its roof cluttered by a series of glass sheds, not unlike greenhouses, interspersed somewhat eccentrically by pots of ferns and small Christmas trees in tubs. At pavement level, a constant coming and going of hired cabs and smart landaus, a dashing of commissionaires with giant parasols (also red), of strollers and gapers – les flâneurs de Paris – indicated some unusually attractive centre of business, art or scandal.
As night fell, and the street-lamps swaying from their iron gibbets filled the thoroughfare with a garish, orange gaslight, and the cab-lamps jerked down the uncertain asphalting of the boulevard, a great arc of clear white light, the output from fifty Bunsen Static Batteries linked in series, flooded down from the windows of number 35. This unearthly glow was occasionally punctuated by the livid flash from a pan of magnesium, which gave rise – not altogether unreasonably – to rumours of spirit-raising and necromancy.
Across the whole frontage, at the level of the third-storey balcony, in bold cursive lettering 10 feet high and 50 feet long, in a system of gas-tubes designed exclusively by Antoine Lumière, ran the proprietorial name: nadar. That too was in red.
In the 1860s Felix Nadar was certainly the most celebrated photographer in France. In retrospect, his reputation still stands with David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron, as one of the three indisputably great portrait photographers of the nineteenth century. His famous atelier at number 35 boulevard des Capucines had long been linked with the pioneering days of French photography, since the time when it had been rented as an undecorated shell of a building, in a then unfashionable quarter, by the early landscape daguerreotypers, the frères Bisson, and the painter turned seascape photographer Gustave Le Gray, in the 1850s. The building was to conclude its controversial associations on a high note, when after the fall of the Second Empire, and the crushing tragedy of the Commune, Nadar moved to smaller premises, and hired the studio out to the ‘Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres’ for a public exposition which became known to posterity as the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874.
The aesthetic revolution brought about by the early photographers, and especially Nadar, was no less far-reaching than that achieved by the Impressionists. But the impact of photography on European society was too rapid, and too widespread, to be grasped at the time. The Impressionists asserted new standards of private, idiosyncratic vision, which penetrated only slowly, and among the elite of the art world. But photographers established, in little more than a decade, entirely new and universal ideas about visual reality, and about what everyone could commonly accept and recognize as ‘lifelikeness’. Photography was, from the start, irretrievably popular in its appeal and suspiciously democratic in its tendencies. Not surprisingly it took Paris by storm: in 1850 there were less than a dozen professional studios in the city; by the 1860s something over 200, with more than 33,000 people directly or indirectly employed. Of these, Nadar was the doyen.
Especially in these early days, photography gave rise to a host of questions and suspicions. Was the photographer an artist, or a scientist? Would he destroy painting? Would his portraits somehow dehumanize nature, and banish the soul? And how was it that photography, with all its mechanistic and chemical crudeness, had suddenly created a golden age of the human image? As Nadar himself put it with typical trenchancy: ‘Photography is a fantastic discovery: a science which engages the most advanced intellects, and an art which provokes the most profound minds: and yet its use lies within the capacity of the shallowest idiot.’
The story of Nadar’s early career is a reflection and to some extent an explanation of many of these issues. It is also a kind of comic-epic, continuously larger and more colourful than life, like his own person. For the Nadar who eventually occupied the boulevard des Capucines was 6 feet 4 inches tall, with blazing red hair once described by the poet de Banville as ‘comet’s fire’, and having for his motto the untranslatable Parisian shrug in the face of an intractable universe: mais, quand même!
In fact Felix Nadar created himself. As he was born in 1820, he was merely Felix Tournachon, the eldest son of a provincial printer and publisher from Lyons. After a long but unsuccessful attempt to establish a business in Paris, selling translations of radical texts by Diderot, d’Holbach and Lamennais, his father Victor Tournachon went bankrupt and returned to die at the Lyons asylum in 1837. Felix, forced at seventeen to assume responsibility for his mother and his younger brother Adrien, worked in the local Lyons journals and studied medicine at night. One story persisted in the memory about his father: he was once said to have swum the Rhône for a dare, carrying an open book in one hand, and a hunting horn – which he blew occasionally – in the other. A Byronic gesture perhaps; but also something more à la mode, a brilliant act of self-publicity.
Within a year Felix Tournachon had taken his mother and his brother back to Paris, his heart set on the grand conquest his father had attempted, but failed. He had no métier, but many schemes. Between 1838 and 1844, the years of the bourgeois monarch with the furled umbrella, Tournachon plunged into the life of the Left Bank. His story became that of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1849), the sloping attics of the sixth arrondissement, the cheap cafés round Notre Dame de Lorette, and the laundry girls and golden-hearted grisette of the quartier Breda.
A bewildering assortment of bad jobs and good contacts followed: stenographer, bookshop assistant, coalseller, pipeseller, cub reporter, private secretary, editorial hack. While writing theatre reviews for an ephemeral journal, he met Jean Duval – later Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress – stealing the show in a bit part at the Porte-Saint-Antoine, and they became friends. His newspaper work brought him into touch with Gautier, Nerval, de Banville, Murger himself (who frequently shared his attic and his purse), Baudelaire, Dumas père, Champfleury, and even Balzac, hiding out from creditors in a chamber hung with gentian wallpaper in the rue de Richelieu.
A somewhat weary police dossier was opened on him. ‘Yet another of those dangerous people sowing highly subversive doctrines in the Quartier Latin – he makes speeches about the Lamennaian socialist theory.’ He was also notorious for his wild, unbourgeois-like generosity.
Tournachon cut a remarkable figure in the narrow, cobbled streets – huge, gangling, red-headed, with long twitching fingers and staring impudent eyes. But it was some time before he settled upon his public image, a concept of singular importance to him. The journalist Charles Bataille first met him climbing down, with ostentatious stealth, from a fifth-floor attic in the rue Neuve des Martyres by the outside ‘like a huge scrawny cat’, presumably to avoid the concierge. Having reached the relative safety of terra firma, he arranged an eye-catching ‘bull’s blood’ jacket round his shoulders, pulled on an elegant pair of gloves and, carefully neglecting to button cuff or cravat, loped off with a boyish grin to impress his new editor. This mixture of craft and sartorial naïveté always remained: at the height of his fame he attended a Fancy Dress Ball with Gustave Doré, dressed as a baby with orange beads and a cotton bib.
By 1842, Tournachon had landed his first regular job, as Letters Editor on Le Commerce (he wrote them himself), and he began publishing short stories of Bohemian life, and finally a novel, La Robe de Déjanire (1846). These showed his lifelong understanding of poverty, and a characteristic combination of fulsome sentiment and black humour. He had also found his name: from Tournachon to Tournadard, an obscure, epistemological gallic joke, referring either to his satirical sting, or else to the tongue of flame (also dard) above his brow; and thence to the more economical and generally more marketable, Nadar. This signature now began to appear below little matchstick drawings, and at the age of twenty-seven, Nadar published a first caricature on the inside page of Charivari, the celebrated illustrated journal edited by Charles Philipon. Pictures, not words, suddenly began to flow from his pen.
The revolutionary events of 1848 precipitated Nadar into perhaps the most quixotic adventure of his entire career. It was nothing less than the liberation of Poland from the Prussians, by a volunteer column of 500 ultra-red republican Parisians, inspired by the rhetoric of the ageing Lamartine and the exiled Mickiewicz. Nadar
