By the 1890s, popular books revisiting the Commune, from children’s adventure tales to historical romances, adult novels, and memoirs, had become a genre of their own, leading one unidentified literary critic to write, “We have had the Commune from the point of view of the novelist ad nauseam.”12 Paris held a romantic fascination across the classes; wealthy tourists used Paris as a hub for visits to other parts of Europe, while bohemian artists sought inspiration among the living French painters and in the museums.
George Dyer, the US naval attaché to Madrid, spent several weeks in Paris with his family, including daughter Susan, renting rooms on Rue de Clichy, a few blocks northeast of the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. “It is a great house built around a court with the front doors inside, and is more like a hotel than a boarding house,” the daughter wrote in her diary, an evocative view by a teenage girl of those days in Paris.13 As her father tended to business, Susan and her mother joined the throngs of American tourists visiting museums and shops, which she found more interesting than those in New York City, but just as expensive. She spent each late afternoon, weather permitting, strolling through the city streets, picking a different area to visit with each walk. In early December, the Christmas displays filled shop windows along Rue de la Paix, just north of the Tuileries and the Louvre, where “the street is lined with jewelers’ stores, as it was dark and everything was lighted up it made a brilliant display. We stopped and chose things out of every window and were just as contented as if we had them in reality.” Evenings out centered on the opera and ballet performances, but also the Folies Bergère, where the young Miss Dyer “saw the best variety show of my life,” though “I could have dispensed with … the ‘ballet’ (so-called). It was too suggestive and Frenchy—I looked at the ceiling most of the time. A woman all but undressed on the stage. Such a thing would not be allowed at Keith’s or Proctor’s in New York.”14
Ambassador Porter took in some of the sights, but his focus was primarily on promoting American business and trade through social connections, in effect recreating his life in New York. His approach differed from the embassy’s standard practice, and Porter fought something like a cultural intransigence. “He wants to work the society racket, so they say, but he is in hard luck with his staff,” Sims wrote. “His first secretary and the military attaché are men who don’t ‘go out’ at all, and you know how much use the naval attaché is in that line.”15 Porter had to go it alone. He issued and accepted an endless stream of dinner invitations and quickly got to know the French leaders, particularly President Félix Faure, with whom he struck up a fast friendship. Faure regularly invited Porter and his wife to his private box at the opera, as well as garden parties and days at the racetrack, a favorite of the diminutive president.
Porter used that friendship to impress visiting Americans, such as Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central Railroad and future US senator from New York, who “went away the most tickled man you ever saw. I made a special request of the president to invite D[epew] to a little theatrical entertainment he was to give at the palace in honor of the Prince and Princess of Bulgaria. This was granted and I took Chauncey with me, presented him to the President, Mrs. Faure and their daughter, and a number of ministers and he ‘underwent’ no end of delight. I did not hear any sore-head talk from him while here.”16
Porter regarded Faure as “a man of distinguished presence, extremely courteous in manner, possessed of real tact, unpretentious but not lacking in dignity, and understands the French people thoroughly.” In reality, Faure was something of an accidental leader, having won the presidency during a fractured convention. He was elected primarily because he offended no specific interests in French political society. Porter might well have seen a bit of himself in the French president. They shared military backgrounds—Faure had been minister of the French navy—and they both had become wealthy through industry, Faure as a leather merchant and Porter in railroads. But there they split. Where Porter embraced a sense of personal conservatism—he’d wear an overcoat until it all but fell apart—Faure “was passionate and expansive” with great appetites for good food, fine clothing, and compliant women. Yet he was a moderate when it came to political affairs, which at the time in France were decidedly unsettled.17
The late 1890s coincided with the third decade of what would be a seven-decade run for the French Third Republic. (It would collapse under the onslaught from Nazi Germany.) Porter’s arrival came as the nation was struggling with searing and divisive issues, from the role of the Roman Catholic Church in an increasingly secularized society and government to simmering class divisions that had led to the insurrection and then brutal suppression of the Paris Commune uprising just twenty-five years earlier. Violent anarchists continued to agitate for reforms and revolution, which made for a murderous time. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was assassinated in Lyon in June 1894 by Italian anarchist Santo Caserio, part of a spree of killings and assaults by the radicals that swept through Europe. Faure himself was the target of botched assassination attempts on July 14, 1896, when a gunman opened fire but missed as Faure’s carriage rolled through Bois de Boulogne, and on June 13, 1897, when a pipe bomb was detonated as his carriage rolled past a thicket, again in Bois de Boulogne en route to the Longchamp racecourse for the Grand Prix horse race. Both would-be assassins were captured and deemed insane, rather than anarchists, though the latter is what they seemed to have been.
Internationally, the European powers—including France—were near the end of the race to colonize the African continent even as they struggled to maintain a military balance in Europe itself. France had declared war on Prussia in 1870 in hopes of maintaining its dominance over Europe. Instead, it suffered a humiliating defeat and saw its power and influence fall as the German states united. By 1897 France was still struggling for power and position, and tensions among the major powers ebbed and flowed as they sought the upper hand in backwaters and byways in the heart of Africa. King Leopold of Belgium was setting a high bar for inhumane acts through his brutal exploitation of the Congo.18
Porter, though, focused on little of that. He was a man of business more than diplomacy; updates on French tariff legislation and a looming meeting in Paris on bimetallism dominated his communications with Sherman, his boss back in Washington. McKinley had appointed a three-member bimetallism commission to represent the United States’ view that the nation would pin the value of its currency to both gold and silver if the European powers did the same. The commission arrived in Paris around the same time as Porter and waited for his credentials to be presented formally to the French before beginning its work. Porter also regularly met with Americans touring Europe. “I cannot feel lonesome as I spend half of every day receiving Americans at the Embassy; still I miss the folks at home, and wait with eagerness for American news.”19
For all the whirl of social Paris that Porter encountered, high society was in a state of deep depression in the late spring and early summer of 1897. Each spring since 1885, wives of the city’s most prominent men had come together for the annual Bazar de la Charité, in which they staffed booths selling a range of fashionable products to raise money for dozens of Catholic charitable organizations working in Paris. Over time, the event had evolved into a sprawling temporary enclave of stitched-together booths and stalls under a massive roof. It was also an affirmation of the social and political power of the Catholic aristocracy, a vibrant symbol of old France even as the new France, in the form of the occasionally anticlerical Third Republic, looked ahead to the next millennium.20
The 1897 incarnation of the Bazar was modeled after a medieval Parisian street and built on an open lot, measuring 300 feet by 150 feet, just off Rue Jean-Goujon on the Right Bank near the Grand Palais. While open at the street, the lot was surrounded on the other three sides by adjoining walls, rising as high as fifteen feet, and multistory buildings. Into that was nestled the temporary superstructure, measuring some 240 feet along the road and abou
t 40 feet deep. The walls were wooden tongue-and-groove panels pieced together beneath a glassed skylight that ran along the ridge of the slightly angled roof, the rest of which was covered with tar paper. A ceiling of suspended canvas hid the trusses from view within the rooms. There were two side-by-side doors in the middle of the structure at the sidewalk, and four other doors at the back, though they were hidden from the view of people inside the building. Wooden planks laid across wooden beams flat on the ground formed the floor. Each charity booth was elaborately decorated with paper and other highly flammable objects—all in all, a recipe for disaster.
And the disaster came. On the afternoon of May 4, some 1,200 members of mostly Catholic Parisian society—given the time of day, nearly all were women and children—milled through the Bazar. It was a place to be seen, so the women dressed in their finest, long frilly gowns of multiple layers, and bonnets or hats. It was spring, so many wore cloaks which they checked at a booth near the door where they entered, setting something of a mental marker for where to find an exit in a hurry. One of the displays featured a cinematograph, an early movie projector, in a closed room near the main entrance. The lamp was placed too close to a container of oil, and the heat ignited the flammable liquid. Panic broke out in the full theater as the fire, fueled by a strong breeze coursing through the loose construction, quickly consumed wood and paper and frilly decorations and chased moviegoers into the main hallway. Flames sprinted along the underside of the roof and blew out some of the skylights, creating a chimney for the conflagration—and fueling its terrifying growth. Flaming joists and tar paper rained down on the crowd of screaming women and children in their loose and flammable finery, a mass of humanity unable to find the exits.
“There is no doubt that many of the visitors practically died where they stood at the time of the outbreak, being enveloped almost immediately in the burning canvas which fell from above,” British fire inspector Edwin O. Sachs wrote after reviewing the fire. “Of the others who succumbed, many were entrapped either by being cut off from the exit; by finding these blocked when they reached them, or by not knowing their exact position. Of those who escaped by the principal exits, a large number were injured by the crush at the doors.”21
Some 130 people, the vast majority of them women and children, were killed; a high percentage of them burned to death. More than 450 others suffered injuries ranging from slight to critical, with scores deeply scarred both physically and emotionally. Many of the dead were charred beyond recognition and had to be identified by partially melted jewelry as their blackened and shrunken bodies were laid out side by side in the nearby Palais de l’Industrie, pressed into service as a makeshift morgue.
The fire broke out the day before the Porters boarded their ship for Paris. By the time they arrived, the first shock of the catastrophe had given way to angry finger-pointing—three organizers eventually would be tried for negligence in the design and operation of the bazaar—but the city was dominated primarily by deep, profound sadness. Given the intermarriage of the city’s elite, few families were untouched by the tragedy, and the social fabric of the aristocracy was shredded as families were suddenly motherless and a number of new widowers also found themselves without one or more of their children.
It was into this muted Parisian high society that the Porters sought to insert themselves, focusing their social attentions at first on fellow expatriate Americans at embassy-hosted dinners. Their daughter, Elsie, was deemed too young at age seventeen to play a role, and was sent off to the Convent of the Assumption on Rue de Lübeck—just a few blocks from the Porters’ rented home at the Spitzer mansion—where she hoped to improve her French language skills.
