Nineteenth-Century ContextsVol. 32, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 31–46

ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/08905491003704038

Becoming Cosmopolitan: Viewing and Reviewing the 1855 Exposition Universelle in ParisMargueritte MurphyHobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York

Taylor and Francis LtdGNCC_A_470925.sgm10.1080/08905491003704038Nineteenth-Century Contexts0890-5495 (print)/1477-2663 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis321000000March 2010MargueritteMurphymmurphy@hws.edu Ajoutons que Paris est le séjour d’une colonie nombreuse d’étrangers qu’y appellent lesaffaires, le plaisir, l’étude, etc. que par ses collections, ses musées, ses bibliothèques, il seprête plus qu’aucune autre capitale aux travaux d’ensemble sur l’industrie, les sciences etles arts; que par l’urbanité de ses mœurs, par son hospitalité envers les étrangers, notrecapitale a véritablement un caractère cosmopolite.1

—Prince Napoléon, Rapport sur l’exposition universelle de 1855 (139)

In this passage from his report to Napoléon III on the Exposition universelle of 1855,Prince Napoléon points to the cosmopolitan character of Paris as a reason for its suit-ability for future grandiose international exhibitions. There is, perhaps, a tension in hisdescription between two facets of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism as urbanedetachment and cosmopolitanism as openness towards strangers. This difference is notnecessarily one between the bad and good faces of the cosmopolitan, since detachmentis integral to critique. The positive quality of detachment is an argument made byAmanda Anderson in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation ofDetachment where she folds cosmopolitanism into a larger ideal of critical distance inVictorian aesthetic and intellectual projects about which many writers conveyed acomplex ambivalence. One aim of her approach is to trace the dialectic betweendetachment and engagement for the Victorians, and defend the “progressive potential-ities of systemic critique” about which much skepticism has arisen in the last twentyyears of literary and cultural studies (31). In a similar vein, Rebecca L. Walkowitzproposes “critical cosmopolitanism” for the Modernists who display “an aversion toheroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privi-lege, views from above or from the center that assume a consistent distinction betweenwho is seeing and what is seen” (2). Her focus is more insistently on the aesthetic thanAnderson’s, for she argues that early Modernist innovations of style made possible the

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critical consciousness of late twentieth-century texts by writers like Salman Rushdie,W.G. Sebald, and Kazuo Ishiguro (she devotes a chapter to each in her book) and goesso far as to locate a connection between the fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism of aesthetes,dandies, and flâneurs and the “new analysis of perception and alternative tones of polit-ical consciousness” of early Modernism that led to such new narrative practices.

The focus of this paper is critical cosmopolitanism on the other side of the channel,specifically Charles Baudelaire’s idea of the “cosmopolitan critic” in his review of theBeaux-Arts Exhibit at the Exposition universelle of 1855 in Paris. Like Walkowitz, I amconcerned with aesthetic questions, specifically with the idea or ideal of a cosmopolitancriticism of visual art. But like Anderson, I am interested in sorting an imperialistcosmopolitanism from a cosmopolitan critique of imperialism, or, in her words:“While cosmopolitanism can in certain key instances be shown to support nationalismand imperialism, and while its own elitist and narrowly European forms must beacknowledged, it still often gives voice, within the Victorian context, to a reflectiveinterrogation of cultural norms.” (21) Such a “reflective interrogation of culturalnorms” is at the heart of Charles Baudelaire’s ideal of the cosmopolitan critic; indeed,his critique of the aesthetic doctrine dominant in most coverage of the Beaux-ArtsExhibit is at once caustic and profound. But I will also emphasize the degree to which,in Baudelaire’s cosmopolitanism, openness to the unfamiliar, here the exhibited objectthat serves as an entry-point into its entire original culture, is key and a move beyondthe moment of critique that opens up not only the possibility of new conceptions ofbeauty, but also of a new definition of the “universal.”

With the Crimean War underway, 1855 was perhaps not the most opportunemoment to celebrate the accord among nations and peaceful competition that the Expo-sition universelle in Paris would showcase. The Exposition universelle drew millions ofcultural tourists to Paris; the official report by Prince Napoléon records 5,162,330visitors (87). Yet unease with the incongruity of an international exhibition, in whichcountries, colonies, principalities, duchies and territories from Europe, Asia, Africa,North America, South America, and Australia were represented, during a time of warpervaded government accounts and provided fodder for a lampooning press (Figure 1).Figure 1 Cham (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé), ‘Croquis par Cham,’ Le Carivari, 1855. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Exposition universelle itself was framed as a peace-making mechanism: “on levoit, renversant la vieille maxime: Si vis pacem para bellum, un génie tout moderne, entemps de guerre préparait la paix”2 (qtd. from La Patrie, 31 December 1854, in LeTravail universel, xv). Thus the ideal of a cosmopolitan order, modeled by the Exposi-tion itself, formed part of the official rhetoric and gave ethical and political weight tothe event.

Both the ideal of cosmopolitanism itself and such festivals promoting communionand understanding among peoples have been described as antidotes to war since antiq-uity. The Cynics of the fourth century BC “first coined the expression cosmopolitan,‘citizen of the cosmos,’ … meant to be paradoxical” (Appiah xiv), but this ideal was alsoused to urge unity among the city-states (Calhoun, “Class Consciousness” 871). In1856, the art critic, E. J. Delécluze, looked back to the Greek city-states for forerunnersof the universal exhibitions in the Olympic and other games, paradoxically in thisaccount both to train warriors and to avoid war:

