Guest Post: Paris in Ruins

M.K. Tod (Mary) is the author of the newly released Paris in Ruins, as well as Time and Regret, Lies Told in Silence, and Unravelled. She has an active historical fiction blog complete with interviews with authors, readers and others involved in the historical fiction genre, as well as insights from five historical fiction surveys. Mary and I have met at multiple Historical Novel Society conferences over the years, and I’m an admirer of her fiction and her blog.

She has set her latest novel, Paris in Ruins, in an iconic place at a time of great upheaval and conflict–during the Prussian invasion of 1870. It is a novel of the human spirit overcoming the worst of times. That seems appropriate these days.

Here’s the quick intro: Paris 1870. Raised for a life of parties and servants, Camille and Mariele have much in common, but it takes the horrors of war to bring them together to fight for the city they love. War has a way of teaching lessons – if only they can survive to learn them.

Mary has written a guest post describing the background of this time and place–not the Paris you probably carry in your imagination.

Rats, trees, and breadlines

Paris In Ruins begins in September 1870 as the Prussian army marches toward Paris. During the early months of that year, Prussia engineered a crisis that threatened the security of France. By the middle of July, the two countries were at war. The Prussian army had superior numbers, leadership, and technology, and on September 2^nd, Napoleon III surrendered after huge losses at the Battle of Sedan. By September 15^th, the Prussian army reached the outskirts of Paris. By the 19^th, Paris was totally surrounded.

The novel tells the story of Mariele de Crécy and Camille Noisette, young upper-class women living in Paris in the tumultuous year following the fall of Napoleon III. As the Prussians lay siege to the city, Camille plunges into the challenge of nursing the wounded while Mariele takes on the task of caring for destitute children. As unrest grows among the lower classes, Camille becomes caught up in a scheme to spy on the radicals plotting to overthrow the French government. Both women learn new and startling truths about their society and about themselves.

Imagine knowing that an army of more than 400,000 soldiers was approaching your city. How would you feel? What preparations would you make? Would you worry about your children, the men you loved who’d enlisted to defend the city, your friends and family? Would you wonder how you would feed your family and whether or not your job was secure? With winter only a few months away, would you be concerned about having enough wood or coal to keep your fires burning?

What was it like to live through five months of siege conditions followed by ten weeks of insurrection?

With Paris cut off from the outside, rationing came into effect almost immediately. Like any bureaucracy, the government instituted a convoluted system to dispense food, with meat and flour being two of the first items affected. According to Henry Labouchere in Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris, “Yesterday [September 30] a decree was promulgated, ordering all persons having flour on sale to give it up to the Government at the current price … As regards meat, the supply does not equal the demand—many persons are unable to obtain [ration] tickets, and consequently have to go without.” Henry goes on to say that most items were unavailable at a restaurant he went to that evening and he had to “make a dinner on sheeps’ trotters, pickled cauliflower, and peaches.”

News was often fabricated with the least bit of good news exaggerated and bad news dismissed as inaccurate. Here’s Henry Labouchere again: “No Parisian is able to believe anything which displeases him, and he is unable not to believe anything which flatters his amour propre [self-esteem] … No journal dares to tell the truth, for if it did its circulation would fall to nothing.”

From the middle of September, Paris assumed the look of an armed camp with 500,000 soldiers and National Guard members. According to Elihu Washburne, American ambassador to France, whose diary entries are captured in a book by Michael Hill, “Every carriage of pleasure has disappeared … The city is but one big camp … There are soldiers everywhere, organized and unorganized, of all arms, uniforms, shades, and colors … Streets and avenues are filled with tents and baggage wagons, horses, forage etc. The garden of the Tuileries is filled with artillery … regiments are marching down the Champs Elysees singing the eternal but ever inspiring Marseillaise.”

As early as September 17^th, trees in the Bois de Boulogne were cut down to provide barricades and fuel and roughly 250,000 sheep and 40,000 oxen were then herded into the Bois de Boulogne to graze until needed for food. For a while, Paris remained busy with stores open, omnibuses circulating, people moving about, and a great many soldiers on the streets. Citizens stopped to watch the soldiers as if military drills were an activity designed for their amusement.

By the middle of October, the meat ration was down to 100 grams per person per day, or 0.22 of a pound, and there were long lines at the butcher shops. Horse meat replaced beef; on the menus, cat meat was passed off as rabbit. Soon Parisians were eating donkey. The price of goods like milk and butter became so high as to be unaffordable for the working class. Jobs for both men and women disappeared.

While the generals dithered over what military action to take, radical republicans calling for the overthrow of the government met regularly in cafés and small public buildings to debate tactics and inflame their followers. At the end of October, a coup attempt almost succeeded. Large restless crowds gathered day and night, sometimes to hear the news, at other times to denounce the military leadership and the Government

By November, gas was in short supply and only one streetlamp in six was lit at night. The hospitals, some located in hotels and theaters, were full. Soldiers were dying. With inadequate medicines and few doctors, amputation was often the only way to save a life.

Dogs disappeared from the streets. Restaurants offered rat, referred to as a ragout, and salted horse. Napoleon III and his wife Eugenie were vilified in the streets, and obscene caricatures sold in the kiosks. Merchants were attacked by starving Parisians. Smallpox was on the rise.

Cantines economiques – soup kitchens – sprang up to feed the poor offering soup made from vegetables and a few scraps of meat for 5 centimes and the government provided small quantities of bread free to the poor.

On November 29^th, “From morning to evening cannon were rolling and troops were marching through the streets,” in preparation for battle. The following day, as battle raged between the French and Prussian soldiers, “a hard, severe frost hit Paris. The streets were cluttered with ambulance wagons making their way back into the city, and the river Seine was filled with steamboats carrying more dead and wounded.”

Bread riots occurred in December. The bitter cold left people frozen to death in the streets. Henry Labouchere visited one of the poor neighborhoods to assess the situation. “The distress is terrible. Women and children, half starved, were seated at their doorsteps, with hardly clothes to cover them decently. They said that as they had no firewood nor coke, they were warmer out-of-doors than in-doors. Many of the National Guards, instead of bringing their money home to their families, spent it in drink.”

The poor pawned their clothes in order to eat, and when the weather turned cold had little to keep them warm. Fuel was in such short supply that even the rich had trouble procuring it. The Government cut down trees as fast as possible to ease the suffering of the poor, while “bands of marauders issue[d] forth and cut down trees, park benches, and garden palings.”

The only people making money were the undertakers.

Prussian bombardment of Paris began in January—first the outer forts and then the bastions of the walled city, then the Left Bank. Here’s Labouchere again: “The cannon now make one continuous noise … the shells fall on the left bank to a distance of about a mile from the ramparts … Waggons and hand-carts packed with household goods are streaming in from the left to the right bank.” “The deaths for last week amount to 3,280, an increase on the previous week of 552 … small-pox is on the increase.” The bread is “dark in colour, heavy, pasty, and gritty.”

In January two elephants from the zoo were killed and their carcasses made available to feed Parisians. Most restaurants were closed due to lack of fuel. In the last days of the siege, food supplies were further restricted. Rumors raced through the streets, while military leaders were denounced, more losses reported, and the bombardment continued.

The siege lasted until the end of January 1871, but the turmoil continued and in mid-March, radical republicans overthrew the government and established the Paris Commune. For ten weeks, the Commune carried out acts of murder, assassination, pillage, robbery, blasphemy, and terror, until finally expiring in blood and flames.

Through the eyes and actions of Camille and Mariele, Paris In Ruins shows how these events affected the lives of both rich and poor. The story features the courage, patriotism, kindness, and fortitude men and women displayed under such terrible conditions, and it celebrates the power of love and friendship in overcoming heartbreak and tragedy.

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Two snippets from reviews for you since I haven’t written one yet:

Deeply moving and suspenseful ~~ Margaret George, author of Splendor Before the Dark: A Novel of the Emperor Nero

Tod is not only a good historian, but also an accomplished writer … a gripping, well-limned picture of a time and a place that provide universal lessons ~~ Kirkus Reviews.

To buy Paris in Ruins on Amazon.

For M.K. Tod’s website.

Paris in Ruins on Goodreads.

For a post about Time and Regret.