1913 Read online

  Maurice Barrès, the French nationalist writer who Poincaré himself proposed as a member of the prestigious Académie française in 1905, summed up the gloomy right-wing cult of the French fatherland with the words ‘la terre et les morts’, the earth and the dead.8 In northern France, slipping past Amiens towards Paris, these words might come back to Poincaré as a recollection of past losses – and perhaps as a prefiguring of the future. A few months earlier Germany had expanded her army, leading the French government to introduce a law to extend military service from two to three years, a highly controversial move. French socialists, and perhaps the majority of the French population, opposed the measures, thinking them unnecessary for the purposes of French territorial defence and unduly influenced by the more aggressive interests of the Russians, who wanted a French army that would carry any future war to the Germans, and who paid parts of the French nationalist press to make their argument. Socialist leader Jean Jaurès brought 150,000 French protesters out to the Pré-Saint-Gervais in May – adding to a petition signed by five times that number – haranguing the government for not pursuing a more active policy of peace. The same month, nearly two hundred French politicians – including deputies and senators – attended a peace conference in Berne, joined by several dozen German colleagues. But for a man such as Poincaré, all this was by the by: it was only by remaining alert and ready that France would prevent history from repeating itself. His was a policy of peace – but it was a policy of peace through strength. Poincaré would ultimately be successful, pushing the three-year law through parliament later that summer.

  French socialist leader Jean Jaurès in characteristic pose, arguing against the extension of military service from two to three years.

  In many ways, a patriotic Frenchman could contemplate France’s position in 1913 with a degree of satisfaction. For a start, the country was perhaps more united than at any time in its recent history. It was more united than in 1870, when France had buckled under the pressure of the Prussian advance, and ended up fighting a civil war on the streets of Paris between the forces of law and order and those of the Paris Commune. And it was more united than at the turn of the century. Then, the heat of the Dreyfus affair had divided families against themselves and turned old friends into sworn enemies. France had torn itself apart over the question of whether Captain Alfred Dreyfus – convicted of spying for Germany by a court martial in 1895 – had been wrongly imprisoned in an army cover-up or whether he was evidence of Jewish treachery at the heart of the Republic.

  For some, Dreyfus’ guilt was preordained by his religious background. For others the question was more a national one. If the army said Dreyfus was guilty, then guilty he must be: to dispute this was to impeach the army’s honour. For the Dreyfusards, however, the whole case was an appalling miscarriage of justice, anti-Semitic prejudice parading itself as patriotism. This was a fight, therefore, for the principles of justice, it was a fight for the soul of the Republic. It was a fight the Dreyfusards won, with Dreyfus ultimately rehabilitated eleven years after his original court martial. But by 1913 Dreyfus had retired from the army, and the affair which had carried his name was old news. Anti-Semitism was still virulent, but it was submerged in the wider cause of French nationalism.

  Many of the older wounds to the French body politic, those dating from the French Revolution, had been cauterised, if not healed. In spite of the separation of church and state in 1905, the Republic was now broadly accepted by Catholics as the expression of the nation. When Joan of Arc was beatified in 1909, both republicans and Catholics rallied around her as a symbol of one eternal France. In Rome, Pope Pius X pointedly kissed the French tricolour at the beatification ceremony.9 In Paris, Paul Déroulède, a leading French nationalist, could pay homage to Joan of Arc, in phrases unthinkable a few decades previously, ‘as the Christian patriot I have always been and the Catholic Republican I shall always be’.10 A Catholic republican, indeed! In the 1870s a royalist restoration of some sort, whether of the Orleanist or the Legitimist branch, had been a real possibility. By 1913 some were still romantically attached to royalism, but they were on the fringes of political power. Instead, France had forged a new common ground around a love of the French patrie, of which the Republic was now the accepted political form. It was precisely this kind of national ralliement which Poincaré himself represented. The form of French government was increasingly accepted on all sides. Politics now revolved around more mundane issues such as electoral reform and tax.

