Seven Ages of Paris (54 page)

Even so, the prevailing mood—in Paris and nationally—was one of contentment. The Republic, writes André Maurois, “was still Athenian.” It had “no reason to be envious of Louis XIV’s France, or of the France of the Renaissance; never had the country had greater renown or a more justifiable prestige …” A nostalgia for les neiges d’antan would be summed up in 1913 with the appearance of the first instalment of Proust’s monumental À la recherche du temps perdu. Yet, if ever there was a sign of the fragility, and hubris, inherent in human endeavours the previous year, 1912, was the year that the unsinkable Titanic sank. And in Europe there was the rumble, though seemingly distant, of wars in the Balkans.

As Europe hastened like lemmings towards a cliff, there is the sense of the inevitability of the forthcoming contest as when children pick sides at school. On the western side, most of the picking of teams had taken place in Paris. First, and perhaps most dangerous of all, in 1894 the Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé—ever mindful of the loss of Alsace, and of how France had so foolishly gone to war in 1870 without a friend—had pioneered the “defensive” Franco-Russian pact. From then till 1914 had grown the increasing popularity of all things Russian, from Diaghilev to Stravinsky. Germany, alarmed at potential enemies combining to west and east, lined up Austria, Bulgaria and later Turkey. Then, in 1903, the francophile Edward VII came over to charm a city still instinctively anti-England; the following year the entente cordiale, unnatural though it may have seemed to many a Frenchman and to many an Englishman, was signed. When fun-loving Edward died, Paris was draped in black, and cab-drivers tied crêpe bows on their whips. But on the international scene, to borrow the sombre words of Philip Guedalla,

A dark resentment replaced the milder flavour of the old diplomatic rivalries, and a new bitterness was born of German inability to win a war with civilized restraint. But the great palace was still standing at Versailles; and in the Galerie des Glaces the mirrors waited on.

In 1905, and again in 1911, the Kaiser blundered into Morocco, stretching nerves in the Chancelleries of Europe and providing grist to the mill of Paris’s Hun-eating nationalist press. In the Sorbonne, German experts like Charles Andler and Romain Rolland, striving for peace with kindred spirits across the Rhine, were progressively outgunned by the Echo de Paris, where Maurice Barrès damned Andler as a “humanitarian anarchist,” ready to “betray” Alsace-Lorraine. One of Europe’s best hopes of peace, the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, son of a road-mender from the Tarn, bitterly opposed France’s pact with a reactionary, feudal and unstable Russia, but hoped to defeat jingoism with an accord between French and German Socialists never to make war on each other. He firmly believed that, in the unspeakable event of war, German Socialists would tear up the railway lines rather than allow their brothers to go to war.

Events defeated him. Agadir, 1911, was the last straw, and the joie de vivre of the Belle Epoque gave way to deep distrust of Germany and her intentions. Three days before the outbreak of war, Jaurès himself was shot down in a café by a deranged young zealot, Raoul Villain. Even Proust began to deploy the label of the “ugly German.” Among Parisians, there was a sudden last-minute attachment to the army, fanned by the jingoist press. In 1912, the restoration of military service to three years was greeted with remarkably good humour. In Paris—as opposed to the calmer provinces—war fever mounted, to the point where, after Agadir, even some sensible writers began to feel that war was not only thinkable, but perhaps actually desirable, in preference to the continuing tension—like a thunderstorm clearing away oppressively sultry weather. Declared Abel Bonnard, in Le Figaro, “War refashions everything anew … We must embrace it in all its savage poetry.” Even Apollinaire could write, apocalyptically, “You are weary of this old world at last.”

SEVENTEEN

*

The Great War

Is Paris ready to withstand a siege?

ADOLPHE MESSIMY, MINISTER OF WAR, AUGUST 1914

AUGUST 1914

On 3 August 1914, Paris found herself at war again—in what men of that time, happily unable to see what lay ahead, would optimistically call the Great War, the War to End All Wars. Historians of the next generation would recognize it merely as the First World War, though their successors in future might well, imbued with all the powers of hindsight, come to see it more realistically as simply the first act in a second Thirty Years War.

