Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Suddenly, however, the wave of Anarchist outrages, which was beginning to hold Paris in a grip of terror, ebbed as swiftly as it had begun. Meanwhile, in the backstreets and in Bohemia Ravachol briefly became something of a hero; a verb, ravacholer, meaning to “wipe out an enemy,” became current, while a song called “La Ravachole” was sung to the tune of “La Carmagnole,” with the refrain:

  It will come, it will come

  Every bourgeois will have his bomb.

  But if Ravachol’s death had any lasting significance it surfaced, in 1895, a year after the last attentat, when Paris workers responded by creating the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)—the first time since the Commune that the prostrate city proletariat had dared raise its head to take collective action.

  On 6 January 1895, Goncourt recorded in his diary how a friend of his, the painter Eugène Carrière, had been present at the Ecole Militaire when a very lonely figure, a slight, academic-looking officer called Alfred Dreyfus with rimless pince-nez, had had his epaulettes ceremoniously ripped off and been reduced to the ranks. Submerged in the crowd, Carrière studied “some little boys up in the trees who, when Dreyfus arrived holding himself erect, shouted: ‘The swine!’ and a few moments later, when he bowed his head: ‘The coward!’ ” To his great credit, even at that early stage and despite his own tendency towards anti-Semitism, Goncourt declared, “I was not convinced of his guilt.” The Dreyfus Affair, or simply l’affaire, one of the most unpalatable episodes in all French history, for more than a decade focused the passions and attention of the entire country, averting its eyes from the clouds that were now gathering on the horizon. It was also peculiarly Parisian, in that Paris was where the central episodes were played out.

  Dreyfus was a thirty-five-year-old French artillery captain, of a moderately prosperous Jewish family, but born in the Alsace seized by Germany when Dreyfus was still a child. Like many Alsatian Jews passionately attached to France, the Dreyfuses fled westwards, to escape Prussianism and likely conscription into the German army. This rise in the number of Jews in Paris had the usual effect of fanning anti-Semitism, aggravated by allegations emerging from the Panama Scandal. In October 1894, Dreyfus was confronted by a fellow officer, on the orders of the Chief of the French General Staff, with a bordereau—a memorandum—filched by a cleaner from the wastepaper basket of the German military attaché. It was alleged to have been written in Dreyfus’s hand. The deadly bordereau contained some (fairly low-grade) intelligence about the firing mechanism of the latest French cannon. Dreyfus protested that it was a forgery, but no one believed him. After a mockery of a trial he was subjected to that most humiliating ceremony in front of troops drawn up on the parade ground of the Ecole Militaire, before being deported to the lethal Devil’s Island, to serve out his sentence of life exile for espionage.

  Terrible years went by before Colonel Picquart, an intelligence officer on the French General Staff, discovered that the bordereau was in fact a forgery. The real spy was revealed to be an unsavoury captain of Hungarian descent called Esterhazy, a man of many mistresses and many debts. Despite Picquart’s powerful evidence, the French General Staff—closing ranks to conceal its previous blunder—refused to accept it, and Picquart himself was disgraced and sent to jail. In 1898 Emile Zola entered the lists. This writer of fiercly realistic novels, who was described by his friend Flaubert as “A colossus with dirty feet, nevertheless a colossus,” composed one of the most powerful pieces of journalism of all time—“J’Accuse!” So powerful was the public emotion it whipped up that it made a retrial unavoidable—though Zola, too, went to prison for his pains.

  “J’Accuse!,” an open letter to the President of the Republic, dramatically crystallized opinion in Paris, forcing to the surface all manner of latent prejudices, submerged since the Great Revolution and well beyond—not least the anti-Semitism that had lurked since the days of Philippe le Bel. It forced Parisians to take sides: Dreyfus symbolized either the eternal Jewish traitor or the denial of justice. L’affaire was, in the words of Léon Blum, a future prime minister and a Jew himself, then in his twenties, “A human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.” To an English visitor, “Paris palpitated,” and the same man sensed a lust for blood in the air. Divisions created by l’affaire ran all through Parisian society. At cafés “Nationalists” and “Revisionists” sat at different tables on opposite sides of the terraces; salons became polarized; Monet and Degas didn’t speak for years; Clemenceau fought a duel with an outspoken anti-Semite; six out of seven Ministers of Defence resigned in the course of the scandal; while a President of the Republic died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress, in the Elysée Palace.

