Seven Ages of Paris (46 page)

* Edmond was now writing alone, his beloved brother Jules having died painfully of syphilis earlier in the summer.

† Duc de Magenta, general commanding the army at Sedan.

RESISTANCE

A possible answer to the second question was provided by the balloons of Paris—which were to constitute probably the most illustrious, most courageous and most inventive single episode of the siege. To most people today, the Siege of Paris prompts two main images: the eating of cats and rats by starving citizens, and the use of balloons. If the first epitomizes the depths a collapsing civilization can reach, the second symbolizes man’s capacity for courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. The balloons of Paris would come close to being the nation’s “finest hour” of the whole war.

In Paris, seven balloons had been located, though most of them were in various states of disrepair. One of them, the Neptune, was sufficiently patched up, however, to be floated out of Paris on 23 September, over the heads of gaping Prussians. Its pilot, Durouf, landed safely at Evreux beyond the enemy’s reach with 125 kilograms of despatches, after a three-hour flight. Four other balloons took off in quick succession, with (astonishingly enough) none of their crews being shot down, captured or otherwise coming to grief. The blockade seemed to have been broken and a means of communicating with the provinces created.

Three days after Durouf’s successful flight, the Minister of Posts in Paris set up a Balloon Post. Among the first to be invited to send a letter was the eighty-six-year-old daughter of the balloon’s inventor,
Mlle.
de Montgolfier. Balloons were soon taking off at a rate of two or three a week, usually from the foot of the Solferino Tower on top of Montmartre, or from outside the Gare du Nord or d’Orléans. Made of varnished cotton, because silk was unobtainable, and filled with highly explosive coal-gas, the balloons were capable of unpredictable motion in all three dimensions, none of which was controllable—in inexperienced hands they had a disagreeable habit of shooting suddenly up to six thousand feet, then falling back again to almost ground level.

To manufacture the balloons, Eugène Godard, veteran of some 800 flights, established an assembly line in the deserted Gare d’Orléans, while all over Paris small ancillary workshops laboured heroically. At the Gare du Nord, where the disused rails were rusted over, with grass growing between them, the finished balloons were varnished after being laid out, partially inflated, like rows of immense whales. In the station waiting-rooms teams of sailors were detailed to braid ropes and halliards. Gas for one balloon alone consumed the equivalent of seven tonnes of coal, out of Paris’s total stocks of some 73,000 tonnes. For each satisfactory product, the factory received 4,000 francs (of which 300 were earmarked for the pilot), but there was a penalty clause imposing a fifty-franc fine for each day that delivery fell behind schedule. (In fact, the economics of the operation proved highly favourable to the government, since each balloon could carry 100,000 letters, bringing in a revenue of 20,000 francs.)

The most intractable problem was that the balloons offered only a one-way method of communication. Right up to the capitulation of Paris, balloonists were still trying to make the return journey into the capital, but none ever succeeded. It was the humble carrier-pigeon that was to prove the only means of breaking the blockade in reverse. A microphotography unit was set up in Tours, and there government despatches were reduced to a minute size, printed on feathery collodion membranes, so that one pigeon could carry up to 40,000 despatches, equivalent to the contents of a complete book. On reaching Paris, the despatches were projected by magic lantern, their contents transcribed by a battery of clerks. During the siege, 302 pigeons were sent off, of which 59 actually reached Paris. The remainder were taken by birds of prey, died of cold and hunger or ended up in Prussian pies. As a counter-measure, the Prussians imported falcons, which prompted one of the many imaginative Parisian “inventors” to suggest that the pigeons be equipped with whistles to frighten off the predators. When the war finally ended, there was serious talk of rewarding the noble birds (which some compared to the saviour geese of Ancient Rome) by the incorporation of a pigeon in the city’s coat of arms.

One of the earliest decisions the government took was to balloon a new plenipotentiary to the provisional government at Tours. The courageous Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, volunteered for this adventure, and on 7 October he soared out of Paris in the Armand Barbès. But his bravery did not have quite the desired consequences. With Gambetta’s intentions uncertain, and with a harsh winter beginning to close in, Trochu decided very late in the day to launch his major sortie from Paris, across the Marne to the south-east. Set for 29 November, it was designed to break the siege in co-ordination with an offensive by Gambetta’s forces outside. But not until the 24th, only five days before the planned attack, was the despatch notifying Gambetta of it sent out aboard the Ville d’Orléans. The balloon took off under cover of darkness, shortly before midnight, and fifteen hours later landed—in Norway, 1,400 kilometres away. It was an astonishing voyage worthy of the imagination of Jules Verne, but it meant that the vital message reached Tours too late for Gambetta to co-ordinate his forces with Trochu’s break-out. As a result, the supreme effort to free the city from the Prussian stranglehold collapsed. Morale in Paris plummeted, and hunger and bitter cold began to do their worst.

