In Europe (3 page)

Around the turn of the century, three major scandals rocked Europe's capitals. They were cracks in the façade, the first fissures in that steadfast world of rank and class. In London, in 1895, there was the conviction of the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde for perversity. In Berlin, a similar scandal took place in the period 1907–9 concerning Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, former ambassador to Vienna and one of the German emperor's intimate friends. But the scandal with the greatest impact was the Dreyfus affair.

No other issue occupied the French more intensely between 1897–9 than the possible rehabilitation of the unjustly accused Alfred Dreyfus. This Jewish army captain had been banished to Devil's Island for allegedly having spied for the Germans. Gradually, however, it became increasingly clear that officers of the war council had tampered with his dossier and then, to refute the rising groundswell of suspicion, had continued to pile forgery upon forgery. The nation's military command knew about it, but refused to budge. To admit to such fraud would be tantamount to blasphemy, and would cast a taint on the
gloire militaire
.

Before long the affair was being monitored breathlessly all over Europe. After Émile Zola forced a reopening of the case on 13 January, 1898 – his fiery ‘
J'Accuse!
’ in
L'Aurore
was intended primarily to provoke charges of libel – scores of other European writers and intellectuals became involved. What was more important? The rights of the individual, or the prestige of the army and the nation? The progressive principles of the Enlightenment, or the old values of the counter-revolution, of the days of glory from before 1789?

The Dreyfus affair, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, was ‘the death-struggle of the old world’. ‘In those years, life seemed to have been temporarily suspended,’ wrote the future prime minister, Léon Blum. It was ‘a human crisis, not as far-reaching or long-lasting as the French Revolution, but no less violent for that … It was as though the whole world revolved around one affair, and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships all was interrupted, all was disrupted, all was seen through different eyes.’

Friends stopped seeing each other: Dreyfus lay between them like a live grenade. Family members avoided each other. Famous salons fell asunder. A certain M. Pistoul, manufacturer of wooden crates, was taken to court
by his mother-in-law after a family row over Dreyfus. He had called her an ‘
intellectuelle
’; she had accused him of being a ‘monster’ and a ‘traitor’; he had struck her; her daughter had filed for divorce. During Dreyfus’ retrial, Marcel Proust sat in the public gallery each day with coffee and sandwiches, so as not to miss a moment. He and his brother Robert helped to circulate a petition,‘The Intellectuals’ Protest’, and collected 3,000 signatures, including those of that notable arbiter of good taste Anatole France, and of André Gide and Claude Monet. For Monet, the petition meant the end of his friendship with his colleague Edgar Degas, and an enraged M. Proust Sr refused to speak to either of his sons for a week.

The Dreyfus scandal, like those surrounding Oscar Wilde and Philipp zu Eulenburg, had been drawn to the public's attention by a newspaper. And it was, above all, a clash of the papers. The affair's unprecedented vitality was due to the phenomenon of the ‘high-circulation daily’ appearing all over Europe, sensation-hungry papers with hundreds of thousands of readers and a distribution network that stretched to the remotest corners of the country. Around the turn of the century, Paris alone had between twenty-five and thirty-five dailies reporting and creating a wide variety of news. Berlin had sixty papers, twelve of which appeared twice a day. In London, the
Daily Mail
cost twopence, and had a circulation of 500,000: eleven times that of the staid and respectable
Times
. There arose in this way a new force, the force of ‘public opinion’, and it did not take the newspaper magnates long to learn to play on popular sentiment like a church organ. They inflated rumours and glossed over facts, everything was allowable for the purposes of higher sales, political gain or the pure adrenaline of making the news.

Yet the question remains: why was French public opinion so susceptible to this particular affair? Anti-Semitism definitely played a part. The anti-Dreyfus papers ran columns every day about the perfidious role of the ‘syndicate’, a burgeoning conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, socialists and foreigners who were out to tear France apart with their deception, lies, bribery and forgeries. When Dreyfus was first court-martialled, the crowd at the courthouse gates shouted ‘
À mort! À mort les juifs!
'The Viennese
Neue Freie Presse
's Jewish correspondent in Paris was so shocked that he went home and penned the first sentences of his tract
Der Judenstaat
: the Jews had to be given a country of their own. The correspondent's name
was Theodor Herzl. And so the first seed of what was to become the state of Israel sprouted here, at the Dreyfus trial.

