One of the most complete departments of the Préfecture de Police is that of the sommiers judiciaires, in which are preserved the fiches or records of every person brought before the tribunals, giving his name, age, place of birth, etc., and the date, the cause, and the nature of his sentence. The récidivistes, the hardened offenders, have each a regular bulletin, sometimes a variety of fiches if they have various aliases. These archives of crime are contained in thousands of boxes, filling a number of rooms, and are constantly consulted; their inspection is strictly forbidden to private individuals. This bureau contains records, systematically arranged, of all the sentences pronounced by the courts and the civil and military tribunals of France; the number of ordinary bulletins exceeds eight millions. In addition to these judicial archives, the Préfecture de Police preserves a personal record of every prominent personage. Less closely connected with affairs of State, the bureau of lost articles is more appreciated by the public; it was opened in 1804, but became generally known only after 1848. The number of these objects found in the streets and public places and deposited here has exceeded twenty-six thousand, and every one of them is carefully numbered, catalogued, and ticketed. After remaining here till all attempts to find the rightful owner have failed, they may be restored to the inventeur, the finder, on his demand, after a period of three months for garments, furs, and woollen stuffs, of six months for other articles capable of deterioration, umbrellas, books, and opera-glasses, and of a year for all others.
THE first well-organized attempt to light the streets of Paris at night seems to have been made under Louis XIV. The Abbé de Caraffe had previously undertaken to establish a force of link-boys and torch-bearers, but the bureau which he opened in the Rue Saint-Honoré was soon closed, to the great regret of the honest bourgeois who scarcely dared to stir out of his house after dark without a lantern. Thieves abounded, and even the lackeys of good houses, sword in hand, made a practice of insulting and striking the unlucky commoner who fell in their way. The lieutenant of police, La Reynie, undertook to establish a regular system of illumination,—at the end of each street and in the middle, he hung an iron and glass lantern, some two feet in height, enclosing a candle weighing a hundred and twenty-five grammes, the whole suspended from a rope, and hoisted and lowered by means of a pulley. The malicious breaking of these lanterns was punished by the galleys. This illumination at first was given only from the 1st of November to the 1st of March, but later, an ordinance of May 23, 1671, extended the period from the 20th of October to the 1st of April, and, still later, it was lengthened to nine months, with the exception of the week in which the moon shone. For the period of six months, the cost was a million and a half of francs, it is said.
This innovation excited universal enthusiasm. The king was so well pleased with it, that he caused a medal to be struck bearing the inscription: "Urbis securitas et nitor [security and lighting of the city]." In a passage in Saint-Evremoniana, we find: "The invention of lighting Paris during the night by an infinity of lamps is worthy of attracting the most distant peoples to come and contemplate that which the Greeks and the Romans never imagined for the policing of their republics. The lights, enclosed in glass lanterns suspended in the air at an equal distance from each other, are arranged in an admirable order and give light all the night; this spectacle is so handsome and so well planned, that Archimedes himself, if he were still living, could add nothing more agreeable and more useful."
As late as the end of the eighteenth century, the vegetable and animal oils and fats furnished the only means of artificial illumination. The tallow-candle dates from the eleventh century, and was an humble partner for the much more aristocratic wax taper. In 1791, Philippe Lebon commenced a series of experiments upon the extraction from wood of a gas for illuminating purposes; and in the following year, Murdoch, in England, succeeded in extracting it from pit-coal. A manufactory of gas, constructed by the Comte de Chabrol, served to light the Hôpital Saint-Louis, in 1818; and, two years later, another furnished illumination for the Palais du Luxembourg and the Odéon. Chevreul's experiments in the saponification of fatty substances and the extraction of oleic, stearic, and margaric acids, undertaken in 1823, led to the manufacture and general use of stearic candles by 1831. In the previous year, the introduction of mineral oils and petroleums had begun; the very extensive importation of the coal-oil of Pennsylvania commenced in 1859, and has been supplemented of recent years by that of the produce of the oil-wells of the Caucasus. Both these are largely imported in the crude state, and are distilled and refined in France. The huile de colza, extracted from the colewort, is still very largely used, and is an excellent oil for lamps; and acetylene is beginning to take the place of coal-gas as an illuminator.
When the permanent street-lamps, burning oil, replaced the ancient lanterns and candles in the streets of Paris, they excited as much admiration as the latter had done. "The very great amount of light which they give," said the lieutenant of police, M. de Sartines, "forbids us to believe that anything better can ever be found." The introduction of gas excited much opposition, as late as 1830; the householders feared to be asphyxiated by sulphuretted hydrogen and adopted the new method with much hesitation. Philippe Lebon was assassinated on the Champs-Élysées on the evening of the coronation of Napoleon I, and his invention, "as is usually the case, made the tour of Europe before returning to benefit France,—the first companies that undertook to work his invention were managed by foreigners, Winsor, Pauwel, and Manley-Wilson." The five or six rival companies that furnished gas to the city, united in 1855 in one corporation, the Compagnie parisienne d'éclairage et de chauffage par le gaz. At present, the Compagnie du Gaz delivers it to private houses within the city at an average price of thirty centimes the cubic mètre, and at varying prices in the suburbs. It cannot refuse to furnish it to any subscriber, but it has the right of demanding that payments be made in advance.
Much apprehension was at first excited in the neighborhood of the companies' works by the enormous metal tanks, or reservoirs, until, as is related, an Englishman, named Clegg, one day went up to one of these huge gasometers, drove a hole through the side, and applied a lighted candle to the aperture. The escaping gas burned in a steady jet, as from a burner, but did not explode. At the opening of the siege of Paris, General Trochu was alarmed at the possibility of one of these gasometers in the suburbs being exploded by a German shell and destroying the ramparts in its vicinity; the Conseil de Défense, having communicated these apprehensions to the gas company, were assured by the latter that the reservoirs would not explode, even though pierced by a projectile. This statement was soon verified; at the works at Ivry, one of the enemy's shells fell through one of the iron cloches,—a long sheaf of fire rose in the air, and was extinguished within a few minutes. At La Villette, a shell burst inside the tank, but the gas escaped without any further damage. It was the latter usine that furnished the means of inflating the balloons that, for so long a time, constituted the city's only method of communication with the outside world.
If the municipality was somewhat slow in adopting the use of gas for its streets, it claims to be the first to have introduced that of electricity. This new method of illumination appeared in 1876, and in the following year the Avenue de l'Opéra was lit up by the Jablochkoff system. In England, the use of electricity for lighting public streets and dwellings was inaugurated in the town of Godalming in 1881; and in America, in New York, in 1882. The Place du Carrousel followed the Avenue de l'Opéra, using sixteen Mersanne lights; experiments were made in the Parc Monceau with fourteen arc lights, and in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with fifty arc lights and seventy-nine incandescent. The tragic burning of the Opéra-Comique, in May, 1887, gave a great impulse to the adoption of the new method in preference to the use of gas, and the city north of the Seine was divided into five secteurs, each furnished by its own electrical company. This method still prevails, the number of secteurs having been increased to seven, one for the left bank of the river, and the different companies hold their concessions for the space of eighteen years. The unit of measurement is the hectowatt-heure, the price of which ranges from ten to fifteen centimes, whilst in other cities, according to statistics of November, 1897, it ranged from five to seven centimes in Brussels, from six to seven in London, and at about seven and a half in Berlin.
This excessive price has had the natural result of curtailing the use of electricity as an illuminator; and the usual thrifty habits of the French householder and municipality contribute to make the capital anything but a well-lighted city at night,—contrary to the general impression. The stranger who leaves the main boulevards and enters any of the minor streets, even such a wide and important one as the Boulevard Saint-Germain, is struck with the village darkness of these thoroughfares. Not only is there no other means of illumination generally but the street-lamps burning gas, which are sufficiently widely spaced,—and, in the case of the boulevard just mentioned, masked by trees,—but all the house-fronts are tightly closed and as black as night. One may cross the Place Vendôme, five minutes from the Opéra, in the middle of the evening in the middle of the season, and have barely light enough to avoid other pedestrians. All around the great circle the houses show no gleam of light in their windows, with two or three exceptions, and the effect is anything but cheerful. In this Place, as in so many localities in Paris, the pedestrians take to the middle of the streets,—in the wide thoroughfares, to cross them, or to avoid détours, and in the narrow ones, because of the insufficiency of sidewalks,—and good eyesight becomes of the utmost importance. Fortunately, the cabs and carriages all carry double lanterns, and even the bicyclers, those terrors to foot-passengers, are compelled to show a light of some kind and to sound some kind of warning. Of these, the neat and efficient little lantern and the bell fixed to the handle-bar are not yet in general use,—the French cycler mounts any kind of a lamp, even a paper Venetian lantern, on the front of his machine, and rings a tea-bell, or sounds a small horn, as he dashes along. If he display no consideration whatever for the pedestrian, he, in turn, perils his own neck with the utmost willingness, and the risks he takes in the narrow and crowded streets, and the coolness and skill with which he avoids the fate he so justly deserves, are equally remarkable.