Paris during the First World War

French soldiers march past the Petit Palais (1916)

Parisians entered the First World War (1914-1918) in August 1914 on a wave of patriotic fervor, but within a few weeks Paris was close to the front lines, and was bombarded by German aircraft and artillery. The Parisians endured food shortages, rationing, and an epidemic of influenza, but morale remained high until near the end of the war. With the departure of young men to the front lines, women took a much greater place in the work force. The city also saw a large influx of immigrants who came to work in the defense factories. The end of the war on November 11, 1918 saw huge celebrations on the boulevards of Paris.

Paris mobilizes

Crowd of reservists being mobilized at the Gare de l'Est (August 2, 1914)

Tensions had been high between France and Germany since 1911, when a German gunboat, the Leopard, had made a provocative demonstration outside the port of Agadir in French-dominated Morocco. The right-wing parties in France wanted revenge for the defeat of France in the Franco-German War of 1870-1871, which had resulted in the loss of the French province of Alsace and much of Lorraine. Many on the left also favored war, to bring down the reactionary monarchies of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On June 28, 1914, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz-Ferdinand by Serbian terrorists in Sarajevo caused Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia. Russia, bound by a treaty to defend Serbia, declared war on Austria-Hungary, and Germany, bound by its own treaty to defend Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia. France and Britain, bound by treaties with Russia, mobilized on August 1.

The war was opposed by some prominent socialists and pacifists, but the press and most political leaders pressed for war. The day before the mobilization, one of the most prominent leaders of the French left, the socialist politician Jean Jaurès, an outspoken opponent of going to war, was assassinated at the Café Croissant on Montmartre, not far from the offices of the socialist newspaper L'Humanité, by a mentally-unstable man, Raoul Villain, who considered Jaurès an "enemy of France.

Most male Parisians of military age were required to report on August 2 to designated stations around the city for mobilization into the army. The army command expected that up to thirteen percent would not appear, but to their surprise all but one percent appeared as ordered. The poet and novelist Anatole France, seventy years old, appeared at the recruitment station to show his support. The Ministry of the Interior was prepared to arrest prominent pacifists and socialists who opposed the war, but, in the face of little opposition to the war, the arrests were never carried out.

Paris on the front lines

General Joseph Gallieni, military governor of Paris

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 saw patriotic demonstrations on the Place de la Concorde and at the Gare de l'Est and Gare du Nord, as the mobilized soldiers departed for the front. But while the Paris newspapers were confident of a quick victory, the German army swept through Belgium and marched rapidly toward Paris.

On 26 August, trainloads of refugees from Belgium arrived at the Gare du Nord, and were given shelter shelter at the Cirque de Paris. On August 30 a German plane appeared over Paris and dropped three bombs, one on rue des Récollets, one on the quai de Valmy and the third on the rue des Vinaigriers; the last bomb killed an elderly woman and wounded three persons. City authorities did not allow the casualties to be mentioned in the press. Another plane appeared on 31 August, dropping a message that the Germans had defeated the French army at Saint-Quentin, and a third plane appeared on September 1, dropping more bombs that killed one person and injured sixteen. The casualties were concealed from the public.

On July 26, the same day that the refugees from Belgium began arriving in the city, General Joseph Gallieni was called from retirement and appointed military governor of Paris, a title which dated back to the fourteenth century. He quickly began organizing the defenses of the city; the forts around the city were prepared for action, 376 cannons and batteries of new 75-millimeter guns were placed around the city to defend it against aerial attack, and machine guns and a cannon were placed on the Eiffel Tower. Herds of cattle were brought into the city to provide meat in the event of a long siege. The important masterpieces of the Louvre were transported to Toulouse for safekeeping. As the German army drew closer, French President Raymond Poincaré decided to move the French government and the National Assembly to safety in Bordeaux, as had been done in the 1870 Franco-German War. On September 2, posters appeared around the city around the city announcing that "The members of the government of the Republic have left Paris to give a new impulse to the national defense."

Paris taxis carried 6000 soldiers to the front during the First Battle of the Marne

By the first week of September, the Germans had come within thirty kilometers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. The French and British armies were engaged in fierce fighting with the Germans in the First Battle of the Marne. When one of the German armies turned southeast to attack the French army on the flank, it opened a gap between the German armies, and the French forces, led by Marechal Joffre, saw an opportunity to attack them on their own flank. General Gallieni decided to send all of his reserves from Paris to the front to aid the attack, but lacked enough trains and omnibuses to move the soldiers. On September 5 Gallieni requisitioned a thousand private vehicles, including about six hundred Paris taxicabs and their drivers to carry soldiers to the front at Nanteuil-le Haudoin, fifty kilometers away. The drivers were assembled on the evening of 6 September on the esplanade of Les Invalides. They were mostly the Renault AG1 Landaulet model, with an average speed of 25 kilometres per hour (16 mph). Within twenty-four hours, the Villemonble and Gagny battalions, about six thousand soldiers and officers, were moved to the front at Nanteuil-le-Haudouin. Each taxi carried five soldiers, four in the back and one next to the driver. Only the back lights of the taxis were lit; the drivers were instructed to follow the lights of the taxi ahead. Most of the taxis were demobilized on September 8 but some remained longer to carry the wounded and refugees. The taxis, following city regulations, dutifully ran their meters. The French treasury reimbursed the total fare of 70,012 francs. The Germans were surprised, and were pushed back by the French and British armies. The number of soldiers transported by taxi was small compared with the huge armies engaged in the battle, and the military impact was minor, but the effect on French morale was enormous; it demonstrated the solidarity between the people and the army.

Fearing a long siege, General Galliéni also did what he could to reduce the number of Parisians who needed to be fed; a dozen free trains were organized on September 5 to take Parisians to the French provinces. An emergency census ordered by Galliéni on September 8 showed that the population of Paris had dropped to 1,800,000, or only 63 percent of the population counted in 1911. By October, public transportation was again running in the city. The military government declared a moratorium on rents for those Parisians who had been summoned into the army and protected them from legal action until the end of the war. As of December 20, pedestrians could walk freely in Paris once again, but vehicles were only allowed to enter and leave Paris by fourteen of the fifty-five city gates which were open from five in the morning until ten at night. The government returned to Paris on December 11, and President Poincaré was again able to meet with his Council of Ministers in the Élysée Palace. The front lines moved further north, and by January 4, 1915, Paris was no longer considered to be threatened. Nonetheless, the city was bombed by a German Zeppelin airship on March 21, 1915, and by German planes on May 11 and May 22.

Daily Life

The Gare de l'Est under the snow (1917)

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Poster for event raising funds for captured and wounded soldiers at the Hôtel de Ville( 1916)

The Parisians gradually adjusted to the life of a city at war. Avenue de l'Allemagne was renamed Avenue Jean-Jaurés, and the rue de Berlin became rue de Liège. The Grand Palais was converted to a military hospital. After a brief interruption, the theaters of Paris reopened, presenting plays with patriotic themes, and the cafés-concerts, which offered music, food and dancing, were crowded.

As it became evident that the war would be long, the government began to take over the system of the distribution of food in the city. A law in October 1915 allowed the state to requisition wheat and other grains at a price fixed by the government. In 1916 the controls were extended to milk, sugar and eggs. A Ministry of Food Supply was created in 1917 to better control the distribution, and to tax the food products to limit consumption. In May 1916 sugar was taxed 1.3 francs per kilo, while margarine, which had largely replaced extremely-scarce butter, was taxed from 2.70 to 3.10 francs per kilo. A standard loaf of bread, called the pain national or national bread, was introduced in June 29, 1916, made with a more rustic flour than the traditional Parisian white loaf. Restrictions were tightened even further on February 25, 1917, with the requirement that only a single type of loaf of bread could be sold; it weighed seven hundred grams, was eighty centimeters long, and was sold twenty-four hours after it was baked. Special breads and brioche were forbidden. Other food staples were also rationed; the municipal council provided a ration of 135 grams of potatoes per day per person to poor families.

Providing electricity and heat for the city population was another urgent need; the major coal mines of northern France were to the north behind the German lines. The problem was especially urgent during the bitterly cold winter of 1916-17, when temperatures fell to seven degrees below zero Celsius. The municipality reserved supplies of coal for the elderly, the unemployed, the families of mobilized soldiers; they were permitted a fifty kilo sack of coal every forty days for a payment of 4.75 francs. Shortages of coal also limited the generation of electricity, sometimes the tram lines could not operate for lack of power.

As men were drafted into the army, women frequently took their place, first as teachers and controlling the tickets on the metro and tramways, and then working in the factories. By 1916 they were driving streetcars; on June 1, 1917 the first women mail carriers began delivering letters in the 10th and 17th arrondissements. Parisian fashions were modified for the benefit of working women; skirts were made shorter, and corsets ere made less tight. New words entered the French language; a factrice for a woman postman; a conductrice for a woman tram driver, and a munitionnette for a woman working in a munitions factory. The first business school for women, the Ècole de haute enseignement commercial opened on December 2, 1915.

While the government stressed efficiency and maximizing supplies for the army, the working class was largely committed to a traditional sense of consumer rights, whereby it was the duty of the government to provide the basic food, housing and fuel for the city, and where hoarding and profiteering were evils that citizens should organize to combat.

Industrial Paris

A Renault FT tank, made at Boulogne-Billancourt (1917), now in the Museum of the French Army

Munitionettes making artillery shells (1917)

The coal mines and major industrial cities of the north were behind German lines, forcing the government to reorganize the industry of Paris to provide the enormous quantities of weapons and ammunition that the army needed. The munitions factories of Paris had to produce one hundred thousand 75-millimeter artillery shells every day, in addition to other munitions, cannon, rifles, trucks, ambulances, and aircraft, as well as building the machine tools and factory equipment needed to expand production. The effort was led by Albert Thomas, a socialist politician who became the Secretary of State for Artillery.. In 1915 more than a thousand Paris enterprises were working in the sector of National Defense. Most of the defense factories were located in the outer neighborhoods of the city, particularly the 13th, 14th, 15th and 18th arrondissements. A large Citroen factory was built at Javel, and the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt was converted from making automobiles to making a revolutionary new weapon, the tank. The aviation firm Blériot Aéronautique built an enormous aircraft factory, covering 28,000 square meters, at Suresnes in 1917. The traditional small workshops of French industry were re-organized into huge assembly lines following the model of factory of Henry Ford in the United States and the productivity studies of Frederick Taylor on scientific management.

As factory workers were drafted and sent to the front, their places were taken by women as well as 183,000 colonials from Africa and Indo-China who were closely watched by the government. On August 27, 1915, 1,700 Chinese workers arrived at the Gare de Lyon to take positions in the Renault tank factory and other defense works.

The work in the defense factories was intense and dangerous, as inexperienced workers handled dangerous chemicals and high explosives. On October 20, 1915, a workshop making hand grenades at 173 rue de Tolbiac exploded, killing about fifty workers and injuring a hundred. In April 1918, a new factory in Vincennes making shells and mustard gas exploded, poisoning three hundred ten workers.

Discontent and strikes

For the first three years of the war, all classes and political parties gave their support to the war effort and the soldiers at the front, a consensus called the "union sacrée". However, in the spring of 1917 Paris workers began to demand more compensation for their efforts. The cost of living in Paris rose twenty percent in 1915, by 35 percent in 1916, and by 120 percent between 1917 and the end of the war in November 1918, while the salaries of factory workers increased only 75 percent during the same period, while the salaries of government employees rose by only 50 percent. Workers began to demand higher wages, better conditions for women workers, and an end to the importation of foreign workers.

The first strike, by two thousand women clothing workers, known as midinettes, began on May 15, 1917. They demanded a salary increase of one franc a day, and a five-day week (called an "English Week"). The strike spread to other trades, and ten thousand midinettes gathered outside the Labor Exchange. Negotiators from the clothing industry agreed to an increase of 75 centimes a day and a five-day week, but this concession was rejected by the association of employers. The midinettes marched to the National Assembly, and on May 23, the employers agreed to raise their wages by one franc a day and to give them a five-day week.

The success of the midinettes inspired workers in other industries; the women employees of the Primtemps department store, and the banks promptly went on strike. The strikes spread to florists, box makers, rubber workers, women serving in restaurants, laundry workers, the employees of the Kodak factory, and other enterprises. By May 29 the strike and spread to the workers of the Orleans railway and the Gare d'Austerlitz, employees of the savings banks, and to workers at the armaments factories of Salmson and Renault. Beginning on June 2, the strikes receded when the industries largely granted the demands. Some of the strike leaders were arrested and imprisoned for hindering the war effort.

Espionage

Mata Hari performing in Paris in1906

As the command center of the French military and the French economy, Paris was a priority target for German espionage. The most famous spy was a Dutch citizen named Margarethe Zelle, better known as Mata Hari. Born in the Netherlands, she came to Paris in 1903 and became first a circus horseback rider, then an exotic dancer, then a courtesan. She became the mistress of a prominent Lyon industrialist, Émile Étienne Guimet, the founder of the Musée Guimet of Asian art in Paris. When the war began, she became part of an espionage network directed from the German Embassy in Madrid, where she traveled frequently. French intelligence suspected her because of her travels to Spain. They had intercepted messages from the German Embassy in Madrid mentioning an agent H-21. By giving her false military information, the French were able to confirm that Mata Hari was H-21. She was arrested on February 13, 1917 at the Hotel Élysée Palace, and tried and convicted on July 24. At dawn on October 15, 1917, she was taken to the moat of the Château of Vincennes and executed by a firing squad.

Art and Culture

Cubist costume by Pablo Picasso for the Ballets Russes performance of "Parade", Theâtre du Châtelet, May 18, 1917

During the First World War, Montparnasse became the new gathering place for Paris artists and writers. Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and André Salmon in front of the café Le Dôme, photographed by Jean Cocteau (1916).

The war limited but did not stop the cultural output of the painters and artists of the city. The artistic center shifted from Montmartre to the neighborhood of Montparnasse, around the cafés Le Dôme, la Coupole, la Rotonde, and le Select, Pablo Picasso, one of those who moved to Montparnasse, was a citizen of Spain, was not required to go into the army, and he continued to experiment with the new style of cubism. Henri Matisse continued to work at his studio on rue de Fleurus until he moved to Cimiez, near Nice, in 1917. Other artists who lived in Montparnasse included André Derain (who joined the army and served through the entire war); Juan Gris, Max Jacob,and Amedeo Modigliani.

Jean Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. In Montparnasse he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. The avant-garde dance troupe Les Ballets Russes was stranded in Paris thanks to the war and the Russian Revolution. The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie, and first performed in Paris on May 18, 1917. The piece was later expanded into a full opera, with music by Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel.

Marcel Proust, in fragile health, spent the war inside his house at 102 Boulevard Haussmann working on the second volume of his novel In Search of Lost Time.

Other Paris artists took part in the war; the poet Guillaume Apollinaire went into the army and was seriously wounded in 1916. While recovering in Paris, he wrote Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and coined the word Surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau's and Erik Satie's ballet Parade. He also published an artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes. The war-weakened Apollinaire died of influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, and was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Paris again on the front lines

By 1917 France was nearly exhausted by the war, and mutinies broke out among some soldiers at the front. On April 6, 1917, the Paris newspapers reported the welcome news that the United States, provoked by submarine attacks against U.S. ships, had declared war on Germany. The first American soldiers arrived on June 29, 1917, but their numbers were small and It took nearly a year to train and prepare a large U.S. army. By the spring of 1918 ten thousand U.S. soldiers a month were arriving in France. The Russian Revolution in November 1917 had taken Russia out of the war; Germany moved its armies west and launched a huge new offensive against France, hoping to end the war quickly before the Americans could change the balance of the war.

In November 1917 Georges Clemenceau of the Radical Party became the new Prime Minister of France. He had been a fierce opponent of the government, and now became an even more fierce proponent of carrying the war to victory; his often repeated slogan was La Guerre jusqu'au bout ("War until the end".) He resided in an apartment on Rue Benjamin-Franklin, and conducted the war not from the Prime Minister's traditional residence at the Matignon Palace, but from the Ministry of War on Rue Saint-Dominique. He made frequent visits to the front, close to the German lines, to encourage the ordinary soldiers.

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Bomb crater on a Paris street after a German Zeppelin raid (1917)

Paris once again became a target for German bombardment aiming at demoralizing the Parisians. On January 30, four squadrons of seven German Gotha bombers each appeared over the city and suburbs dropping two hundred bombs. suburbs. There were more attacks on March 8 and March 11. The attacks took place at night, and Parisians took sanctuary in the metro stations. During a new attack on the night of March 11–12, a panic took place in the crowded Bolivar metro station, causing the death of seventy persons.

On March 21, 1918, the Germans launched a major new offensive, hoping to end the war before the bulk of American forces arrived. They attacked through a gap between the British and French Armies, and headed directly toward Paris. On 23 March, the Germans introduced a new weapon to terrorize the Parisians, the long ranged Paris Gun. It could fire shell 120 kilometers into the heart of the city. Three hundred and three huge shells were lobbed into the city. On 29 March 1918, one shell struck the Saint-Gervais church, killing 88 persons. Two hundred fifty six Parisians were killed and six hundred twenty-nine were wounded by the Big Bertha shells.

Another enemy struck Paris in the spring of 1918, even deadlier than the German artillery; an epidemic of the Spanish influenza. At the peak of the epidemic, in October 1918, 1,769 Parisians died, including the writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Edmond Rostand.

By July 14 the new German offensive had reached Château-Thierry, only seventy kilometers from Paris. The city was put back under military government. The bombardments of the city intensified; the works of art were once again evacuated from the Louvre, sandbags were placed around monuments, and the street lights were turned off at ten in the evening, to hide the city from German night bombers. To more effectively resist the Germans, Clemenceau insisted that the French, British and American armies be under a single commander, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Thousands of fresh American soldiers arrived in France every month, while the German resources and manpower were nearly exhausted. The German offensive was turned back by an Allied counter-offensive on July 21, and Paris was not threatened again.

The End of the War and Celebration

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An American sailor in the crowd on the Place de la Concorde on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918,

Parisians welcome President Woodrow Wilson (December 16, 1918)

By August 1918, the final German offensive had failed. The Allied armies launched the Hundred Days Offensive with four hundred tanks (most of them produced in Paris) and 120,000 men, which steadily pushed back the Germans. One hundred thousand German prisoners were taken in the first weeks of the offensive. By November, the Germans and their Allies were unable to continue the war. First the Habsburg monarchy collapsed on November 3, then the German monarchy on November 9. Germany was proclaimed a republic, and the Kaiser fled to the Netherlands. The new German government sent a delegation to Compiegne, north of Paris, and the armistice was signed at 5:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, coming into effect at 11:00 on that day. The day was described by the French historian René Héron de Villefosse, who was a young student in a Paris college; "At eleven o'clock, in the fog, the church bells announced the armistice. The college released its students class by class, and they rushed to the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde, where there were displays of trench mortars and small cannon recently captured from the enemy. The students of philosophy returned, dragging these trophies, including a captured flag, with them. In the afternoon, on the Grands Boulevards, the enthusiasm of the crowd was indescribable. People shouted, kissed, blew on trumpets, and blew the horns of trucks surrounded by the crowds. Any soldier encountered was embraced and carried in triumph. We poor students of rhetoric gave more kisses than we had exchanged during the entire past year. The lights came back on during the evening, and the buses began running again...We sang, we danced, and we made parades for days afterwards."

Equally enthusiastic crowds filled the Champs Élysées on 17 November to celebrate the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France. Huge crowds also welcomed President Woodrow Wilson to the Hôtel de Ville on 16 December 1918, when he arrived to take part in the peace negotiations at Versailles.

Chronology

• 1914
  • 31 July – Jean Jaurès, leader of the French socialists, assassinated by mentally disturbed man in the Café du Croissant on rue du Croissant in Montmartre.
  • 1 August – Mobilization of army reservists.
  • 3 August – France declares war on Germany. .
  • 29 August - French government and National Assembly depart Paris for Bordeaux.
  • September 6–9 – Army requisitions 600-1000 Paris taxis to transport six thousand soldiers fifty kilometers to the front lines in the First Battle of the Marne.
  • December 9 – Government and National Assembly return to Paris.
  • El Ajedrecista automaton introduced at University of Paris.
• 1915
  • 10 September – the Satirical magazine Canard enchaîné begins publication.
  • 30 October – official prices of food are posted on doorways of public schools, to deter speculation.
• 1916
  • 20 January – Frozen meat goes on sale in two Paris butcher shops.
  • 29 January – First bombing of Paris by a German Zeppelin. Twenty-six persons are killed and thirty two wounded at Belleville.
  • 27 August – 1,700 Chinese workers arrive at the Gare de Lyon to work in Paris armaments factories, replacing men mobilized into the army.
  • 15 December – The first woman conductor is hired for the Paris tramways.
  • The Renault factory at Boulogne-sur-Seine begins manufacturing the first French tanks.
• 1917
  • 9 February – Shortage of coal and grain. Bakers are permitted to sell only one kind of bread, sold the day after it is baked.
  • 15 May – Wave of strikes in Paris workshops and factories, demanding a five-day week and an extra franc a day to compensate for higher prices. Most demands are granted.
  • 1 September – Rationing of coal begins.
  • 25 November – Seats are reserved on Paris public transportation for the blind and those wounded in the war.
  • 15 October – Execution by firing squad of the Dutch Mata Hari, a spy for the Germans, in the moat of the Château de Vincennes.
• 1918
  • 29 January – Rationing of bread is imposed; a card allows three hundred grams per day per person.
  • 30 January – Night bombing raid by twenty-eight German aircraft kills sixty-five persons and injures two hundred. Further raids took place on 8 and 11 March.
  • 11 March – German bombing raid causes a panic in the Bolivar metro station, killing seventy one persons.
  • 21 March – German long-range artillery fires eighteen shells into Paris, killing fifteen and wounding sixty-nine. The shelling continued until 16 September.
  • 29 March – a German shell hits the Saint-Gervais church during mass, killing eighty-two persons and injuring sixty-nine.
  • October – Epidemic of Spanish influenza, which began at the start of the year, kills 1,778 persons in one week.
  • 11 November – Signing of armistice ends the war. Victory celebrations on the Champs-Élysées.
  • 16 December – U.S. President Wilson addresses crowd at the Hôtel-de-Ville.