But that was not all. What was really taking place, in fact, was a collision between two Frances: the old, static France of the status quo, and the modern, dynamic France of the press, public debate, justice and truth. Between the France of the palaces, in other words, and the France of the boulevards.

Strangely enough, the affair also blew over almost as quickly as it had arisen. On 9 September, 1899 Dreyfus was convicted once more, despite obvious tampering with the evidence. Europe was stunned to discover that such things were possible in an enlightened France. ‘Scandalous, cynical, disgusting and barbaric,’ the correspondent for
The Times
wrote. The French began to realise that the affair was damaging their country in the eyes of international opinion – and on the eve of a world's fair that was to be the biggest ever held. Dreyfus was offered a pardon and accepted it, too tired to fight on.

In 1906 the army rehabilitated him. He was promoted to the rank of major and received the
Légion d'honneur
. Zola died in 1902; in 1908 his ashes were interred at the Panthéon. Once free, Dreyfus himself proved less idealistic than those who had fought for him. ‘We were prepared to die for Dreyfus,’ one of his most avid supporters later said. ‘But Dreyfus himself was not.’ Years later, when a group of intellectuals asked him to sign a petition to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti – two American victims of a political process – he flew into a rage: he wanted nothing more to do with such affairs.

During my first few days in Paris, I take as my guide a copy of the 1896 Baedeker. In it, the avenue Jean-Jaurès is still the rue d'Allemagne, the SacréCoeur is still under construction, the most important painter of the day is Louis Meissonier, and the vanes of the Moulin de Galette have only recently stopped turning. I hail one of the 13,000
fiacres
, or hop aboard one of the forty omnibus lines crossing the city. Everything works and moves by horsepower, tens of thousands of horses for the cabs, omnibuses, carts and coaches, my entire city guide smells of horse. And all those horses must be stabled and fed – hence the hay and oats markets – and watered – there are 2,000 city fountains – to say nothing of disposing of all that manure.

The days have been sunny and mild. From my hotel window I look out over the roofs of Montmartre, the ruins of an old windmill, the misty hills in the distance. Beneath my window are a few old gardens with tall trees, a house with a sun porch, the early spring sounds of the blackbirds, sparrows and starlings. Darkness falls gradually. Between the roofs and the grey of the evening sky, more and more yellow lights appear. The city hums quietly.

It was with this ode to Paris, written by the Vietnamese Nguyen Trong Hiep in 1897, that the wandering European writer Walter Benjamin begins his essay ‘The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. Why did he – and so many with him – choose to grant the title to Paris? Why was the name Paris still on everyone's lips around 1900, when global power had long been focused in London, industry in Berlin, the future of good and evil in Vienna? Why was nineteenth-century Paris seen so widely as the springboard to the modern age?

That overwhelming unanimity had to do, first of all, with the new building materials and construction techniques, the iron and glass used here so much more freely and artfully than anywhere else. Take, for example, the palaces, the Eiffel Tower, the metro tunnels under the Seine with their immense iron stairways and lifts half the size of a railway car. And everywhere the famous galleries, the ‘indoor boulevards’ that formed the motif for Benjamin's most important work.

The lush interiors of the bourgeoisie – ‘the purses of the private man’, as Benjamin called them – became safe havens for the arts. The rise of photography – Paris led the way in that as well – forced painters to find totally new forms. It was now the splendour of a movement that made its way onto canvas, or the impression of a late afternoon. In this way the Impressionists blazed trails for painters like Pablo Picasso, who later pulled scenes and objects apart in search of structure.

The ties between the artists were intense, the market eager. Claude Monet immediately sold his first paintings for 300 francs, twice the
monthly salary of a teacher. Week after week in his diary, André Gide speaks of new exhibitions. Those were the places to which ‘the whole world’ went, the things ‘the whole world’ talked about.

