European, and notably British, opinion was initially sympathetic to the Prussians, since it was the French who had declared war, first invaded at Saarbrücken, and then refused Bismarck’s offer of an armistice. The celebrated British war correspondent, William Russell of The Times, who had famously covered the Crimean War, significantly chose to report from the Prussian headquarters. This, for him, was the story his British readership wanted.
It was strategically important to Bismarck to retain this sympathy. The French under Napoleon III were regarded as foolish aggressors, and Paris under the Empire was widely viewed as the seat of fashion, frivolity and sexual licence, quite incapable of offering any resistance to an invader. It was a lax city of ‘luxury and pleasure’, as The Times put it with a certain relish. The newspaper’s Special Correspondent sent a dramatic despatch datelined Palace of Versailles, 30 September 1870, which opened: ‘Here at 7.30 p.m. the German Crown Prince and his Staff are comfortably quartered … close at hand they have an angry Paris agitated by a hundred passions … impotent in her rage and fierce vindictiveness.’2
In fact many pro-republican French people themselves felt ashamed of what France had become. Félix Nadar and Fonvielle both expressed such views. Victor Hugo, who had remained in exile since 1851, returned to Paris on 5 September, immediately the Third Republic was declared. He brought with him his new book of poems, symbolically entitled Les Châtiments. It meant, literally, ‘The Punishments’; or perhaps, ‘The Reckoning’.
Bismarck’s strategy was to take advantage of these international views, and avoid any direct military attack on the civilian population of Paris, who, as he put it bluntly, could ‘stew in their own juice’.3 Moltke contented himself with shelling the ring of huge, isolated forts – like Mont-Valérien and the Fort d’Issy – that surrounded the city, a psychological as much as a military tactic. The master plan was to close down all communication between Paris and the outside world. The Prussians intended to silence, humiliate and punish Paris – but to do it largely in secret. Without too much fuss, they would quietly starve her citizens into submission within a matter of weeks. It was therefore vitally important that the minimum information about actual conditions in Paris should be allowed to filter out, and that the French government should remain paralysed. The blockade was a military necessity, but even more a diplomatic one.
On 17 September a Times editorial noted grimly: ‘In a few days we shall know nothing of what is passing in Paris … The Prussian army is large enough to destroy regular and effective communication between the invested city and the rest of France … Will the whole body politic be paralysed?’ Nonetheless, the commentator remarked, it was possible that ‘Paris will show fight’.4
It is difficult to imagine how complete such a blockade could be, in an age before electronic communications were universally established (let alone before radio, mobile phones or the internet). All the French telegraph lines were above-ground, and were easily identified and severed. In a matter of days, all roads were closed, all bridges were blown up or guarded, all railway lines cut, and all river traffic on the Seine strictly controlled. Even the smallest skiffs were caught in Prussian nets. There was a desperate last-minute attempt to lay a submerged telegraph line along the bed of the Seine from Paris to Rouen. This was hastily imported from England at vast expense in the last days of August, but within a week of its arrival the Prussians had discovered and destroyed it, its position betrayed by a French collaborator.5
One young British journalist daringly slipped into the city at the last moment, the bilingual Henry Labouchère of the Daily News. His last despatch noted that he had no idea how he could send his next one, and that he would keep a Diary of a Besieged Resident instead. For the moment Labouchère observed only a phoney war: ‘The cafés are crowded … In the Champs-Elysées the nursery maids are flirting with the soldiers … there is universal drilling by the militia … at the Rond-Point an exceptionally tall woman was mobbed because she was thought to be an Uhlan [Prussian dragoon] in disguise … but no one took it seriously.’6
But things soon became very serious. On 19 September the last telegraph line was cut, and the official Paris mail coach was turned back with a contemptuous volley of shots by the Prussian pickets. Twenty-eight postal runners were sent out the following day, but all except one were captured or shot.7 Every village in the Ile de France surrounding Paris, within a distance of some thirty miles, was either permanently occupied by troops or regularly swept by the Prussian cavalry, the dreaded Uhlans. The Prussian encirclement was complete, and the siege was now absolute.