The war would sweep away the age of prosperity and hope that all Europe had begun to enjoy, including backward Russia. Europe was about to enter a new Dark Age of unknowable duration, and for the next four years it was as if violence and destruction had become the sole arbiters in the world, with human leaders—so powerful and optimistic at the turn of the century—rendered impotent in the face of historical forces greater than anything they could have foreseen. On both sides there were many—and not just among the Kaiser’s entourage in Berlin, or the sword-rattling revanchists of Paul Déroulède in Paris—who greeted the outbreak of war almost with relief, such had been the stresses and strains leading up to it in recent years.

Paul Claudel, Catholic mystic, diplomat and playwright, currently French consul in enemy Hamburg, was one of many young Europeans who saw war bringing adventure, even a kind of freedom: “Freedom from one’s job, from one’s wife, from one’s children, from a fixed place; adventure.” When Austria set the machine in motion by declaring war on Serbia, Louis Gillet, a brilliant young art historian, formerly a pacifist but now a lieutenant in an infantry regiment, saw an adventure of high altruism where it was “beautiful to fight with pure hands and an innocent heart, to give one’s life for divine justice.” To his mentor Romain Rolland, who had dedicated himself in vain to an understanding with Germany, he wrote, “what an awakening … Today we witness France’s resurrection. Always the same: victory over Otho at Bouvines, Crusades, Cathedrals, Revolution, always we’re the world’s knights, God’s paladins.” Within a matter of weeks half his battalion would be dead or wounded.

André Gide hastened back to Paris by the last available civilian train (as it went by he heard a railwayman shout, “All aboard for Berlin! And what fun we’ll have there!”), but, not being subject to conscription, three days into the war he anticipated adventure of a higher level: “The wonderful behaviour of the government, of everyone, and of all France … leaves room for every hope. One foresees the beginning of a new era: the United States of Europe bound by a treaty limiting their armaments.” Naturally, as to all Frenchmen now, the sine qua non of such a rosy future had to be the return of Alsace-Lorraine. Marcel Proust, however, right to the end, refused to believe in the prospect of war; it would be simply “too frightful,” he thought. He was much more concerned with finding a publisher for his very long novel, À la recherche du temps perdu. His chronic asthma disqualified him from military service. Instead he daydreamed of male bordels—having found himself pleasurably in one which he had mistaken for an air-raid shelter.

Outside Paris, in the provinces, reactions to the coming of war were distinctly more sombre. Yet even in brainwashed Paris there was little repetition of the wild, clamouring cries of “A Berlin!” in that July of forty-four years previously. On 28 July 1914, the British Ambassador, Lord Bertie, recorded in his diary, “There is much nervous excitement, but no popular demonstrations for war …” Parisians, he noted, hoped that Britain would be the “deciding factor” in keeping Germany out of the war. He told the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that if Britain should “declare herself solidaire with France and Russia there will be no war.” Grey and the Asquith government—“a house divided against itself, and they change their attitude day by day” in the opinion of Bertie—dithered. In execution of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany marched into and through Belgium, and on 4 August war became general. “It will be a savage war,” Bertie noted prophetically from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Two days later, he recorded that Paris was rather “like London would be on a Sunday in August. Very many shops are closed par cause de mobilisation.”

Parisians, including many artists, were swift to join the colours. Braque and Derain rejoined their regiments and fought bravely at the front. Matisse came back to Paris from the south and did everything he could to enlist—but, at forty-five, was declared too old and was sent home. Raoul Dufy went to drive a van for the army postal service; Jean Cocteau, though classified unfit, became an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. Apollinaire, despite his Polish-Italian extraction, grateful for all that his adopted France had done for him, enlisted at thirty-four and, in the earliest days of the war, received a severe head wound from which he never properly recovered. Lieutenant Charles Péguy, aged forty-one, died in the very first days of the Marne, leading his company across an exposed beetroot field, to become almost beatified by his generation of artists. The twenty-eight-year-old Henri Alain-Fournier, whom peace had allowed time to write only his one great, mystical novel Le Grand Meaulnes, also fell in the early months of the war. Referring chiefly to the gratin and the privileged of Paris, Apollinaire complained that “nearly everybody is running away.” Rodin and Debussy left for the provinces (but they were over-age anyway); Picasso, who was of course Spanish, drove his friends into Avignon station to join their regiments, and claimed, “I never saw them again.” Romain Rolland remained in Switzerland, to continue to fight for peace; staying on in Paris, Marie Curie offered her medals to be melted down, and bought war bonds with her Nobel Prize money.

