48. "Wholly given up to the worship of pleasure": Paris in 1855 & 1867

In 1855 Alice made her first trip abroad, going with John to Paris.  By this time they had been married nearly seven years and had four children.  When she got back to England, she wrote on 25 August from the home of her sister-in-law Ellen Tubbs to her "beloved sister" Alice Wills, who had been looking after some of the Hopkinson children at her house in Clifton, the affluent suburb of Bristol.  The trip had been something of a culture shock to her:

I have enjoyed our trip very much and am really very glad to have seen Paris.  But I love England all the better for the change.  Paris seems wholly given up to the worship of pleasure. [1]

In August 1867 John went to Paris with young John and Alfred to join some of the Wills family and to see Messrs Wren & Hopkinson's stall at the Paris Exposition ("quite one of the popular attractions in the Engineering Department" said John).  Young John was by now 18 and was very taken with the French, writing

I like the French very well; they are very civil and seem to enjoy themselves heartily; they do not appear to be troubled with self-consciousness in any form.[2]

Between Rue de l'Échelle and Rue Saint Augustin: demolition. 1877. by Charles Marville

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the great Napoleon's nephew, after an adventurous life had become President of France in 1848 and made himself Emperor by coup d'état in 1852.  He had set about modernising France and radically changing the old mediaeval city of Paris.  

In 1854 Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann had begun work – the city would be a vast building site for twenty years – and John Hopkinson as an engineer and city councillor was inspired by the Haussmann vision and the new grands boulevards:

I am delighted with the magnificence of Paris – the boldness, and straightforwardness of the ideas in the streets, railways, etc and the development of the national power of arrangement and organization.  I should like to apprentice a few of our town councillors or aldermen here for a few years.  London and Manchester might well take a lesson.  I must go through some of the buildings in course of construction to see what new dodges can be picked up.  We English have a good deal to learn and one does not wonder that the French sometimes talk about our insular notions and prejudices.  There is nothing like going from home to have the conceit knocked out of one.  I should almost like to live here for a few months or years to understand better some of the social and governmental questions. [3]

Alfred aged about 16
(taken 1867 or 1868)

This was the boys' first visit abroad and it gave them a glimpse of the startling events that were soon to come.  Alfred, remembering foreshadowings of the revolutionary Paris Commune that seized power after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, wrote 

Even then there was a strange sense of the undercurrents of feeling in Paris which came to the surface three years later. [4]

He remembered very well the British public's fascination with the Emperor Napoleon III, that "man of mystery", and knew people who were caught up in the conspiracy theories that abounded: 

By many earnest people the Prophetic Books and the Apocalypse were searched, with what they thought to be complete success, for references to the part he would play before the final battle of Armageddon.  One book which an excellent clergyman of my acquaintance and members of his family read with thrilling interest was 'Napoleon, the Destined Monarch of the World'.  The letters of the Emperor's name were taken to represent Greek numerals which made up the number of the Beast 666. [5]

There were many British people who thought that, like his uncle the first Napoleon, this Napoleon was a very real threat.  Alfred remembered the uneasiness of the mood in Paris.  He and Johnnie were on the balcony of their pension on the Avenue Wagram talking with the owner's daughter when she said "as though it were a matter of course, that a revolution would very shortly take place and that it might be expected at any time". [6]

At the time of their trip to Paris, their younger siblings were under the age of 14 – Albert was only four and May was three.  Not very many letters from the later 1860s and the later 1870s survived, so we have hardly any information on the younger children's holidays.

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 25

[2] ibid., p. 50

[3] ibid.

[4] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 20

[5] ibid., p. 21

[6] ibid., p. 22