Finally, and at the last minute, it was ready. The scene shifted from the Quai d’Orsay to Versailles. Why Versailles? Clemenceau, with his bitter recollections as mayor of Montmartre in 1871, claimed to believe that if the Germans were to appear in force in Paris, there would be riot and revolution. Moreover, all the administrative machinery of the Allied Supreme War Council had been out there since the war years. But, of far greater historical significance, was the pleasing congruence of making the enemy sign at the scene of his erstwhile great triumph, and France’s appalling humiliation of that January of forty-eight winters previously. On 28 April the German delegation set off from Berlin to receive the terms that were to be imposed on them, headed by Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau from the Foreign Office. As their train reached the battlefields of northern France, the French cheminots—determined that the Germans should have the clearest view of the devastation the war had caused and be fully apprised of the hatred which awaited them—slowed it down to fifteen kilometres an hour. With icy correctness, a French colonel conducted them to the Hôtel des Reservoirs, selected because, in 1871, it was where the dejected French peace commission had resided while suing for peace with Bismarck.
On the evening of 7 May, when they read the terms set out in the 200-page document, with its 440 separate articles and 75,000 words, the Germans were rendered speechless. It was far worse than anything they had dreamed possible; the reparations alone would ruin their country, while most of her coal mines, Germany’s principal underlying wealth, had been distributed among the Poles and the French. For the first time they began to speak of a Diktat: no German government could possibly accept it. Reactions among some of the Allied delegates echoed their sentiments. Young William C. Bullitt, who would return as U.S. ambassador, resigned from the American delegation; in his note of resignation he declared forthrightly that he was “going to lie on the sands of the Riviera and watch the world go to hell.” In Berlin, the Scheidemann government resigned. Foch ordered the remobilization of the French army, and fighting threatened to break out anew. In the joyous spring weather Paris was beset with depression, resignations and nervous breakdowns. Then the Germans, under their new Chancellor, Gustav Bauer, crumbled, as the Allies poised to march on Berlin.
On 28 June, a Saturday, the great hall in the Palace of Versailles was ready for the occasion it had been awaiting, like a sleeping princess, since Bismarck’s triumphant Prussians had desecrated it by daring to crown an enemy emperor there. At the centre of the Galerie des Glaces, a horseshoe table had been set up for the plenipotentiaries; in front of it, “like a guillotine,” a small table for the signatures. In a “harshly penetrating” voice, Clemenceau called out, “Faîtes entrer les Allemands!” Once more the huge mirrors had Germans reflected in them; this time, in place of the triumphant princes and grandees of Prussia, they were two very ordinary little men in frock coats, Dr. Müller and Dr. Bell, “isolated and pitiful.” From outside there came a crash of guns, announcing to Paris that the Second Treaty of Versailles—as Clemenceau dubbed it—had been signed. “La séance est levée,” rasped Clemenceau, not a word more or less.
Whatever pity might have been felt for those two German delegates that day, historians would reflect that, had Britain and France lost, their punishment would have been no less harsh; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by Germany on a prostrate Russia demonstrated that. To tidy and unforgetting French minds, Versailles 1919 may have represented a full circle from 1871; but in fact history would soon prove it to be only a half-circle, with the remainder to come twenty-one summers later. Wrote Winston Churchill, “Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.”
CELEBRATIONS
This was, however, not how Parisians saw it in the immediate aftermath of Versailles. On the eve of the 14 July procession, an estimated 100,000 took up positions along the Champs-Elysées, their tone one of restrained jubilation. A temporary cenotaph occupied most of the huge vault of the Arc de Triomphe, its four sides each guarded by a figure of Victory, their wings made from the fabric of warplanes. On its plinth was the inscription “Aux Morts pour la Patrie.” Throughout the night soldiers of the French army kept vigil with rifles reversed. As the dawn broke, spectators fortunate enough to have a place on the balconies high up on buildings flanking the Champs-Elysées could see, down the green line of the Avenue de la Grande Armée and all the way along the eight kilometres of the processional route, the fluttering flags and pennants of the Allied nations from a dense forest of white masts. On either side of the Rond-Point was piled a small hill of captured German guns, crowned on one side by the Gallic cock of 1914, preening himself for the fight, and on the other by the victorious cock of 1918, crowing to the world.
