The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Before the food shortage had reached its full gravity, and to those that could afford them, these bizarre victuals also provided a rich source of humour. Le Figaro related how a man was pursued through Paris by a pack of dogs, barking loudly at his heels; he could not understand their interest until he remembered that he had eaten a rat for breakfast. A similar cartoon in one of the illustrated journals depicted, sticking out of a man’s mouth, the tail of a cat which had dived down his throat in pursuit of its natural prey. After a dog dinner at Brébant’s, Hébrard was heard to comment, ‘At our next dinner they’ll be serving us the shepherd’; but in fact the Parisians were never quite reduced to cannibalism.

  Some of France’s best scientific brains had been employed to devise additional ways of supplementing the dwindling food supplies. In the latter days of the Siege a bread, named ‘pain Ferry’ after the responsible Minister and composed of wheat, rice and straw, made its appearance. One Frenchman said, ‘It seemed to have been made from old Panama hats picked out of the gutters’, while to Professor Sheppard it tasted of ‘sawdust, mud and potato skins’. As a kind of synthetic milk, the Comité Scientifique recommended a nauseous-sounding brew of glucose, albumen (or gelatine), and olive oil; unfortunately there was no olive oil in Paris. One of its more successful developments was the ‘osseine’ mentioned earlier, made out of bones and gelatine, which was sold widely in the last days of the Siege for making bouillon, at one franc a kilogram. Unfortunately, in Paris’s anguish speculators were also swift to glimpse opportunity. Appalling concoctions of bogus foodstuffs—above all of milk for desperate mothers—appeared on the market; doctored pumpkins were sold as apricot marmalade, and jams fabricated from horse gelatine and molasses were sold at 1.40 francs a pound; cooking-grease was adulterated with candles, and Goncourt overheard arsenic being recommended as a good antidote to hunger. Few butchers were above taking advantage of their sudden emergence as the most powerful (and most detested) section of the community; cat, said Professor Sheppard, was frequently sold as ‘an otter, or a rare species of hare, or an extraordinary small and odd kind of sheep’, and a lamb offered to one British correspondent ironically turned out to be a wolf. There were also ingenious rackets whereby valuable racehorses, bought at knackers’ prices, were switched for old hacks of equivalent weight and were somehow kept alive until they made a handsome profit for their new ‘owner’ when the Siege ended.

  Despite the quite sensible entreaties of Blanqui and the left wing, no effort was made by the Government to establish proper control of food distribution until too late, and then the measures were ineffectual and unfair. In the earliest days the Government had set up price controls on a number of staple foods, but these were feebly enforced and soon short-circuited by a rampant black market. Meat rationing was introduced in mid-October; it started at 100 grammes per person per day, was reduced in November to 50 grammes, and later to 30—or roughly one ounce—but it encompassed none of the ‘exotic’ meats mentioned above. Restaurants were also instructed in October to serve but one plate of meat to each client; notices were posted up, but little attention paid to them in any place where money could speak. Labouchere noted that ‘in the expensive cafés of the Boulevards, feasts worthy of Lucullus are still served’, and the situation altered little as the months passed. Bread was not rationed until the last days of the Siege, though false rumours of it provoked panic and riots in mid-December. No measures were ever taken to counter hoarding. The prudent well-to-do lived off their own private stocks purchased before the Siege began, but far more reprehensible were the speculators who sat on foodstuffs until prices seemed sufficiently attractive. Some made a killing from beetroots bought in October at 2 centimes a piece, and later sold for 1.75 francs. Panicked by the rumours of premature peace that followed Thiers’ armistice talks, others released some of their butter hoards so that prices dropped by two-thirds with revealing abruptness.

  Because it was more profitable to sell ‘under the counter’, but also because the disgracefully inefficient system of distribution meant that often their shops were genuinely bare, traders took to putting up their shutters for long periods. This resulted in endless, heart-breaking food queues; a word that one British correspondent (who would not live long enough to see mid-twentieth-century Britain) found hard to translate—‘There is no equivalent in English—happily!’ Such a queue, he discovered, 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’. Hour after hour the wretched housewives waited (‘to have any certainty of a basketful one had to be on the spot by three in the morning’ claimed O’Shea), often leaving empty-handed, with hatred in their hearts equally for the petit bourgeois as represented by the heartless butcher and for the rich bourgeois who could afford to buy without queuing.

  Virtually the only effective rationing was achieved by that most unfair of all criteria—by price. Regardless of the Government’s attempts at price controls, the cost of most foodstuffs soared as the weeks went by, as its shown by the following table:1

  First two weeks of the Siege

  December 10th to 24th

  francs

  francs

  Butter

  4.00 per lb.

  35.00 per lb.

  Eggs

  1·80 a dozen

  24·00 a dozen

  Fowl

  6.00

  26.00

  Rabbit

  8·00

  40.00

  Cheese

  2.00 er lb.

  30·00 er lb.

  Fresh pork

  1.10 per lb.

  —(non-existent)

  Cat

  —

  6.00 per lb.

  Rat

  —

  0·50

  Potatoes

  2·75 per bushel

  15·00 per bushel2

  Carrots

  1·20 per box

  2·80 per lb.

  Cabbage

  0·75 each

  4·00 each3

  Even this table barely reflects the full extent of price rises, as these had already been substantial by the time the investment of Paris was complete; compared with pre-war days, for instance, the prices of butter had risen by over one-third, and potatoes and rabbits had more than doubled. The price that some people were prepared to pay for uncontrolled foods seemed limitless. O’Shea recalled that a friend of his had been offered a fat poodle for 100 francs; on December 19th Washburne recorded eating mule meat at ‘2 dollars per pound in gold’; on Christmas Day he saw a goose in a shop being sold for 25 dollars, while Sheppard noted that a turkey which could still have been bought for 100 francs the previous week had had its price pushed up to 180 francs for Christmas (before the war it would have fetched 10 francs). Towards the end of the year, Francisque Sarcey studied a ‘crowd of loiterers huddled around a turkey, just as in other times one used to see them in front of the great jewellers on the Rue de la Paix’. The comparison was hardly exaggerated, and indeed at least one jeweller had found it more profitable to transform his premises into a provision shop, displaying elegantly in the window (according to O’Shea) ‘a dead rabbit… flanked by a plate of minnows and three tiny sparrows; while higher up half-a-dozen hen-eggs were arranged in a circle, like a necklet of pearls’.

  Even by this time there was, claimed Sarcey, still ‘an enormous quantity of rabbits and poultry’, so that for the affluent the Siege offered inconvenience but never real hunger. Before the investment began all those who could afford it, and had foresight, had laid in substantial reserves. At the beginning of December, Labouchere noted that there were still three sheep hoarded in the cellar of the British Embassy (‘Never did the rich man lust more after the poor man’s ewe lamb that I lust after these sheep’). Bowles had a friend ‘who possesses two sheep and a pig, and I am happy to say that I am on the best of terms with him, as well as wit
h another who has got a cow and produces fresh butter’, while another Englishman, Henry Markheim, recalled eating roast beef in a restaurant on December 20th, and being assured by the proprietor that there was a further week’s supply in his cellar. Edward Blount kept two live cows as well as two horses throughout most of the Siege. On November 17th he wrote in a letter ‘Paris can stand out for two months more…. I have still fresh meat of the cow I killed, for breakfast, and milk and butter from the one still living… we dine well at the Jockey Club. In fine we get enough, and people do not complain…’, though four days later he noted ‘dreadful misery in the poor quarters of the town’. Throughout November and December he managed to live on his salted cow; his horses were requisitioned, but spared after a personal appeal to Jules Favre, and not until January 1st was he forced to kill his remaining cow, which kept him in meat for the remainder of the Siege, so that as far as he was concerned he was able to say comfortably ‘I think a little starvation does no harm’. The experiences of Dr. Alan Herbert were not dissimilar. At the end of November, he was writing to his brother, the Earl of Carnarvon: ‘Good stock of provisions; enough, if necessary, to last till end of January…. If there should be an amnesty, beg Fortnum and Mason to send immediately hams, tongues, potted meats and cheese…’. He too had a reserve of livestock, including a hen called ‘Una’, to whom he became so attached that he would not permit her to be sacrificed;1 a fact which suggests that, as well as being tender-hearted, the doctor can never have been quite reduced to the extremities shared by some of the more hard-up Britons in Paris, whom he did so much to help.