One of the few to try to dodge conscription was Gide’s young publisher friend who had turned down Proust, Gaston Gallimard, who feigned illness until it induced real sickness and he was declared unfit for service. But in general few young Frenchmen stayed at home as embusqués (shirkers); the vast majority, with sober determination and a welling up of patriotism, joined the colours. Overnight the Gare de l’Est became the busiest and most crowded place in Paris, with a steady flow of soldiers marching towards it singing:

C’est l’Alsace et la Lorraine …

C’est l’Alsace qu’il nous faut!

Behind them rumbled batteries of the much vaunted soixante-quinze, with their long and narrow barrels the pride of the French army, which was going to smash the enemy to the east. There were also many detachments of foreign volunteers marching under banners with such slogans as “Greeks who love France,” “Romania rallies to the Mother of the Latin Races,” “Italy whose freedom was bought with French blood” and “British volunteers for France.”

Among those to rush to the colours at the earliest possible moment were many members of the Dreyfus family, which had suffered so much at the hands of the army. Alfred’s son Pierre fought in the first battles of 1914 as a corporal and ended the war a captain. The disgraced and rehabilitated Alfred himself, still in the army though aged fifty-five, repeatedly requested to be sent to the front and was finally permitted to take part as a gunner in the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of 1917.

Suddenly Paris was a deserted city. The streets were empty; there were no buses, only a few trams with women conductors. Theatres and cinemas were closed; cafés shut promptly at 8 p.m., restaurants at 9:30. At the Louvre, as in 1870, art treasures were crated up; iron shutters came down on many a shop. One merchant chalked up on his closed shop, “Sleep peacefully, your mattress-maker is at the front!” Other shops promised to reopen in September—when it would all be over. On 20 August, Lord Bertie made a trip out to the Bois, which he found “all so quiet and peaceful, and I thought of all the horrors going on in Belgium.” At night the beauty of la ville lumière was muted by the black-out, with Proust lamenting the quiet capital under the “unchanged antique splendour of a moon cruelly, mysteriously serene, which poured the useless beauty of its light on monuments that were still intact.” Under moonlight, the Champs-Elysées, flooded with a blue-green sheen, seemed to some “like a hallowed wood,” while the silvery Seine took on a strange beauty all of its own. The night-time Paris defences were tested by sporadic raids of German planes, (ironically called Tauben—or Doves), where Blériot had shown the way only five years previously. The Tauben, and later the weightier Zeppelins, would cause only pinpricks of damage and few casualties, but—as with Teutonic “frightfulness” and terror-weapons in earlier wars, as well as a later one—all the raids on Paris did was to stiffen resolve and make the war more terrible and more prolonged. How far it all seemed from the carefree days of the Belle Epoque!

Older Parisians, or those with a sense of history, who could recall the diet of rats in 1870, laid in extensive stocks of food. Everywhere in the city small workshops manufacturing weapons began to spring up, as they had in 1870. Meanwhile, at the beginning of August the painter Maurice Vlaminck took a tram out to Porte Maillot on the western outskirts of the city, where he found that the Governor of Paris:

had taken strong measures to defend the capital. A dozen or so big trees had been cut down and were laid across the Avenue de Neuilly with a view to stopping German cavalry; palisades and iron spikes set in timber were erected in the streets. As I looked at this improvised defence system I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

But would the Kaiser’s grey-clad hordes really arrive to besiege Paris again? What were their intentions? And what were the plans of the French General Staff?

MILITARY DISASTER

As the spectre of German militarism had grown more menacing from the Agadir Crisis of 1911 onwards, the damage caused in the French army by l’affaire and Emil Combes had been repaired with almost miraculous speed. Raymond Poincaré, a staunch revanchist from Lorraine who would never allow himself to forget his childhood memories of Pickelhauben occupying his homeland, had been elected president, and the country was wholeheartedly behind him. When the Union Sacrée coalition was formed to prosecute the war, all politicians, even the left-wing pacifists, backed it in a display of loyalty and unity that had not been seen in France since Napoleon I (nor was it to be seen again in the Third, Fourth or even Fifth Republic). In 1914, the Chief of the Sûreté could remark confidently, “The workers will not rise; they will follow the regimental bands.”