Paris overwhelmed the senses as well with its boulevards, with that stunning order imposed on the city by prefect Haussmann. In that order, Benjamin said, ‘the institutions of the worldly and spiritual dominion of the citizenry found their apotheosis’. Of course, Haussmann's
grands travaux
were based on the necessities of law and order – from that point on, military units could operate much more easily in the event of a rebellion – but that was not their most important objective. The boulevards were primarily designed to be modern transport corridors between the various terminals; nineteenth-century Paris, like London and Brussels, was a complete chaos of horses, carts, carriages, coaches and omnibuses. They also served as visual corridors between monuments and major government buildings, national symbols to be viewed in awe by Parisians and visitors alike and therefore requiring a great deal of space. The boulevards served as dividing lines between the city's bourgeoisie and the common workfolk, between the wealthy arrondissements and dirty, smoky suburbs. But at the same time Haussmann's plan generated unprecedented dynamism, because it was based, for the first time, on an all-inclusive view of the phenomenon of the ‘city’.

‘Modern Paris could not exist within the boundaries of the Paris of the past,’ enthused the poet and journalist Théophile Gautier. ‘Civilisation blazes broad trails through the old town's dark maze of little streets, crossings and dead-end alleys: she brings down houses the way the pioneers in America bring down trees.’ In this way Paris was to become the outpost of the modern age, a beacon for the modern spirit, a light in the provincial darkness, France's song of glory, the city state of the new Europe.

No other metropolis is so much a city and, at the same time, so infused with the countryside as Paris. In the three-minute walk from my hotel to the nearest boulevard I pass six greengrocers, five bakeries, five butchers, three fishmongers. Shop after shop, the crates are displayed on the pavement: apples, oranges, lettuce, cabbage, leeks, radiant in the winter sun.
The butcher shops are hung with sausages and hams, the fish lie in trays along the pavement, from the bakeries wafts the scent of hundreds of varieties of crisp and gleaming bread.

It has always been a complicated relationship, that of the Parisians with their mysterious rural roots, ‘
la France profonde
’, and an intense one as well. Many Parisians, or their parents, or otherwise their grandparents, originally come from the countryside. These days the French are not ashamed of that, they actually cultivate and flaunt it with holiday houses and products from ‘home’ on the table. It's all a part of ‘
l'exception Française
’, even though one third of France's urban population today consists of foreigners.

Around the turn of the century, however, they seemingly wanted to shake off the dust of the countryside as soon as they arrived in Paris. In that sense, too, one could speak of two French nations. The more the big cities grew to be machines full of light and movement, the darker and sleepier the provinces seemed.

Generally speaking, the Parisians saw farm folk as savages or barbarians. One could pick them out in a crowd by the sound of their clumping, clattering clogs, and even when they wore shoes in the city, their strange, waddling gait immediately gave them away. This social rift was found everywhere in Europe, but nowhere as emphatically as in France.

Around 1880, there were still many people in the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Massif Central, in all those villages and river valleys where Europe today spends its holidays, who had never seen a cart or a wagon. Everything went by horse or mule. Local dialects predominated; according to official figures from 1863, one quarter of all French citizens barely spoke a word of French. Many regions were still using units of measure and weight, and some of them even currencies, that had been officially done away with a hundred years earlier. Anyone who had visited Paris, even if only for a day, bore the honorary title ‘Parisian’ for the rest of their lives.

There was nothing very romantic about ‘pure’ French country life. The provincial court records bear constant witness to inhuman poverty and harshness. A daughter-in-law murdered ‘because she was sickly and no good to us’; a mother-in-law thrown down a well to avoid paying a yearly annuity of twenty francs and three sacks of grain. One old man's wife
and daughter beat him severely with a pestle, a hammer and a rake, because they had grown tired of feeding him. Little Rémi from Malot's
Sans Famille
could be found everywhere: in 1905, there were some 400,000 beggars wandering the French countryside.