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Ces jeux, dès leur origine, eurent pour objet de rendre les habitants des diverses parties dela Grèce aptes à combattre pour défendre le pays. Mais à cette intention, déjà si généreuse,s’en joignit une dont la portée morale était de la plus haute importance. Les fondateurs deces jeux voulurent que toutes les peuplades dont l’ensemble constituait la Grèce, concou-russent à l’accomplissement de ces solennités ; et en effet l’idée de ces fêtes, fortementimprimée dans l’esprit des Grecs par les traditions religieuses et un long usage, s’y estconservée pendant un grand nombre de siècles. Or le but moral de ces réunions à époquesfixes, soit à Olympie ou à Corinthe, était d’adoucir les mœurs des diverses peuplades hellé-niques si disposées à se faire des guerres à outrance, en les amenant peu à peu à se voir, àparticiper aux mêmes fêtes, et enfin à abjurer les haines féroces qui les divisaient. Tel fut lepremier effort tenté pour préparer les hommes à recevoir les bienfaits d’une civilisationplus humaine et plus douce.3 (v)

Thus, according to Delécluze, the games had another purpose seemingly at odds withthe militarist one: to foster peace and mutual understanding by bringing diversepeoples together to share in the festivities. He notes the tradition of respecting a generaltruce during the time devoted to the games (vi) and laments how the centuries have

Figure 1 Cham (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé), ‘Croquis par Cham,’ Le Charivari, 1855.Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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shown that such hopes for an end to war through shared festivities were again and againshattered (v–viii). The Exposition universelle, like the early Greek games, was designedto gird the competitive loins of the nation, to encourage innovation and emulation inmanufacturing. At the same time, the Exposition literally put on display the idea ofpeaceful and orderly competition.

While the potential for encouraging international accord was apparent to writers likeDelécluze and trumpeted by official government organs, nationalism eclipsed interna-tionalism for most observers. In fact, the Exposition universelle for many, including thegovernment, provided a forum for the vaunting of national pride and claims of supe-riority within an international framework, an especially clear enactment of the tensionsbetween the spirit of international communion and the fierceness of nineteenth-century nationalist sentiment. It was France’s first international exhibition, and Franceprided itself on its innovation vis-à-vis the 1851 Crystal Palace in London of erecting aseparate pavilion for the display of art. Coverage of the Exposition universelle domi-nated the press for months, and the fine arts exhibition was separately reviewed bynumerous newspapers and journals. Thus with separate pavilions for Industry and theFine Arts, the Exposition universelle promoted competition in both the economic andaesthetic realms; in the latter, French preeminence was assumed and repeatedlyasserted, and even in manufacturing French taste was acknowledged as a competitiveadvantage.4

The number of French artists included in the Beaux-Arts Exhibition alone seemstestament to an undisguised chauvinism: 1,072 out of 2,175 total (Rapport 466). Butother decisions about the conception of the Exhibition also had an impact on how itwas reviewed. As Patricia Mainardi observes, the decision to make the Beaux-ArtsExhibition into a retrospective, with special exhibitions for artists like Ingres andDelacroix who represented distinct directions in French art, was “far-reaching in itsimplications, for, unlike previous regimes, that of the Second Empire no longer wishedto set the direction of art, but was content merely to ratify existing popular choices”(47). The Eclecticism of Victor Cousin, both as an overarching philosophy of art andthe distinctive feature of French art, was adopted as the officially sanctioned approachto the Beaux-Arts Exhibition. Hence, as Théophile Gautier argued in Le MoniteurUniversel, the official government newspaper, French art as “eclectic” is “universal”and thus superior to the art of other nations (Mainardi 69–70). The notion of theretrospective, of course, involved reading art historically, and here again, in Mainardi’sanalysis, Cousin’s philosophy was broadly influential. Cousin associates a single ideawith a national or ethnic people in his understanding of historical trends; “Gautierestablished this as the framework for evaluating the different national styles, proposingEngland as the representative of Individuality, Belgium of Facility (savoir-faire),Germany of Intellectualism and France of Eclecticism.” Other critics followed suit(Mainardi 70). For instance, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, in a concluding overviewof the Exhibition, declare: “Embrassons de l’œil le génie national des races, et, pleurantla tristesse de tant de décadences, pesons l’œuvre de paix des peuples,”5 sounding thechords of both ethnic nationalism and peaceful productivity (181). France is “lePortique où se disputent les systèmes, l’atelier où les procédés s’élaborent; elle est la

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grande nation de l’art,”6 a claim of France’s role and “genius” as arbiter of theories(189). Of course, the arrangement of the arts exhibition according to country with alike ordering in the livret or catalogue to the Exhibition powerfully encouraged a sensethat national character was dominant in art’s expressiveness.

With special exhibition space assigned to France’s most renowned painters and theoverall retrospective framework, a dominant question in much of the coverage of theBeaux-Arts Exhibition was the state of contemporary French art in light of its historyduring the past half century, and its competing schools. Even Maxime du Camp, leftistcritic and a prolific travel-writer—in 1855 already author of Souvenirs et Paysagesd’Orient (Smyrne, Ephèse, Magnésie, Constantinople, Scio) (1848), Égypte, Nubie, Pales-tine, Syrie (1852), and Le Nil (Égypte et Nubie) (1854)—confines his overview of paint-ing in the introduction to Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition universelle de 1855 to French artwith the exception of a British artist, John Sell Cotman. This focus on French art,however, does not preclude a critical perspective. Du Camp sees Cotman as a model forFrench landscape painters since he is “essentiellement moderne et vivant” in DuCamp’s words (16). For Du Camp, the exhibition is an occasion to critique the direc-tion of French art since the 1789 Revolution, to chastise its tendency to look backwards,the cause of its present mediocrity in his view (2). He explicitly ties the progress of artto moments of revolution, but berates artists for missing the opportunity to participatein the freedom of a forward-looking society. A Republican, he urges art that wouldcelebrate the people and contemporary life; instead of the emblems, apotheoses, alle-gories, hunts, nymphs, and Pans that appear in the Hôtel de Ville, he would havepreferred “en décorant la maison commune, de peindre les hauts faits de ce peuple deParis qui a déjà accompli de si grandes choses, sans compter celles qu’il accompliraencore. Paris, ce cœur et ce cerveau de la France et du monde entier, méritait mieux queces inutilités dont on a rempli son propre palais”7 (27). In other words, French paintingis not living up to the promise of the French people. Indeed, in his critique of historypainting in France, he calls for more attention to the “people” who are “la nation, quia sans cesse sauvé la patrie que les chefs s’obstinent souvent à perdre”8 as opposed tokings and other powerful figures (410). As he mentions the conquest of Algeria amongthose “événements héroïques accomplis par cette glorieuse légion qu’on appelle laFrance,”9 events ripe for celebration by French painters, he is hardly a critic of imperi-alism; his sympathy here is with the French people, not colonized subalterns (411).Thus this much traveled critic brings a fully francophile lens to the first internationalexhibition of painting and laces his coverage with encomiums to the French nation.