  The American Legation had also laid in a large stock of food for its dependents, including canned hominy and grits. Some thirty of its members dined off traditional turkey (‘at twelve dollars a piece’) on Thanksgiving Day; on December 13th, Wickham Hoffman wrote to a colleague ‘We ate (four days ago) a sucking pig, a roast duck, truffles and fresh butter. This is not famine—and all washed down with Château Margaux 1850…. I was a guest’; and on Christmas Day his Minister, Washburne, sat down unashamedly to an eight-course menu beginning with oyster soup. Some senior French officers seem to have looked after themselves just as well as the diplomats; Wickham Hoffman recalled in astonishment one three-hour ‘breakfast’ with a general commanding a forward position, at which ‘we had beef, eggs, ham, etc., and from what I heard I should say that he and his staff breakfasted as well every day’. One Parisian also describes a fabulous dinner in the Rue de Ponthieu, given by a French naval captain just two weeks before the capitulation to celebrate the installation of a new mistress: ‘Domestics in breeches and silk hose served us foies gras truffés, filets of steak of real beef—no Jardin des Plantes hippopotamus—enormous Argenteuil asparagus, grapes from Thomery that had escaped Prussian surveillance, and bucketfuls of the finest champagne’. The author concluded that really the only hungry ones in Paris were those who ‘suffered from voracious appetites’. Restaurants seemed remarkably unaffected, and inversely so in proportion to their expensiveness; after the Siege was over, Goncourt and his friends presented to Chez Brébant a medallion bearing the inscription:

  ‘DURING THE SIEGE OF PARIS A FEW PEOPLE ACCUSTOMED TO FOREGATHERING AT MONSIEUR BRÉBANT’S ONCE A FORTNIGHT NEVER ON ONE SINGLE OCCASION PERCEIVED THAT THEY WERE DINING IN A CITY OF TWO MILLION BESIEGED SOULS’.

  It was a remarkable and revealing testimony.

  For those with even a little money, the situation was rarely worse than it was for the average Briton during the direst moments of the U-Boat blockade in the First World War. Edwin Child on his apprentice’s pay (though no doubt aided by a youthful and insouciant digestion) describes dining, at the end of the year, off ‘two plates of meat (couldn’t say of what) with sauces and preserved green peas. Found it remarkably good anyhow and relished it as such.’ But in a letter home a short time later he admits: ‘the Garde Nationale helps me a great deal as outside Paris we are fed and inside are paid 1½ francs a day, but when it costs 2 francs each meal this does not go far’. Many of the British correspondents wrote of eating a slice of Pollux’s trunk (though the genuine article must have been almost as rare as bits of the True Cross), but even a young elephant will not go far among two million people; especially at 40 francs a pound. Apart from the plight of the indigent foreigners in Paris, which has been noted earlier, for the hundreds of thousands of the really poor in Paris, who had found it a struggle to keep their heads above water under the high cost of living of the Second Empire, and who could not now afford rats because of the cost of the essential sauces, jokes about strange foods were hardly funny. Starvation was never very far away. In the third week of December, Labouchere was shocked to find in slums off the Boulevard de Clichy women and children sitting, ‘half-starved’, on their doorsteps. ‘They said that, as they had neither firewood nor coke, they were warmer out-of-doors than in-doors….’ Prostitution spread as women, like one young girl who accosted Goncourt, sold themselves for a crust of bread; the restaurants benefited, for the poor sold them their ration cards when they were unable to pay for the food. In December the sight of convoys of small coffins carried by weeping parents up to Père Lachaise cemetery became a daily occurrence as the lack of milk made infant mortality soar. Apart from the children, it was the women of the poor who suffered most. At least the men had, most of them, their 1.50 francs a day from the National Guard, little enough of which reached their wives. The habit of the bistro formed under Louis-Napoleon had assumed a still stronger hold, as representing the only barrier against boredom and cold, and even—corroborating an axiom of Hippocrates—as the surest way to appease hunger. And there was never any shortage of wine or alcohol. In the poorer districts, drunknenness was never more widespread, nor more wretched. So while the women and children of proletarian Paris queued and died, the men got drunk; all the while fuming against the Government.

  For all the suffering, with the exception of the children, very few Parisians actually died of starvation during the Siege. Once again, by way of comparison, it is perhaps worth returning to the Siege of Leningrad. Within the first month of war starting in June 1941, rationing was introduced, and by November this had already been reduced to below subsistence-level. That month the first cases of death by starvation were recorded: 11,085. There was no question of such exotic meat substitutes as rat or elephant; during the first winter of the Siege the population of Leningrad was reduced to eating ‘pancakes made of sawdust, jelly made from carpenter’s glue… raw bran pancakes made from powdered wall-paper glue and containing an insect repellent’. People died at their work and in the streets; and by January 1942 the death rate had risen to as high as an estimated 9,000 a day.

  * * *

  Apart from her apparently bottomless cellars, Paris—accustomed as she was to both demanding and supplying more diversions than most other cities—had few enough resources with which to distract her mind from the reality of hunger. Promenades around the fortifications, enlivened with an occasional peep through telescopes at the Prussian lines, continued to provide the principal Sunday occupation; the philosophical, motionless gudgeon fishermen still found diversion on the banks of the Seine, and, although their efforts became less and less frequently rewarded with success, the curious crowds they drew never diminished.1 But, as the weather grew more bitterly cold, these pastimes began to pall. Instead, rat-hunting became the vogue, with the Paris Journal offering helpful hints on how to ‘fish for sewer rats with a hook and line bated with tallow’. Spy-chasing, rumour-mongering, and scurrility continued to keep minds busy, ably abetted by the wilder elements of the Press; although Blanqui’s La Patrie en Danger folded up on December 8th for want of funds. There were still plenty of lengthy parades and patriotic demonstrations to keep both body and emotions warm; many of them in the Concorde before the statue of Strasbourg, which had become a kind of shrine.

  Meanwhile, a new and enduring source of entertainment had been provided by the publication of the Tuileries papers, replete with the most
salacious revelations of corruption and vice under the Second Empire. Labouchere recalled seeing the copy of a receipt from Miss Howard, showing how as the Emperor’s mistress she had received five million francs, and even he admitted to being shocked at the discovery of what an ‘El Dorado of pimps and parasites, panders and wantons’ the Imperial court had been. Meretricious booksellers made a heyday out of the disclosures, shouting to passers-by ‘Demandez la femme Bonaparte! Ses amants, ses orgies!’ The virtuous and frigid Eugénie was usually the butt of the obscene caricatures resulting from the release of the Tuileries papers; one showed her in the nude, being sketched by the Prince de Joinville, and another dancing a cancan, her petticoats flung up over her head, for the delectation of the King of Prussia, who was drinking champagne on a sofa, while Louis-Napoleon hung, encaged, from the wall. All this, encouraged and even sponsored by the Trochu Government, appalled Goncourt as many other Parisians by its ‘lack of gravity, of restraint, of what is proper’; and indeed there was something shamefully frivolous in the way Paris could continue to blame the ancien régime for its present terrible dilemma. Against the protests of the austere Blanqui, the theatres which had closed in September reopened at the end of October. Their comeback was led by the Theâtre français with excerpts from Le Misanthrope and a lecture on ‘Moral Nourishment During the Siege’, and on November 5th the Opéra had also reopened, but with a dismally depleted cast as most of the singers had made haste to leave Paris before the investment. The bill of fare offered by the theatres was equally impoverished, and a performance seldom ended without some patriotic polemic. Labouchere recorded a typical evening at the Comédie française, consisting of ‘a speech, a play of Molière’s without costumes, and an ode to Liberty’. Young Sarah Bernhardt was among the actresses to take part in the many fund-raising productions, devoted to hospital charities and the purchase of cannon; it was a role that she was to repeat, though aged and minus a leg, in another war, nearly half a century later. At these performances nothing was more popular than a fiery reading of of Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments, the embittered attack on Louis-Napoleon that he had written when in exile, and of which 22,000 copies had been sold by mid-December.