The discomfort that Bertie felt on hearing this story would have been much the same as his anguish about the state of France in 1870 and 1871. His foreign mistress was being attacked by heavily armed Prussians, and he would have loved to step in and calm things down, but propriety meant that he had to stay away and let the violence take its course.
Unchecked by any serious international disapproval, the Prussians were free to give Bertie’s sexual second home a severe pasting. And then, to make things worse, even before the Prussians had ceased hostilities, the French themselves descended into a period of terrifying self-abuse.
Paris’s worst mugging of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began almost as soon as Napoléon III surrendered at Sedan on 1 September 1870. The Prussians charged westwards towards Paris, more or less unopposed by a badly prepared French army – a situation that would be exactly reproduced in 1914 and 1940.1 By 19 September, France’s capital was encircled and a four-month siege began.
Paris was easier to defend in 1870 than in 1940 because it was ringed with fortifications and guarded by more than a dozen forts, most of them the typical star-shaped French bastions that look from the air like red-brick tortoises. Unfortunately, though, when France went to war with Prussia most of the forts were unarmed, so in the late summer of 1870 cannons had to be dragged in from the (less important) provinces or hurriedly forged in makeshift arms factories that were set up within Paris, including one in the Louvre where there was, of course, a handy supply of bronze in the sculpture galleries.
Meanwhile, with most of France’s troops having surrendered to the enemy, Paris rounded up regiments of untrained civilian troops who – this being a newly formed republic – were allowed to elect their own officers. Perhaps not the best way to nominate the men who would organize the city’s defences.
Sexual equality was just beginning to seep into French culture, so a women’s brigade was founded in Paris, the so-called Amazones de la Seine. Their uniform: black trousers with orange stripes, a black hooded jacket and a black cap with orange trim. It was all very egalitarian, but the official announcement (obviously written by men) specified that, as well as defending the city ramparts with ‘light rifles’, the women would be expected to ‘give combatants . . . all the domestic and sisterly services they require, as long as they are compatible with military discipline’. The city thought it necessary to specify that the ladies weren’t there to make guard duty more fun.
When the modernized, highly trained Prussian army heard about all this, their generals must have giggled into their pointy helmets. Even so, by the time the Germans had billeted themselves in the comfortable palace at Versailles and occupied a ring of villages around Paris, the city had about 400,000 officially enrolled defenders, three-quarters of them untrained.
Almost immediately, Bertie would have heard disturbing news – on 13 October, the Château de Saint-Cloud, where he and his parents had been so majestically entertained by Napoléon and Eugénie in 1855, was demolished by artillery fire. Not Prussian fire, but French. The château stood on high ground overlooking the Seine and was being used as an observation post by the enemy, so the unsentimental Parisians, for whom the building (which still contained most of its priceless furnishings) was little more than a reminder of Napoléon’s frivolity, bombarded it. Within hours, it was a smouldering ruin. It must have felt to Bertie, and even more to the fleeing Eugénie, like a very strong hint that their flamboyant Parisian lifestyle was a thing of the past.2
For the whole of the following autumn and bitingly harsh winter, no one in Paris enjoyed the lifestyle that had made the city famous for the previous two decades of Napoleonic rule. Those that could went into exile south and west of the Prussian lines, while the people who stayed behind sank slowly into illness and starvation. Of course, as in many sieges, the illness and starvation were doled out along class lines. If you had money or influential friends, you could find food and firewood. But almost everyone in Paris had family members amongst the troops who kept up a constant aggressive attempt to dislodge the occupiers, and all lived in terror of the artillery shells that were used by the Prussians as negotiating tactics. The city became a massive army base, with militiamen camping in the parks and training on the boulevards, prostitutes disappearing off the streets to sew uniforms in workshops, and cafés closing at ten o’clock. The playboys had to go out on guard duty or stay at home.
For almost half a year, the invaders brought in fresh troops, weapons and supplies to tighten their stranglehold, letting the Parisians stew in their own juices. At first, the inhabitants carried on eating almost normally thanks to the many small farms within the ring of fortifications, but soon supplies were running low and new sources of protein were needed. Anything with four legs became a potential meal. Amongst the thousands of mules and horses pulling carts and carriages around the city, only those needed for the war effort were safe from slaughter. Pets were eaten, and a report from November 1870 speaks of a butcher on the boulevard de Rochechouart, in the poor north of the city, starting to sell dogs, cats, rats and even sparrows on a stick. Outside the Hôtel de Ville a rat market opened. Clients would choose the rodent from a crowded cage, it would be strangled to death by a (presumably well-fed) bulldog, and dinner was served. Meanwhile, the only winged creature off the menu was pigeon. Carrier pigeons were so vital to communications with the outside world that it was made a capital offence to kill one – that bird on your plate might well have been a highly trained messenger carrying news of Prussian troop movements.3 For the same reason, in the occupied zone, the Prussians imposed the death penalty on anyone keeping pigeons – it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Nazi ban on owning radio equipment.