  By any measure France was still a great country and a first-rank power. The French navy was amongst the world’s largest; its army was the equal of any, though parity with Germany was becoming harder to maintain. France had amassed the world’s second largest empire, from Indochina to Guyana, reaching into every continent on earth, even Antarctica. This empire was still expanding – not least in north Africa. While France had no continent or sub-continent to itself, as did Britain in India and Australia, it had Algeria, relatively sparsely populated yet close to the fatherland. The empire was a source of pride for many, and of wealth for some. It was also an increasingly important source of troops. At the Bastille Day march past at Longchamp in July 1913, Poincaré presented the flag to twenty-five colonial regiments, from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Indochina, Madagascar, Chad and Gabon.11 French investments around the world were second only to those of Britain. In Russia, in particular, French investment was dominant. And while London was the undisputed clearing house for the international gold standard, France had been instrumental in forming a Latin Monetary Union with Paris in a leading role, making the currencies of several European countries interchangeable.

  If French industry was far smaller than that of either Germany or of Britain, it was nonetheless technologically advanced, pioneering both moving pictures (the Lumière brothers, Pathé) and the European automobile industry (Michelin, Renault, Peugeot). The Germans might have their lumbering Zeppelins, portrayed in French magazines as both ugly and dangerous, but the French were masters of the aeroplane, more graceful, more manoeuvrable, and faster. A Frenchman had already been the first to cross the Channel in 1909, and first to fly to Rome in 1911, sailing above the Vatican and an awestruck Pope. The year 1913 saw a Frenchman be the first to fly across the Mediterranean, a Frenchman be the first to land a plane in the Holy Land, French pilots flying higher than any man had ever flown, and a Frenchman perform the first loop-the-loop (which was then reperformed for adoring crowds at the Ghent world fair). Like French pilots, French engineers – educated in the École Polytéchnique or the École Centrale – had a daring and a flair of which their German counterparts could only dream. Only a Frenchman such as Gustave Eiffel, a graduate of the École Centrale, could have built the tower which bore his name in Paris. (In keeping with the time, by 1913 Eiffel was working on aerodynamics.)

  Besides these material considerations of its power and influence France was, more to the point, still a great civilisation. It was the French language, not English, that was the lingua franca of society and diplomacy, if not commerce. French cooking was deemed the standard of elegance, and French chefs the most capable exponents of the art. French fashion set the trends for the world. France’s universities, though perhaps less famous than Oxford and Cambridge, and without quite the same status at home as German universities, nonetheless housed great philosophers, Henri Bergson being the most famous, the advocate of intuition and the prophet of ‘l’élan vital’ – the vital force of life. France produced great mathematicians, including Raymond Poincaré’s cousin Henri. Over the preceding twelve years French scientists, authors and humanitarians had been awarded no fewer than fifteen Nobel prizes, close to the German total of seventeen, and far ahead of the British total of six, let alone the American three.

  Above all, France still had Paris. While London dominated the terrestrial plane, did not Paris reign supreme on a more ethereal plane? It was, at the very least, more beautiful. Even a loyal subject of the British Empire such as Mr Ramunajaswam
i, stopping briefly in Paris on his way back to Berhampore, was forced to admit its beauty, though he worried this might appear disloyal to London. ‘I may be pardoned’, Ramunajaswami wrote, ‘for hazarding my opinion that, in the best portions of Paris, were traceable more artistic beauty and greater symmetrical arrangements [than in the British capital]’ though ‘in respects other than those of artistic beauty, my predilections are unhesitatingly in favour of London’.12

  But there was something more. For the two and a half million Parisians who lived there – with a further one and a half million in the city’s suburbs – and for thousands of visitors who arrived every day to catch something of the city’s spirit, Paris was still the citélumière, the metropolis of light: a beacon to humanity. It was still in Paris that eternal verities of the human condition might reveal themselves, and universal principles of life be laid down. Paris, as a city of myths as much as one of bricks and stone, was a product of the collective imagination of its inhabitants, its visitors, and those who dreamed of visiting. As long as those myths were believed, Paris would retain its allure. And as long as Paris maintained its allure, France would be great.

  For a visitor to the French capital, looking out from the observation deck at the top of the Eiffel Tower, the tallest man-made structure on earth, Paris unfolded itself voluptuously.

  To the west and far below lay the Bois de Boulogne, the city’s pleasure gardens, the former hunting grounds of emperors and kings, now crowded on any given afternoon with men in straw boaters promenading with their mistresses. To the north-west were the Place de l’Étoile and the magnificent Arc de Triomphe, reminder of the past victories of Napoleonic France. Down the Champs-Elysées, a more majestic avenue than any in London – and one marched down by German troops in 1871 – was the Place de la Concorde, home of the Hôtel Crillon and the Automobile Club de France, where Parisian high society celebrated the cult of speed and danger. Directly in front, beyond the gilded Opéra, at the summit of the hill of Montmartre, stood the Catholic basilica of Sacré-Cœur, largely built with donations from the public, erected as a bright reminder of France’s Catholic heritage and as a symbol of penance for past godlessness – now surrounded by irreligious cafés, cabarets and dancing halls for every budget and every taste.

  Below, at one’s feet, lay the seventh arrondissement, home of the French parliament, military school, foreign ministry, and of the ministers and officials who worked there – the seat of French empire. To the east, the older districts of Paris on either side of the Seine, and the cathedral of Nôtre Dame on the Île de la Cité, in the middle of the river’s flow. On the ‘left bank’ (though on the right viewed from the Eiffel Tower) the Latin quarter of the Sorbonne, crowned with the Panthéon, to which were committed the ashes of heroes of nation and Republic. On the ‘right bank’ (though on the left from this vantage point) stretched out the elongated elegance of the Louvre, the grandest gallery in the world, from which the Mona Lisa had been stolen in 1911 and to which it had not yet been returned. Further on, almost out of view, the district of the Marais, the former working-class heart of Paris and now home to the city’s Jewish immigrants. Behind these, in an arc around the city’s northern and eastern fringes, the quartiers populaires of Paris, the Paris of the street, Belleville and Ménilmontant, where the Commune had made its last bloody stand forty years before.

  ‘Modern Paris’, noted Baedeker in 1910, ‘has been criticised for the uniformity of its general appearance’.13 It was indeed true that large parts of the city had been rebuilt in the 1860s under the watchful eye of Baron Haussmann, widening the city’s boulevards so as to make the construction of barricades more difficult and facilitate the movement of troops. This required that apartment blocks be built in a similar style and of a similar height, creating a city of greater aesthetic unity, and one which the rising bourgeoisie could claim as their own, rather than a city of poor artisans, shiftless vagrants and wealthy aristocrats.

  Yet Haussmann’s work had enhanced the city’s grandeur, not destroyed its charm. Some quarters of Paris struck Baedeker as almost Italian, others medieval. Surveying the city from the Eiffel Tower one caught a suggestion of its variety:

  The Seine, with its flotilla of merchant ships and barges, conveys, especially after dark, the impression of a sea-port. The boulevards at night with their electric lights and brilliant illuminations, suggest a city of pleasure, always en fête. And the charming environs, with the woods of Boulogne, Vincennes, Meudon and Montmorency, add a final touch to the variety that is one of the charms of the seductive capital, which no one quits without regret.

  The Eiffel Tower had now stood for twenty-five years, the priapic symbol of French modernity, instantly recognisable to the city’s visitors, and to many more around the world. In the first years of the twentieth century it had been slated for demolition. But it had been ingeniously repurposed as a radio mast, exciting a renewed burst of artistic appreciation for the tower as a symbol of modernity, painted by French artist Robert Delaunay and by Russian artist Marc Chagall, eulogised by Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss-born poet, and by the Italian-born writer Guillaume Apollinaire (briefly arrested on suspicion of having stolen the Mona Lisa). In a gesture which surely appealed to every Parisian’s sense of their place in the world it now became, from July 1913, a planetary clock tower, the ‘watch of the universe’.14 Once in the late morning and then again at midnight a powerful radio signal would be sent around the world. The world would be reminded that Paris still existed, and it was against this signal that the world’s clocks should be set. Robert Delaunay completed one of his canvases with the words: ‘La tour à l’univers s’addresse’ – ‘The tower addresses itself to the universe’.

  Thus was the myth of Paris as a force of universalisation maintained. The truth was somewhat more complex, itself a parable of how much France had become a single country over the last few decades, its regions and identities welded together by the force of the republican French state. It was not so long ago that there had been no commonly agreed time zones for the world, nor even a single time zone within France itself. In the past this had not mattered. In a world where ‘all human existence played out in the shadow of one’s native bell-tower’ place determined the hour. But what was accepted in that world seemed anachronistic in the world of the telegraph and the railway, set to standard rather than local times. ‘According to local time’, noted Louis Houllevigue in the Revue de Paris in 1913, ‘the train seemed to take fifty-four minutes less to travel from Paris to Brest, than from Brest to Paris; a news item sent from Nice at midday arrived in Paris at eleven-forty’.15 (To make this more confusing for the foreigner, clocks in French train stations ran five minutes behind in order to provide a cushion for hard-pressed passengers.)

  Robert Delaunay, The Eiffel Tower (1910). The tower, symbol of France’s ‘élan vital’, beloved of artists of the time, had been slated for demolition at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1913 the tower had been repurposed as a radio mast, broadcasting Paris time around the world.

  To overcome these discrepancies, in 1891 France set her national time – and that of French Algeria – on Paris. Now, clocks in Calais and in Biarritz would show the same hour. But internationally, standardisation had already moved ahead from setting national times to aligning and setting regular intervals between them. This required establishing a starting point, a time zone against which to set others. Greenwich Mean Time, based on the Greenwich observatory outside London, had become the standard, a few minutes behind Paris. The establishment of a universal benchmark was a matter of practicality in an interconnected world, for much the same reason that local time was necessarily superseded by national time. But it was also a matter of safety: sending time signals by radio to ships at sea allowed them better to determine their exact location. In 1911 France bowed to the inevitable and renominated France’s national time as being nine minutes and twenty-one seconds slower than Paris Mean Time, equivalent to that of Argentan, a village in Normandy on
exactly the same line of longitude as Greenwich. Having failed to make the world adopt a system based on its geographical position, Paris now manoeuvred itself to be the world’s time-setter nonetheless. In 1912 Paris hosted an international conference on the subject, preparing the Eiffel Tower for its new role, and Paris as the host of the new Bureau International de l’Heure.16

  For much of the nineteenth century the claim of Paris to universality related to its politics: forever at the leading edge of history. In 1789 that had been the guillotine and the storming of the Bastille. In 1830, after a period when France had seen its first republic, then its first empire, and then the restoration of the monarch, Paris deposed a Legitimist Bourbon king for a second time, replacing him with a more liberal Orleanist monarch, and setting itself up as a bastion of individual freedoms and political liberalism. It was around this time that German writer Karl Ludwig Börne moved to Paris and declared it the capital of the nineteenth century.17 In 1848 another French revolution occurred, sparking off a wave of European popular uprisings, and encouraging a young Karl Marx to move back to Paris from Brussels, to what appeared to be the revolutionary heart of Europe once more. In 1871, Paris became a focus for political violence once again, establishing the radical Paris Commune against both the Germans and the new conservative French government which emerged from the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War. The re-establishment of national order in Paris cost 10,000 lives on the barricades. Another 10,000 were summarily executed; further thousands were exiled to New Caledonia in the Pacific.

  But alongside the image of Paris as a city of political radicalism, occasionally violent, was the idea of Paris as a capital of pleasure – forbidden pleasures included. Over the course of the long nineteenth century it was ultimately this idea which came to predominate: Paris as a worldly city of good taste and luxury but also a romantic city of artists and poets, poverty and its tragedies.