The one critic covering this international exhibition who took cosmopolitanismseriously was Baudelaire. Baudelaire had long questioned both nationalism and thedominant aesthetic systems of his time. Although the Exposition universelle of 1855offered the occasion for his articulation of the figure of the cosmopolitan critic andprovided vivid evidence of the relativity of beauty, his embrace of the cosmopolitandates back, at least, to Le Salon de 1846. A young critic, at the time only 25, he wouldrally French youth against the militarist nationalism of the work of Horace Vernet,which he deems eminently French. He critiques Vernet’s paintings on the grounds ofboth aesthetics, or style, and subject matter in the strongest terms: “Je hais cet homme

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parce que ses tableaux ne sont point de la peinture, mais une masturbation agile etfréquente, une irritation de l’épiderme français.”10 He accounts for Vernet’s popularityin that “il vous raconte votre gloire, et c’est la grande affaire.—Eh! qu’importe auvoyageur enthousiaste, à l’esprit cosmopolite qui préfère le beau à la gloire?” (470)11

Here his invocation of the cosmopolitan is tied to his abhorrence of unthinkingnationalism.

In 1855 Baudelaire acknowledges what is essentially the program of the Expositionuniverselle—the comparison of nations and their products, while interrogating theidea of the universal: “Il est peu d’occupations aussi intéressantes, aussi attachantes,aussi pleines de surprises et de révélations pour un critique, pour un rêveur dontl’esprit est tourné à la généralisation aussi bien qu’à l’étude des détails, et, pour mieuxdire encore, à l’idée d’ordre et de hiérarchie universelle, que la comparaison des nationset de leurs produits respectifs” (575).12 References to the “universal,” of course, werepart and parcel of the process of definition of this spectacle, the Universal Exhibition.13

In his report to the Emperor Napoleon III, Prince Napoleon, who oversaw the planningand execution of the entire exhibition, takes “universal” quite simply to refer to thegathering of peoples and their products from around the globe (133). Gautier, asmentioned earlier, employs “universal” to suggest a single aesthetic standard and thetheory of eclecticism based in the art of France. In contrast, Baudelaire defines the“universal” as a culturally relative aesthetic, and pointedly rejects claims of nationalsupremacy:

Quand je dis hiérarchie, je ne veux pas affirmer la suprématie de telle nation sur telleautre. Quoiqu’il y ait dans la nature des plantes plus ou moins saintes, des formes plus oumoins spirituelles, des animaux plus ou moins sacrés, et qu’il soit légitime de conclure,d’après les instigations de l’immense analogie universelle, que certaines nations—vastesanimaux dont l’organisme est adéquat à leur milieu,—aient été préparées et éduquées parla Providence pour un but déterminé, but plus ou moins élevé, plus ou moins rapprochédu ciel,—je ne veux pas faire ici autre chose qu’affirmer leur égale utilité aux yeux deCELUI qui est indéfinissable, et le miraculeux secours qu’elles se prêtent dans l’harmoniede l’univers. (575)14

From this broad vision of natural harmony, he goes on to express the stimulation thathe has felt as a spectator, using words like “surprises” and “revelations.” He character-izes himself as a critic who is a “rêveur,” one prone to dream of a universal order andharmony, which would seem to prepare the way for a grand utopian scheme, but laterin the essay, he utterly disavows any such aim, citing his own failures at creating endur-ing systems in the past and the inevitability of some surprise or unexpected disruptionto the system: “Et toujours un produit spontané, inattendu, de la vitalité universellevenait donner un démenti à ma science enfantine et vieillotte, fille déplorable del’utopie. J’avais beau déplacer ou étendre le critérium, il était toujours en retard surl’homme universel, et courait sans cesse après le beau multiforme et versicolore, qui semeut dans les spirales infinies de la vie” (577-78).15 Thus he will not stipulate the hier-archy of this universal order, deferring before the all-seeing eye who judges all equallyuseful, no matter what their place in the order; two pages later it is a “vitalité” that isuniversal, and “l’homme universel” is part of an everchanging beauty of many forms

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and colors, linked to the “infinite spirals of life.” As Claude Pichois notes, “analogieuniverselle” is a Fourierist term, but in 1855, Baudelaire adheres to no utopian ormystical system (1386, n 3). In the context of the opening paragraph of his essay on theoccasion of the Exposition universelle, he clearly is employing this language to dislodge“universal” from the more obvious, state-sanctioned meaning of the world-wide reachof an exhibition that shows off the ability of the French to dominate in art and goodson a world stage.

Not only will Baudelaire not construct his own system of universal beauty, but heattacks current aesthetic systems, especially latent neoclassicism, for blindness to thetrue universal. Baudelaire’s foil to his cosmopolitan critic is the contemporary neoclas-sicist and the inadequacy of the aesthetic of absolute beauty to account for the beautieson display:16

[Q]ue ferait, que dirait un Winckelmann moderne (nous en sommes pleins, la nation enregorge, les paresseux en raffolent), que dirait-il en face d’un produit chinois, produitétrange, bizarre, contourné dans sa forme, intense par sa couleur, et quelquefois délicatjusqu’à l’évanouissement? Cependant c’est un échantillon de la beauté universelle; mais ilfaut, pour qu’il soit compris, que le critique, le spectateur opère en lui-même une transfor-mation qui tient du mystère, et que, par un phénomène de la volonté agissant sur l’imagi-nation, il apprenne de lui-même à participer au milieu qui a donné naissance à cettefloraison insolite. Peu d’hommes ont,—au complet,—cette grâce divine du cosmopolit-isme; mais tous peuvent l’acquérir à des degrés divers. Les mieux doués à cet égard sont cesvoyageurs solitaires qui ont vécu pendant des années au fond des bois, au milieu des vertig-ineuses prairies, sans autre compagnon que leur fusil, contemplant, disséquant, écrivant.Aucun voile scolaire, aucun paradoxe universitaire, aucune utopie pédagogique, ne se sontinterposés entre eux et la complexe vérité. Ils savent l’admirable, l’immortel, l’inévitablerapport entre la forme et la fonction. Ils ne critiquent pas, ceux-là: ils contemplent, ilsétudient. (576)17

It is significant to the form of relationship between the spectator and object that Baude-laire describes his ideal cosmopolite not as an urbane dandy, but rather as a “solitarywanderer” in the wilderness. This quality underscores an openness to the object ofcontemplation and a lack of the self-regard, the expectation of being the object ofothers’ glances, associated with the dandy. These characteristics set the stage for thetransformation of subjectivity enacted through such contemplation and study.

The object that Baudelaire chooses as an example is also significant since, of thethirty art critics who covered the Exposition universelle, only Baudelaire and Gautierdiscussed the Chinese art. Gautier denigrates the Chinese aesthetic as “ideal ugliness”in contrast with Greek “ideal beauty,” making Baudelaire the only critic to discernbeauty in the Chinese works.18 For Baudelaire, the Chinese object as a “specimen ofuniversal beauty” demonstrates that such beauty is not uniform, but “multiform”(123). For Baudelaire the truly cosmopolitan critic would see freshly—“contem-plate,” “study”—and avoid judging works according to pre-existing academic systemsthat blind the critic to their “complex truth,” including the functionality of theobject’s form. In other words, in a move away from a doctrine of formal autonomy,Baudelaire represents the relationship between form and function as part of theobject’s aesthetic impact, a perception of the embeddedness of the object within its

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original cultural context and the contribution of that embedding to the object’sbeauty.

Gautier’s more extensive treatment of the Chinese works offers an instructivecontrast. When Gautier’s article first appeared in L’Artiste, in the October 7, 1855 issue,it was entitled “L’Art chinois” (“Chinese Art”); when it was reprinted in Gautier’s 1857collection of his reviews of the Exposition universelle of 1855, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe(The Fine Arts in Europe), published by Michel Lévy, Frères, the title had been changedto “Collection chinoise” (“The Chinese Collection”). This minor change of title maywell be significant for Gautier’s tone is derisive when he speaks of Chinese art while hegreatly admires Chinese objects—the porcelain, furniture, and other luxury goods thatare ordinarily found on the “industrial” side of the exposition. He begins his articlewith the usual tired stereotypes of the Chinese as an ancient, but “immobile” people:“Ils ont tout inventé et n’ont rien perfectionné; ils connaissaient la boussole, la poudre,l’imprimerie, le gaz, bien avant que le reste du monde se doutât de ces précieusesdécouvertes” (130).19 Such a remark owes something to the general temper of exhibi-tion coverage, since the exhibition is meant to measure and compare “progress” and sothe relevance of technology and inventions that were not exploited, symptoms,perhaps, of the immobility that he deems a national trait. In describing the Chinese“genius,” Gautier employs some of the same vocabulary as Baudelaire, but theinflection is entirely different:

Ils ont un génie bizarre, maniaque et patient, qui ne ressemble au génie d’aucun peuple, etqui, au lieu de s’épanouir comme une fleur, se tortille comme une racine de mandragore.Nuls pour la beauté sérieuse, ils excellent dans la curiosité; s’ils n’ont rien à envoyer auxmusées, en revanche ils peuvent remplir toutes les boutiques de bric-à-brac de créationsbaroques et difformes, du caprice le plus rare. Vous avez sans doute vu ce nain de la rivièredes Perles qu’on avait enfermé dans une potiche pour qu’il s’y rabougrit d’une façoncurieuse; c’est l’image la plus juste du génie chinois. (131)20

Thus for Gautier the “bizarre” implies deformity, stunted growth, and the productionof shop goods, not art. He contrasts their aesthetic vision directly with that of classicalGreece: “Les autres nations, à commencer par les Grecs, qui l’ont atteint, cherchent lebeau idéal; les Chinois cherchent le laid idéal; ils pensent que l’art doit s’éloigner autantque possible de la nature, inutile selon eux à représenter, puisque l’original et la copieferaient double emploi” (131–2).21 Gautier’s move here is revealing: ideal beauty isultimately representational, legitimized by the doctrine of mimesis, and thus a more“natural” flowering, while the Chinese pursue an anti-mimetic aesthetic, symptomaticof a “deformed” genius that produces “curiosities.” He assumes here a close relation-ship between nature and beauty, and that this relationship is universally recognized.For him Chinese art and artifacts reflect a particular “genius,” consistent with his asso-ciation of a single idea with a specific nation or people. But he does not suggest that theChinese view nature differently from the West. Rather their “genius” subverts ordistorts the relationship between art and nature and thus produces deformed andstunted products. He mocks Chinese painting both in terms of composition—“fairetenir dans le même cadre des objets que la perspective sépare”—and use of color—“Une tigre bleu-de-ciel, un lion vert-pomme, sont bien plus curieux que s’ils étaient

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tout bêtement colories de leurs nuances naturelles” (132). He concludes: “le laid estinfini et ses combinaisons monstrueuses offrent à la fantaisie des champs illimités”(132).22 Of course, in hindsight, we discern here the features of modernist painting thatemerge later in the century, influenced by the art of Japan and other “exotic” cultures:the non-naturalistic, arbitrary use of color, the telescoping of objects within the pictureplane, and the crucial anti-representational turn.

His tone changes when he describes Chinese luxury goods, “la partie vraimentsérieuse de la collection composée des objets les plus rares et les plus précieux enémaux, bronzes, porcelaines, laques, cabinets et meubles de toutes sortes” (136).23 Thematerials, the work, and the provenance—imperial palaces—all add value to theseobjects. He explicitly contrasts Chinese anti-mimetic painting with the art of ornamentwhere whimsy is to be applauded: “dans l’arabesque pure, dans l’ornement capricieusedu bronze, de la porcelaine, du bois, de la laque et des pierres dures, les Chinois sontdes maitres inimitables, et l’on ne peut qu’admirer les mille produits de leur imagina-tion inépuisablement fertile” (137).24 His use of the word “arabesque” is telling for headopts Orientalist lenses fashioned by Western perspectives on the Islamic world tostimulate interest in these objects and the world he suggests they intimate. For example,the beauty of Chinese characters and their use in ornamentation reminds him of theAlhambra (133), and he imagines apartments for Chinese women “aussi fermés auxEuropéens que les harems des pachas d’Asie” (134).25 Indeed, the general idea ofmystery, of a hidden world, and of this exposition as the exposure of what is normallyveiled or forbidden to Western eyes is a leitmotif throughout the review, which beginswith the visitor passing by the faux-Chinese “guard,” “deux bronzes de Jules Cordier,un mandarin et son épouse, purs types de l’empire du Milieu qui grimacent avec unsérieux jovial sur leurs piédouches” (130)26 and ends, not surprisingly, with the asser-tion that this “merveilleuse collection … vous fait franchir pour quelques instants lamuraille de la Chine” (142).27

In contrast with Gautier’s presentation of this exhibit as a sneak peek into the worldof imperial China, Baudelaire theorizes that for any understanding of the object, itselfa specimen of “universal beauty,” a more profound change in the spectator is required:a “transformation” dependent on the imagination—that is, the imagining of the localethat produced this art or artifact. Thus Baudelaire invokes a cosmopolitanism rootedin a local (foreign) imaginary. Further, the Chinese object is a “product” of a “strangeefflorescence,” tropes which suggest a natural process. But, in contrast with Gautier’smimetic ideal, Baudelaire’s view of the relationship between art and nature emphasizesanalogous harmonic systems rather than representation, and thus redefines theaesthetic worth of these productions within a different ontology, a different sense of theinterconnection between art and nature, and of natural processes tout court. Under-standing Chinese art is just one window into understanding “universal beauty” which,he implies, is not fully knowable because of its infinite potential configurations or“correspondences” among sensorial instantiations.

Thus Baudelaire posits in the object the capacity to elicit its own original environ-ment under the gaze of the receptive and imaginative spectator. The Chinese “product”is also the occasion and inspiration for Baudelaire’s new aesthetic: “The beau est

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toujours bizarre”28 (578). This “bizarrerie” itself is “dépendante des milieux, desclimats, des mœurs, de la race, de la religion et du tempérament de l’artiste” (578–9);29

thus the bizarre is not simply the exotic, in other words, the effect of foreignness, butdepends on it own cultural context for its effect. That is, as there are many diverse beau-ties, so there are many bizarreries, and they are bizarre through their relationship withtheir own context. It is a cosmopolitanism that would be firmly non-eurocentric, byrecognizing that the bizarre itself is locally meaningful, not the effect of distance fromthe dominant home culture.

Critical Cosmopolitanisms

In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah uses SirRichard Francis Burton as an example of one who had extensive and intimateexperience of other cultures, yet held many of the standard Victorian views on racialhierarchies. Appiah comments: “Burton is a standing refutation, then, to those whoimagine that prejudice derives only from ignorance, that intimacy must breed amity.You can be genuinely engaged with the ways of other societies without approving, letalone adopting, them.” (8) In other words, mere exposure to other cultures does notnecessarily dispel prejudice, and we may take Gautier’s coverage of the Chinese collec-tion as a case in point. Baudelaire himself calls Gautier “cosmopolitan” elsewhere:“[S]on esprit est un miroir cosmopolite de beauté” (“Théophile Gautier [I],” 108).30

But, in light of his remarks on the Chinese art, we may judge this as a “cosmopolitan-ism” so steeped in the dominant racial and national prejudices of his day that he isunable to grasp a non-European aesthetic or discern beauty outside a narrow Westernparadigm.

In contrast, Baudelaire does not only react positively to art that departs fromWestern representational norms, but would elaborate a theory of culturally relativebeauty, partly in reaction to the constraints of such norms, but also to limn what exciteshim about such art. Baudelaire’s openness to new aesthetics is a harbinger of later radi-cal changes in Western art, influenced by Asian (Impressionism) and African (Cubism)aesthetics. But, does the ideal sketched by Baudelaire, that of a cosmopolitan critic, liveup to the program of critical cosmopolitanism that has emerged in recent years? Thatis, does this ideal work as an intervention against nationalism, provincialism, andxenophobia in the nineteenth century?

Walter Mignolo offers a particularly robust version of critical cosmopolitanismgrounded in a broad historical perspective. Coloniality is central to his analysis, for hesees an image of the West “consolidated” as a result of the colonization of the Americasand later of Asia and Africa; it is a “geopolitical image that exhibits chronologicalmovement.” He sketches three “macronarratives” that emerge from this image: theorigin of the West in Greece with a movement northward over time; the origin of theWestern modernity in the Renaissance, spread through capitalism and the Atlanticcommercial circuit; and the origin of Western modernity in Northern Europe in theEnlightenment and the French Revolution (722). The cosmopolitanism associatedwith these narratives falls into two categories in Mignolo’s scheme: “managerial”

Nineteenth-Century Contexts 41

cosmopolitanism by which he means “global designs,” for instance, Christianity,nineteenth-century imperialism, and contemporary neoliberal globalization, and“emancipatory” cosmopolitanism with Francisco de Vitoria’s writings on the “rights ofthe people” in the sixteenth century, and Kant’s and Marx’s writings on cosmopolitan-ism as examples (722–3; 728–30). The second category arises in reaction to the first ascomplement or dissent. Even as critique or dissent, however, such emancipatorycosmopolitan projects are framed within the ideology of the dominant global designs.Thus they do not function fully as a “critical cosmopolitanism” in Mignolo’s view; helocates “critical cosmopolitanism” within coloniality, but from the exterior ofmodernity, that is, from the perspective of the subaltern.

