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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
During the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was besieged by the Prussians from the middle of September 1870 until the end of January 1871. During most of the period, the main means of transportation – railways, roads, telegraph, bridges, etc. – were cut off by the Prussians. This article shows that, given the elimination of the main means of diffusion of news, some novel strategies were used to preserve a democratic distribution of information. An analysis of the content of four illustrated periodicals – The Illustrated London News and The Graphic in London and L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré in Paris – shows that innovative methods involving such things as the balloon and the carrier pigeon were used to circulate news inside and outside the fortifications of Paris and beyond the surrounding Prussian army. The article also demonstrates that while this distribution had a different form from that occurring in normal situations, it did not prevent the papers from reaching a balance among the various issues related to the war and covered by their content.
1 Often known as the 1870 war.
2 The fortifications of Paris were built by Adolphe Thiers between 1840 and 1844 and did not include the arrondissements annexed by Haussmann in 1860. Thiers, after the armistice, became the chief of the executive power of the Republic from 1871 until 1873. For more on these and related issues, see Marchand, B., Paris, histoire d'une ville, XIX–XXe siècles (Paris, 1993)Google Scholar, particularly chs. 1 and 2.
3 Ibid., 49 and 15, 68–9, 103–7. There was resentment from the provinces, Marchand asserts, mainly felt by the peasants and artisans. Bourgeois, on the contrary, wanted to have roads and railways built to link the smaller cities in the provinces directly to Paris. For more on the development of nationhood and national identities in France, see Tombs, R., Nationhood and Nationalism in France before the Great War (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E., Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Thiesse, A.-M., La création des identities nationales: Europe XVIII–XXe siècles (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar; Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (London 1996)Google Scholar. See also Weber, E., Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, 1976)Google Scholar, which confirms that there was a difference in understanding the notion of national identity between urban and rural areas in France.
4 For more on the Franco-Prussian War, French nationalism and the illustrated periodicals, see Martin, M., Images at War. Illustrated Periodicals and Constructed Nations (Toronto, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This does not mean that there was no opposition, or at least resentment, between Paris and the provinces. That opposition which had gradually developed was not only symbolic, but was based on the gap in the economic conditions between the capital and the rest of France.
5 Harvey, D., Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York and London, 2003), 114.Google Scholar Parisians' pride was partly constructed from literary works by writers such as Victor Hugo, for instance, and was not incompatible with national pride.
6 For an account of the balloon and pigeon posts' use in the war, see Horne, A., The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–1 (London, 1965), 82–134Google Scholar. Use of the balloon and pigeon posts are also mentioned in Howard, M., The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (London, 1962), 325–7Google Scholar; Christiansen, R., Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune (New York, 1994), 181–2, 215–16Google Scholar.
7 Beetham, M., ‘Towards a theory of the periodical as a publishing genre’, in Brake, L., Jones, A. and Madden, L. (eds.), Investigating Victorian Journalism (London, 1990)Google Scholar.
8 Brown, J., ‘Reconstructing representation. Social types, readers and the pictorial press, 1865–1877s’, Radical History Review, 66 (1996), 5–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Jackson, M., The Pictorial Press. Its Origin and Progress (London, 1885)Google Scholar.
10 Or superintendent engraver as Jackson called him.
11 For more on the production of engravings in the illustrated press, see Martin, Images at War, particularly ch. 3.
12 Marchand, Paris, histoire d'une ville, 152. See also Jordan, D.Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.
13 Marchand, Paris, histoire d'une ville, 78. The following information about the development of systems of communication and transportation in Paris has been largely drawn from Marchand and from deMoncan, P. and Heurteux, C., Le Paris d'Haussmann (Paris, 2002)Google Scholar.
14 Livet, G., Histoire des routes et des transports en Europe. Des chemins de Saint-Jacques à l'âge d'or des diligences (Strasbourg, 2003), p. 474Google Scholar. These numbers are somewhat suspicious. It is very difficult to know the exact number of kilometres of railroads in European countries at the time. There are different, if not contradictory statistics on this issue. For instance, some sources assert that Haussmann, between 1852 and 1869 built 35 kilometres of railroads. At that pace, it is difficult to see how it would be possible to have 17,440 in 1870. One thing that is constant, though, is that England had almost twice as many kilometres of railroads as France and Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.
15 Moncan and Heurteux, Le Paris d'Haussmann, 50.
16 Indeed, while some stations were related by pairs (e.g. Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est, Gares Montparnasse and Austerlitz), a complete network of large streets linking all the railway stations was missing (Marchand, Paris, histoire d'une ville, 77).
