The Prussian encirclement of the city was so complete that it was immediately clear that balloon observation was practically superfluous. It was now that Nadar began to consider the much more perilous possibility of actually crossing the siege lines. The following day, 17 September, he wrote urgently to Colonel Usquin, at the Council for the Defence of Paris: ‘Monsieur Cornu, whom we had the honour to see yesterday, spoke to us of the fabrication of free flight Aerostats, in the event that communications should be entirely cut. This concept is an excellent one, and all our personnel are immediately ready to volunteer for such missions, one after the other, as necessary.’18
He added, on a strictly practical note, that he only had one balloon, the Neptune, and that the Council should be aware that any new balloons would take him a minimum of two days to complete. However many specialists were employed, the canopies would always require ‘three separate coats of varnish’ to seal them, and each coat took at least twelve hours to dry properly.
Nadar’s historic proposal for launching a first ‘free flight’ balloon out of Paris produced absolutely no effect for several days. This left him and Jules Duruof in a fever of frustration. All the time they could see – and smell (‘insupportable stink of burning straw’) – from the observation position of the Neptune, four hundred feet above the Butte, that the Prussians were digging in and preparing their Krupp guns. They also knew that Louis and Jules Godard, based nearby at the La Villette gasworks, were making similar proposals to the Defence Council. As so often in war, there was growing rivalry between allies, as well as cooperation.
On 21 September, Monsieur Rampont-Lechin, the Director of Postal Services, finally issued a top-secret request to the Council for National Defence: ‘It has become absolutely necessary and urgent to employ aerostats to re-establish communications with the provisional government in Tours, which is required for numerous pressing reasons of a psychological as well as military and political nature.’19
Top-secret or not, rumours of this decision quickly reached the place Saint-Pierre. Nadar’s No. 1 Aérostiers were now desperate to be given the go-ahead, and fully rigged the Neptune for free flight. But still the Council delayed. Unknown to Nadar, another balloon was somehow procured by the Postal Services itself – possibly from the Godards – and clandestinely inflated at a hidden site in the Vaugirard gasworks, in the south-west of Paris, on the afternoon of 22 September. Its aeronaut was a professional, Gabriel Mangin. But the balloon was found to be in ‘a hopeless condition’, the pilot was unenthusiastic, and the launch was abandoned.20
At this point, on the evening of the 22nd, the Neptune was finally given secret instructions to prepare for a launch at dawn the following day. The task would be to carry an undefined amount of mail and government despatches to Tours. The westerly air current was favourable, but the Aérostiers had now been waiting in full readiness for over forty-eight hours. All this time, the old and worn-out balloon had been fully inflated but steadily leaking coal gas. Much battered after six years of Duruof’s festival flights, and the recent regime of tethered observation ascents, the Neptune had brittle varnish, numerous small punctures and splitting seams. It was now having to be repaired not merely daily, but hourly.
Throughout the night, the Aérostier team of volunteers steadily painted fresh cow-gum on the seams, and stuck on cotton patches as each new hole appeared. Nadar was hoping that the gentle westerly airstream would hold good. Duruof was quietly wondering how much the mail would weigh. Both of them privately speculated about whether the balloon would simply fall apart in the first hundred feet. The Neptune was, they said fondly, ‘a noble piece of wreckage’.
Finally, at 7 a.m., just after dawn on 23 September, the harassed Directeur des Postes, Monsieur Rampont-Lechin himself, arrived in a fiacre with several canvas sacks containing 125 kilos of despatches and public mail. This was the equivalent in weight of two extra passengers, for a balloon that had barely been able to lift a single observer. Watched by a grimly silent group of soldiers, Nadar and the Aérostiers team hastily loaded the mailbags, disconnected the municipal gas pipe, helped Jules Duruof into the basket, weighed off, and shook hands. Then they stood awaiting Duruof’s final command: Lachez-tout! – ‘Let go all!’