Although Mignolo is less interested in the first narrative in his analysis, descent fromthe Greeks, this macro-narrative is a prominent one at the time of the Expositionuniverselle. The persistence of a neoclassical aesthetic or reliance on Greek models ofbeauty, apparent both in a negative form in Baudelaire’s attack on these latter-dayWinckelmanns and in the positive form of Gautier’s critique of Chinese art against aclassical ideal, implies a continued reliance on classical art as universal standard. Atstake, of course, is the nature of a universal sensibility to beauty. Delécluze’s location ofthe idea of festivities promoting international harmony in the ancient Greek gameslikewise relies on this historical trajectory, although his ethnographic inflection—theGreeks as a group of warring tribes—would seem to undercut the notion of a singletimeless aesthetic discovered and shared by the Greeks.

Certainly Mignolo’s other “macronarratives” are extant in nineteenth-centurycolonialism and imperialism celebrated in the exhibition space devoted to France’scolonies, for instance, at the Exposition universelle, and in the rhetoric of equality andthe rights of man, now bound up ironically with political imperialism as the Napole-onic tradition of spreading rights (albeit through conquest) is a legacy that Napoleonthe Third would embrace rhetorically, if not in fact. In the aesthetic realm, as notedearlier, political exigencies influenced the conception of and layout of the Beaux-ArtsExhibition and awareness of official political ideologies, like Eclecticism, an approachwith egalitarian pretentions, influenced its coverage and thus judgments of taste.Baudelaire’s own difficulties with publication are an example of the politicized atmo-sphere of criticism and the consequences to those who step outside the bounds of thepolitically acceptable. Indeed, Le Pays which published Baudelaire’s first and thirdreview of the Beaux-Arts exhibition rejected the second on Ingres because of his acerbiccritique of “The Apotheosis of Napoleon I” and his philosophy of art (Mainardi 77;Pichois 1366). Baudelaire did publish the article in a little review, Le Portefeuille, butwas not hired by any other journal as a regular critic. As Mainardi remarks, “in a yearin which virtually every art critic in Paris managed to sign onto a journal for a lucrativesix-month stint of weekly review of the Exposition, Baudelaire, the most brilliant criticof the period, found himself excluded and unemployable. No wonder, then, that otherswere more discreet” (77).

Baudelaire’s targets included not only poor works by the most revered artist of theday,31 but in the first essay, the blindness of academic criticism, including thatinformed by contemporary aesthetic philosophy (“ces modernes professeurs-jurés

42 M. Murphy

d’esthétique” 577), nationalist hubris, and the ideology of progress and its serialversion of history. Concerning this latter theme, he asserts the dire epistemologicaleffects of the idea of progress: “Ce fanal obscur, invention du philosophisme actuel,breveté sans garantie de la Nature ou de tous les objets de la connaissance; la libertés’évanouit, le châtiment disparait” (580).32 In other words, the assumption that theWest is more advanced because of technological innovation, the results of industrial-ization, is widely accepted, but false, and leads to complacency in everyman who isassured of his superiority and ignorant of the consequences of his complicity in this“civilization.” For Baudelaire, the art exhibition, with contemporary art from Italy,Spain, and Germany that does not measure up to past works from those countries, isevidence of the fallacies of the ideology of progress. Such remarks underscore the needfor a nonwestern perspective, even though it may be mediated through the aesthetic. Itis not only the tired formulas of academic taste that he rejects, but the very epistemol-ogy underlying European notions of civilization.

In Mignolo’s account, Baudelaire’s ideal of the cosmopolitan critic would notsatisfy the requirements of a critical cosmopolitanism because the critic does notinhabit a position of exteriority, the position of the colonized. This argument,however, serves to essentialize identity. Baudelaire’s cosmopolitan critic wouldchange identity.33 Baudelaire imagines the experience of the intelligent and alert trav-eler as one in which the other culture slowly penetrates until “quelques milliersd’idées et de sensations enrichiront son dictionnaire de mortel, et même il est possibleque, dépassant la mesure et transformant la justice en révolte, il fasse comme leSicambre converti, qu’il brule ce qu’il avait adoré, et qu’il adore ce qu’il avait brulé”(577).34 In other words, Baudelaire limns the utter transformation into the sensibilityof the other such that the traveler’s original culture becomes anathema to him. Whilemost accounts of cosmopolitanism would not require such a complete transforma-tion of sensibility, the starkness of his rejection of the home culture is clear evidenceof a strong critique of national or provincial sensibilities and the epistemic orders towhich they are attached.

The power of critique from within the dominant culture, of course, is the intimacywith which the critic knows the hegemonic culture, the inside knowledge. Indeed, onemight return to Anderson’s argument for a detached cosmopolitanism as integral tocritique, and so the cosmopolitan is by definition detached to some degree from thehome culture, whether that of the imperial nation or the colonized, to considerMignolo’s ideal. I would not want to argue the advantage of one position over another,but simply that critical cosmopolitanism is possible both within and at the borders ofthe dominant culture.35

One might ask whether the aesthetic is the place to begin to form such a cosmopol-itan sensibility, and Baudelaire does make it clear that it is the exceptional individualwho is able to experience the other culture in this way, through observation of thecultural artifact, and thus not every visitor to the Exposition universelle would have thisexperience. But he does value a direct, unmediated reception of the strange orunknown, and so implies that such an experience is open to anyone willing to be opento it. Transforming cultural sensibilities may well be a necessary step in building an

Nineteenth-Century Contexts 43

ethical cosmopolitanism that avoids imposing the cultural norms of the dominanthome culture.

