jostling to put on a good welcome. The fact is that nobody saw anything, because the Queen arrived at night. I felt badly for all those good people who were putting their whole soul into it.)

The main official newspaper, the Moniteur universel, devoted two pages to the event with superb media hype and unabashed nationalistic propaganda, celebrating the alliance of England and France against Russia in the war currently under way in the Crimea. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived at the Gare de l'Est around 7.30 p.m. and crossed the city in an open carriage to get to the imperial residence at Saint-Cloud.

Dès le matin des myriades d'étrangers, venus de tous les points du monde et mêlés, comme des flots mouvants, à la population parisienne, envahissaient les Boulevards et s'installaient dans les meilleures places, qu'ils avaient eu soin de retenir plusieurs jours à l'avance. Bannières, drapeaux, banderoles, emblèmes, colonnes, bustes, trophées et arcs de triomphe accueillirent le couple royal; de jeunes filles vêtues de blanc se rangeaient tout le long des Champs-Elysées.

(Myriads of foreigners came from all parts of the globe to mingle with the population of Paris, invading the boulevards and taking up the best places, which they had reserved several days in advance. Banners, flags, scrolls, emblems, columns, busts, trophies and triumphal arches greeted the royal couple; young girls in white dresses lined the whole length of the Champs-Elysées.)

If, as Delacroix remarked ironically, the darkness kept people from seeing anything, the country hosting the festival of industry had, at least according to the Moniteur of 19 August 1855, a ready answer: ‘Une illumination soudaine, éclatante, féerique, dissipait les ténèbres et précédait, comme une traînée de flamme, le passage de Leurs Majestés. Ce nouveau coup d'œil ajouté au programme, a porté au comble l'enthousiasme et le ravissement de la foule’ (A sudden illumination, brilliant and magical, dissipated the darkness and led the way of their majesties, like a trail of fire. This surprise, added to the programme, carried the enthusiasm and raptures of the crowd to their height). Yet the Illustrated London News (18 August 1855) seems to confirm his account: ‘Night was rapidly closing in. People exclaimed against the delay which threatened to turn an array so imposing into a failure. As the cortège made its way toward the Madeleine, the light entirely failed. The Royal Lady for whose eyes the various words of welcome were disposed on all sides saw none of them.’ In his sympathy for the good folk who were putting their whole soul into the welcome, Delacroix might have been consoled to read the sequel: ‘Yet we may be assured that no ouvrière who had withstood the broiling sun, sitting on the gravel of the avenue de l'Impératrice, felt more grieved than did the Queen herself.’

Similarly, on 23 August, Delacroix notes: ‘Bal à l'Hôtel de Ville pour la reine d'Angleterre. Chaleur affreuse … J'ai fait le tour de l'Hôtel de Ville deux ou trois fois pour conquérir un verre de punch. J'étais glacé, tant j'étais baigné de sueur. Quelles insipides réunions' (Ball at the Town Hall for the queen of England. Dreadful heat … I went round the whole building two or three times just to get hold of a glass of punch. I was frozen, I was so bathed in sweat. What insipid gatherings). Small wonder that Delacroix had trouble finding any refreshments, that the air was stifling, the gathering insipid, that he could hardly make his way through the crowd: there were over 8,000 guests, 57,000 people having applied to attend. Once again, the Moniteur (24 August 1855) reported things differently:

La fête … a dépassé en beauté et en magnificence tout ce qu'on avait vu jusqu'ici de plus brillant et de mieux ordonné. … Il y avait à tous les étages, et dans presque toutes les salles où on ne dansait pas, des buffets servis avec la plus grande profusion. … Les mesures avaient été si bien prises que, malgré l'énormité de la foule, la ventilation a pu être suffisamment entretenue, et la circulation n'a pas été entravée un instant.

(The celebration … surpassed in beauty and magnificence everything that had been seen thus far for brilliance and orderliness. … On every floor and in nearly every room where dancing wasn't going on, there were buffets in the greatest profusion. … Careful measures had been taken so that, despite the huge crowd, the ventilation could be adequately kept up, and free movement would not be blocked for a single instant.)

Yet the Illustrated London News again confirms the Journal, noting the numerous fainting fits caused by the heat. In this way, the diary's brief, fragmentary account points more adequately to the ‘real’.

The publication of the Journal in 1893-95 coincided with a prise de conscience of the posthumous ‘modernity’ of Delacroix's art. The retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1885 provided a context for the self-definition of the avant-garde, and genealogies of modernity taking him as their point of departure proliferated; Signac's influential De Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme, however problematic, was the most obvious manifestation of this. The writings of other artists and critics testify equally to the importance of Delacroix for the development of a ‘modern’ art: Van Gogh, Redon, Matisse, Laforgue, to name only a few.²⁴ The Journal, too, is part of that same modernity. Reading it as such involves, as I have argued, hypothesis and speculation, and thus subjectivity; engaged in making sense of things, one is conscious of removing that historical ‘otherness’ described above. By the same token, in his diary Delacroix did so too, approaching the material of contemporary history, selecting it, making sense of it for himself, involving his own subjectivity; the Journal is at once historiography and autobiography. That modernity is nonetheless there, and in the late twentieth century we are still its descendants, struggling with similar problems, fascinated by similar achievements.

Ultimately for Delacroix this long engagement with time that the Journal represents may derive from a seemingly paradoxical, but curiously modern fear: not so much the lack of time, but too much time, meaningless time, ennui. His consciousness of the present is intense, as he analyses the temporality proper to modern life—the obsession with speed, ‘saving’ time, abolishing space—troubling words indeed for a practitioner of that spatial art, painting, and for one who, by his own admission, often found time ‘too long’ (11 August 1854). Of the modern world's obsession with ever faster communications, he remarks: ‘Nous marchons vers cet heureux temps qui aura supprimé l'espace, mais qui n'aura pas supprimé l'ennui, attendu la nécessité toujours croissante de remplir les heures dont les allées et venues occupaient au moins une partie' (27 August 1854) (We are heading towards that time when space will be abolished but not ennui, considering the increasing need to fill up the hours which used to be occupied with coming and going). For him, the antidote to ennui is work, and work defined specifically as the mind at work: ‘The secret of avoiding ennui, for me at least, is to have ideas’ (14 July 1850). This, of course, was the function of the Journal, and the purpose of painting too. After a lifetime of astounding productivity, of worthwhile time, in which he had, in Baudelaire's words, ‘dealt with all genres, covered all areas of the field of painting, made illustrious the walls of our national palaces, filled our museums with vast compositions’,²⁵ a simple, uncontextualised sentence on 19 August 1858 perhaps sums up best what Delacroix—painter, writer and citizen—sought in this activity most of all: ‘The purpose of work is not just to produce, it is to give value to time.’

Notes

1. Delacroix, Journal, 19 August 1858 (henceforth noted by date only). All references to the diary come from my own reading of the manuscripts. My edition of the Journal, including a new text and substantial unpublished material, will appear in 1998 with Macula. Until then, the standard text remains that of André Joubin in three volumes (Paris, Plon, 1932).

2. On the Journal's aesthetic ideas and its status as a form of art-writing, see my Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995). Also George Mras, Eugène Delacroix's Theory of Art (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966); Karl Schawelka, Eugène Delacroix: Sieben Studien zu seiner Kunsttheorie (Mittenwald, Maander, 1979); Christine Sieber-Meier Untersuchungen zum ‘Œuvre littéraire’ von Eugène Delacroix (Bern, Francke, 1963); Delacroix, Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, ed. A. Larue (Paris, Hermann, 1996). Artists from Gauguin and Signac to Motherwell have commented on its influence on them. Matisse alone found it too particular to the author, as he said of the writings of all painters, including his own (letter to Tériade, 1947, in H. Matisse, Ecrits et propos sur l'art [Paris, Hermann, 1972], p. 311); yet he cites it frequently in the context of his own thought and practice.

3. Examples are numerous, e.g. 25 January 1824:

   Ma mémoire s'enfuit tellement de jour en jour que je ne suis plus le maître de rien: ni du passé que j'oublie, ni à peine du présent, où je suis presque toujours tellement occupé d'une chose que je perds de vue ou crains de perdre ce que je devrais faire, ni même de l'avenir, puisque je ne suis jamais assuré de n'avoir pas d'avance disposé de mon temps. Je désire prendre sur moi d'apprendre beaucoup par cœur, pour rappeler quelque chose de ma mémoire. Un homme sans mémoire ne sait sur quoi compter. Tout le trahit.

   (My memory flees so much as each day passes that I am no longer in control of anything: neither of the past which I am forgetting, nor of the present in which I am so occupied with something that I lose sight, or fear losing sight, of what I should be doing; nor even of the future, since I am never sure that I haven't already booked up my time in advance. I ardently desire to take it upon myself to learn things by heart, to recall something from my memory. A man without memory does not know what to rely on, everything betrays him.)

   Such concerns recur repeatedly in the early years in particular (1822-24), as the diary seeks to establish a memory—‘firm’, ‘solid’, ‘healthy’—to combat the flight, or worse, the squandering, of time. The effort fails: after a fitful two years, the diary falls silent, not to resume until 1847.

4. See the section on historiography in P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire II: La Nation, Pt. I (Paris, Gallimard, 1986), esp. M. Gauchet, ‘Les Lettres sur l'histoire de France d'Augustin Thierry’, pp. 247-316, and P. Nora, ‘L'Histoire de France de Lavisse’, pp. 317-75. The historical novel participates in this same effort. See Claudie Bernard, Le Passé recomposé: le roman historique français du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, Hachette, 1996), chap. 1.

5. E.g. the full study by Béatrice Didier, Le Journal intime (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1976); and her ‘Pour une sociologie du journal intime’, in V. Del Litto (ed.), Le Journal intime et ses formes littéraires (Geneva, Droz, 1978), pp. 245-65; Alain Girard, Le Journal intime (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

6. See Walter Benjamin's analysis of modernity in the Passagen-Werk, esp. the sections on Louis-Philippe, Baudelaire and Haussmann in the two exposés of the whole (Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Rolf Tiedemann, ed. Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt-am-Main, Suhrkamp, 1982], V).

