Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 2

by William Walton

In the summer of 1898, the discussion concerning the deficient éclairage électrique, periodically revived, took on new animation in view of the approaching Exposition of 1900 and the admitted inferiority of Paris in this respect to other cities. The question was brought up in the Conseil Municipal in the spring; the various companies made a proposition to modify their contracts with the city and to effect a considerable reduction in their price, as much as twenty-five or thirty-five per cent, to individual consumers, in return for a prolongation of their contracts to 1930,—the present ones expiring in 1907 and 1908. This prolongation, they said, would allow them to assume the heavy expense of establishing new plants, and extending their wires, while at the same time reducing the price,—the near approach of the end of the present contracts restraining them from doing either in view of the necessity of securing a speedy return upon the capital already invested. The municipal councillors replied with another proposition,—to maintain the status quo until the expiration of the present contracts, and then, in some ten or fifteen years, when the condition of the municipal finances would permit, to establish three great compagnies fermières, which should furnish both gas and electricity at a very moderate price, to be set by the Conseil itself. The objections to this plan were set forth very freely,—in the first place, it prolonged an intolerable situation, and just at the moment when the capital was inviting all the world to visit her. In the second place, nothing is more doubtful than the future,—it is quite possible that in the course of fifteen years electricity may be superseded by some other power, as the utilization of the solar heat; if the Municipal Council are so convinced of the excellence of their system, why not put it in practice at once, as they have the power? Moreover, it is very doubtful if the financial condition of the city will be better in 1907 or 1908 than it is at present; it will be necessary at that date, at the expiration of the concessions, to purchase the plants of the companies. The municipal debt, so far from diminishing, has, so far, steadily increased; it is estimated that the city will have to borrow, in these ten years, the sum of four hundred and seventy-five millions of francs,—twenty millions for the conversion of the loan of 1886, forty millions for the water-supply, a hundred and sixty-five millions for the Métropolitan railway, fifty millions for education, and two hundred millions for the opening and maintenance of highways. It is, therefore, highly probable that the municipal control of the electric lighting, so far from bringing any amelioration of the lot of the consumer, will only be considered as another source of municipal revenue, like the State monopoly of tobacco, powder, etc. It is recalled that these monopolies always incite the public administration to draw from them the greatest possible profit,—as in the case of the water-supply, the price of which has doubled since the city has assumed the management of it. One of the immediate results of this augmentation has been a great increase in the number of electric elevators.

In this connection, the experience of the city with the gas company is recalled. In 1888, the Compagnie parisienne du gaz offered to lower the price to twenty-five centimes the cubic mètre for lighting and to twenty for motive power, in return for certain considerations which involved no pecuniary cost to the city. The Conseil Municipal refused this offer. The result was somewhat as follows: in 1888, there were consumed in Paris and in the banlieue, in round numbers, two hundred and ninety-eight millions of cubic mètres of gas, and in 1897, three hundred and fifteen; the average consumption for the period 1888-1898 being thus something over three hundred millions. Consequently, if the terms of the company had been accepted, the consumers would have had to pay in these ten years a hundred and thirty-three million francs less,—and the municipal council had made a present of this sum to the shareholders of the Compagnie du gaz. In the present case, the acceptance of the offer of the electrical companies would involve a reduction in the cost to the consumers, and also to the city, of two or three million francs a year, that is to say, of thirty or forty-five millions for the fifteen years of waiting which are proposed,—supposing, which is not at all probable, that the consumption would not greatly increase with the lowering of the cost. So that, from every point of view, it is considered that the necessity is for immediate reform.

ALL these larger administrative municipal details, and the Third Republic itself, date from 1870, the most important year in the history of France, and it may be thought that no record, however brief, of the machinery of government, of the characteristics, the aspirations, and tendencies of this modern society, would be approximately correct without some allusion to its recent origin, to those tremendous political events which so transformed it, and which still remain for it an endless and hopelessly bitter source of speculation, of discussion, and of fierce recrimination. In this overthrow of a nation, it is the great figure of the Chancellor of the German Empire that fills the scene, moving apparently at his will kings, emperors, and ambassadors, and influencing, even at this late day, every measure of the government of the capital and the nation by an enduring Consternation,—by a fear that does but increase from year to year. The incompetence of the Emperor, the folly of the Empress, probably but served to aid or to accelerate the ruin which Bismarck thought necessary to secure his great building,—the Confederation of the North German states had been consolidated by the defeat of Austria at Sadowa, but France, he was convinced, would never consent to the re-establishment of the German Empire. Even the vanquished admit that he did not want war for the sake of war; but, by his own admission, in 1892, he was willing to secure this necessary result by any trick, even that of the forger.