  From the point of view of contemporary European history, what had the most lethal impact were the divisions caused within the French army itself, only so recently recovering from its débâcle of 1870–1. When Dreyfus was finally cleared, but not till July 1906, the army leaders who had ranged themselves solidly against the wretched man sent the army several leagues further down the road of disrepute where Boulanger had first guided it. Also of significance was the fact that l’affaire coincided with the publication in France of the first effectively anti-military novels.

  None of this went unnoticed across the Rhine in Kaiser Wilhelm’s newly aggressive Germany, as internal conflict appeared to absorb all France’s energies. Moreover, the passions fanned by the Dreyfus affair were to provide a kind of dress rehearsal for Paris politics in the 1930s.

  TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE

  One additional effect of l’affaire and its attendant obsessiveness was to obscure from Parisians the very real material and technological advances being made in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Replacing gaslight, there was electricity (thanks to the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” Thomas Edison). There was the gramophone; there was the telephone (functioning by 1879, in Paris, about as efficiently as it would for the next century), which Goncourt observed in 1882 was “the very latest thing, this leave-taking which cuts out all possibility of argument”; and there was a uniquely Parisian, Jules Verne–like wonder, the pneumatique, whereby lovers could send each other billets-doux zipping through subterranean capsules delivered within an hour from one end of the city to another. There were horseless carriages, and in 1894 the first car race took place from Paris to Rouen, 123 kilometres. In 1885 Louis Pasteur in his Paris laboratory discovered a vaccine cure for rabies.

  In 1895, Louis Lumière showed the first moving pictures.* One of his earliest “Kinos,” Teasing the Gardener, was a Monsieur Hulot–like affair with a child stepping on a hose and getting soaked. Lumière himself, however, thought his invention “a scientific curiosity with no commercial possibilities.” This may, however, have been said in the wake of the first major disaster of the infant industry, when 140 people died in a fire at a charity bazaar caused by Lumière’s cinématographe.

  Rail networks proliferated and became faster; and there were more train crashes. The all-metal vélocipède became all the rage among à la mode Parisians. But, given what they had had to suffer over the previous six centuries and more, perhaps the greatest technological advance was one that was invisible to the eye—the new sewer system. Sketches of the times depict elegant ladies, genteelly holding their noses, being pulled along on a sightseeing carriage alongside the tumbling sewers under Paris.

  Paris was becoming full of the new wonders of the world—not least its most visible symbol, the Eiffel Tower, designed to crown the 1889 Exposition. It was to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Revolution, but, more than that, it was to hail France’s recovery and her spectacular entry into the modern world. Gustave Eiffel was an engineer of Alsatian origin, which fact perhaps helped gain popular support for his improbable project. His work on the construction of metal bridges and viaducts led him to propose for Paris what would then be the tallest building in the world— making France, he said, “the only country with a 300 me
tre flagpole.” Eager to do anything to restore Paris’s pre-1870 standing as world leader, the city fathers supported this extraordinary and risky venture. It would arise from the foot of the Champ-de-Mars, and look across and down upon the site intended for the King of Rome’s vast palace. The technology was formidable: using two and a half million rivets, 300 steeplejacks working flat out would run it up in the space of two years; it would weigh only 7,000 tonnes in total, exerting a deadweight pressure per square centimetre no greater than that of a man seated in a chair. It was intended to last for only twenty years, when its concession would expire, and it was saved from being dismantled in 1909 only because its huge radio antennae had become essential to the development of French radio telegraphy. But, predictably, some protests in the cultural community were violent. Gounod, Dumas fils and Garnier of Opéra fame were among fifty to sign a petition damning Eiffel’s project as “a monstrous construction,” “a hollow candlestick” or—worse—a “solitary riddled suppositoire.” “Metal asparagus” was another Parisian epithet. “Douanier” Rousseau was one of the first artists to break ranks and treat it as a respectable subject for the canvas. But, as the alternative projects in the competition to commemorate the Revolution included a gigantic guillotine, fortunately Eiffel’s design triumphed, at a modest cost of fifteen million francs.