17 Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 118–24.
18 This, however, does not mean that the provinces were deprived of illustrated periodicals. Indeed, with the expansion of railroads, the Parisian illustrated press was massively diffused in most French provinces.
19 Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 114.
20 Schwartz, V., Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley and London, 1998)Google Scholar. Marchand, however, situates the construction of Paris' image in the 1830s. Paris, histoire d'une ville, 64.
21 The fact that some researchers (cf. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities) situate the beginning of mass-produced newspapers in Paris with La Presse obscures the role of the illustrated press and shows the extent to which it is neglected as an object of research. Le Magazine Pittoresque, founded by Edouard Charton in 1833, was massively distributed. See Bacot, J.-P., La presse illustré au XIXe siècle: une histoire oubliée (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar, on that and related issues.
22 For more on these and related issues, see Martin Images at War; and Bacot, La presse illustré au XIXe siècle. The economic contribution of the illustrated press was the more so important that the production of images needed the formation of workshops, in which large teams of draughtsmen and engravers were working.
23 Beetham, ‘Towards a theory of the periodical as a publishing genre’, 19–31.
24 Very often, the illustrated periodicals published in the provinces were only reproducing the content of the Parisian papers published a few weeks earlier. See for instance Le Petit Marseillais, or Le Petit Bordelais.
25 Graham, S. and Marvin, S., Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition (London and New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Mattelart, A., Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (Minneapolis, 1994), 18Google Scholar.
27 For more information on the diffusion and distribution of dailies in France, see K. Taveaux-Grandpierre, ‘De la diffusion de la presse parisienne quotidienne en France: Hachette et les quotidiens à grand tirage, 1870–1914’, Ph.D. thesis, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 1999. The sale of illustrated papers in kiosks and railway stations started at the same time.
28 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 31.
29 Sinnema, P.W., Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot, 1998)Google Scholar.
30 Of course, daily experiences were different for people living in cities from those living in the provinces. However, the fact that more than one provincial illustrated periodical reproduced large parts of the Parisian papers' content (see n. 24) shows that rural people were not indifferent to what was going on in the capital.
31 In ‘Courrier de Paris’, Le Monde Illustré, 12 Nov. 1870.
32 It is not that they did not have any newspapers. ‘The Parisian press was varied and militant’ during the siege, says Roth, F., La Guerre de 70 (Paris, 1990), 204Google Scholar. They gave daily military reports and official dispatches, but they also carried out rumours and false news.
33 In ‘Foreign and colonial news, Paris August 25’, in The Illustrated London News, 28 Aug. 1870.
34 See C.P. Doullay, ‘Aspects de Paris: Nos gravures’, Illustration, 10 Sep. 1870.
35 According to Jackson, The Pictorial Press, 346, it is what William Simpson was doing without fault.
36 The terms ‘investment’ and ‘invested’ were often used by English illustrated periodicals when they meant the ‘siege of Paris’ or ‘besieged Paris’. It is not clear whether it was by ‘delicacy’ to avoid the work ‘siege’, or because at the time, it was the usual term to qualify such an event.
37 Jackson, The Pictorial Press, 339–40. Mason Jackson was, during the 1870 war, the superintendent engraver for The Illustrated London News and, as such, received all the drawings and sketches executed by the artists working for that paper. He seems to imply, in this quotation, that the balloons were travelling from Paris to London. However, the many texts that have been published on the balloons show that, generally, they were used in order to cross the German lines out of Paris, and landed as soon as they could thereafter. The rest of the distance was covered by more traditional transportation. Many of the documents were micro-photographed to be transported by balloon and all of them to be transported back by pigeon, not only in order to be able to send more than one copy of each, but specifically for security purposes since the Germans did not have the technology to decipher the micro-photographed messages. It also served to make the bags of dispatches lighter and increase the number of documents to be sent.
38 This remained a prominent consideration, despite accusations of rumour and false news across the press through the siege.
39 For instance, some members of the government were in Tours and other in Bordeaux.
40 For more details on the diffusionist approach applied to communication technologies, see Martin, M. ‘Communication and social forms: the development of the telephone 1876–1920’, Antipode, 23 (1991), 307–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on innovation, see Flichy, P.L'innovation technique (Paris, 1995)Google Scholar.