In 1857, Gautier himself perceived a cosmopolitan effect on art as a result of theExposition universelle:

The Universal Exposition of 1855 has provided us some elements of diversity. The nation-alities of art have been introduced and, after the first astonishment, have quietly studiedeach other. Everyone has tried to adopt the style of his neighbor and we will recognize inmore than one eminent work some traces of foreign influence. These cosmopolitanmixtures have produced some combinations and results difficult to classify in the ancientcategories. (qtd by Mainardi 118)

This version of a cosmopolitan influence is certainly weak in comparison with thetransformation of subjectivity desired by Baudelaire, although the unsettling of cate-gories clearly fits within his program. We do know, however, that the impact of theBeaux-Arts exhibition was weak in another way: it was much less popular than thePalais de l’Industrie. Prince Napoléon’s report records 4,180,117 visitors to the Expo-sition de l’Industrie, 935,601 to the Exposition des Beaux-Arts, and 46,612 to theMusée chinois (483). In the end, it was the products of different countries thatproved most fascinating to the public. Whether such observation led to a greaterunderstanding of other cultures or to a truly cosmopolitan sensibility is yet anothertopic.

Notes1. [1] “Let us add that Paris is the abode of a large colony of foreigners called there by business, plea-

sure, study, etc., that through its collections, museums, libraries, it lends itself more than anyother capital to synthetic studies of industry, the sciences and the arts; that through theurbanity of its manners, through its hospitality towards foreigners, our capital truly has acosmopolitan character.” (my translation)

2. [2] “We see, reversing the old maxim: If you want peace, prepare for war, an entirely modernspirit, in time of war peace prepared.”

3. [3] “These games, since their origin, were intended to render the inhabitants of the various partsof Greece fit for combat to defend their country. But, to this purpose, already so noble, wasjoined one of highest moral import. The founders of these games wanted all the tribes thattogether made up Greece to take part in these solemnities; and in effect the idea of these festi-vals, strongly imprinted on the spirit of the Greeks through religious traditions and throughcustom, was thereby retained for many centuries. Now the moral aim of these periodic assem-blies, whether at Olympia or at Corinth, was to soften the manners of the various Hellenictribes, so inclined to wage all-out war, by leading them little by little to visit one another, toparticipate in the same festivals, and finally to give up the fierce hatreds that divided them.Such was the first attempt to prepare men to accept the benefits of a more humane andpeaceful civilization.”

4. [4] This claim of the superiority of French taste and art and its evidence in manufactured goods,especially luxury items, is already widespread in the coverage of the earlier industrialexpositions of the July Monarchy (Murphy).

5. [5] “Let us take in visually the national genius of races, and, lamenting the dreariness of so muchin decline, let us weigh the work of the peace of peoples.”

6. [6] “the Portico where systems are debated, the studio where methods are worked out; she is thegreat nation of art.”

44 M. Murphy7. [7] “in decorating the town hall [literally the common house], to paint the lofty deeds of this Pari-

sian people who have already accomplished such great things, without counting those that itwill yet accomplish. Paris, this heart and brain of France and of the entire world, deservesmore than these useless things that fill its own palace.”

8. [8] the “people” who are “the nation that has ceaselessly saved the fatherland that the leadersoften persist in losing.”

9. [9] “heroic events achieved by this glorious legion called France.”10.[10] “I hate this man because his pictures have nothing whatever to do with painting (I would

prefer to call them a kind of brisk and frequent masturbation in paint, a kind of itching on theFrench skin)” (Mayne 94). All translations of Baudelaire’s The Salon of 1846 and The Exposi-tion universelle of 1855 are by Jonathan Mayne unless otherwise noted. All other translationsare my own.

11.[11] “he is the chronicler of your National glory, and that is the great thing. But what, I ask you,can that matter to the enthusiastic traveler, to the cosmopolitan spirit who prefers beauty toglory?” (Mayne 94).

12.[12] “There can be few occupations so interesting, so attractive, so full of surprises and revelationsfor a critic, a dreamer whose mind is given to generalization as well as to the study of details—or, to put it even better, to the idea of an universal order and hierarchy—as a comparison ofthe nations and their respective products” (Mayne 121).

13.[13] Baudelaire published three essays on the Exposition universelle, later collected in Curiositésesthétiques. The first and third appeared in Le Pays of May 26 and June 3, 1855; the second,critical of the art of Ingres, was rejected by Le Pays and appeared instead in Le Portefeuille ofAugust 12, 1855 (Claude Pichois, notes, 1366).

14.[14] “When I say ‘hierarchy’, I have no wish to assert the supremacy of any one nation overanother. Although Nature contains certain plants which are more or less holy, certain formsmore or less spiritual, certain animals more or less sacred; and although, following thepromptings of the immense universal analogy, it is legitimate for us to conclude that certainnations (vast animals, whose organisms are adequate to their surroundings) have beenprepared and educated by Providence for a determined goal—a goal more or less lofty, moreor less near to Heaven;—nevertheless all I wish to do here is to assert their equal utility in theeyes of Him who is indefinable, and the miraculous way in which they come to one another’said in the harmony of the universe” (Mayne 121).

15.[15] “But always some spontaneous, unexpected product of universal vitality would come to givethe lie to my childish and superannuated wisdom—that lamentable child of Utopia!” (Mayne123).

16.[16] This section contrasting Gautier’s review of the Chinese exhibit with Baudelaire’s hasappeared previously in “The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility andthe Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity,” in Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizingand Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor, edited by Kelly Comfort(Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 25–41; see 27–30.

