Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [11]
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For all its gaiety and progress, there were still dark shadows in the City of Light. The Third Republic, the current national government, had been born in the midst of the tragedy and humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. When the Prussian army defeated the forces of Napoleon III at Sedan in northeastern France on September 2, 1870, it brought a crashing and ignominious end to France’s Second Empire. In the span of less than a century, France had experienced eight different forms of government. 35 Now, a provisional leadership in Paris declared the establishment of a republic — France’s third. Its prospects seemed bleak. As sporadic resistance continued in the countryside, the Prussian army surrounded the capital and laid siege to it. Starvation and bombardment took their toll, and the government had no choice but to agree to harsh terms for an armistice. Parisians had to endure the sight of German soldiers marching down the Champs-Élysées; the government agreed to pay a large indemnity and, worst of all, to give up entirely the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. These were humiliations that the French never forgot.
The conditions of peace angered the populace, particularly in Paris. On March 18, 1871, as a precautionary measure, the head of the French government, Adolphe Thiers, sent troops to take back the cannons set on the heights of Montmartre. They met with resistance and two of the soldiers were killed. Workers in Paris, joining forces with some National Guard troops stationed in the city, set up a revolutionary municipal government called the Commune. Its goals were to carry on the war with Germany and to return to the revolutionary principles of 1793. Friction between the government in Versailles and the Commune in Paris broke into a bloody conflict marked by atrocities on both sides. The national army entered Paris on May 21, 1871, fighting its way through the city streets until the Communards made their last stand in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in the center of working-class Belleville. The defenders were shot down among the tombs of French luminaries. Remembered as la semaine sanglante or Bloody Week, the urban battle caused death and destruction on a wide scale.
As the army tightened its hold on the city, the Communards killed the archbishop of Paris and wreaked vengeance on such landmarks as the Hôtel de Ville, Tuileries Palace, the Prefecture of Police, and expensive houses along the rue de Rivoli. The victorious army was far more ferocious, carrying out mass executions that made the Seine River run red with blood. The smell of burning bodies wafted through the city. Between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand Communards were slaughtered and even more sent to penal colonies in Guiana and New Caledonia. The carnage on both sides and its legacy of hatred would haunt the Third Republic for decades.
The first goal of the government was to repair the material damage to the city. By the end of the decade, this was accomplished. Paris had sought to demonstrate its recovery by staging a World’s Fair in 1878; a second, in 1889, added the Eiffel Tower to the city skyline. Ironically, its construction had been vehemently opposed by French intellectuals, who only relented on condition that the tower be demolished after a certain period. (Fortunately, it proved useful as a place from which radio transmissions could be sent overseas, so it was spared.) More controversial was the white-domed Basilica of Sacre-Coeur, which was built at the top of Montmartre as atonement for the violence of the Communards. Construction began in 1876 and did not end until just before World War I. Those who lived in Montmartre, most of whom were sympathetic to the memory of the Communards, resented the structure.
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