  On 31 March 1889, a sixty-strong party in top hats and tailcoats made the first official ascent—on foot. Prime Minister Tirard gave up at the first platform, and only Eiffel and ten others braved it to the top, where he had the Légion d’Honneur pinned to his breast. On the first platform, the 300 workmen still in overalls feasted and quaffed champagne. The critics were derisive once more when, on the day of the tower’s inauguration, 7 May, none of the lifts worked. Nevertheless, “le Tour Eiffel qui monte au ciel,” in the words of the popular song, had arrived. Suicides and inventors of flying machines selected it as a jumping-off place (in 1964, a would-be suicide became the only one of 380 to survive after she landed on the roof of a car parked below).

  Though the tower dominated the scene, beneath it a remarkable city had been built for the 1889 Exposition. To distract minds and hearts from France’s territorial loss, the central theme was the colonial empire. Gazing at its minarets and domes with the same kind of superciliousness he had reserved for Louis Napoleon’s grand show of two decades previously, Goncourt observed acidly, “One can tell this Exhibition was going to be an Exhibition for dagoes.” Paris, he lamented, “is no longer the Paris of old, but an open city to which all the robbers in the world, after making their fortune in business, come to eat poor food and rub against flesh which calls itself Parisian.”

  If nothing else, the two Expos of 1879 and 1889 had once more re-established Paris as the world’s leading host. Yet the Eiffel Tower and the exotic structures run up for 1889 gave a somewhat deceptively flamboyant picture of what in fact was being built in Paris. The departure of Haussmann, the collapse of the Second Empire and the chaos of the Commune brought to a halt public works and private buildings in the early 1870s. The great era of Haussmann was over, and nothing like it would ever be seen again in Paris. In the early 1880s, private building revived and even reached a peak that surpassed the previous boom of the 1860s. But, after 1870, under the Third Republic the city grew more slowly. By the early 1900s the rate of building permits had sunk to around 2,000 a year. Under Garnier, who became the doyen of architectural taste in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a greater freedom was afforded the architect until the end of the century. This was in marked contrast to the strictly controlled street uniformity imposed by Haussmann. Apartment houses grew taller and more motley in their exoticism and luxuriance. Glass and metal bow windows began to bulge out above the street. Briefly, very briefly, the craze for Art Nouveau seized the city, surviving mainly in the entrances to the new Métro stations commissioned at the end of the century. Paris borrowed from William Morris, while Manhattan borrowed from the Parisian apartment block. From a municipal commission set up in 1896 to re-examine building regulations, Louis Bonnier emerged as the high-priest of change and variety. Under his influence façades became more and more florid, often to the point of the ridiculous and the fantastical. Once again building regulations permitted structures to hang out over the street, as they had done before Louis XIV, making the new apartment blocks look top-heavy. Individualism and variety became everything. Haussmann would have rolled in his grave. Despite the demand for higher and higher buildings, though, Bonnier fortunately opposed the novelty of the American skyscraper as inappropriate.

  Inevitably, the new century brought a reaction against Bonnier’s architecture. By 1908, the government had intervened to reform building codes and protect the intrinsic beauty of Paris. An eminent member with a special interest in fine arts, Guillaume Chastenet, impressed the Chamber of Deputies with an appeal for a renewed urban aesthetic, declaring that “A great city is … a work of art. It is a collective and complex art, it is true, but this makes it an even higher form of art.” Once again the importance of harmony began to reassert itself. In the years up to the outbreak of the Great War, Paris’s most notable new buildings included sumptuous grand hotels like the Astoria and Claridge (their architects were commissioned to build the Savoy and Claridge’s in London) and great stations like the Gares de Lyons and d’Orsay. The latter, a superb piece of ornate architecture on any account, now marvellously converted into an art museum, managed discreetly to render itself compatible with the Louvre across the Seine. Nevertheless, economic recovery after 1870 never succeeded in generating a lasting architectural style.