Despite the recent assertions of the French minister, M. Ollivier, it is probable that the Empire of Louis Napoleon had lost all its allies. Austria, anxious to avenge Sadowa, was restrained by the threat of the intervention of Russia; that power still considered the dual empire its rival in the Balkans and still remembered the Crimea; an offensive and defensive alliance had been concluded by Prussia with the German states south of the Main. Thus prepared, the chancellor waited for an opportunity, and as none presented itself soon enough, he made one. The revolution in Spain in 1868 had driven Queen Isabella into exile and left her throne vacant; Marshal Prim, who retained the reins of power, was negotiating in the different courts of Europe to find an acceptable new sovereign. At the beginning of July, 1870, Paris was surprised to hear that the candidate chosen by him, and who would probably be proclaimed by the Cortès, was Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern. This negotiation had been carried on secretly, the French ambassador at Madrid had been informed of nothing, and from Marshal Prim's documents it was afterward learned that Bismarck himself had suggested the prince for the crown. It was very certain that France would oppose this union of the dynasties of Berlin and Madrid, and, in fact, on the 6th of July the government sent a message to the Chamber protesting against this candidature and declaring that it would be compelled to oppose it, if necessary, to the last extremity.

Three days later, M. Benedetti, the French ambassador at Berlin, sought an interview with the King of Prussia at Ems, where he was taking the waters, and requested him, as head of the Hohenzollern family, not to give his consent to the candidature of Prince Leopold. The king replied that, in this affair, he had intervened not as King of Prussia but as head of the family, and the interview ended without any definite assurances on his part. However, Prince Anthony of Hohenzollern, the father of Leopold, officially announced that his son was no longer a candidate. Then the French diplomacy came to Bismarck's aid by committing a great blunder; M. Benedetti sought another interview with the king, who had not yet heard of this withdrawal, informed him of it, and requested him to give the French government formal assurance that Prince Leopold would abide by it. This promise the king refused to give, but he notified the ambassador that he would inform him when he had received a confirmation of the renunciation. When this was received, he sent word to M. Benedetti by an aide-de-camp, refusing him the third audience which he requested, stating that he approved of the prince's decision, but declining to bind himself with regard to any future negotiations.

An official statement of these interviews was drawn up under the eyes of the king by his private councillor Abeken, and telegraphed to Bismarck, with authority to publish it. This statement contained nothing that need inflame the national feeling in either Germany or France, but, as re-edited by the chancellor, it represented the French ambassador as unduly importunate, and as having received a flat refusal from the monarch. The patriotism on both sides took fire; and war was declared on the 19th of July. The Germans assert that it would have been inevitable in any case, without this falsification of the despatch of Ems, but the Iron Chancellor is convicted, on his own testimony, of having desired it and of having wrought to bring it about.

M. Émile Ollivier, Louis Napoleon's minister, president of the Conseil, whose "light heart" for the "great responsibility" of the war with Germany has earned him a special measure of obloquy, has within the last two or three years appeared again in public, in his own defence. In an interview granted an editor of the Gil Blas on the twenty-sixth anniversary of his fall, the ex-minister made a series of statements justifying the men and measures of that fatal period, and contributing some very important assertions to history. "We committed no faults," said M. Ollivier; "we were unfortunate, that was all, and I have nothing, nothing with which to reproach myself." France, he declares, was assured of the alliance of Austria and Italy, even after Reischoffen; the plan of campaign, which has been so much criticised, the scattering of the troops along the frontier, was imposed by the Austrian general staff. Sedan, however, chilled these allies, and delivered Germany, as Bismarck himself wrote, from all danger of a coalition against her. The inertia of the Emperor, who was ill with the stone, who could not command himself, and "would suffer no one to take the command in his place;" the errors of the generals, including Mac-Mahon; the treason of Bazaine, and the council of war held by the ministers and presided over by the Empress, at which the fatal march on Sedan was determined upon, all combined to ruin the national cause. The Empress would not comprehend, notwithstanding the instances of the Emperor, of Mac-Mahon, of Prince Napoleon, that "it was at Paris alone that the Empire could be defended, at Paris that France could be armed, at Paris that the allies, who had promised their aid, could be constrained to pronounce their adherence." Through a false conception of the interests of the dynasty, it was resolved to go to Sedan, notwithstanding the Emperor, who said to Mac-Mahon: "Since it is so, let us go and get our heads broken." The last volume of M. Ollivier's work, L'Empire libéral: études, récits et souvenirs, has appeared in this present year (1898), and completes an able and very interesting defence of a dynasty which has not found many apologists as yet.

General Trochu, military commandant of Paris during the siege, has also, in his Mémoires, published in 1896, dwelt upon the all-important part which the capital might have played in the great drama of the national defence. "I dreamed," he says, "of a Parisian population forgetting before the grandeur of the common peril its animosity toward the Empire, in order to associate itself with us in the supreme effort which we were about to make in conjunction with it; of Paris, with its immense resources, put in a state of defence by the labor of a hundred thousand arms and, after a brief delay, rendered impregnable." This theory of the great importance of the capital is, however, by no means held by all the military critics of the war.