The Ville d’Orléans’ trip was a rare failure. Altogether some sixty-five manned balloons left Paris during the siege. They carried 164 passengers, 381 pigeons, five dogs and nearly eleven tonnes of despatches, including approximately two and a half million letters, and only two balloonists died. The news they brought of Paris’s continued resistance helped generate sympathy abroad for the French cause, as well as arousing hope in the provinces. But, above all, the knowledge that the city was not completely isolated from the outside world and that other French forces were still resisting the enemy somewhere in the provinces did a great deal to maintain Parisian morale. Though she was doomed, Paris could always point with pride to the epic of the balloons.

The balloon was not the only scientific development to preoccupy fertile Parisian minds during the siege. All kinds of inventions and ideas were put before the government, so that even before the Prussians got near to Paris it was obliged to set up a Comité Scientifique to handle this torrent of innovation. Most of the suggestions mixed science fiction with straightforward fantasy. One proposal was to poison the Seine where it left Paris; another was to set free the more dangerous animals from the zoo. But some of the “inventions,” though seemingly unworkable in 1870, have a certain familiarity today. There was the “mobile rampart,” a precursor of the tank (offered by an Italian engineer to Mayor Clemenceau of Montmartre, to whom as Premier of France in 1918 the tank would be a matter of national survival); there were gas shells that would give out “suffocating vapours”; and there were “pockets of Satan,” filled with petroleum, which would explode over enemy positions, coating them with napalm-like fire. One modern-minded scientist conceived the idea of bombarding the Prussian lines with bottles containing smallpox germs. The search for new weapons led to a number of fatal accidents; one victim was the inventor of the hand-grenade, who blew himself up in his laboratory.

Some of the more eccentric schemes emerged from the Red clubs, and the most exotic of these were Jules Allix’s doigts prussiques: pins dipped (appropriately enough) in prussic acid with which “Amazons of the Seine” could defend their virtue. In October recruiting placards for the Amazons started to appear on walls all over Paris. These remarkable women were to be attired in black pantaloons with orange stripes, a black hooded blouse and a black képi with an orange band. Armed with a rifle and bearing a cartridge pouch slung across the shoulder, they were “to defend the ramparts and the barricades, and to afford to the troops in the ranks of which they will be distributed all the domestic and fraternal services compatible with moral order and military discipline.” Allix explained the role of his doigt prussique as follows: “The Prussian advances towards you—you put forth your hand, you prick him—he is dead, and you are pure and tranquil.” Unfortunately, although 15,000 women were said to have applied, this particular secret weapon was never put to use. The government, less concerned by the implications of the “fraternal services” which the Amazons were to supply at the front than by the discovery that the organizers were apparently collecting enrolment “fees,” intervened.

In terms of military hardware, the greatest achievements lay in the manufacture of cannon, mitrailleuses and rifles during the siege, and for this the credit belongs to one man: Dorian, the Minister of Works. A peacetime industrialist, Dorian proved to be the most impressive member of the Trochu government, and the best of organizers. Under his direction, every available workshop and factory in Paris knuckled down to producing munitions; the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was turned into a giant cannon plant; and even along Napoleon’s chic Rue de Rivoli the characteristic din of metal workers came from the windows of basements where weapons were being forged. Shortages of raw materials were overcome by ingenious substitutes: steel was replaced by alloys of bronze and tin, there was discussion about exploiting that new rare metal, aluminium, and saltpetre for gunpowder was somehow extracted from old plaster. Even the bells of Saint-Denis Cathedral were melted down for cannon. As early as the end of September, Dorian’s workshops were turning out 300,000 cartridges a day, and by the time the siege ended no fewer than 400 cannon had been manufactured in Paris.

Hardly less extraordinary was the means of financing the cannon, some 200 of which were subsidized through popular subscription launched by Victor Hugo. The inhabitants of the poorer, Red districts took the view that many of these had strictly speaking been bought by them, and their pride in the product of their sacrifices was understandably enormous. This was to become one of the immediate causes of civil war when the siege came to an end.

MORALE COLLAPSES

As the siege ground on, anger on the left was steadily mounting. The apparent ineptitude of Trochu and his bourgeois administration persuaded leaders of the Parisian proletariat, not entirely without reason, that they would rather do a deal with the Prussians than face a Dantonesque war to the finish—which might, incidentally, result in the destruction of Paris. Another bourgeois swindle at their expense seemed to be in the offing. “The Prussians have been here a month and more and nothing has been done. Nothing but false reports,” grumbled a young Englishman, Charlie Carter, in a letter of October to his sister that echoed feelings widespread in Paris. A combination of boredom among the National Guard outposts on the ramparts, fiery rough red wine (which never ran out, even when Paris was down to her last rat) and effusions of scurrilous bombast from Félix Pyat’s journal Le Combat fell on fertile ground inside the proliferating Red clubs. Precarious in its hold on power at the Hôtel de Ville, Trochu’s team possessed none of the instruments of censorship, useful in wartime, that had been wielded by both Napoleons. Meanwhile, every utterance by the “moderates” (equally not without reason) that the Reds inside the capital were as grave a menace as the Prussians outside was seized by them as a warning of what to expect. With the remarkable expansion of the National Guard, the power and weaponry of the Reds within it grew disproportionately.

At the end of October, after the failure of a major sortie at Le Bourget and the arrival of news of Marshal Bazaine’s surrender at besieged Metz, angry Reds had actually broken into the Hôtel de Ville and temporarily seized control. There had been farcical and humiliating scenes as the swashbuckling Gustave Flourens, magnificently booted and spurred and wielding a massive Turkish scimitar, leaped on to the table, kicking over inkwells on a level with President Trochu’s nose. Order was restored only by loyal troops suddenly appearing in the Hôtel de Ville via a secret subterranean passage from the nearby Napoleon Barracks, built for just such an eventuality. Ominously three of the Paris mayors—including Dr. Clemenceau of Montmartre—had nevertheless declared themselves in favour of the 31 October revolt.

“The sufferings of Paris during the siege?” Edmond Goncourt wrote in his diary for 7 January 1871, within the bourgeois comfort of his house in the semi-detached village of Auteuil:

A joke for two months. In the third month the joke went sour. Now nobody finds it funny any more, and we are moving fast towards starvation or, for the moment at least, towards an epidemic of gastritis. Half a pound of horsemeat, including the bones, which is two people’s ration for three days, is lunch for an ordinary appetite.

The previous month Goncourt had noted, among his own circle, Gautier lamenting that he had to wear braces for the first time, “his abdomen no longer supporting his trousers.” But, in terms of food, Goncourt and his friends were luckier than most. He continued, “The greater part of Paris is living on coffee, wine and bread.” The failure of the Great Sortie at the end of November was to prove the turning point in the siege. Hitherto boredom had been the principal affliction; with the failure of the break-out and the sense that Paris was now on her own, morale began to collapse, and with the onset of serious winter, hunger and cold moved in. The hordes of cattle and sheep that in September had grazed in the Bois had long since gone. Fresh vegetables too were no longer to be had. For one franc a day and at enormous risk to themselves, “marauders” were sent out under the protection of mobiles to see what could be filched from no-man’s land.

Early in October even bourgeois Paris had turned to horsemeat, first introduced by Parisian butchers four years before as low-cost food for the poor. As hunger tightened its grip, so many a splendid champion of the turf came to a well-spiced end in the casserole. Among them were two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis Napoleon at the time of the Great Exposition, originally valued at 56,000 francs, now bought by a butcher for 800. It was in mid-November, however, that supplies of fresh meat were exhausted—and it was then that Parisians invented the exotic menus with which the siege will always be linked. The signs “Feline and Canine Butchers” made their first appearance. To begin with, dog-loving Parisians objected fiercely to slaughtering domestic pets for human consumption, but soon necessity overcame their fastidiousness. By mid-December Henry Labouchère, the “Besieged Resident” of the London Daily News, was telling his readers, “I had a slice of spaniel the other day,” adding that it made him “feel like a cannibal.” A week later he reported that he had encountered a man who was fattening up a large cat which he planned to serve up on Christmas Day, “surrounded with mice, like sausages.” Théophile Gautier claimed that cats and dogs in the city rapidly sensed their changed status: