The boulevards of the Right Bank of the Seine featured luxurious hotels and expensive restaurants frequented by foreign tourists and their counterparts from other parts of France. The names of the grands cafés, catering to a well-heeled clientele who came to sit, observe the passing scene, and read newspapers, reflected British and American influence: Grill Room, Express Bar, Piano Player. One knowledgeable contemporary insisted that "the bar, the democratic and modern café, has dethroned the old drinking places that were on street corners and are now disappearing ... What can one say about the innumerable harm brought by the bars, foreign imports all!" Flâneurs observed the never-ending spectacle of the boulevards. Here, crowded, dark, and dirty Paris seemed to disappear into the "city of light."
In front of the recently constructed train station of Saint-Lazare stood the Hôtel Terminus. The widely respected Baedeker guidebook described it as "not quite so well situated" as the other great hotels, just a little beyond the fanciest quartier. It provided five hundred rooms, each with electric lighting and a telephone, and its least expensive accommodation cost four francs, a full day's wage for many workers. Lunch, including wine, coffee, and liqueurs, cost five francs; dinner cost seven, and full board could be had for sixteen francs.
The elegant avenue de l'Opéra, along which wagons and carriages, including those of the police, were still pulled by horses, was lined with hotels, cafés—notably, the Café de Paris—and luxury shops. The avenue, almost 650 yards long and 30 yards wide, stretched from place du Théâtre-Français, not far from rue de Rivoli, which runs parallel to the Seine to the opera house. No trees had been planted along the avenue, so the view of the commanding edifice would not be obstructed.
With the inscription ACADÉMIE NATIONALE DE MUSIQUE, the Opera, which opened in 1875, was at the time the largest theater in the world. It covered nearly three acres but seated only 2,156 people, fewer than La Scala in Milan, San Carlo in Naples, or the opera house in Vienna. A prominent guidebook proudly noted that "there is hardly a variety of marble or costly stone that has not been used," green and red granite from Sweden and Scotland, yellow and white marble from Italy, red porphyry from Finland, and marble from other regions of France. The purchase of the site and the construction of the building cost fabulous sums. It took fourteen years to put together the principal façade; its rich ornamentation included a portico with seven arches, whose pillars were embellished with statues representing Music, Idyllic Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Drama, Lyric Drama, Dance, and Song. Inside, the grand staircase led to the boxes and balconies on each floor, from which the lavishly dressed operagoers could observe the magnificent stage, 178 feet wide and 74 feet deep. Monday and Friday evening performances were considered the most fashionable, with evening dress required for the best seats, which cost the equivalent of three or four days' wages for most workers.
In Émile Zola's novel Paris (1898), Abbé Pierre Froment arrives at place de l'Opéra and describes it thus:
The heart of the great city seemed to beat on that spot, in that vast expanse where met so many thoroughfares, as if from every point the blood of distant districts flowed thither along triumphal avenues. Right away to the horizon stretched the great gaps of avenue de l'Opéra, rue du Quatre-Septembre, and rue de la Paix ... Then there was the detached mass of the opera house, slowly steeped in gloom and rising huge and mysterious like a symbol, its lyre-bearing figure of Apollo, right aloft, showing a last reflection of daylight amid the livid sky. And all the windows of the house fronts began to shine, gaiety sprang from those thousands of lamps which coruscated one by one, a universal longing for ease and free gratification of each desire spread with the growing dusk; while, at long intervals, the large globes of the electric lights shone as brightly as the moons of the city's cloudless nights.
Avenue de l'Opéra and the opera house itself stood as centerpieces of a city caught up in a feast of consumer goods. Across the stage of the Parisian boulevards strolled proud bankers, captains of industry, and successful merchants, wearing dark coats and top hats; their ladies were decked out in elegant long dresses, constricting corsets, and huge stylish hats. Doormen clicked their heels in respect as the well-to-do passed by, and policemen and soldiers stood at attention. The mien of the wealthy told the poor, "I live at your expense."
The term boulevardiers came into use to describe men who turned up "at the proper moment in the proper café." According to Jules Claretie's Life in Paris 1896, "On the boulevard each day one can gamble on love, money, winning or losing, the boulevardiers are like fish in the water of this urban aquarium, residents in this zoo, where it is better to be a young fish or a young lion." For the upper classes, such display was part of urban life, constantly reaffirming and celebrating their social distance from, say, the waiters in the fine restaurants who brought plate after plate of elaborately prepared food, along with wine, which according to the current taste was now coordinated to complement each dish.
Sold in kiosks, hawked by peddlers, and delivered to homes, newspapers flourished as never before in belle époque Paris. Given their low cost, as well as the continued growth of Paris itself, print runs of the twenty daily newspapers doubled in the 1880s, and weekly supplements followed, all this largely due to improvements in printing techniques. The Linotype machine, introduced in the 1880s, made composition easier. Through lithography, photographs and color could appear in print. A wide range of subject matter was on offer: sensational scandals, of which there were no small number in the first decades of the Third Republic, as well as entertaining serials, crimes big and small, and enticing advertisements. Several newspapers featured interviews and investigations.
The press played a decisive role in the mass politicization of this period, and each newspaper had a particular political slant. People got most of their news, as well as discussion of the issues of the day, from the papers, which together powerfully shaped public opinion. The government paid journalists to support its policies, and politicians themselves penned articles in the major papers. Zola described "steam-powered journalism, polished off in twenty minutes, edited on the fly, written at full gallop at a café table." Le Matin had begun publication in 1882, and many considered it the first "American-style" newspaper in France. The relatively moderate Le Petit Parisien printed nearly a half-million copies of each issue in the early 1890s, and Le Petit Journal a million. Posters were plastered all over Paris to advertise the advent of Le Journal in September 1892, with an ambitious first print run of 200,000 copies. The wealthy read the right-wing L'Écho de Paris and the more moderate republican Le Temps, considered a newspaper of quality and more serious (especially about expanding France's colonial empire) than other more flamboyant contenders, along with its rival Le Figaro. Monarchists had their own newspapers (Le Soleil and Le Gaulois), among others on the political right (L'Intransigeant, La Presse, La Cocarde, Le Drapeau, L'Éclair, La Patrie, and the viciously anti-Semitic La Libre Parole). The right-wing press dominated Paris and would have its heyday during the campaign, a few years later, against the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany.
The modern glories of Paris were on full display during the magnificent Exposition Universelle in 1889, a world's fair that affirmed the triumph of the Third Republic, France's prominent role in Europe, and the expanding French colonial empire in Southeast Asia and Africa. This empire, to be sure, had been constructed at the expense of peoples considered to be the "inferior races," as Jules Ferry, who had served as minister for foreign affairs, termed them. This attitude was reflected in some of the exhibits, including the "Negro Village," which exhibited hundreds of Africans. The exposition, which stretched along both sides of the Seine in western Paris, also celebrated technological progress (with omnipresent reminders of France and Paris as the center of Beaux-Arts). Most of the more than 32 million visitors who strolled through the enormous Gallery of Machines gazed down from a catwalk to view the wonders achieved by science, especially in the form of consum
er goods. Thomas Edison himself, "the Wizard of Menlo Park," had a look at the pavilion that celebrated his work, ten years after electricity illuminated a grand Parisian café for the first time.
The Eiffel Tower commemorated the Revolution and France's Third Republic. Nine hundred feet in height, it then stood as the tallest structure in the world. Built of iron, the tower symbolized the glories of engineering as well as the industrial age in general.
But the progress celebrated at the exposition and the fruits of capitalism on display in the boulevards, department stores, hotels, and cafés brought unforeseen economic and social consequences. Even as the middle classes embraced Paris's elegant cafés, the horseraces at Longchamps, and rides through the Bois de Boulogne. Some bourgeois came to feel disconnected, even isolated, anonymous, and helpless, as they sought new urban pleasures. The work of the early impressionists, particularly Gustave Caillebotte, reflects this sense of dislocation. Bourgeois couples or individuals share space, but nothing else, or gaze down on the street from the isolated safety of an apartment. The Catholic poet and writer Charles Péguy would famously exclaim that "the World has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the past thirty years," and the pace of innovation was hard to adjust to.
But if one was to be a victim of this trend, it was certainly better to be a rich one, or at least a middle-class one, than truly poor. The seemingly endless wonders of modern times had brought precious little to the indigent. Augustin Léger, an anarchist, described the place of the Opera in the imagination of the poor:
What I saw in the evening when I wandered through the wealthy neighborhoods! The other day, I was walking near the opera. There was some sort of nighttime occasion going on ... I saw luxurious carriages, men and women covered with jewelry, dressed in their finery, carrying rare flowers, and I noted scandalous scenes, as well! I was shocked. What a beautiful society when the budget of the state spends four million francs on the opera each year as a subsidy, with the goal of making even it ever more beautiful ... while poor people try to get by in the streets and public places, without anywhere to live ... What kind of society is this when the rich drink full glasses of champagne with women to whom they give fistfuls of money, while their brothers in the lower classes die of misery, the cold, and hunger!
A visitor who glanced away from the centers of flamboyant Parisian prosperity observed that "away in the distance, on the horizon, across light violet mists, lay uncertain outlines of smoky suburbs, behind which, nothing being visible, we still fancied Paris. On another side, other enormous suburbs, crowded upon the heights like armies ready to descend, full of sadness and menace." The guest was looking toward the north and northeast. Paris, after all, was still predominantly a city of workers, the privileged neighborhoods in western Paris notwithstanding. Handicraft production was still important in the capital of luxury but had declined in relative terms. The second industrial revolution brought factories producing rubber, steel, and machines to the outskirts of Paris, an area that offered more space, proximity to rail and canal transport, and a way to avoid the customs barriers that taxed goods entering Paris's city limits, thereby making raw materials somewhat cheaper. The northern and eastern faubourgs—peripheral settlements once beyond the city limits but now well within them—gave way to increasingly industrialized suburbs, where many of the workers lived. These included skilled workers such as ironsmiths, foundry workers, and mechanics; semiskilled laborers such as machine tenders; unskilled proletarians, among them thousands of women; and service workers who lived on the outskirts of Paris but often worked in the fancier neighborhoods of the center and west. "Dirty" industries, such as manufacturers of soaps and chemicals, were relegated to the outskirts; they involved activities and people unwanted by those in the center. Beyond the city limits, wine and other drinks were cheaper, and modest bars thrived.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the lives of most workers had marginally improved, at least if one considers wages and the cost of living. Their diet was more varied, and the relative price of food had declined. Yet economic instability, physical exhaustion, and frequent unemployment still defined working-class existence. The contrast between the relatively prosperous west and the proletarian east was gradually matched by the disparity between center and periphery, a development hastened by Haussmann's construction. In the mid-188os, in twelve of these poorer neighborhoods, ordinary workers made up more than 70 percent of the population. Other neighborhoods boasted an even larger proportion of them.
In fact, the population of Paris had risen from about 1.8 million people in 1872 to almost 2.5 million by 1891. Impoverished people from the provinces arrived and accelerated the development of working-class suburbs on the margins of urban life. This immigration swelled the ranks of Parisians—many, if not most, driven to urban life by the monumental difficulty of making ends meet in rural France. Falling prices for farm products meant that what farmers raised brought in little money. Moreover, the grape phylloxera epidemic attacked the country's vineyards. In Paris, craft production became saturated. These new workers found jobs in recently established industries, such as metallurgy, which by 1898 occupied over two thousand factories, employing more than twenty workers each. The exterior districts (arrondissements) grew far more rapidly than did the central city. These heavily populated industrial suburbs subsumed land that had only recently presented a bucolic scene of villages and farms.
If wages and conditions of life had improved for Parisian workers during the 1870s, unemployment kept about half of the working population on the edge of economic disaster. During years of recession, notably 1883–87, 1889, and 1892, between a quarter and a half of all workers in major occupations were unemployed. And in most years, perhaps half of all industrial workers lived in poverty, particularly as wages in some sectors declined. Getting enough to eat was a constant preoccupation for ordinary working people.
Within the limits of the city itself, tens of thousands of workers were piled into old houses, basements, attics, and even stables that had been divided and then subdivided into small rooms. Many were only a few square yards in size, some with ceilings of less than two yards in height. Extra floors were maladroitly added where possible, and the tiny, unsanitary apartments often lacked running water or heat. Thousands of workers lived in rooming houses, which offered little more than a bed in a tiny room or in a dormitory, where beds were laid out side by side. Because of these conditions, landlords were a target of popular wrath.
"People's Paris" remained in many ways a very unhealthful place to live, its hovels notorious. Rates of infant mortality and death from tuberculosis were both much higher on the periphery—for TB, five times greater in the impoverished twentieth district in the far northeast than in the district of the Opera. Moreover, in the industrial suburbs, with their chemical and metallurgical factories, tanneries, freight railway stations, and canals, shacks of all sorts formed nascent shantytowns, standing amid mud and raw sewage. If drinkable water was now available in the center of Paris, this was by no means the case in the industrial suburbs such as Saint-Ouen, where women lined up early in the morning with buckets to get filtered water when the faucets were opened for the street sweepers. In the suburbs more than thirty thousand wells stood near cesspools that were hardly ever emptied.
People of means got around in Paris by horse-drawn omnibus, tramway, taxi, or private carriage. Thirty-four lines of omnibuses—rectangular, closed carriages with windows, drawn by two or three horses—crisscrossed Paris from seven in the morning until shortly after midnight. An omnibus could be expected to pass about every five minutes. They complemented the tramways, even larger carriages pulled by horses along tracks, which could accommodate up to fifty people. The poor, however, had to walk, because they lacked the money for a fare.
In the mid-188os the tramway lines radiated to a number of suburbs, including Saint-Denis, Gennevilliers, and Vitry, as well as Versailles, a rather different kind of suburb. But their cost—fifty centimes
for the tramway—was prohibitive for most people. Riverboats (bateaux-mouches) had begun their journeys through Paris in 1867, depositing passengers on both sides of the Seine. There were now more than a hundred of them—but, again, it cost ten to twenty centimes to take them. Private carriages, much more expensive, were simply out the question for ordinary people. Thus each day, from the heights of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements, thousands of workers and domestics of every conceivable variety walked down to work, returning on foot that night. Most anyone having to go from one suburb to another walked, because there was no other way: public transportation lines in Paris radiated like spokes on a wheel, just as the railroads did, to and from the capital.
In short, the belle époque was not belle for most French men and women, who had little reason for optimism and great concern for the future. Millions still lived in abject misery. The gap between the wealthy and the poor had, if anything, increased. The livret, a booklet that workers were obliged to carry in which was inscribed past work experience (and made it easy to blacklist militants), disappeared only in 1890. In the best of circumstances a working-class family of four all had jobs, and the father who worked three hundred days a year could bring home about 450 francs. His spouse could earn about 180 francs, and two children each about 65, for a total of 760 francs. Unfortunately, a family of four required about 860 francs just to get by.*
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Page 2