It was expected to last a matter of weeks, and would certainly be – like all wars – ‘over by Christmas’. In fact it lasted for five increasingly agonised months. Two and a half million people were crowded and sequestered within the walls of Paris. As Gaston Tissandier wrote in the Magasin pittoresque: ‘Our mighty capital city was surrounded, cut off not only from France but from the entire outside world … Two million human beings were shut away, silenced, and fenced in by a bristling ring of bayonets.’8
The siege tightened its grip in early October. The Prussians began a ceaseless shelling of the twelve Paris forts from the surrounding heights, the regular booming explosions wearing away at nerves, and making nights sleepless. On 13 October, when the French gunners of Mont-Valérien tried to fire a salvo at a Prussian encampment, they inadvertently scored a direct hit on the beautiful palace at Saint-Cloud and flattened it. Paris seemed to be collaborating in its own destruction.
City life became constrained, pinched and, above all, cold. One by one the theatres were closed, the street gaslights were dimmed or extinguished after 10 p.m., horse-drawn cabs virtually disappeared from the boulevards. Well before dawn, all the bakeries were thronged by endless queues. Makeshift ration books were issued, covering milk, coffee, bread and sugar. Meat was rationed to thirty-five grams – slightly over an ounce – per head per day. All luxury goods, including candles, became rare, or very expensive. Most of the trees in the Bois de Boulogne were cut down for firewood. The bitter comment went round that Paris was still a beautiful woman, but she had shaved her head in penitence.
Most of the cafés remained open, and wine alone remained surprisingly cheap and plentiful: many of the poor, especially the soldiers, were drunk for much of the time. As food supplies became seriously short, most domestic animals in the city were eventually eaten, except for a few prudent cats. There was a cull of ducks, carp and goldfish from the municipal ponds. Over forty thousand horses, and most of the rare animals from the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, including two elephants and two zebras, were butchered.9 A surviving restaurant siege menu proposes elephant soup, kangaroo stew, roast camel, antelope terrine, and baked cat with rat garnish.
By December, the poet Théophile Gautier found himself writing a tragic appeal to the municipal authorities on behalf of his horse. This horse, a family friend and a faithful old servant, ‘a poor and perfectly innocent being’, was due to be forcibly dragged off to the city abattoir in the next twenty-four hours. His appeal, beautifully phrased and genuinely touching, did not succeed. Finally, all inhibitions breaking down, there was a brisk trade in rats. In a later letter, Gautier remarked on the curious flavour of rat pâté.10
Hunger and humiliation were the chief Prussian weapons against the Parisians. There was a dangerous collapse of morale, and a mood of hopelessness and cynicism. The emergency government of Jules Favre seemed paralysed, and a Council of National Defence was formed. Metz surrendered. The French army and the National Guard, under General Trochu, did little more than hold parades along the empty boulevards. Despite the presence of thousands of National Guards, there was no immediate attempt at a breakout. When this did come, on 27 November, under the vainglorious General Ducrot (‘I will only return dead or victorious’), it was a catastrophic failure, costing more than twelve thousand lives (but not Ducrot’s).11 There was talk of setting up a revolutionary Commune, and on several occasions the Hôtel
de Ville was surrounded by a hostile crowd, and General Trochu was threatened and barracked.
Above all, there was a growing sense of utter isolation. All communications with the outside world had been severed. No post, no despatches, no newspapers; no Reuters cables, no weather reports, no London stock exchange figures; no Italian magazines, no American scientific journals. Most demoralising of all was the crushing of ordinary private life. From beyond the steely Prussian lines there came no family letters, no news of grandchildren or aged parents, no cheering get-well postcards, and no lovers’ billets-doux. Paris, the centre of European civilisation and enlightenment, was psychologically shrunk and physically silenced, just as Bismarck had planned.
Worse than that, it was mocked. The Times summarised the situation: ‘The Germans have on their side all the organized apparatus of modern warfare, strong discipline, a unanimous will; while on the side of France there is wild fury, alternate fits of overweening confidence and blank despondency, no mutual faith, no truth, and a suicidal tendency to universal social dissolution.’ In the circumstances, The Times concluded icily, the immediate, peaceful and silent surrender of Paris to the Germans would be ‘a triumph of civilization’.12
2
It was precisely at this low point of collapse and chaos that the fantastic story of the Paris siege balloons began. In the space of four months, between 23 September 1870 and 28 January 1871, no fewer than sixty-seven manned balloons were successfully launched from the encircled city, finding a new method of breaking a modern siege.13 In many ways these balloons represented the apotheosis of aerostation in the nineteenth century. They achieved what had never been done, or even fully imagined, before. Without being military balloons or carrying weapons, they changed the conditions of human warfare. They were the first successful civilian airlift in history.
Even as the Prussians advanced, the small group of aeronauts saw that there was one route out of the city that no one had really considered, and that remained unguarded: the air. The practical, and especially the propaganda, possibilities of balloons suddenly inspired them with a vision. Gaston Tissandier wrote a moving declaration on behalf of his band of brothers:
The silencing of Paris would be the death of France. Our besieged city would be lost irrevocably if she cannot find some way of making her voice heard abroad. Whatever the cost, we have to find a means of avoiding the slow torture of psychological encirclement [l’investement moral], as well as establishing communications with the army of the Loire. All ground routes being blocked, all river routes being barred, there remains but one other dimension open to the besieged – THE AIR! Paris will be reminded that balloons are one of the chief glories of the scientific genius of France. The mighty invention of Montgolfier is destined to come to the aid of la Patrie in this hour of mortal danger.14
This was all very fine. But initially there was no official response from the new Council of National Defence, or the harassed ministers of the Third Republic. Neither General Trochu’s army nor the Paris militia owned a single military balloon. The Minister for War, General le Flô, had his eyes fixed bleakly on the ground, desperately concentrating on supplying the Paris forts, and building up the city’s ramparts and artillery defences. Even the young and vigorous Minister for the Interior, Léon Gambetta (1838–82), the man of vision and energy, the hope of France, had no strategic policy on the air. There was plenty of coal gas in the enormous gasometers of La Villette and Vaugirard, but nothing to put it in.
Besides, ballooning out of Paris was regarded as a high-risk, and probably suicidal strategy. No one knew if a balloon could escape the inevitable Prussian fusillade, and the legendary power of the new Krupp field guns. A balloon would pass with agonising slowness over the armed siege lines, more than sixty miles deep in many directions, and would doubtless be pursued by Prussian cavalry, the notorious Uhlans, in the spirit of a murderous fox hunt. Moreover, the Prussians had made it clear that anyone caught crossing the siege lines would be shot out of hand as a spy.
Equally, no one was sure which was the safest wind direction to try. The Prussians were known to be bivouacked in most of the towns and villages to the north and east of Paris, and out along the Marne as far as the newly occupied Alsace-Lorraine. To the south and west, where von Moltke had set up his headquarters at Versailles, approximately twelve miles from Paris, there were huge field garrisons and artillery supply dumps. Prussian cavalry units were constantly foraging and burning, and shifted quarters without warning. Officers had also forcibly requisitioned and, as it later emerged, looted and despoiled, many of the châteaux throughout the region, as far as Normandy. Moreover, the sympathies of the local farmers and peasantry could never be entirely relied upon.fn35
Finally, even if balloons were available, could actually fly out of Paris, and land safely, what exactly could they achieve? Clearly there was no question of using them to move troops en masse, as Benjamin Franklin and later Napoleon had once imagined. But might it be possible to establish communications with the Army of the Loire? Or to make contact with members of the government in exile at Tours, nearly a hundred miles to the west? Beyond these purely military considerations were other tantalising possibilities: could they deliver news despatches, a civilian postal service, or even some form of propaganda campaign?
Just four balloons were ready in Paris in September 1870. All were in private ownership, and most were rather the worse for wear. The first was the Neptune, the same balloon that had flown out of Calais in the storm, still manned and owned by Jules Duruof, now twenty-nine. The second was Les Etats-Unis, owned by the Godard family, and piloted by the comparative veteran Louis Godard, though he was still aged only forty-one. The third was Le Céleste, the scientific balloon now owned by Gaston Tissandier, aged twenty-seven. The fourth was Le National, lent by the Godards but piloted by Albert Tissandier, aged thirty-one. But the man who largely organised the whole initiative was none other than Félix Nadar.
3
It was done with all Nadar’s characteristic panache and flair for publicity. Within a week of the outbreak of war, he had created, virtually out of nothing except a piece of headed notepaper, the ‘No. 1 Compagnie des Aérostiers’ – The Number One Company of Balloonists. Starting with Jules Duruof and his balloon the Neptune, he began enthusiastically recruiting among his friends, and anyone who had known Le Géant. At the same time he wrote directly to the Council announcing that he was setting up, on his own initiative, an observation-balloon service on the heights at Montmartre. From here his No. 1 Aérostiers (still basically himself and Duruof) would guard the northern approaches to the city by day, and by night mount high-powered electric searchlights, adapted from arc lights from his photographic studio.
By 8 September 1870 Nadar had established a camp on the place Saint-Pierre, in the north Paris district of Montmartre. Besides Duruof, nine other balloonists had rallied to his call, including the Parisian balloon-maker Camille Dartois, the mechanical engineer Eugène Farcot, the doctor Emile Lacaze, and the militant socialist Jean-Pierre Nadal, who would go on to become Directeur Aéronautique for the Paris Commune during the tragic uprising of 1871. Apart from three bell tents and the tethered Neptune, Nadar’s main equipment consisted of a supply of headed notepaper, and a fine metal stamp with the company’s logo on it: ‘République Français; No. 1. Compagnie des Aérostiers. Nadar-Dartois-Duruof’.15
The place Saint-Pierre was an ideal balloon site, both strategically and psychologically. It was a flat platform of open wasteground, three hundred feet below the Butte Montmartre. A pagoda-like monument known as the Solferino Tower dominated the northern ridge of the Butte, and a steep bank of tussocky grass on which goats grazed and ragamuffin Parisian children played led down to Nadar’s encampment below on the Place. From the top of the Butte, the highest point in the whole of Paris, one could look north as far as the little villages of Saint-Denis and Le Bourget, now occupied by the Prussians.
In the opposite direction there was an unobstructed view fr
om the Butte southwards, over the rooftops of Paris towards Montparnasse. All the heart-stirring monuments of the city were laid out for contemplation. The Aérostiers could see, in a single great panoramic sweep from left to right, the Vendôme column, the towers of Notre Dame, the dome of the Panthéon, the spires of the Institut, the green copper roof of La Madeleine, and the glittering golden cupola of Les Invalides. It was a place from which a patriot could see what he was fighting for.fn36
Nadar began his observational ascents in the tethered Neptune on 16 September, going up six times by day and three times by night. He had small cards printed off for his observation notes. These showed an outline map of Paris upon which he marked in all the military dispositions he could identify. To do this he used ‘naïve’ coloured crayons: ‘red for French, blue for Prussian, black for doubtful’. These cards he despatched ‘religiously’ to General Trochu, but never heard a word back in return.16
Nadar had established a simple rope cordon around the balloon site. Theoretically, this was to protect the Neptune, and the three bell tents where the Aérostiers team took turns to sleep and eat, from restive crowds. The weather had been cold and wet, and they had few provisions, but a local restaurateur known as Monsieur Charles provided them with cheap meals and wine. The patriotic young Mayor of Montmartre, future Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (only elected on 5 September), after objecting violently to their commandeering the Place without his permission, suddenly sent them a cartful of hay to sleep in. To this he added a gift of five or six large dogs to keep the area secure, and if necessary to warm their bell tents.17