Soon, for the first time since Bismarck’s Prussians had paraded through it, military figures appeared under the Arc de Triomphe (the cenotaph had been moved aside at midnight). They were three young soldiers, dreadfully maimed by war, and trundled by nurses in invalid carriages. They were followed by more grands mutilés of all ranks, almost all with an eye or a limb missing. At a hobbling pace the column moved down the Champs-Elysées to the stands specially reserved for them, a party of 150 young Alsatian girls raining flowers down upon them.
After a lengthy pause in the procession, “as if to permit us to breathe—or to dry our tears,” there came la Gloire itself: a squadron of the splendid Gardes Républicaines rode through the sacred arch, and just forty metres behind them appeared Joffre and Foch. Then it was the Allies’ turn. First, in alphabetical order, the Americans led by General Pershing. Next came the Belgians, then the British with Sir Douglas Haig at their head, and all the rest marching on the carpet of blossoms that had been flung before them. But, understandably, it was the weighty French contingent bringing up the rear of the parade for which the spectators had reserved their greatest enthusiasm. His austere face paler than ever, the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Pétain, rode on a white horse ahead of wave after wave of poilus. For over an hour the French contingent marched past. Finally, nine of France’s new assault tanks roared through the Arc de Triomphe. As the silence returned and the gilded cenotaph was hauled back under the arch, one onlooker reflected that “a sight like this will never be seen again. Because there will never again be a war.”
LEFT-WING DISSENT
Throughout the night of 14 July 1919, revellers danced in the streets of a brightly lit Paris, so that it seemed to The Times like “one vast ballroom.” But Americans who took part in these celebrations noticed that many women were dancing together, a symptom of France’s shattering losses of manpower. Parisians that night must have hoped that peace would somehow return them to la vie douce of the pre-1914 Belle Epoque. Yet there was a spectre at the feast, called Communism. On the very day of the signature of the Peace Treaty, a Communist-led Métro and bus strike had paralysed the city. The government was being tough with these left-wing demonstrators, but its toughness was only making matters worse.
Meanwhile, worrying rumours were emanating from Washington that President Wilson might not be able to persuade the American Congress to ratify the Peace Treaty which was supposed to guarantee France, once and for all, against the German threat. Four months later the rumours became reality.
For Parisians, however, it was the political constellation of the far left—Communists, Internationalists and extreme Socialists—that was attracting the most attention. In none other of the victorious nations had Russia’s October Revolution aroused more fervent sympathy than among the workers of Paris—the home of revolution itself. The foundation in March 1919 of the Third International in Moscow had prompted the spiritual heirs of the martyred Communards to fan the flames of revolt—for which there was already abundant fuel on the French economic and social scene.
The post-war economy was indeed in a sorry state. France had spent a quarter of her national fortune during the war, and although with her customary recuperative genius she rapidly rebuilt her devastated industries and rest
ored her agricultural production, it was her financial structure that had been most lastingly damaged. France had paid for the war by issuing paper money. Inflation soared as a result. By the Armistice the franc had lost nearly two-thirds of its value, exchanging at 26 to the pound sterling, and as early as the Victory Parade it had depreciated to 51 to the pound. By May 1926 its value had plummeted to 178 to the pound, and finally, only two months later, with a threatening mob pounding on the gates of the Palais Bourbon, to 220. Urged on by the revolutionary left, French workers had good reason to demand better conditions and higher wages to offset this inflation. National finances were further worsened by the additional millions of francs needed to fund the pensions of the host of ex-servicemen.