7. Delacroix was exceedingly conscious of such gaps: ‘Je viens de relire en courant tout ce qui précède. Je déplore les lacunes. Il me semble que je suis encore le maître des jours que j'ai inscrits, quoiqu'ils soient passés. Mais ceux que ce papier ne mentionne point, ils sont comme s'ils n'avaient point été’ (7 April 1824) (I have just reread in passing all that precedes. I deplore the gaps. It seems to me that I am still the master of the days which I have recorded here, even though they have passed. But those which these pages do not mention, it is as though they never existed).

8. E.g. 28 February 1849: ‘Je n'ai pas écrit depuis le 16 et j'en suis fâché: j'aurais pu noter diverses choses intéressantes’ (I haven't written since the 16th and I am upset about it; I could have noted various interesting things). He frequently writes the entries out after the fact, placing them under the date he thinks they took place and acknowledging that he has forgotten some of the experience. For example, having seen a painting of Correggio, he notes on 20 September 1855: ‘Je regrette bien vivement de n'écrire ceci que trois semaines après l'impression que j'en ai reçue’ (I so regret only writing this three weeks after the impression I had of it). Attempting to describe his impression of the paintings of Decamps he says:

   Quand on prend une plume pour décrire des objects aussi expressifs, on sent nettement, à l'impuissance d'en donner une idée de cette manière, les limites qui forment le domaine des arts entre eux. C'est une espèce de mauvaise humeur contre soi-même de ne pouvoir fixer ses souvenirs, lesquels pourtant sont aussi vivaces dans l'esprit après cette imparfaite description que l'on fait à l'aide des mots. Je n'en dirai donc pas davantage …

   (21 April 1853)

   (When you take up a pen to describe such expressive objects, you sense clearly, from your inability to give any idea of them through writing, the boundaries of the two arts. It's like being out of sorts with yourself not to be able to fix your memories, which are yet still as vivid in your mind even after your inadequate description. So I will say no more about the matter …)

   What more there was to say, or what else there was that would have said it better than the paragraph which remains, we will of course never know.

9. None of this material has been exploited. A frequently cited source, Haussmann's memoirs, are far less reliable, having been written after the fact as a narrative of his career and in view of publication.

10. 14 March 1847; 5 March 1849; 22 January 1858; 22 May 1855; 24 December 1853; 6 June 1850.

11. 22 May 1853; 26 January 1847 and 3 April 1849; 5 February 1855.

12. See, for example, the Grandville section of ‘Paris, capitale du dix-neuvième siècle’, in Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, pp. 64-6.

13. The point is made repeatedly in dossier N, ‘Epistemology, theory of progress’, of the Passagen-Werk, pp. 570-611.

14. L'Ecriture de l'histoire (Paris, Gallimard, 1975), p. 8.

15. Ibid.

16. As usual, Delacroix took part but kept a sceptical distance. On 11 March 1847, having received advice about investing, he notes: ‘Le dernier actionnaire restant de la première classe sur la tontine Lafarge’—who by rights should receive the whole of the collective investment and return—‘a trente mille francs de rente. Il a cent ans. C'est un peu tard pour en jouir beaucoup’ (The last remaining shareholder in the Lafarge tontine gets 30,000 francs a year income. He is a hundred years old. It's a little late to enjoy it).

17. Such was the title of the work of Jules Ferry in 1868.

18. It was noted at the time that the cholera epidemic of 1854 followed the line of the newly opened Strasbourg railway.

19. See Jean Sagne, Delacroix et la photographie (Paris, Herscher, 1982); Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London, Allen Lane, 1968).

20. These have either been omitted from existing editions, as with Nadar, or not glossed, as with Baldus.

21. See Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987).

22. Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 6 vols (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981-89), no. 198 (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux).

23. Commission Impériale, Rapport sur l'Exposition Universelle de 1855 (Paris, 1857), pp. 81-3. Attendance figures come from this report also.

24. References in Van Gogh's letters are numerous, e.g. no. 13 to Emile Bernard (The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. J. Van Gogh-Bonger (Boston and New York, Graphic Society, 1978); Odilon Redon, A soi-même: Journal (Paris, José Corti, 1961), pp. 170-83; Matisse traces modern colourist usage from ‘Delacroix to Van Gogh and Gauguin, by way of the Impressionists and Cézanne’ (Ecrits et propos sur l'art, p. 199). In 1885, after taking careful notes on Delacroix's correspondence and the notes on art which were then available, Laforgue planned to write an article on his relation to Impressionism. See my article, ‘Jules Laforgue, lecteur de Delacroix: Notes inédites’, Studi francesi, 93 (1987) 407-20.

25. ‘Exposition Universelle de 1855’, Œuvres complètes, ed. C. Pichois (Paris, Gallimard, 1975-76), II, pp. 591-2.

An early version of this chapter was given as an inaugural lecture at University College London in March 1996, at the kind invitation of the Provost, Derek Roberts.