There is a photograph taken at this moment, just before the launch, from the grassy Butte just above the place Saint-Pierre.21 It shows the grey light of an urban dawn, a bleak huddle of Paris rooftops and windows, and the unpaved square almost deserted except for a group of dark figures in heavy coats clustered anxiously round the balloon basket. The balloon itself appears large, dirty and undecorated, swaying above the military bell tents, and casting no shadow. The long, thick snake of the gas pipe is still attached to the balloon’s mouth, so it was evidently being reinflated until the very last moment. To the left, a dispirited line of soldiers lounge as close as possible to Monsieur Charles’s café on the southern side of the Place. To the right, waiting behind Nadar’s cordon, are a sparse and dejected audience of some twenty people, most of whom appear to be small boys sitting on the ground. Contrary to later legends, there are no flags, no cheering crowds, no military band. It is a bleak and unglamorous image of grim determination.
Just after 8 a.m. – no balloon launch ever happens on time – Duruof shouted the irrevocable command, ‘Lachez-tout!’, and Nadar stepped smartly back from the heavily loaded basket. It was at once apparent that Duruof had a special flight plan in mind. Contrary to standard procedure, and using exactly the technique he had employed with Gaston Tissandier in Calais, he immediately cut away a huge sack of ballast and sent the ancient, creaking Neptune leaping vertically into the air. Whatever the risk of rupturing the old and rotten canopy, Duruof was absolutely determined to gain height and clear the Prussian lines. He might fall from the sky, but he would definitely not be shot out of it.
The Neptune rose with impressive speed, effortlessly cleared the nearest line of rooftops (the photograph shows nine-storey apartment buildings), and sailed away to the south-west. To Nadar’s amazement the scattered, apathetic group of soldiers suddenly began cheering, and the shouts and huzzahs were taken up by the small boys across the Place. Duruof’s fellow aeronaut Eugène Farcot recorded proudly: ‘Duruof took off in high style, shouting that he would see us all in Le Havre. He slashed away the trailing ropes, and emptied an entire sack of ballast, coolly setting out in the direction of Versailles, very much the old and practised routier of the air.’22
Wilfrid de Fonvielle, who also seems to have turned up for the launch, remarked admiringly: ‘Duruof challenged all the fury of the Prussian guns in an old, small, clapped-out balloon – he was a modern Curtius – he simply flung himself into the clouds, and went at them neck or nothing [à corps perdu] … He shot his balloon straight upwards like a shell from a mortar.’23
Duruof later left a detailed account of this first-ever balloon escape from the besieged city. Having reached a height of five thousand feet without disintegrating, the Neptune unexpectedly turned north-westwards, crossed the Seine, and floated slowly over the ‘black ant-heap’ of the Prussian lines beyond Mont-Valérien. Duruof could hear the sinister crackling of musketfire below, and hunched down low into his basket. He felt vibrations, but no direct hits. Only later was it established that 3,500 feet was the safe height, out of range of most standard Prussian weapons. But this had to be judged by eye, as few of the later siege balloons were equipped with anything as sophisticated and expensive as aneroid barometers.
On this occasion, by way of reply, Duruof threw out handfuls of printed business cards embossed ‘Nadar Photographe’. It was later said that each one had been marked personally by Nadar in the top right-hand corner: ‘Compliments to Kaiser Wilhelm and Monsieur Von Bismarck’.24
Duruof noted that the Prussians attempted to elevate their big field guns to fire up at him (like the Confederate artillery in the American Civil War), but without apparent effect. It was more disconcerting to see a line of Uhlan cavalry setting out in hot pursuit.
But eking out what little remained of his ballast handful by handful, and throwing out more business cards, he nursed the leaking Neptune as it continued to drift north-westwards along the meandering line of the Seine.
To his immense relief, all signs of pursuit gradually disappeared after Mantes, apparently obstructed by the many twists of the river. Three hours after launching, at 11 a.m., he landed successfully at Corneville, near Evreux. He had travelled twenty miles, about a third of the way to Rouen. He was greeted ecstatically by the villagers, who could not believe that he had come from Paris until they were shown the official mailbags. Duruof commandeered a cart and trotted briskly to the nearest railway station, where by good luck he was able to board a direct train to Tours.
He arrived at Tours, with all the mail intact, by 4 p.m., and delivered his despatches to the government in exile. These included a special address to the nation from Léon Gambetta, which was printed in the next day’s newspapers throughout France. Gambetta announced that Paris was preparing ‘a heroic resistance’. All Prussian disinformation should be ignored. All political parties were united. The city could hold out all winter. ‘Let all France prepare herself for a heroic effort of will!’
By the next evening the news had begun to spread like wildfire. It was not just the arrival of private mail, or Gambetta’s public message. It was the fact that the siege of Paris had been broken by a balloon. Prussian firepower had been beaten by French air power. Paris was airborne and alive. It was a technical, but above all, a huge propaganda, triumph. In celebration, the artist Puvis de Chavannes painted the figure of a defiant Marianne with fixed bayonet standing guard on the north-western ramparts, bidding farewell to a departing aeronaut. Completed in November 1870, the dramatic picture shows the balloon directly above Fort Mont-Valérien. It was made into a lithograph and widely distributed in Paris as a propaganda poster.
4
The propaganda moved beyond France. Among the mails Duruof carried was an open letter from Nadar to The Times in London, appealing for international support. It was copied by government clerks at Tours, and then immediately sent on by train to Le Havre, where it was transferred to a steamship, offloaded at Dover, and delivered by overnight Royal Mail express train to the Continental sorting office in London. Finally it was published by The Times in the first edition of 28 September 1870, a mere five days after it had left Nadar’s bell tent on the place Saint-Pierre. It appeared on the editorial page under the dramatic title ‘From a Balloon’.
The Times also chose to make this day a special siege edition. It took the almost unheard-of step of publishing on its sacrosanct front page a huge, half-page map of ‘Paris and Environs’. Actually what it showed was ‘Paris and its Defences’. It displayed all the central arrondissements, the inner ring of defences, the disputed outlying villages, the main redoubts and ramparts, the twelve perimeter forts, and all the incoming roads and railway lines (though of course these were now cut). The level of detail is extraordinary, and copies must soon have been pinned up in every Prussian officer’s tent and mess room. Given The Times’s anti-French bias, this is quite possibly what was intended.
Nadar understood the business of publicity and propaganda as well as, perhaps better than, any politician in Paris. He was also aware of the probably hostile attitude of Times readers. So his historic balloon letter consisted of just three short paragraphs, which the newspaper left entirely in their original French. He omitted any of the expected Gallic melodrama, self-justifying rhetoric or flamboyant heroics. The tone was modest, down-to-earth, frank.
Nadar began by thanking The Times for the ‘hospitality’ of its pages. (He was of course providing it with a sensational balloon scoop.) On previous occasions the newspaper had been ‘extremely severe’ towards ‘imperial France’, and it had been largely justified in this attitude. He himself – ‘moi Français’ – was indignant and ashamed at ‘the deplorable example my poor, benighted country’ had given over the last twenty years. It was undoubtedly imperial France’s ‘error’ to declare ‘this abominable war’ against the Prussians.
But now he begged English readers, with their famous sense of fair play, to reconsider the position. Here was a new, young, idealistic French republican government in power. Its peace proposals had been ‘disdainfully’ refused by the Prussians. Its sovereign lands had been ‘cruelly’ invaded and despoiled, by an enemy which had become ‘greedy and over-confident’. Most of all, the Prussian military hostilities were now being pursued not merely against the French army, but against the civilian population itself, the ordinary ‘people of France’.
The whole temper of that people, the people of France and specifically the people of Paris, was profoundly altered. ‘I could only wish, Sir, that you could bear witness to the sudden, unexpected sight of Paris transformed and regenerated, and now standing utterly alone in the face of supreme danger. The city of pleasure and frivolity has become silent, grave, and serious-minded.’
‘Wars,’ Nadar concluded pointedly, ‘are not won with cannons and rifles alone – there is also the small matter of having right on your side.’ Prussia had become an ‘insatiable’ enemy, too sure of itself, too self-justifying, too vindictive. Imperial France had been justly punished in the first place. But now it was Prussia’s turn to receive just punishment, a punishment that it had brought upon itself: ‘La Prussie va recevoir le châtiment qu’elle provoque.’ For readers of The Times, many of whom would have known Victor Hugo’s poetry, Nadar’s clinching sentence must have had a particular ring.25 A version of this same letter also appeared in L’Indépendance Belge on the following day, 29 September. The communications blackout had been decisively broken.
Three more balloons followed in quick succession over the next week, on 25, 29 and 30 September. Their aeronauts were Gabriel Mangin (his second attempt), Louis Godard and Gaston Tissandier, and they took off from the gasworks at La Villette and Vaugirard. All three of these balloons crossed the Seine and landed safely to the west of Paris carrying mail. They also carried baskets of carrier pigeons provided by a patriotic ‘columbine’ society, L’Espérance, to see if replies to the despatches could be flown back into Paris from the sorting office in Tours. When several of the pigeons returned over the next few days, it was clear that a complete outward-and-return postal service was now possible.
The Defence Council now officially announced the formation of the Paris Balloon Post.26 There were to be two kinds of delivery: monté and non-monté – by manned and by unmanned balloons. The first would take proper private letters; the second would accept only official ten-centime postcards with standardised message boxes to tick. Naturally, only the first ever caught on with the Parisians.
The third of the balloons, Le Céleste, was manned by Gaston Tissandier, who landed near Dreux, seventy miles due west of Paris in the department of Eure-et-Loir. He broke his arm, but still delivered the mail. Tissandier was also tasked with setting up a communications centre at Tours, and investigating all the possible methods of getting messages back into Paris. His ingenious professorial brain came up with numerous ideas, including not only carrier pigeons, but also messenger dogs, river flotation bags, and even balloons flown back into the city. His concept was that, as in the American Civil War, balloons could be mounted on trains. They could then be rapidly deployed to positions precisely upwind from Paris on any particular day, inflated and immediately released.
It was a supremely hazardous undertaking, but morale was high. Tissandier wrote: ‘The appearance of these first balloons in the provinces produced universal excitement and enthusiasm. In less than eight days, literally tens of thousands of families had received precious news from their besieged relatives by means of the air.’27
He was not exaggerating. As the weight of each letter was limited to four grams, Duruof’s original 125-kilo mailbag had held over three thousand letters. The next three balloons carried two or more mailbags each, totalling between them over nine hundred kilos of mail. This produced a grand tota
l of well over twenty-five thousand letters delivered by the first four siege balloons in the last week of September 1870. These numbers would soon rise dramatically.
Victor Hugo wrote to Nadar: ‘One would have to be a pinhead not to recognise the huge significance of what has been achieved. Paris is surrounded, blockaded, blotted out from the rest of the world! – and yet by means of a simple balloon, a mere bubble of air, Paris is back in communication with the rest of the world!’28
5
The new Defence Council decided on a propaganda coup. On 7 October the fifth and sixth balloons, christened the Armand Barbès and George Sand, were launched simultaneously from Nadar’s place Saint-Pierre. The dual launch was partly intended to confuse the Prussians, for aboard the Armand Barbès was the key member of the new republican government, Léon Gambetta. A radical lawyer and journalist, already known and admired as the dynamic Minister for the Interior, Gambetta had become the hope of all France. Still in his thirties, he was renowned for his populist sympathies and fiery, patriotic speeches.
The council had appointed him Minister for War, and given him the crucial task of energising and reorganising the provisional government in Tours. His instructions were to mobilise the population, recruit fresh troops, and put the army of the Loire on a renewed and aggressive footing. In short, he was to inspire ‘the sentiment of resistance’ throughout the south and west of France. With Gambetta went the editor of the leading newspaper La République Française, whose parallel job was to revitalise political publicity for the provisional government.