Chapter Five: The Local Politics of Berlioz’s Symphonie militaire

I emphasize this matter at the outset because, while the titular expression is not my chief interest in this chapter, those titular words are not without significance. Jeffrey Kallberg has argued that Frédéric Chopin might have removed the word funèbre from his own famous march because he wanted to put as much distance as possible between his work (the third movement of the B-flat-minor Piano Sonata, composed in 1839 and published in 1840, now one of the most celebrated funeral marches in the world) and Berlioz’s march, which he and George Sand heard in open rehearsal at the Salle Vivienne, on July 26, 1840.3 Kallberg, “Chopin’s March,” 15. Kallberg goes on to suggest that by not at all mentioning Henri Reber’s arrangement of Chopin’s great march, which accompanied Chopin’s funeral procession at the Église de la Madeleine, on October 30, 1849, Berlioz may have been remembering Chopin’s disdain of his own marche funèbre.4 CG 8:292–293 (Berlioz to his sister, October 30, 1849). But this is far-fetched: Berlioz was sincerely chagrined by the death of his friend, and, while he was indeed capable of bearing a grudge, he would not have remembered that moment from the summer of 1840 at the funeral ceremony in the autumn of 1849. Had he wanted to say something impertinent, he would have focused upon the arrangement by Reber, which we would suspect he heard as a dérangement. (By a later arrangement, however, he seems to have been impressed.)5 See Eusèbe Lucas, “Berlioz,” Le Figaro (April 25, 1878). Be this as it may, here, as always in French culture, words matter.

On the broader subject of Berlioz’s politics and the politics of Berlioz, artistic and other, interest over the years has been slight. The issues heat up every hundred years or so, as in 1903, for example, at the centenary of his birth, when Raoul Gunsbourg staged La Damnation de Faust in Paris to the displeasure of the purists (who know and appreciate that it is not an opera) and to the delight of the public (who want everything to be operatic); or as in 2003, when the directors of an international Berlioz committee recommended to the President of the French Republic that he order the translation of Berlioz’s remains to the Panthéon, where the grands hommes of the nation receive the posthumous reconnaissance de la patrie. That president, Jacques Chirac—not many people know that he once worked as a soda-jerk in Harvard Square—was apparently “harmonophobic,” to use the term Berlioz applied to Napoléon III, but he did agree to the committee’s recommendation, and in an elaborate press conference held in Paris in February of 2000, his then Minister of Culture, Catherine Trautmann, announced the decision to the world.

The panthéonisation of Berlioz, which I have considered in the Prologue of this book, was proclaimed at precisely the same time that Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party—which many observers deemed a neo-Nazi organization—announced that it was forming a governing coalition in Austria, home to the famous Salzburg Festival, where, it happens, Berlioz’s Les Troyens was scheduled to be the principal offering in the summer of 2000. The artistic director of the festival, Gérard Mortier, immediately announced his resignation: “Je pars pour des raisons absolument politiques”—“I am leaving for reasons that are purely political.”6 Le Web de l’Humanité (February 16, 2000). And while he later changed his mind, others continued to protest the ongoing festival, of whom one—a certain Gottfried Wagner, the great-grandson of a certain Richard Wagner—went so far as to disapprove of the performance and television transmission of Berlioz’s great opera because of its imperialistic ideology, an ideology, he claimed, which is that of a “so-called providential ruler who would found a supposedly imperishable world order.”7 Jean Kahn, Philippe Oliver, and Gottfried Wagner, “À Salzbourg, cet été, comme si de rien n’était,” Le Monde (June 21, 2000). Despite this surprising protest, Les Troyens was both performed at the Grosses Festspielhaus and televised from Salzburg to the world at large. Herbert Wernicke’s mise-en-scène employed machine guns and Nazi uniforms, with colors in blue and black presumably representative of the newly empowered Haider coalition, but no further protests were lodged, and the politics of Berlioz receded from page one.

The ideology of opera is an issue that is very much in vogue, and it is an issue that merits more careful and dispassionate study than some modern directors tend to give it. I shall take up the ideology of Les Troyens in chapter 10, hoping to bring clarity to a subject far less exhausted than the ideology of Die Meistersinger, for example, the debate over which has generated both much heat and, quite frankly, much light. Even the ideology of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has at times entered the arena of the controversy, as, for example, when it was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, in May 2000, in the former concentration camp at Mauthausen. That performance was intended as an act of Austrian atonement, but the ceremony was compromised and tempers flared when the aforementioned Jörg Haider’s party came to power during that very year.8 See, for example, Ellison, “Specter of Austria’s Nazi Past,” 25–28.

Berlioz’s Symphonie militaire, because it is not enshrined in celebrity, is a far less incendiary device. The occasion for which it was commissioned—a grand celebration of the tenth anniversary of the July Revolution—seems to have been the brain-child of one of Comte de Montalivet’s successors, Charles de Rémusat, journalist, philosopher, homme de lettres, député, and Minister of the Interior in the cabinet formed by Adolphe Thiers on March 1, 1840. (We shall meet another of Montalivet’s successors, another administrator apparently well-disposed to Berlioz, Charles-Marie Tanneguy Duchâtel, in chapter 8, when we consider the composer’s “mission” to Germany.) The Thiers cabinet would last for only two hundred forty-two days, as the newspapers were later at pains to emphasize (“la durée du ministère Thiers a été de 242 jours, c’est-à-dire de 7 mois et 28 jours”),9 Le Siècle (November 1, 1840). for the political tensions of the moment would soon cause Thiers to be replaced, in October 1840, by the man who had lately been French ambassador to England, François Guizot. For at least one historian, the transfer of power to Guizot brought an end to the founding principles of the July Revolution.10 Charléty, La Monarchie de Juillet, 176, quoted by Karila-Cohen, “Charles de Rémusat,” 422.

The Thiers ministry fell, among other reasons, because of the debate over France’s role in what was known at the time as “the crisis of the Orient,” an exigency provoked by the conclusion of a quadruple alliance among England, Russia, Prussia, and Austria designed to guarantee the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire and thus to maintain the balance of power in the Middle East in the face of the turmoil caused by Egypt’s insistence on continuing to control that part of Syria which the Turks felt was their domain. The announcement of this alliance, concluded on July 15, 1840, and posted in the Paris press on July 25, caused a furor, not because France was opposed to maintaining the balance of power (which is why a compromise was soon reached and the quadruple alliance was soon dissolved, in March 1841), but because the alliance reminded many in power of the force of the invaders of 1814. Some editorialists took the quadruple alliance as a casus belli; the project to complete the fortifications of Paris was given new impetus, and reserves were called up in order to prepare an army of some five hundred thousand men. It is precisely because of the apparent urgency of military preparedness that none other than Hector Berlioz was sentenced to spend a night in prison! He had failed to appear for duty as a member of the Garde Nationale, two days after conducting the first performance of the Symphonie militaire, on July 28, 1840. This came to the attention of the authorities in the autumn, and, in September, Berlioz was officially notified of his delinquency—his violation of the law of the law of March 22, 1831, that obliged all Frenchmen between twenty and sixty years of age to defend the constitutional monarchy, and those in the “service de reserve,” in “extraordinary circumstances,” to make exceptional tours of duty, in the commune of their legal residence:

The first public announcement of the commissioning of Berlioz by the Minister of the Interior is found in Le Ménestrel of May 24, 1840, but it is clear that the composer had had word from Comte Dûchatel, regarding a new symphony designed to honor the régime, some time before that date. On March 11, 1840, he mentioned to his sister Adèle that “a thousand and one projects” were tormenting his soul.13 CG 2:632. One of these was the concoction of a festival, at the Panthéon, for which he sought official permission at the end of that month, and for which he may conceivably have intended a performance of what would become the Symphonie militaire.14 CG 2:637–638. On April 4, 1840, he wrote to his now familiar acquaintance, Comte de Montalivet—who had sponsored his candidacy at the Théâtre-Italien in 1838, and who now occupied the post of Intendant Général de la Liste Civile, that is to say the director of the royal office of administrative pensions and subventions—to ask for authorization to give a concert, on May 10, in the concert hall of the Conservatoire. While it was not possible for Montalivet to authorize this request, it was possible for him to suggest to Comte Duchâtel that Berlioz be commissioned to compose a magisterial work for the forthcoming anniversary, the tenth, of Les Trois Glorieuses.15 CG 8:181. Be this as it may, the official commission for the work was not signed by the Minister of the Interior, oddly enough, until July 11, only seventeen days before the actual celebration was to occur:

We do know from chapter 50 of the Mémoires, in which Berlioz describes the prescript and the performance, and from further correspondence, that the composer appreciated both Rémusat’s commission and his confidence, even though, in Rémusat’s own Mémoires de ma vie, the author asserts that he deserved no particular credit for being a supporter of music. Rémusat was a habitué of the operatic theaters of the capital, it seems, and does tell us that Berlioz conducted the Symphonie militaire “like the maestro of an Italian opera”:

Berlioz had of course conceived this symphony for performance on the urban stage of Paris, and specifically for the predetermined trajectory of the funeral procession that began on July 28, 1840, at 8 a.m., at the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, just east of the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, that moved westward to the place de la Concorde, up the rue Royale to the Église de la Madeleine, then along the semicircular grands boulevards—the Boulevards de la Madeleine, des Capucines, des Italiens, du Montmartre, du Faubourg Possonnière, de Bonne Nouvelle, de Saint-Denis, de Saint-Martin, du Temple, des Filles du Calvaire, and de Beaumarchais—to the Place de la Bastille, arriving there three hours later, at 11 a.m. The trajectory was first and foremost practical, because the gigantic sarcophagus—designed by Berlioz’s friend the architect Joseph-Louis Duc to accommodate the bodies of the four or five hundred victims of the July Revolution (the precise number is a matter of dispute) who were to be newly entombed on that day under the Colonne de Juillet, likewise designed by Duc—could not have passed through any but the widest of streets. And, like the great parades of the first three years of the new regime, the trajectory was also symbolic, extending as it did from the Louvre, epitomizing the Ancien régime, to the Bastille, exemplifying the liberating force of the revolutions of 1789 and 1830—all the while traversing districts that were then under modification and modernization in accordance with a new urban self-consciousness that most of us tend to associate with Baron Haussmann and Napoléon III, but that was already being felt during the reign of Louis-Philippe.22 Fauquet, “Du Louvre à la Bastille,” 59–63.

The score and parts for the Symphonie militaire of 1840 are lost. Hugh Macdonald’s critical edition of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale is based on materials from the revised version of 1842. It is thus worth mentioning that while the original score was presumably set down like others from Berlioz’s middle period, the original parts had to have been written on small sheets glued to cardboard, as would have been needed for the wind and brass players who would be marching through the streets. Such cardboard parts have been preserved for three celebratory marches written at almost the same time by Auber, Halévy, and Adam, and it is at least possible that the Berlioz parts, too, are still waiting to be found, in the basement of a library or archive, in a large and dusty wooden box.

In chapter 50 of the Mémoires Berlioz describes the open-air performance of the symphony and the miserable conditions that led him to conclude, in an article for the Revue et Gazette musicale of July 10, 1842 (using a phrase later incorporated into chapter 66 of the Traité d’instrumentation), that music for the out-of-doors simply does not exist: “Voilà pourquoi la musique en plein air n’existe pas.” Years earlier, in Le Rénovateur of June 22, 1834, he had said the same thing: “Music in the out-of-doors is simply not possible.” Chapter 50 of the Mémoires was written many years after the event, and some of the facts may have been slightly altered in order to maintain the amusing and ironical tone of the book. But Berlioz’s comment that the playing of the Apothéose was muzzled by a noisy assault from the fifty snare-drums of the Garde Nationale, which began a premature recessional, is certainly true. The anonymous reporter for Berlioz’s own newspaper, the Journal des débats, wrote that the Apothéose was “the most brilliant part of this magnificent work [and that] even the passing crowd saluted it with their cheers.”23 Journal des débats (August 3, 1840). But the critic for Le Courrier français said that because of the exit of the Garde Nationale, “the end of the work was hidden under the sound of the drums.”

The presence of the Garde Nationale, some sixty thousand men, according to Le Constitutionnel, was of course not fortuitous—and for two reasons. First, the ceremony was itself an indirect tribute to the Garde Nationale, the citizens’ militia which, under Général La Fayette, had so strongly supported the new “citizen-King” in the aftermath of the three-day revolution, in August of 1830, and which had thus been instrumental in stabilizing the “révolution harmonieuse,” as Berlioz called it, whose tenth anniversary was now in full celebration. Second, as the archival documents make clear,24 AnF, F21 718. the Minister of the Interior was seriously concerned about security: Louis-Philippe had already survived five attempted assassinations, and on this occasion made an appearance, as the cortège passed by, only from a window at the Louvre. It was also for reasons of security that Berlioz and his musicians were ordered by the Ministry to appear in uniform, so as to be readily distinguished from the crowd.