To help Parisians adapt to their new cuisine, a newspaper, Le Quotidien des Nouvelles, published recipes. Amongst the most appetizing (or least inedible) were dog cutlets with peas, dog liver skewers, fillet of cat’s back with mayonnaise, roast dog dressed with baby rats, rat salami and, for dessert, plum pudding with the cream replaced by a horse marrow jus. Bon appétit indeed.
Meanwhile, as stocks of flour dwindled away, bread gradually became more strictly rationed and less breadlike. By the end of the siege much of it was little more than mashed straw.
On the other hand, if you had money and an inquisitive palate you could eat pretty well throughout the siege. At the end of October 1870, the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes began sacrificing its exhibits. Some of these were sources of conventional meat – deer, ducks, swans and buffaloes. And the yaks, zebras and antelopes can’t have tasted much different from horse or beef, especially in the hands of French chefs, though even they would have had more trouble with the elephant trunks that went on sale for forty francs per pound (at a time when the wage of a soldier was 1.50 per day, and a rat cost two francs).
Many of these exotic animals were sold as ‘fantasy meat’ at the Boucherie Anglaise (English butcher’s) on the boulevard Haussmann, near Bertie’s favourite haunts. And given his taste for slaughtering exotic beasts, he would probably have loved to sneak into Paris to attend the dinner served on Christmas Day 1870 at the Café Voisin, just an apéritif stroll away from his usual hotel. Amongst the delicacies on offer that night were elephant consommé, camel ‘roasted English-style’, kangaroo in its own juices, haunch of wolf and antelope pâté with truffles. All this washed down with excellent wines including a Mouton Rothschild 1846. And Bertie would certainly have brought along whisky and cigars to round off the evening.
That he would have liked to go to Paris and lend moral support to France is not idle fantasy. Bertie had paid a quick visit in the summer of 1870 as war loomed, though this might well have been to get a last taste of Napoleonic luxury in case it all came tumbling down. And one of the things he did while there was persuade the grande horizontale Cora Pearl to come to London, which she did, just in time.
Indeed, throughout the whole of the Franco-Prussian war, Bertie fought a lone battle against his pro-German family back in Engla
nd. While his sister Vicky lobbied the Queen in favour of her father-in-law’s cause, and Victoria carried on with her moral crusade about the need for puritan Prussia to beat the frivolity out of France,4 Bertie was urging the Austrians (who had fought against Prussia in 1866 over Schleswig-Holstein) to join forces with the French. At least that was the report sent to Bismarck by Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, the Prussian Ambassador to London, who said that Bertie had loudly and publicly expressed his certainty that Austria ‘was going to join with the French, and his hope that we [the Prussians] would do badly’.
Victoria was forced to write to Vicky defending Bertie and denying the story, though we can assume that she was less defensive towards her undiplomatic son in person.
In addition to this, one of Bertie’s French playboy friends, Gaston de Gallifet, was a military man and had been captured by the Prussians after leading a cavalry charge at Sedan. Bertie tried to plead for his liberation, but the Prussian Ambassador in London refused to forward his letter.
Bertie made things even worse by offering Empress Eugénie exile in England without consulting either his mother or the British government. In a well-written letter in French containing only one minor grammatical error,5 Bertie offered Eugénie the use of ‘our country house at Chiswick’, a vast neo-classical villa that he was renting from the Duke of Devonshire. It was a thoughtful offer – the house had strong French connections and had previously welcomed another French exile, Voltaire, as well as the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the first American Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson.
The exiled Eugénie refused Bertie’s hospitality because she had already arranged to rent a house in Chislehurst in Kent, but such thoughtfulness towards a deposed French ruler was not a wise diplomatic move, and Parliament accused Bertie of meddling in international affairs. He was forced to grovel to Victoria, assuring her that it was impossible for him to be pro-French – he had so many German relatives that, he told her, ‘It is not likely that I should go against them.’ Not likely, perhaps, but only too credible.
In an effort to prove his neutrality, Bertie declared that he was willing to act as a negotiator between the warring parties. He wrote to his mother telling her that: ‘I cannot bear sitting here and doing nothing whilst all this bloodshed is going on. How I wish you could send me with letters to the Emperor [Napoléon] and King of Prussia . . . I would gladly go any distance.’ Especially to Paris, he could have added. And he might well have been a good candidate for the job – after all, he had friends in one camp, family in the other – but his offer was dismissed out of hand by his mother, who didn’t think that he was ‘personally fitted for such a very difficult task’, and even more brutally by Prime Minister Gladstone who thought the idea was ‘royal twaddle’.
If Bertie’s plan had been to go to Paris and feast on zoo animals, however, it would have been a risky meal. The Prussians were shooting anyone (or anything) trying to break through their lines in either direction – even unarmed Parisians who strayed too far while scavenging for food. No one could get in, and hot-air balloons were the only way of getting anyone out. On almost every day of the siege, a balloon took off carrying people and mail, though the passengers could never be sure where they were going to land. Some fell almost immediately to be captured by Prussian troops, one balloon drifted all the way to Norway, another crashed into the sea off Plymouth, and on one humiliating occasion, a vital cargo came down in Bavaria. This balloon was carrying divers and their diving suits (which had been one of the innovations at the 1867 Exposition). The plan was for the divers to sneak supplies back into Paris along the bed of the River Seine, but in the event the lead-booted suits ended up as war trophies in Prussia, in a smaller version of the Exposition.
Paris was well and truly cut off from both practical and moral support. In a way it was even harder on the inhabitants of what are now the suburbs of the city, because not only were they occupied by Prussians, they were regularly bombarded by Parisians. The Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro had a house in Louveciennes, a small town on the Seine just west of Paris, and he was forced to flee to London, leaving hundreds of paintings behind him. When he returned a year later, his home had survived but had been partially requisitioned as a Prussian latrine. Some of his canvases had been cut up for use as (rather stiff) toilet paper, while others had served as tablecloths for butchering animals. Even the artist’s neighbours had helped themselves, and local women were wearing what would now be priceless paintings as laundry aprons.6
All through the coldest winter in living memory, Paris fought on until the Prussians finally lost patience and began a murderous three-week-long artillery barrage in January 1871. Day and night they fired randomly into the city, hitting houses, schools, hospitals and churches. Weapons technology was still primitive in modern terms, so the damage was light compared to the bombardments that would completely flatten other French towns and cities during the two World Wars, but enough shells landed in the Latin Quarter, the Luxembourg gardens, Montparnasse and on the Invalides (home to Napoléon Bonaparte’s tomb) to convince the Parisians that further resistance was useless.
An armistice was negotiated, which allowed the Prussians to occupy Paris itself. Only partially, however – the occupiers were to take over a small area of the city on either side of the Champs-Élysées. And very briefly – they left again after two days. The Prussians’ main motive for carrying out this perfunctory occupation seemed to be that it gave them the chance to hold a self-congratulatory cavalry parade through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées.
The Parisians snubbed them – windows were shuttered, businesses closed, and a cordon of the city’s makeshift soldiers made sure the occupiers did not leave their sector. When a group of unarmed Prussians went to the Louvre it caused a public uproar, and a proposed visit by the victorious generals to the Invalides was cancelled. As a result, the unloved invaders left almost as soon as they arrived, and France’s Minister of the Interior, Ernest Picard, praised the population. In the enemy’s presence, he said, ‘The behaviour of Parisians was beyond any praise. Everywhere, public buildings, factories and shops were spontaneously closed.’ How different it would be in 1940, when many of the cafés, cabarets and brothels of Paris would welcome these Prussians’ great-grandsons with open arms.
II
If Francophiles like Bertie were hoping for a return to normal service in Paris, they were to be very disappointed. Even before the Prussians had withdrawn all their troops, France held parliamentary elections and voted in a large majority of royalist députés (MPs). It was a typically French contradiction – the new Third Republic was being led by men who wanted to put a king back on the throne.
The President was Adolphe Thiers, a 73-year-old statesman who had married the eldest daughter of his mistress, thereby joining a rich banking family and earning himself a sumptuous Paris mansion. Thiers had been King Louis-Philippe’s Minister of the Interior, so it was a case of back to the future, and the Parisians (who believed that they had just endured a siege to defend their republican revolution) refused to accept the situation, disdaining the new government as a ‘rural parliament’. The MPs took the hint and relocated to Versailles, which only made things worse – a so-called republican parliament electing to sit at the traditional home of royal power? The Parisian working classes knew (or were reminded by left-wing politicians) that the previous three revolutions – in 1789, 1830 and 1848 – had all ended in an empire or a monarchy, and this time they were determined that things would be different. In March 1871 the city elected a ‘Communal Council’7 and decided to govern itself. La Commune had begun.
Unfortunately, the city was still completely surrounded by hostile forces. The Prussians, who opposed the idea of a French republic, immediately freed 60,000 prisoners and handed over their artillery to Thiers. Suddenly he and his royalists had a large, well-armed army.
Hostilities between France’s government and its capital city began on 17 March 1871 when Thi
ers sent in soldiers to grab Paris’s cannons from the hilltop of Montmartre. The mission failed, mainly because the troops began fraternizing with Parisians who were objecting on the grounds that their taxes had paid for the manufacture of the guns during the Prussian siege, so they didn’t see why they should give them up. The generals leading the mission were taken prisoner and shot. It was a declaration of civil war.
For the next two months, there was a second siege of Paris, as government forces and Communards relived all the horrors of the previous winter. The difference this time was that about half the city’s population got out of town and left the workers to defend themselves.
The well-off residents of the new boulevards wanted no part of a populist uprising. The civil servants fled, deciding that they would be better off siding with the people out in Versailles who paid their salaries. Other middle-class professionals such as lawyers, teachers and the owners of the city’s many small factories also deserted the town. Paris was left to its manual workers, small shopkeepers, left-wing politicians and all the anti-royalists amongst the men and women who had taken up arms against the Prussians. They began to rip up the cobblestones from Napoléon’s boulevards and block the streets with barricades. Photos of the time show men and women posing beside cannons that point along the streets where today’s Parisians go on carefree shopping expeditions. On many of the photos, the uniforms are clean and the cuboid cobblestones neatly stacked. But they were not to stay that way for very long.