17.[17] “Let him [the reader] imagine a modern Winckelmann (we are full of them; the nation over-flows with them; they are the idols of the lazy). What would he say, if faced with a product ofChina—something weird, strange, distorted in form, intense in color and sometimes delicateto the point of evanescence? And yet such a thing is a specimen of universal beauty; but inorder for it to be understood, it is necessary for the critic, for the spectator, to work a transfor-mation in himself which partakes of the nature of a mystery—it is necessary for him, bymeans of a phenomenon of the will acting upon the imagination, to learn of himself to parti-cipate in the surroundings which have given birth to this singular flowering. Few men havethe divine grace of cosmopolitanism in its entirety; but all can acquire it in different degrees.The best endowed in this respect are those solitary wanderers who have lived for years in theheart of forests, in the midst of illimitable prairies, with no other companion but their gun—contemplating, dissecting, writing. No scholastic veil, no university paradox, no academic

Nineteenth-Century Contexts 45

utopia has intervened between them and the complex truth. They know the admirable, eternaland inevitable relationship between form and function. Such people do not criticize; theycontemplate, they study” (Mayne 121–22).

18.[18] The Chinese museum in the Palais des Beaux-Arts consisted of a collection brought back byMontigni, former consul at Shanghai and Ning-Po, according to Pichois who cites an articleby Yoshio Abé in Le Monde, 28 November 1968 (notes, 2, 1368).

19.[19] “They have invented everything and perfected nothing; they understood the compass,gunpowder, printing, gas, long before the rest of the world had any idea of these preciousdiscoveries.”

20.[20] “They have a bizarre, eccentric and patient genius, unlike that of any other people, and whichinstead of opening like a flower, writhes like a mandrake root. Lacking interest in seriousbeauty, they excel in curiosities; if they have nothing to send to museums, they can, on theother hand, fill all the bric-a-brac shops with baroque and deformed creations, of the mostwhimsical sort. You have no doubt seen this dwarf of the River of Pearls enclosed in a porcelainvase so that his growth is curiously stunted; this is the most apt image of the Chinese genius.”

21.[21] “Other nations, beginning with the Greeks, who attained it, seek ideal beauty; the Chineseseek ideal ugliness; they think that art should be as distant as possible from nature, that it isuseless to represent, since the original and the copy do the same thing.”

22.[22] “to put in the same frame objects that perspective separates”— and use of color—“A sky-bluetiger, an apple-green lion, are much more singular than if they were simply painted in theirnatural hues.” He concludes: “the ugly is infinite and its monstrous combinations offer to thefancy unlimited possibilities.”

23.[23] “the truly serious part of the collection composed of the most rare and precious objects inenamel, bronze, porcelain, lacquer, of cabinets, and furniture of all sorts.”

24.[24] “for pure arabesque, for whimsical ornamentation in bronze, porcelain, wood, lacquer andhard stones, the Chinese are inimitable masters, and one can only admire the thousandproducts of their inexhaustibly fertile imagination.”

25.[25] “as closed to Europeans as the harems of the pashas of Asia.”26.[26] “two bronzes by Jules Cordier, a mandarin and his wife, perfect types of the Middle Empire

that grimace with a jovial gravity on their pedestals.”27.[27] “wonderful collection … takes you across the Great Wall of China for a few moments.”28.[28] “The beautiful is always bizarre” (my translation).29.[29] “depend[ent] upon the environment, the climate, the manners, the race, the religion and the

temperament of the artist” (Mayne 124).30.[30] “[H]is wit is a cosmopolitan mirror of beauty” (my translation). The point that Baudelaire

goes on to make is that Gautier’s witty mirror reflects the Middle Ages and the Renaissance aswell as ancient Greece, and so his sensibility is at once classical and romantic.

31.[31] In the Awards Ceremony of the Exposition, Ingres was named “Grand Officier of the Légiond’honneur,” an honor which effectively recognized him as the greatest living artist (Mainardi112–3).

32.[32] “This modern lantern throws a stream of darkness upon all the objects of knowledge; libertymelts away, discipline vanishes” (Mayne 126).

33.[33] This idea of the chameleon nature of the cosmopolitan reappears in Le Peintre de la viemoderne; Baudelaire describes Constantin Guys as “par nature, très voyageur et très cosmopo-lite” (689) (“naturally, very much a traveller and very cosmopolitan”), and a “kaléidoscopedoué de conscience, qui, à chacun de ses mouvements, représente la vie multiple et la grâcemouvante de tous les éléments de la vie” … “un moi insatiable de non-moi, qui, à chaqueinstant, le rend et l’exprime en images plus vivantes que la vie elle-même, toujours instable etfugitive” (692) (“kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, who, in each of his movements,represents the multiple life and the moving grace of all the elements of life… a self insatiable ofthe non-self, who, at every instant renders it and expresses it in images more alive than lifeitself, always unstable and fugitive.”)

46 M. Murphy34.[34] “several thousands of ideas and sensations will enrich his earthly dictionary, and it is even

possible that, going a step too far and transforming justice into revolt, he will do like theconverted Sicambrian and burn what he had formerly adored—and adore what he hadformerly burnt” (Mayne 123).

35.[35] Mignolo speaks of “border thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those localhistories that had to deal all along with global designs” (744).

Works Cited

Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment.Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006.Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres Complètes. Ed. Claude Pichois. Vol 2. Paris: Pléiade-Gallimard, 1975.———. Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire. Trans.

Jonathan Mayne. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP–Phaidon, 1965.Bonaparte, Prince Napoléon. Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1855 présenté à l’Empereur par

S.A.I. le prince Napoléon. Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1857.Calhoun, Craig. “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Toward a Critique of Actually

Existing Cosmopolitanism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002): 869–897.Delécluze, Etienne J. Les Beaux-Arts dans les deux mondes en 1855. Paris: Charpentier, 1856.Du Camp, Maxime. Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition universelle de 1855. Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1855.Gautier, Théophile. Les Beaux-Arts en Europe. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857.Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de. Études d’Art: Le Salon de 1852—La Peinture à l’Exposition de 1855.

Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1893.Mainardi, Patricia. Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867.

New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987.Mignolo, Walter D. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitan-

ism.” Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 721–748.Murphy, Margueritte. “Commodity Aesthetics: The Industrial Exhibitions of Paris, 1834–1844,

Reviewed.” Forthcoming in Journal of European Studies.Le Travail universel. Revue complète des œuvres de l’art et de l’industrie, exposées à Paris en 1855. Paris:

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