  The building developments—coupled with the soaring prices that always went with them—and improved communications within the city accounted for one of the most important migrations in Parisian history. The artists moved from the Left Bank’s Latin Quarter, from Montparnasse to Montmartre. In almost every way Montmartre suited them better. The narrow irregular streets and low houses of what until recently had been a detached village, with windmills, vineyards and gardens, put on the map by the balloons of Paris flying from it during the siege, provided an exhilarating contrast to Haussmann’s monumental, orderly and alienating Paris. An earlier generation led by Berlioz and writers like Murger, Nerval and Heine was replaced by Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, who were in turn succeeded by Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Dufy, with the centenary year of 1900 acting as a kind of watershed. There in this sleepy village the artists and their favourite models such as Jeanne Avril, “La Goulue” and Valentin-le-Désossé brought immortal fame to cafés and bals musettes such as the Moulin Rouge, the Moulin de la Galette, the Lapin Agile. Montmartre became something of a year-long carnival, where anyone abandoning bourgeois respectability could submerge his identity for a few hours, disappearing into an alluring milieu of Bohemians, prostitutes and criminals. For the artists it represented cheap and congenial living—with plenty of motifs to paint all round them. Slowly arising above them was the sugary white cupola of the Sacré-Coeur—the monument to reconciliation after the bloodletting of the Commune, loathed by some but painted by many others, and eventually to become as integral a part of the Paris skyline as its opposing pinnacle, the Eiffel Tower.

  * There remains some controversy over whether he or Thomas Edison could properly claim to be the father of the moving picture. Edison’s “Kinetograph,” patented in 1894, was an immobile, studio affair weighing 450 kilos; Lumière’s cinématographe, hand-cranked and weighing less than nine kilos, could reasonably claim to be the first commercially viable projector.

  LA VIE DOUCE

  The economic successes of the Third Republic during the 1880s and 1890s and right through to the outbreak of war in 1914 were enjoyed by a larger spectrum of Parisians than at any other time in history. Dubbed the Belle Epoque (or the “Banquet Years” or the “Miraculous Years’), it felt like a period that would last for ever. This age of excitement, of fear combined with optimistic expectation, saw the dawning of the consume
r society in what one author dubbed the nivellement des jouissances. By the end of the century this “levelling of pleasures” found its blossoming in more than 200 café-concerts, bals musettes, guinguettes and cabarets artistiques. Sometimes called “theatres of the poor,” they offered a variety of inexpensive pleasures that drew not only the classes laborieuses; inevitably around the wealthy loafers and badauds circled the usual charivari of tarts, just as in Second Empire days. Even so, Edmond Goncourt recorded in 1881, “According to a lecherous Englishman, the best place to pick up a woman in Paris is in the omnibus offices, and the remark is that of a foreigner who knows his Paris.” Ten years later he cited a friend’s calculation that every year 80,000 tarts started work, but only about forty got to the top; these were “all women born in the provinces”—because the Parisiennes had a “mocking, ironical side to them which irritates the customer.”

  As ever, hand in hand with sex went crimes of passion, duelling and murder. The first two categories were never punished with execution. Mme. Caillaux, wife of a former prime minister, who marched into the office of Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, and emptied an entire pistol magazine into him for libelling her husband, was eventually acquitted. Duelling continued right up to the 1920s, often over the flimsiest of provocations. In 1901 the gentle Debussy narrowly escaped a duel with an aggressive Maeterlinck over who should play his Mélisande. But for the more heinous offences the guillotine was always at the ready. Public executions continued outside La Roquette prison until 1899, and for long afterwards the five large stones on which had perched the guillotine were clearly visible.