Elsie stayed at the convent in a private room separate from the dormitories that housed the other young women. She returned home at noon on Saturdays and arrived back at school by 9:30 AM on Mondays. In her diaries, Elsie said she had asked to attend the school, though once she was enrolled, she referred to the convent as “this blessed hole.” Dinners were taken from benches at common tables and eaten in silence; afterward the young women passed by the mother superior in pairs for a visual inspection.
Raised a Protestant, Elsie was uncomfortable with the Catholic icons. “Christ is too holy, it seems to me, to be carved for ten cents on a cross all dripping with gore and in the most awful agonies.” Yet she was equally harsh in her view of the social responsibilities of an ambassador’s daughter, which meant spending Sunday with her mother visiting society ladies. “It is very nice, I suppose, being in society, especially when you have a great name and position, but as far as I can see, it consists of standing for hours at the dressmaker and invariably having your clothes tight … or cackling to a lot of freaks you don’t care anything about.”22
Yet Elsie would be spending more time than she anticipated fulfilling social obligations as her mother’s health began to flag. The issue, never detailed publicly, was a weakened heart, and Sophie Porter found the mountain air in Switzerland better for her health than the pollution—and stress—of Paris. Over the next few years, she would be absent from her husband’s side for months at a time, and her daughter would stand in.
Porter had only been at work a few weeks when a special dispatch from the secretary of state, John Sherman, landed on his desk. Sent to both Porter and John Hay, the US ambassador to England, Sherman’s message advised that Stewart Woodford, the newly appointed ambassador to Spain, would be arriving in late July. Weeks earlier, President McKinley had settled on Woodford for the delicate post after several other men turned down the appointment. Woodford’s marching orders were to negotiate an end to the Cuban crisis; McKinley was becoming increasingly worried that the United States would be drawn inexorably into a military intervention.
Woodford’s first step would be to stop in Paris to meet with Porter, as well as the American ambassadors to England and Germany, to discuss the growing tensions with Spain and the mood of America’s European allies. There was a lot to discuss. The Spanish colonial empire had been dwindling since its peak in the 1600s, when it dominated the Americas, and it now consisted of Spanish Sahara and a few other small outposts in Africa; the Philippines and other islands in the East Indies; and Cuba. Insurrectionists had been active in both the Philippines and Cuba, but it was the latter, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, that had seized the attention of the American public, many of whom saw parallels to the American colonies’ fight for independence from Great Britain—the fight that made John Paul Jones an American icon.23
The trouble in Cuba had surged and ebbed numerous times during the 1800s, with native-born Cubans chafing under Spanish rule. A violent insurrection broke out in 1868, and lasted a decade before it burned itself out. In 1895 rebellion began anew when José Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party organized military landings and uprisings in three places in Cuba. (The plans were crippled by the US government, which seized two ships planning to move weapons and revolutionaries from Fernandina Beach, Florida, to Cuba.) Martí was killed in one of the early skirmishes, but the rebels battled on with a scorched-earth policy seeking to destroy the sugar industry, believing that the resulting economic crisis would so destabilize Spanish interests that they would grant independence rather than spend the money to quell the rebellion. It was effective, at least in disrupting the sugar cash crops. Cuba produced about $65 million in sugar exports in 1895, the year the rebellion began in earnest. In 1896 the value of the sugar crop dropped to $13 million. At the same time, two insurrectionist fronts were opened up in western Cuba, which led to media accounts that overstated the strength of the revolutionary forces. That helped increase the sense of instability in Cuba and raised questions about Spain’s ability to maintain control.24
American media accounts over the years, often embellished and romanticized, pushed political pressure for US intervention, though neither President Cleveland nor President McKinley wanted to lead the nation to war. Since its founding, the United States had largely pursued a policy of
isolation. In June 1895 Cleveland had issued a statement of neutrality on Cuba that was read as a de facto recognition of the insurrection. The American public was split between those who favored American support for the revolutionaries and those who wanted to aid Spain in putting down the rebellion. But the revolutionaries found support in Congress, leading to a vote on April 6, 1896, urging Cleveland to recognize the rebellion and offer support.
Cleveland was unmoved, and he privately informed Spain that the United States would be willing to mediate negotiations with the rebels. Spain took two months to consider the offer then rejected it. McKinley, both during the campaign and once in office, wanted neither military intervention nor a pledge of US support for either side. He seemed to be wishing the problem would just go away so he could concentrate on reviving the still-moribund US economy.
In April 1896 Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas replaced the general in Cuba, Arsenio Martínez de Campos, with the more aggressive General Valeriano Weyler. Weyler immediately ordered all rural Cubans in areas where the insurgents were most successful to move to villages and towns, in the belief that this would undercut the rebels’ access to supplies and support. Many of the forcibly displaced were collected in unsanitary camps, and the focus on civilians in what was ostensibly a military conflict drew sharp international condemnation, particularly among Americans backing Cuban independence.
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