The post-war Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau “the only Jew who knows nothing about money”), made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed by German reparations. But in 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments. France (unsupported by England) occupied the Ruhr in order to enforce payment, but she was soon obliged to withdraw, a humiliating setback to French power. While Britain and America were already emerging from the world slump, France remained in depression. Between 1928 and 1934, her industrial production fell by 17 per cent; between 1929 and 1936, average income slipped 30 per cent; and by the end of 1935 more than 800,000 were unemployed. So the nation’s financial crisis ran on into the 1930s, bringing down government after government, making it impossible to achieve a consistent foreign policy, quite apart from a policy of reconciliation with Germany.
EXPANSION AND EXPATRIATES
By the “hollow years” of the 1930s two-thirds of France’s population lived in the towns and cities; forty years before, the figure had been exactly the reverse, with two-thirds living on the land. The explanation for this dramatic swing lay partly in the appalling losses suffered among the sons of the peasantry in 1914–18, partly also in the universal drift to the cities. Paris remained, as always, the principal magnet. Yet, although the outer banlieues expanded, the population of central Paris actually decreased, from nearly 3 million just after the war to just over 2.7 million by 1939—not much more than it had been at the turn of the century. This reflected the serious lack of acceptable accommodation: more than half of the poorer young Parisians lived in one room or in a kitchen-bedroom, most of which had no toilet and no heating. It was not till around 1940 that most Parisian buildings had running water and drainage connected to a central sewer. How many centuries it had taken since the first endeavours of Philippe Auguste! The trouble was that, because of inhibiting legislation and stuffy building regulations imposed by successive post-1919 governments, there was little profit in building. Few private investors could afford the cost of constructing apartment blocks. Gone were the days of Haussmann. Instead speculators put their money into commercial property—and that bubble burst with the Depression. By 1939 the rate of dwelling construction had sunk from 6,470 storeys per year in 1914 to 400, with well over three-quarters dating from pre-1914.
In 1919, with the arrival of peace, the city of Paris had a unique opportunity for expansion. The line of Thiers’s old walls and bastions, thirty-five kilometres in all, and so useful in 1870, was now rendered obsolete by the development of heavy cannon and bombers. Instead there would be the Maginot Line protecting France’s eastern frontier. So this “zone,” representing a substantial proportion of the existing area of Paris, was purchased from the military, freeing it for immediate development. Demolition and construction began at once. Opened to private speculation, some 38,750 new dwelling units were run up, many lasting only a brief period. One critic described the result as a “dense wall of mediocrity encircling the city.” Fresh slums and what were later to become known as bidonvilles sprang up, and the zone was infested with corruption and poverty. Indeed, at the Porte de Clignancourt (site of today’s Marché aux Puces) forty-seven houses had to be demolished in 1921 because of an outbreak of bubonic plague. It became a terrible monument to the recently ended Great War. Building in the zone was not completed till the 1930s—though at the Liberation of 1944 the Allies still found something of an unoccupied desert there. Upon it de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic would build the notorious “Boulevard Périphérique,” thereby girdling the city with a new impenetrable wall.
For the reasons already suggested, after 1919 most new building shifted towards the public sector, with a marked slowing—particularly in the 1930s—in the building of luxury apartments, now stark and become simply “machines for living” with little that was decorative. Instead cinemas started to proliferate. The style of architecture changed, with a brief flash of inventiveness with the arrival of Art Deco in the mid-1920s—almost exclusively for the worse. It was perhaps just as well that there was a depression, with money short; otherwise the Swiss architect Le Corbusier might well have been able to refashion Paris in his own image. Le Corbusier had plans to destroy much of the centre of Paris on the Right Bank, replacing it with a grid of shoebox towers over 200 metres high. Perhaps for once Parisians had reason to thank the tangle of municipal building regulations descended from Bonnier’s 1902 prescriptions.
In practical terms, the one enduring (though visually questionable) success Modernism in Paris could claim was the great Trocadéro complex built for the World Exposition of 1937, although some contemporaries with long memories thought the structure little better than the pseudo-oriental mishmash left over from the last Expo, which it replaced. A man called Freyssinet wanted to construct on Mont Valérien a tower 700 metres high, up which you could drive a car; instead, here, on the site designated by Napoleon for his Palace of the King of Rome, uncompromisingly angular structures (of the sort Mussolini was building in Rome and Stalin in Moscow) were dominated by the Soviet and German pavilions. Symbolic of their times, there an aggressive Nazi eagle glared across at the new Soviet Adam and Eve, striding optimistically towards an unrealizable future. Like the regimes they represented, both pavilions would disappear—though the central feature linking them would survive to house the new Modern Art Museum and the Museum of Man.
Meanwhile, as dwelling space dwindled in the centre of Paris, so the pollution and noise from automobile traffic grew ever worse, as the number of cars rose from 150,000 in 1922 to 500,000 in 1938. One Parisian lamented, “C’est fini! the tranquillity of our streets, and the calm of promenading either on foot or in a carriage … Paris belongs to the machines.”
In the harsh 1920s there was, however, one important faction of Parisian society which found life wonderfully good and bon marché: the expatriates, and especially Americans. In 1921 foreign residents of Paris comprised 5.3 per cent of the population; ten years later the figure had almost doubled, to 9.2 per cent—while foreigners also accounted for a quarter of all those arrested by the police. Oscar Wilde’s Mrs. Allonby observes that when good Americans die they go to Paris; but after 1919 even not-so-good Americans took off in droves for Paris. For $80 they could secure a ship berth; otherwise they could work their way “shovelling out” in the holds of cattle boats; and a modest allowance in dollars would maintain an American in Paris for an indefinite period. The impulse generated was partly negative, an escape from the restrictive, puritan world that Prohibition under the Volstead Act had imposed on young Americans returning from the war. In Paris, by contrast, one was left free to lead one’s private life, to swim—or sink. Many Americans had sampled the delights of the city when serving as Pershing’s doughboys during the war and wanted to come back for more.
Paris also drew, once again, those of artistic bent as she had done in the days of Whistler, Henry James and Edith Wharton. The list was an imposing one: Gertrude Stein was already there, well established in her lair at Rue de Fleurus near the Luxembourg; then there were John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, Stephen Vincent Benét, Archibald MacLeish, Louis Bromfield, Philip Barry, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker—not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. There was Sylvia Beach, famed founder of S
hakespeare and Co., the English bookshop and gathering point near the Odéon—and brave publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses and The Life and Loves of Frank Harris. Among itinerants, there was Cole Porter, with his nine cigarette cases and sixteen dressing gowns at 13 Rue Monsieur, his fibs (lapped up by Hollywood) about his wartime deeds in the Foreign Legion, his long-suffering wife, Linda, and his faiblesse for lusty black men. Then there was the magical, tragic dancer Isadora Duncan, broke and gallantly declaring that she didn’t know where her next bottle of champagne was coming from, later strangled when her scarf became caught in the wheels of a car.
By 1927, there were said to be 15,000 Americans resident in Paris, but the real figure was estimated to be much more like 40,000. For watering holes, they tended to gravitate around the Dôme and the Coupole in Montparnasse—and the enchanting Closerie des Lilas, which thoughtfully installed for them a bar américain (though Hemingway gave it the cold shoulder for a while after the new management ordered the waiters, mostly Great War heroes, to shave off their military moustaches and don white jackets). Meanwhile, bals became dancings—to the deep shock of académiciens, guardians of the language.
In Montmartre
In Montmartre, everybody is playing a part
wrote Douglas Byng. Did the expatriate writers and artists (American and others) find the fulfilment that Paris seemed to promise them? If we believe Hemingway, in his first blush of love for Paris—and for his young bride, Hadley—he for one was extremely poor, but happy. At 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine (then the centre of the rough Apache district and poor students’ quarters in the Contrescarpe area of the 6th arrondissement), they rented in 1922 a tiny flat on the fourth floor. It had no running water and a malodorous stand-up toilet on the landing; in winter it was so cold that tangerines left on the table would freeze overnight.
Seven Ages of Paris Page 47