Seven Ages of Paris (47 page)

Soon the animals observed that man was regarding them in a strange manner and that, under the pretext of caressing them, his hand was feeling them like the fingers of a butcher, to ascertain the state of their embonpoint. More intellectual and more suspicious than dogs, the cats were the first to understand, and adopted the greatest prudence in their relations.

And then it was rats. Along with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the Siege of Paris, and from December the National Guard spent much of its time engaged in vigorous rat-hunts. Even so, the number actually consumed was relatively few: according to one contemporary American calculation, only 300 rats were eaten during the whole siege, compared with 65,000 horses, 5,000 cats and 1,200 dogs. The elaborate sauces that were necessary to render them edible meant that rats were essentially a rich man’s dish—hence the notorious menus of the Jockey Club, which featured such delicacies as salmis de rats and rat pie.

As the weeks passed, Parisian diets grew even more outlandish as the zoos started to offer up their animals. Victor Hugo was given some joints of bear, deer and antelope by the curator of the Jardin des Plantes, while kangaroo was on the menu at Goncourt’s favourite haunt, Chez Brébant. The lions and tigers were thought too dangerous to kill, so they survived, as did the monkeys, apparently thanks to the Parisians’ exaggerated Darwinian instincts. Otherwise no animal was safe. Unsurprisingly perhaps, opinions differed on the quality of these unusual dishes. After his meal of horse in November, a young Englishman called Tommy Bowles was so impressed he wrote, “How people continue to eat pigs I can’t imagine.” But by early January he was noting, “I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written … horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.” His was not the only palate that became more discriminating: there was a significant variation in price between brewery and sewer rats, while Wickham Hoffman, a diplomat at the American Legation, declared a preference for light grey horses over black ones. Most butchers were only too ready to exploit the desperate shortages of meat (and they were justifiably loathed in consequence). A lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically proved to be a wolf.

No attempt was made by the government to control food distribution until it was much too late, and even then the steps taken were neither fair nor effective. To start with, price controls were imposed on certain staple foods, but these were inadequately enforced and were rapidly sidestepped by the growth of a flourishing black market. Meat rationing was introduced in mid-October, starting at 100 grams per person per day before being reduced eventually to 30 grams, but it covered none of the exotic meats described above. Restaurant customers were supposed to receive only one plate of meat, but this regulation was flouted wherever money spoke louder. Labouchère observed that “in the expensive cafés of the Boulevards, feasts worthy of Lucullus are still served.” Nothing was ever done to oppose hoarding, and the provident bourgeoisie tended to live off private stocks which they had bought before the siege. The worst offenders were the speculators who released foodstuffs on to the market only when prices had soared. Some of them made a killing from beetroots bought in October at two centimes a piece and later sold for 1.75 francs.

Because it was more profitable to sell under the counter, but also because the inept distribution system meant that often their shops really were empty, traders would put up their shutters for long periods. This resulted in interminable food queues. Such a queue, one British correspondent wrote, was often “more than a couple of hundred strong. Its outer edge towards the street was kept by armed Gardes Nationaux, who, patrolling like sheepdogs here and there, suppressed with difficulty the almost continual disputes.” For hours the unfortunate housewives would wait, often ending up empty-handed, burning with hatred equally for the petit bourgeois as represented by the ruthless butcher and for the rich bourgeois who could afford to buy without queuing. Pretty well the only effective rationing was accomplished by that most unfair instrument: price. The cost of most foodstuffs rocketed as the weeks passed. Compared with pre-war days, for example, the price of butter jumped by over one-third, and those of potatoes and rabbits had more than doubled. Oddly enough, there was never any shortage of wine or other alcohol. In the poorer districts of Paris drunkenness was never more pervasive, nor more pitiable. While the working-class women of Paris queued and hungered, the men got drunk on the barricades—all the while railing against the government.

BOMBARDMENT AND CAPITULATION

To the misery of hunger and cold, in a move aimed at ending the siege at the end of December, Bismarck and Moltke now added a new component of horror: the systematic bombardment of the civilian population. On the morning of the 27th, a French colonel and his wife were hosting a breakfast party for friends at the outpost of Avron, to the east of the city. All of a sudden, a Prussian shell burst right on top of them, killing six of the breakfasters instantly and seriously injuring the colonel. For the next two days Prussian heavy guns of a calibre hitherto unknown continued to hurl their huge shells down on Avron. On 5 January 1871, bombardment of Paris proper began. As Moltke put it with icy precision, “an elevation of 30 degrees, by a peculiar contrivance, sent the shot into the heart of the city.” A small girl walking home from school near the Luxembourg was cut in two; six women in a food queue were killed; so was a cantinière of the National Guard while sleeping in her bed; in a bistro in the aptly named Rue de l’Enfer several drinkers were struck down.

Three or four hundred shells fell every day, at random and with no attempt to single out military targets. It marked the beginning of the Germanic technique of war by Schrecklichkeit. But, once the initial fear of the unknown had passed, indignation became the principal Parisian reaction—indignation that reached a peak on 11 January with the funeral of six little children all killed by the same shell. Then, in a manner comparable to the London Blitz of 1940, indignation was replaced by a surprising indifference to the indiscriminate shelling. Life went on as usual. House doors were left unlocked so that passers-by could take refuge from the shells. In the Louvre the Venus de Milo was crated up and stowed in a secret vault by the Prefect of Police himself; and piles of sandbags were stacked around the Arc de Triomphe and such treasures as the originals of the Chevaux de Marly (the fiery horses sculpted by Guillaume Coustou in 1740–5) on the Concorde. But soon the Prussians, under pressure from an outraged Europe, realized that the bombardment was proving a failure. The heavy guns (behemoths though they were by nineteenth-century standards) could not inflict that much serious damage. The humanitarian Crown Prince himself was beginning to oppose the bombardment. When he learned that Prussian shells had exploded among a Parisian church congregation, he exclaimed, “Such a piece of news wrings my heart.”

Meanwhile, the Prussian court ensconced at Versailles had more immediate priorities. These were to have consequences that were much more far-reaching for European history than the disembowelling of innocent children in Paris by the terror-weapons of the new warfare. A large number of princes and princelings had gathered in Louis XIV’s great château to participate in an event that was to bring Bismarck to the pinnacle of his life’s ambitions. The big restaurant in the Hôtel des Reservoirs was full of food and wine and German voices. In a strange reversal of fortune, while the former Emperor of France sat dismally a prisoner in a provincial Schloss in Germany, his Empress in a depressing house in Kent, the King of Prussia took his afternoon tea in the Prefecture of Versailles, while Bismarck smoked, talked, drank and ate inexhaustibly in another unpretentious Versailles house as he planned the great day. At the nearby château, the proud lettering of the façade which dedicated it “à toutes les gloires de la France” looked bleakly down on Prussian guns parked below. In the great staterooms where the Roi Soleil and
Mme.
de Maintenon had paraded less than two centuries previously, German wounded lay in cots dominated by the rows of vast patriotic canvases proclaiming past French victories over their countrymen. From beyond Louis XIV’s Rhine, court painters were being rushed to Versailles to record the historic event.

By 18 January the scene was set in the glittering Galerie des Glaces, where only a few years before Queen Victoria had danced with Louis Napoleon amid all the splendours of the Second Empire at its zenith. King Wilhelm I was to proclaim himself emperor of a Germany united over the corpse of a defunct French Empire. At twelve noon, recorded W. H. Russell of The Times:

The boom of a gun far away rolls above the voices in the Court hailing the Emperor King. Then there is a hush of expectation, and then rich and sonorous rise the massive strains of the chorale chanted by the men of regimental bands assembled in a choir, as the King, bearing his helmet in his hand, and dressed in full uniform as a German general, stalked slowly up the long gallery, and, bowing to the clergy in front of the temporary altar opposite him, halted and dressed himself right and front, and then twirling his heavy moustache with his disengaged hand, surveyed the scene at each side of him.

This pleasing scene was multiplied in the great mirrors. Then the heavy figure of Bismarck, in the blue tunic and great boots of a Prussian cuirassier, stepped forward, holding his Pickelhaube by its spike, to proclaim the German Empire.

Bismarck at Versailles had triumphed over Louis XIV. Russell’s very English comment on the extraordinary scene which had been enacted beneath a painting of Frenchmen whipping Germans was “What a humorous jade Fortune is!” But, in besieged Paris, the humour was hardly evident, and Goncourt lamented prophetically, “That really marks the end of the greatness of France.” Some thing of the old order of Europe died in the Galerie des Glaces. More than that, to the injury inflicted on France by the bombardment of la ville lumière an unforgettable insult had been added. In brutal combination, this injury and this insult would infuse into Franco-German relations for the next three-quarters of a century a terrible bitterness.

About the same time as the proclamation in the Galerie des Glaces, Trochu made one last, hopeless attempt to break the Prussian stranglehold. It was the turn of the National Guard, which had been so loud in its condemnation of the Hôtel de Ville’s ineptitude and apathy. It attacked at Buzenval to the west of Paris, with half-trained troops debilitated by hunger and cold. Predictably, the result was a massacre. Once again, on 22 January, furious Reds blaming the Trochu government launched an assault on the Hôtel de Ville. “Civil war was a few metres away,” wrote Jules Favre. With Paris in a dreadful state, and faced now with this new spectre of an enemy within the walls, Trochu sent an emissary to Bismarck to ask for an armistice. The Iron Chancellor whistled a huntsman’s air and remarked, “Gentlemen, the kill!”

The hunt was over. The peace negotiations were painful, the Prussian terms savage. France lost Alsace and Lorraine, two of her fairest and richest provinces, and was required to pay a crippling indemnity of five billion francs, or more than seven times the total reparations demanded by the Allies in 1815 after twenty years of war in which French armies had devastated half the continent. But the term most hurtful to the pride of the defeated nation, and particularly to its half-starved and frozen capital, was Bismarck’s insistence on a triumphal, symbolic march along the Champs-Elysées. It was brief, but sufficed to raise Parisian indignation to boiling point.

On the last night of February, all the customary nocturnal noises of Paris had fallen silent. The cafés emptied, and no fiacres rattled across the cobbles with late passengers. A few cavalry patrols moved silently through empty streets. As dawn came up blinds were drawn and windows shuttered. Early on Wednesday, 1 March, a lone German officer came riding down the Champs-Elysées with an escort of Uhlans. Behind him followed the rattle of kettle drums, with 30,000 German troops marching up an empty, silent avenue draped with black flags towards a sand-bagged Arc de Triomphe. Then, in the afternoon, they marched down again, wheeling into the Place de la Concorde as the music died away. Uniformed German sightseers at the Louvre were spotted by an angry crowd and pelted with coppers—a first instalment of reparations. There was more military music from the bivouacs in the Concorde that night. By the next morning, the last German had left. Paris’s ordeal was over. But the insult lingered on. The city was enraged; patriotic Paris would have none of the treaty of shame; republican Paris would have none of the new Assembly created in the provinces; Paris, the capital, would not tolerate the government’s decision to establish itself at Versailles, occupying billets only recently vacated by the Prussian conquerors. Revolutionaries of the left and patriots of the right found themselves united in anger, as a peace came which was no peace.

At last food, most of it from England, could be rushed into the devastated city. But Parisians were now in the grip of what physicians called “obsidional fever,” a sort of collective paranoia or mistrust. Psychologically, they were in no state to confront the humiliation of unprecedented defeat or of the harsh peace terms that came with it. The very appearance of the city, with most of the handsome trees on its boulevards cut down and many houses shattered by shellfire, was worlds away from the glittering Paris of 1867—a contrast that did nothing for morale. In the streets men drifted aimlessly about, staring in desultory fashion into shop windows: regular troops and mobiles waiting to be sent back to their homes, National Guards with no employment, petits bourgeois with no trade. The scene, after months of confinement, terror and hunger, might seem peaceful enough. Yet, hidden away, a seething fury was ready to erupt into violence. This unhealthy condition required a leadership sensitive not just to the shifts in politics but also to the demands of psychology. Unfortunately the new government of France turned out to be as deficient in this respect as its predecessor had been in its handling of the war. At the end of February, Goncourt—though his own taste for work had at last returned—sensed that Paris was suffering “under the most terrible of apprehensions, apprehension of the unknown.” More optimistically, an English commercial traveller, William Brown, about to leave Paris for good, wrote to his wife, “it is all over now I feel sure, thank God,” and spoke of “the prospect of peace and business, the abundance of every kind of food, the beautiful Spring weather.” Nonetheless, it was certainly rash of Jules Ferry, on 5 March, confidently to telegraph from Paris to his colleague Jules Simon in Bordeaux, “The city is entirely calm. The danger has passed.” It had not—far from it.