If not that, then why, we may ask, did the Minister of the Interior turn to Berlioz on this occasion? Why did Charles de Rémusat, who at the time was engaged in the eventually unsuccessful effort of rejuvenating the régime of Louis-Philippe by returning to the more parliamentary and less authoritarian government of the years immediately after 1830, by excluding the King from certain meetings of the cabinet, by readjusting the laws that guaranteed liberty and the laws that maintained order, by reminding the legislature of Louis-Philippe’s own participation in the Revolution of 1789 in order to reaffirm the constitutional aspect of constitutional monarchy, why, at that juncture, did Rémusat select Berlioz to provide the music for the fête nationale of July 28, 1840—which he hoped would renew the youthful spirit of the Monarchie de Juillet?

Despite his musical modesty, Rémusat was not naïve in artistic matters. He personally selected those of whom busts and statues would ornament the Chambre des Pairs, then under reconstruction. He knew well that military music would lend pomp and circumstance to his self-styled “imposing event” that would confound the enemies of the state and the enemies of the government, as he later reported to Guizot.28 Karila-Cohen, “Charles de Rémusat,” 418. He must also have known, or have been told, that Berlioz was a composer of “architectural” music in a city where political leaders, from the time of Louis XIV to the time of François Mitterrand and beyond, considered architecture the “first among all arts.”29 François Mitterrand, interview in Le Nouvel Observateur (December 1984): 45: “Architecture is an art that I admire. For me, it is the first among the arts.” And he was presumably aware of Berlioz’s relationship with the heir to the throne, the Duc d’Orléans, who had attended a number of Berlioz’s concerts and had compensated him with what were genteelly called encouragements—sums of money considerably greater than the normal price of a ticket. Indeed, the published score of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale was eventually dedicated to the Duc d’Orléans, arguably the most popular member of the royal family, who would die in a tragic carriage accident on July 13, 1842.

In July 1840, Berlioz was thus an almost obvious candidate for Rémusat’s grand occasion. Had he been aware of Berlioz’s settings of the Marseillaise, Le Cinq Mai (the cantata on the death of Napoléon, of which the dedication was offered to Louis-Philippe), and of course the Grande Messe des morts of 1837, then perhaps he would have assumed that Berlioz even shared his desire to revivify the ideals of 1830. I cannot prove this, but a fan letter that Berlioz received from an avowed leftist, after hearing the Apothéose of the Symphonie militaire, offers evidence: Auguste Luchet, an ardent republican, wrote to Berlioz to say that only he had fully understood “the people of July,” and that only he had known how to celebrate “in a noble and dignified way” the tenth anniversary of the régime. “You took your task seriously,” Luchet wrote to Berlioz, “and you accomplished it as a citizen and as a poet. Bless you a thousand times!”30 CG 2:658 (August 12, 1840). A not completely unknown writer and journalist, Luchet figures nowhere in the Berlioz literature, but in 1840 he believed that the composer was a kindred spirit. In fact, he was mistaken, for while Luchet would soon welcome the Revolution of 1848 with open arms (which he did as Governor of the Château de Fontainebleau, at a celebratory banquet that was held there on March 12, 1848),31 “Toast porté par le citoyen Auguste Luchet au banquet national de la ville de Fontainebleau,” in Delvau, Les Murailles révolutionnaires, 2:245–247. Berlioz would decry it as marking the end of an era of civilization. Still, some of the reviews of the performance of the Symphonie militaire would second Luchet’s notion. In the Revue du progrès, for example, Berlioz was seen as one of those artists who “move their century forward.” In the liberal National, Berlioz’s old enemy Joseph Mainzer had kind words for the work, as did Athanase Mourier, in L’Univers, and as did others in Le Commerce, La France musicale, and La Revue du dix-neuvième siècle.

Berlioz himself, while pleased with that day’s labors, spilled the beans, as it were, in a letter to his father written on July 30, 1840:

In the letter of July 30 that we have cited, Berlioz articulates the hope that he will be asked to contribute to the forthcoming ceremony. Writing to his father a few weeks later, on August 18, 1840, he laments: “I’ve still heard nothing about the ceremony for Napoléon. I have the feeling that they are going to opt for some silly trifle. Rossini is ridiculing [the whole matter] and is doing nothing, or at least that is what his friends have told me. In two weeks it will be too late to begin anything serious at all, since the ceremony is to take place in December.”33 CG 9:185–186. I have suggested “the whole matter” for words in the autograph that are illegible.

For that ceremony—which occurred at Les Invalides on December 15, 1840, and which in the history books has eclipsed the ceremony of July 28—the three marches by Auber, Halévy, and Adam, to which I earlier alluded, were played. (In his memoirs, the Prince de Joinville, who described the event, mentioned no music.) Berlioz, who seems to have attended the ceremony, had heard the marches in rehearsal two days earlier, on December 13, 1840. A few days later he revealed to his sister that at the end of November, he, Berlioz, had finally been asked to write a triumphal march for the occasion, as he had imagined in July and August, but that he had refused to do so “on the pretext,” he admits, of such short notice:

Richard Wagner, whose name and posthumous fame were well known to the ignominious German Führer, heard at least one of the concert performances that followed the outdoor première of the Symphonie militaire, on August 7 and 14, and what he said of it has resonated over the years: “I gladly predict that this July Symphony will continue to live and provide inspiration as long as there exists a nation that calls itself France.”39 Dresdener Abendzeitung (June 14, 1841), quoted in Wagner Writes from Paris, 133 (I have slightly altered the translation). The oft-cited comment is found in an essay that is at pains to emphasize Berlioz’s essential “Frenchness,” by which Wagner seems to mean an “ebullience” that leads to astounding but superficial effects. And yet the German—most of whose own astounding writing for wind and brass was yet to come—was apparently attracted to the Symphonie militaire precisely because it was popular in the sense of appealing to the French equivalent of “das Volk,” or to some sort of “public consciousness” that he associated with the culture of ancient Greece, and that became a central element of his own aesthetic doctrine. Indeed, in Wagner’s comment on Berlioz’s Frenchness, it is possible to see an admiration of a kind of national identity to which das junge Deutschland and Wagner himself would aspire.40 Millington, Wagner, 11–12. As a composer, Wagner was surely more impressed by Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, which, as Egon Voss suggests, had an immediate impact on the German’s decision to begin a Faust Symphony.41 Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Werke, 18/2, ed. Egon Voss (Mainz: Schott, 1997), vii. Roméo et Juliette, many have said, had a later impact on the composition of Tristan und Isolde. I furthermore hear an echo of Berlioz’s military music in Wagner’s Trauermusik of 1844, scored for numbers of winds and brasses not dramatically different from those required for the Symphonie militaire.

In the twentieth century, Wagner’s brand of nationalism had nefarious consequences for which his personal responsibility, without entering into that ongoing debate, is at best circumscribed. Berlioz’s “patriotism,” on display in the Symphonie militaire, had no such consequences at all. Our composer became excessively anti-republican in 1848 because the party of order had been overthrown, and, in his mind, only the party of order was conducive to a productive musical community. He nonetheless chose, during that revolutionary season, to return from exile in England “to that country which is still called France,” as he put it, “and which is, after all, my own.”42 CG 3:555.

To conclude this chapter, I return to the immediate afterlife of the première of the Symphonie militaire in 1840 and, specifically, to the Opéra de Paris, where, on the first of November, Berlioz directed a colossal music festival, with an ensemble of four hundred fifty singers and instrumentalists, that featured works by Gluck (the first act of Iphigénie en Tauride), Handel (a double chorus from the oratorio Athalie), Palestrina (the madrigal Alla riva del Tebro), and himself: four movements of the Requiem, most of Roméo et Juliette, and, as it was listed in the program printed in the Revue et Gazette musicale of October 23, 1840, the Symphonie militaire in its entirety. The orchestra was preparing to commence the last-mentioned work when Louis Bergeron, the well-known radical republican who was an editor at the republican-leaning newspaper Le Siècle, approached Émile de Girardin, the editor of the Louis-Philippard newspaper La Presse, and, in a premediated act of belligerence, slapped his face. He did so because Girardin’s newspaper had without evidence associated Bergeron with Marius Darmès’s recent attempt to assassinate Louis-Philippe, on October 15, 1840, while the royal carriage was on the way from the Louvre to Saint-Cloud.

The incident at the Opéra was mentioned in all of the Parisian papers; each put its own spin on precisely what took place. We had to wait until the publication in 2017 of Louis Bergeron: Un regicide sous Louis-Philippe, by Jean-Michel Miel, to find an account that places the matter in its full historical context. Eight years earlier, in 1832, Bergeron had been accused of attempting to assassinate Louis-Philippe, but, at the trial, for lack of proof, he was found not guilty. By alluding to Bergeron’s possible culpability in the earlier episode, Girardin was flirting with defamation. Having at first attempted to challenge Girardin to a duel—a challenge Girardin rejected because he had earlier put to death another newspaperman and wished to duel no more—Bergeron thus publicly insulted the famous journalist with the slap, regretting with an odd sort of gallantry the necessity of delivering the blow in the presence of his adversary’s wife. The republican zealot was arrested on November 9, 1840, put on trial, condemned to a fine of fifty francs, and sent to prison for a term of two years. His appeal of the verdict led, not to a reduction, but to a hardening of the sentence from two years to three—which he served in full, at Sainte-Pélagie, the prison in the Latin Quarter that had once been home to the Marquis de Sade.

Unfortunately, this political provocation overshadowed the press coverage of the musical event—Berlioz’s grand festival, which was the first of its kind. In chapter 51 of the Mémoires, Berlioz gives a lengthy account of the rehearsals, the performance, and the striking incident we have mentioned. In an annotation in his own copy of the Mémoires, Jacques Offenbach wrote that it was Habeneck, of all people, who “paid Bergeron” for the disturbance!43 Mémoires, 481. This speaks to Offenbach’s wry sense of humor, but it does remind us that for the future composer of The Tales of Hoffmann, aware of the tensions between the controversial composer and the famous conductor, the musical world took precedence. That was of course true for Berlioz as well: to a letter from Henry Forbes, the organist at Saint Luke’s Church in London and conductor of the Società Armonica who, in March and June 1840, had given the first performances in England, in the Hanover Square Rooms, of Berlioz’s overtures Les Francs-Juges and Waverley, and who near the end of that year had asked if Berlioz had written music for wind instruments alone, the composer replied, on January 15, 1841:

By the time Berlioz’s symphony was published as a Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, in 1843, Wagner was no longer living in Paris. The new and now definitive version of the work was dedicated to Louis-Philippe’s eldest son, Ferdinand-Philippe d’Orléans, with whom Berlioz had been in friendly contact since at least 1833, and from whom Berlioz had regularly received encouragements in the form of both compliments and cash.46 Bloom, “Berlioz and Officialdom,” 134–146. Shortly before his death in the carriage accident we have mentioned, the Duc d’Orléans had accepted the dedication of the work, which Berlioz forever afterward referred to as “the Duc d’Orléans’ symphony.” Writing to his brother-in-law Marc Suat one month after the accident, Berlioz noted wistfully: “I simply cannot tell you how sad I felt after this tragic event…”47 CG 2:727. The ellipses speak volumes: had this art-loving sovereign succeeded his father as King of the French, Berlioz, apparently liked and respected by the Duke, might well have enjoyed a career less fraught with obstacles of the material kind.

Or would he! Despite support from Armand Bertin, editor of the powerful Journal des débats, from François Guizot, the then Foreign Minister of France, from Abel-François Villemain, the past and future Minister of Public Education, and from the Duc d’Orléans himself, Berlioz, in the summer of 1842, was refused the position of Inspecteur de Chant or director of the vocal programs in the public schools of Paris. At the time, Berlioz’s competitors were the vocal pedagogues Joseph Mainzer, Auguste Panseron, Frédéric Massimino, and Joseph Hubert, the directeur-adjoint to the former Inspecteur, Guillaume-Louis Bocquillon-Wilhem, who had died on April 26, 1842. In May, the Conseil Municipal, charged with the replacement, reduced the future Inspecteur’s salary from six thousand francs to thirty-five hundred,48 Le Ménestrel (May 22, 1842). but this did not cause the competitors to withdraw. That Council—composed of thirty-six members of whom two, named by the King, served as president and vice-president—had limited powers, and usually reacted to propositions made by the Préfet de la Seine (at the time Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Comte de Rambuteau, who Berlioz believed had a favorable opinion of him),49 CG 2:721. and the Préfet de Police (at the time Gabriel Delessert, with whom Berlioz would later have only tepid relations).50 CG 3:197. Even though he had visited most of them in person, Berlioz reported to his sister Nanci, the members of the Council had apparently “decided in advance” that the former Inspecteur would be replaced by his directeur-adjoint; “that the modest requirements of the position did not require the talents of a great musician.”51 CG 2:723. We know nothing of what actually took place during the Council’s deliberations. Their outcome was not announced until November. The view from here is that the national authorities, among whom Berlioz had prominent supporters, were overruled by the neighborhood commissioners. Tip O’Neil was right. “All politics is local.”