41 They were also called aerostats, a conscription of ‘aerial station’, or mongolfières in honour of their inventors, the brothers Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier. The political incentive behind the balloon's use in France has a longer history. In 1793, ten years after its first launch, the French army adopted the tethered, hydrogen-filled balloon, and formed a military service, the Aérostiers, that used balloons as reconnaissance platforms. They proved to be most useful particularly during national crises, when the French Republic was under attack from various countries. But the usefulness of the balloon was mixed, mostly because communications with the ground were sometimes hampered by bad visibility. The service was dismantled by Napoleon I in 1802 – a sign, perhaps, of the limited use of balloons in given situations, but also an indication that Napoleon I may not have been as visionary in technological matters as in military strategies.
It was an English aeronaut, Charles Green, and then an American, John Wise, who brought important advancements to the balloon. The usefulness of the improved balloon as a military technology surfaced in the United States when Abraham Lincoln declared, on 15 April 1861, that an insurrection was imminent in the Southern states. Thaddeus Lowe, who was convinced of the necessity to introduce aeronautics as a legitimate branch of the American military, suggested that a battery-powered telegraph, connected to the ground, be added to the balloon's equipment. The president was then convinced that the Union war activities would be greatly enhanced by the formation of an Aeronautical Corps that could survey the battlefields as well as the positions of the enemy. Moreover, coupled with the use of a telegraph, the Corps would direct the ground artillery to targets that the soldiers could not see (Evans, C.M., War of the Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning in the Civil War (Mechanicsburk, 2002), p. 76Google Scholar). But while useful for surveying the battlefield, this form of aeronautics was still generally used more for surveillance rather than the transportation of items across space (Virilio, P., War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London, 1989), p. 3Google Scholar). The use of the balloons during the Franco-Prussian War was quite a different matter. There is no record of their use at the very beginning of the war as a strategic technology to help the ground troops, nor is there any evidence of their use by the German army at all, though The Graphic asserted that the Prussians attempted to use them with mixed results. In fact the war was too short, and its onset too sudden, to have time to organize the use of such a ‘weapon’.
42 Horne, Fall of Paris, 83.
43 Ibid., 123–5.
44 In the ‘Chronicle of the war’, published on 26 Nov. 1870, The Graphic asserted that the French wanted to use eagles to guide the balloons in their flights, but that the Prussians had already shot most of them. Since this information was mentioned nowhere else, not even in Die Illustrirte Zietung, one does not know how much credit to give it.
45 This, of course, suggests that the people who were transported outside Paris by balloon had either to remain outside for the rest of the siege, or find another way to come back. It seems that to bribe the Prussians was one option. On this particular issue, see Zola, E. (ed.) Les soirées de Médan (Paris, 1880)Google Scholar.
46 However, they preferred to send the birds consecutively so that they could use an in-octavo format of 400 pages. Le Monde Illustré published two articles, entitled ‘Le service postal pendant le siège. Peripateia d'un astronaute photographe’, respectively on 7 and 14 Jan. 1871, reproducing part of a report written for the Ministry of Defence by Dagron, then photographer in charge of the postal service and inventor of the microscopic photography.
47 There were other ways to diffuse news from the front. During the very short period of the war, 70 small newspapers (Petits Journaux) were created, each containing a few sheets of paper on which information from battlefields were published; information was not always accurate, as one may guess. See Dupuy, A., 1870–1871: la guerre, la commune et la presse (Paris, 1959), 82, 178Google Scholar.
48 Le Monde Illustré asserts that there were 59, but since the Illustration listed them and described the content and mission of each of the 64 balloons, its number should be regarded as more credible.
49 The number of messages going out of Paris was greater than the total coming in.
50 See ‘Departure of a balloon from Paris’, 21 Jan. 1871. The author asserts that the French had perfected the technology to such a point that the balloons were almost impossible to catch or shoot by the Prussians. This was a little overly enthusiastic!
51 18 Mar. 1871.
52 Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, 326.
53 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 27–8.
54 Mattelart, Mapping World Communication, 15.
55 For an excellent international analysis of the nineteenth-century illustrated press, see Bacot, La presse illustré au XIXe siècle.
56 Here one critique suggested that we talk about the sense of pride in the city, instead of the national identity. Yet, although the Parisians' sense of pride certainly was instrumental in preventing the city from falling as early as had been foreseen by some foreigners, this sense of pride was firmly anchored in a cohesive understanding of national identity. Parisians knew that if Paris fell into the hands of the enemy, the way Metz and Strasbourg had, France would fall apart.
57 For a historical study of news agencies and related issues, see Palmer, M., Des petits journaux aux grandes agences. Naissance du journalisme moderne 1863–1914 (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar.