Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  The blade of the guillotine that was shipped to Nouméa was the same that had been used almost a century before to decapitate Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. In the event, it was not required. A price of two hundred francs was placed on the head of Ataï. He was betrayed by a neighbouring tribe, and his encampment was surrounded. After a ferocious battle in which he showed the courage of a wild animal, he was killed with a spear, then beheaded with a knife. Such had been the savagery of the rebellion that few regretted his grisly end. Settlers were demanding the complete eradication of the native race. In view of the atmosphere that prevailed, it is hard to say whether the head was shipped to the Ministère de la Marine as an anthropological specimen or as a trophy of war.

  5

  THE MASSACRES IN New Caledonia were reported on the inside pages of the Figaro, after domestic politics and society gossip, ‘News from the Exhibition’, the serial, the list of commonly misused words and the day’s weather. The violent doings of savages on the other side of the world were of little concern to Parisians. The main local interest lay in the behaviour of the deportees. Letters had been appearing in the London Times, accusing the French government of cruelty to its own citizens. Political prisoners who had escaped from the island by rowing out beyond the coral reefs to a British schooner had published bitter accounts of their torture and captivity. The successful repression of the Kanak revolt showed that, on the contrary, the colonial experiment had been justified.

  The idea behind the experiment was simple but inspired: the terrorists who had turned the City of Light into a beacon of barbarism should be sent to populate the new colony. Removed from the cobbled canyons of Paris, and forced to till the soil of a tropical paradise, they would be civilized by their contact with Nature. Then, in their newly civilized state, they would help to civilize the natives.

  It had been a long and difficult process. To the exiles themselves, it had often seemed that it was designed to achieve the exact reverse. They were held for many months in the hulks of Brest and the Île d’Oléron, and given a communal trough of beans, but no cutlery. On the dilapidated frigates that took them to Nouméa, they were locked in metal cages on the gun deck–each deportee and his hammock took up less than one cubic metre–and allowed out for half an hour each day. The Arab deportees were given pork and wine, and lost the ability to walk. Four months after bidding farewell to the coasts of Europe, they saw the bleak, green mountains of New Caledonia, which look grey at a distance.

  Fifteen hundred deportees had been delivered to the penal settlements of the Ducos peninsula and the Île Nou, where sadists avenged themselves for the hell of boredom to which greed and exotic fantasies had led them. Three thousand others–those who had been deported for life–were each given a thatched hut and a tiny plot. They were forbidden from making or acquiring any tools. Instead, they used their nails, and harvested radishes that were little more than filaments. If they sang songs, cut firewood or tried to give lessons to each other, their huts were flattened and their gardens destroyed. Forced into idleness, they exchanged their socialist ideals for other, more practical aspirations. A man might improve his lot if he gave away a conspiracy or reported a careless comment. He might spend a blessed day with a bottle of absinthe, oblivious to the sun that fell like a stone, dozing peacefully under the muddled stars in a pool of his own vomit.

  This is why the Kanak insurrection of 1878 was such a vital event for the young colony, and why, in spite of the loss of European life, it brought fresh hope for the future.

  4

  THE FIGARO NEWSPAPER, whose offices had been vandalized by some of those reluctant colonists seven years before (‘they were half drunk, because it was only noon’), had taken the same line throughout the whole affair–from the panic that followed the Battle of Sedan, to the Prussian siege of Paris and then the occupation of the city by terrorists. The editor, who had been forced to sit out the troubles on the Côte d’Azur, had called for the complete eradication of the socialist menace, but also for the application of science to ‘the gangrene that has been eating away at Paris for the last twenty years’.

  The Communard insurrection in Paris and its aftermath had provided irrefutable evidence of atavism. Among the ‘wild animals’ that had been marched to the reception centres at Versailles, there were a fair few hunchbacks and cripples. There were flattened brows, prognathous jaws and brutish faces etched with loathing. The females who stood, stripped to the waist, within spitting distance of the crowd, were swarthy and gave off a peculiar odour. Never before had the phenomenon of degeneration been so clearly displayed. Roused from the sleep of countless centuries by alcoholism and political hysteria, primitive traits had reasserted themselves in the modern world.

  Those who had been deported to New Caledonia were not the worst. Justice had disposed of many others before the trials of the Communards had begun. The Parc Monceau, where nurses sat with prams under the leafy parasol of plane trees, had been closed for several days. Passers-by heard the syncopated rattle of shots. In the Jardin du Luxembourg, the soldiers had dumped bodies in the shrubberies and the ornamental lake. There had been long queues of captives outside the railway stations and the barracks. A man leaning over the Pont de la Concorde had seen a red streak flowing under the second arch. When the wind blew from the north-east, the smoke from the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont could be smelled in the city.

  On a crowded boulevard, a man with dirty hands was hoisted on the bayonet of a soldier, to the delight of a group of well-dressed women, who urged the soldier to ‘cut the rat’s head off’. One in every six Parisians sat down to write a letter to the Ministry, giving names and addresses and details of subversive acts. The ‘cull’, as it was called, reduced the population of Paris by about twenty-five thousand, but it returned to its earlier level when the bourgeoisie came back from the country.

  It was all very well for The Times to accuse the French of barbarism. No rational person could have been expected to behave with moderation after what had happened. In the late spring of 1871, Paris was a stage set for a scene of madness. There was a Gothic cathedral on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, where a department store was buttressed with enormous wooden beams. Tiles clung to the rafters of the Tuileries Palace–whose central clock had stopped at ten minutes to nine–like fish caught in nets. A hundred feet in the air, a porcelain vase stood on a mantelpiece, and the reflections of birds flashed across a mirror.

  Special guidebooks were published for foreign tourists, and there were postcards of the most impressive monuments: the wrought-iron creepers that covered the Ministry of Finance; the empty metal tube of the Vendôme Column; the headless statue of the City of Lille sitting on her own remains. At the Hôtel de Ville, the anarchists’ fire had dipped its flames in a palette of ink and molten metal. Seen from the square, it was a foundering ship with shattered masts and gaping portholes, while the side that faced the river had been painted a range of shades from lilac to grey, reminiscent of the latest developments in modern art.

  The Guide á travers les ruines (June 1871) particularly recommended a tour of the Père-Lachaise cemetery. The hill on which it stood had been occupied by the anarchists during the last days of the Commune, to hinder the advance of government troops from the east. The emaciated pyramid that rose above the other tombs contained some chicken bones and bottles of wine. An anarchist evening paper called Paris Libre lay on the ground as though it had been left there after a picnic. Unused petrol bombs were scattered all about. Shells had been fired by government troops from the summit of Montmartre, and had inflicted poignant damage on the homes of the dead.

  Though the cemetery was a maze of paths and the gravestones had served as shields, few had escaped. They had been encircled, then ignored while government troops reoccupied the city, then slowly hunted to extinction. Lower down, in a quiet part of the cemetery, a long, drab wall was pocked with holes. Soft soil was heaped up where hundreds of bodies had been dumped. Arms and legs were seen jutting out of the soil, and
a bullet-ridden head had either been pushed up from below or deliberately placed on the mound as a vindictive memorial.

  3

  IN THE ‘WEEK OF BLOOD’ when Paris was recaptured from the anarchists by the French army–watched from the surrounding heights by the Prussian army–it was already becoming difficult to form a clear memory of those distant days of early spring, when Paris was no longer the capital of anything but itself.

  There had been no Figaro to report events and to transmit the government’s view. Instead, there were dozens of hysterical little newssheets written in an obscene and barbarous form of French. Paris seemed to have been overrun by journalists who took revenge for two decades of imperial censorship by filling their columns with foutres and merdes.

  Oddly, though, in those two months of psychopathic democracy, there was often a dearth of news. Nothing extraordinary appeared to be happening: the buses were running again, the streets were being swept, dogs were chasing pigeons and pedestrians were running into long-lost friends, as usual, on the Pont Neuf. In the autonomous urban enclave that had once been the capital of France, the year 1871 had ceased to exist. It was 79 in the revolutionary calendar, and the clock was running backwards towards a new dawn. After the defeat by Prussia, and the siege of Paris, normal life was an amazing novelty, and complete nonentities suddenly found themselves the centre of attention.

  One such nonentity was a man called Léon Bigot. On 10 Floréal 79 (Saturday, 29 April 1871), when the streets appeared to be safe, he left his apartment on the Boulevard Beaumarchais and set off towards the Place de la Bastille. He had every reason to feel hopeful. He had not been blown to pieces by a Prussian shell, nor had he been starved to death by the besieging army. Until recently, he had worked as an interpreter at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre. As a luxury hotel with a telegraph office, steam-powered lifts and a reputation for culinary excellence, the Grand Hôtel had been requisitioned by the Commune’s Chief Director of Barricade Construction. But one day soon, M. Bigot would be back at work. Tourists would want to see the bombed city, to sketch the ruins, to hear tales of mad anarchists, and so M. Bigot kept abreast of events.

  He bought a paper at the newsstand. It was called Paris Libre–a single sheet, twenty-four inches by eighteen, with six columns on either side. He stopped in the middle of the pavement, urinating involuntarily: he saw his name in an alphabetical list, BIGOT, LÉ ON, between the names of a carpenter and a schoolteacher, his job (‘interpreter attached to the Hôtel du Louvre’), the date of his application (June 1868), and his address (89 Boulevard Beaumarchais).

  The series had just begun, and it was already proving a great success. The editor–a short man with a very large hump, who sat on the Commune’s Public Services Committee–had been the secretary of the serial novelist Eugène Sue. His own literary effort, based on documents that had been liberated from the Ministry of Police, promised to be just as popular as Les Mystères de Paris.

  We shall publish the names and addresses of all individuals who asked for employment as spies under the empire.

  A daily list of names and addresses lacked the narrative complexity of an Eugène Sue serial, but it had its own suspense and energy, and there were occasional examples of application letters to add some colour to the list:

  ‘I know people of all classes and opinions, and am well placed to keep an eye out in all directions at once, in addition to which I am endowed with manly vigour, matchless courage and passive obedience.’

  A guard employed by the Northern Railway Company, 8 Rue de la Nation, Montmartre.

  The volunteer spies had come from all walks of life: grocers, bakers, office clerks, retired soldiers and seamen, students, writers and artists. There was a house painter, a photographer’s assistant, a solicitor and a clown. There were insurance salesmen, a seamstress and a former Mayor of Chassenon near Limoges. According to Paris Libre, those mouchards were all alike, driven to acts of sly brutality by hunger and hatred. ‘They deserve no mercy.’

  Naturally, the dénouements had to be left to the reader’s imagination or initiative. Did M. Léon Bigot, for instance, return to his apartment at 89 Boulevard Beaumarchais after seeing his name in the paper? Did he try to leave the city, or did he spend a fortune buying multiple copies of Paris Libre from every newsstand in his quartier? Did he, like other readers–especially those whose names came later in the alphabet–visit the offices of Paris Libre bearing a high-denomination banknote?

  Those scoundrels thought they were immune from exposure…We shall continue until the letter Z is exhausted.

  Only one visitor to the offices of Paris Libre seemed to find the editor inclined to take pity on him:

  One man appeared deserving of consideration. So great and so obvious was his remorse that we are convinced of his sincere repentance. His name is Fouché, and he lives at 20 Grande-Rue, Saint-Mandé.

  The last issue of Paris Libre (24 May 1871) was a ‘Call to Arms’. It urged all its readers to defend the Commune by whatever means, and to prevent the nation from sliding back into the bad old days of imperialist dictatorship.

  2

  LOOKING BACK THROUGH the layers of history to the origins of the disaster becomes increasingly difficult. So many documents disappeared when the Communards set fire to Paris, and so many educated people who might have left reliable accounts of the Commune abandoned the city when it surrendered to Prussia and the siege was lifted. Even if the death of certain individuals on the alphabetized lists could be inferred from their subsequent absence, it would be impossible to say whether they died in the fire, were shot by soldiers or lynched by their neighbours.

  Two million Parisians had been dreaming the same convoluted dream. They had gone to the ballot box, and voted for a government of idealists who might prevent them from waking up. Meanwhile, beyond the gates, on the hills that surrounded the enchanted enclave, the Prussians had been assessing their new domain. Prussian cartographers had been creating relief maps more accurate than any the natives had ever seen. They took aerial photographs, and collated data from different sources. They itemized the estates and chattels of the region’s inhabitants, paying particular attention to the homes of the rich.

  The Commune had been doomed from the start. With more effective barricades and better luck, it might have defended the labyrinth of streets until some diplomatic compromise was reached, but it was fatally handicapped by its simple state of mind, its futile hopes and above all by the fact that the rude awakening had come before the dream.

  Parisians had seen their conquerors march along the avenues that had, after all, been designed for triumphal parades. Despite what the Figaro called their ‘wounded patriotism’ and ‘popular resentment’, they had allowed the Prussians to spend two days sightseeing in Paris without a single shot being fired. But the Prussians had taken the sensible precaution of dressing up. They brought out the silvery trumpets and the blue-and-white flags; they burnished the harnesses and the weaponry. The Battle of Paris was won with flattery and polish. The indigenous population saw tall young men in freshly laundered uniforms, riding sleek and confident horses. They saw the sun of Paris dance on the gleaming guns, and were mightily impressed.

  The decisive engagement had taken place, not on the battlefields above Sedan on 4 September 1870, but on the Place de la Concorde on 1 March 1871.

  The triumphal parade had descended the Champs-É lysées and reached the statue of Strasbourg, which was draped in black crêpe. The square was already filling up, and the eddies caused by the motion of horses through the crowd had begun to scatter the procession into separate groups. Some grim-looking men gathered around Bismarck and his horse. They had come in from the eastern suburbs, to see, and perhaps to act. The German Chancellor looked down from his horse and seemed to smile under his moustache. A hiss came from one of the men, and for a moment, the crowd fell silent. Bismarck signalled to the man with his gloved hand, bent over his holster and asked if Monsieur would have the kindness to light his cigar. The match was
reluctantly struck, a cloud of smoke rose into the sky and the procession moved on into the Rue de Rivoli. A little later, a café that had unpatriotically stayed open was ransacked by an angry mob.

  1

  PARISIANS HAD NO DOUBT exhausted their courage and their ingenuity in the siege. One hundred and thirty-two days of dog food had not been good for the rational faculties. They had reverted to the simplest aspirations: eating and staying alive. They had reduced the size of their stomachs and their brains. (There were medical studies to prove it.) When buildings suddenly disappeared in a cloud of dust, they showed remarkably little interest. The men in the bar on the Rue d’Enfer, the girl walking home from school by the Jardin du Luxembourg, the horses at the Grenelle bus depot knew nothing–a rush of air, a roof falling in. (All the shells fell on the Left Bank.) Everyone else was a spectator and a collector of Prussian bomb casings and pieces of carved stone.