One of the worst Christmases in the history of Paris arrived on December 25, 1870, the ninety-ninth day of a brutal siege by the Prussian army. France had stupidly stumbled into a war with its German neighbors, and now the capital was paying the price. Most of its residents were starving. Emperor Napoleon III was a Prussian captive and the Second Empire had fallen. The French nation had been humiliated on the European stage once again.
Yet there is a curious continuity throughout the history of war, and that is that even in the most dire situations, the wealthiest strata of society usually manages to lead a more charmed life than the famished masses. And so on Christmas Day 1870, some of the richest denizens of Paris sat down to a feast legendary for its gothic innovation. The acclaimed chef Alexandre Étienne Choron had acquired a number of former residents of the then-shuttered Paris zoo and fashioned them into one of the most famous menus in French culinary history—one that would have horrified diners a few months earlier but now seemed unbelievably decadent.
The Christmas Day meal at Voisin, Choron’s restaurant on rue Saint-Honoré, began with a stuffed donkey’s head, an inelegant successor to the usual porcine centerpieces of prewar banquets. The soup course included elephant consommé. This was followed by kangaroo stew, rack of bear in pepper sauce, and roasted camel à l’anglaise (a cheeky reference to what the French saw as the plainness of English cuisine). The main course included le chat flanqué de rats (cat flanked by rats) and cuissot de loup, sauce chevreuil (wolf in deer sauce), a wry inversion of the natural order. A terrine of antelope and truffles invoked a fast-disappearing age of luxury. The feast ended relatively normally, with a cheese course of Gruyère, and was accompanied by some of the finest wines still in stock (an 1846 Mouton Rothschild, an 1858 Romanée-Conti, and an 1827 Grand Porto). The ingenuity and absurdity of this macabre siege menu immediately cemented its place in French gastronomic legend.
The feast also serves as an excellent illustration of the disaster and folly of the short Franco-Prussian War, which destroyed the Second Empire and laid the seeds for a later global conflagration. France was essentially goaded into declaring war by Prussia’s wily chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. He dreamed of uniting the different German kingdoms into one powerful German state, dominated by Prussia. He correctly predicted that a French war of aggression would draw the recalcitrant southern German provinces into his unification project, and so he engineered a diplomatic dispute over the Spanish royal succession into a French declaration of war. It was a further sign that the European balance of power crafted at Vienna in 1815 was beginning to fray. Prussia was a rising power, having already bested Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, and was now targeting the military might of France, the grande dame of Europe.
The animals of the Paris zoo were sacrificed during the siege, as the caption to this dramatic illustration explains: “For many months, no food came into Paris, besieged by the Prussians. To feed the 2 million souls that were in the capital, soon dogs, cats, and even rats were sacrificed! Finally the administration, bowing to the situation, handed over some animals of the Jardin des Plantes for consumption. The elephant, because of its mass, was one of the first to be sacrificed and served as food to the most famished.” Elie Haguenthal, Pont-à-Mousson, “1870—La Guerre—1871 Siége de Paris. Abattage de l’Elephant” (1871). © Musée de l’ Image–Ville d’Épinal/cliché H. Rouyer.
Napoleon III’s Second Empire had been a prosperous and trans-formative era for France, a triumph of bourgeois interests and modernizing zeal. But by 1870, the emperor’s popularity had declined amid economic crisis and continued opposition from republicans and socialists. A limited program of liberal reform in the 1860s was merely a façade for an essentially authoritarian regime, and many aspects of modernization—including the radical redevelopment of Paris spearheaded by Georges-Eugène Haussmann—benefited the wealthy purveyors of bourgeois capitalism, at the expense of the poor and working classes. As so often in the past, the scent of rebellion could be detected in the Parisian streets. In fact, one of the motivations for Haussmann’s grands boulevards was to replace the narrow streets of central Paris, so easily barricaded and held by small groups of urban revolutionaries, with wide roads more conducive to control by imperial armed forces.
Napoleon III believed a quick victory over Prussia would restore his popularity and insulate his regime from political challengers. He failed to take into account Prussia’s military advantages, such as its superior troop strength, the entrepreneurial flair of its officers, and its impressive mobilization capabilities. The well-planned German railroad network brought 380,000 soldiers and a mountain of equipment to the front in less than three weeks, while French forces struggled to organize and equip themselves.
Quite predictably, the Prussian army won several pitched battles in August, before delivering a knockout blow at the Battle of Sedan on September 1. The emperor himself, who had been commanding the troops, surrendered to the Prussians, along with one hundred thousand of his soldiers. The rest of the French army was pinned down in Metz and would eventually surrender in October. The war was effectively over at this point, but the French capital had yet to be taken. On September 19, the Prussian siege of Paris began.
With the emperor captured, a provisional government had taken control in Paris and proclaimed a new Third Republic. One of its primary considerations was how to keep the capital’s population of 2 million civilians and 200,000 National Guardsmen alive for what was anticipated to be a relatively short siege.1 Unfortunately, it lasted longer than expected: French negotiators would not agree to the Prussian demand to surrender Alsace and Lorraine, and attempts to raise French provincial armies and lift the siege failed.
Supplies had been laid in before the snare closed completely. The parks of Paris, including the Bois de Boulogne and Jardin du Luxembourg, hosted tens of thousands of sheep, cows, and pigs. Massive quantities of rice, potatoes, corn, flour, cheese, wine, and other food items were laid in store. But already in October, butchers began to sell the meat of horses, donkeys, and mules. The rationing of meat was instituted, first at 100 grams per adult per day, but quickly dropped to 50 and then 33 grams. Fish was still being caught in the Seine, but it was usually destined only for high-end restaurants. Adventurous people went foraging for vegetables in fields near the enemy lines. The famous cafés and boulevards of Paris were dark and quiet by ten p.m.
Eventually, one journalist declared, “we will end up going through the whole of Noah’s ark,” and he could not have been more right. In November, butchers started to sell cats and dogs. The butcher stalls in Les Halles indicated if they were selling bulldogs, terriers, or basset hounds. The meat of a rat was supposed to be tender and delicious, and it was valued much more than dog meat, which was seen as too tough.2 Because they were so expensive, vegetables were sold in half or quarter units. “How much for half a carrot?” became a frighteningly common new shopping phrase. People waited for hours in the freezing cold for the mere chance of meat or decent food. Municipal canteens provided only the most meager sorts of rations.
Of course, not everybody was suffering to the same degree. The upper classes still usually managed to procure enough food, and high-end restaurants remained open, if sharply curtailed in their provisions. Auguste Blanqui, one of the most prominent socialist revolutionaries, divided Parisian society into two classes, “the fat and the thin,” noting that “the fat particularly look after their favorite good, their belly . . . they lounge on their table, drinking, laughing, eating, each one with a triple chin and an abdomen that rebounds on their knees.”3 So it is not particularly surprising that when the Paris zoo was forced to close in late December, its most exotic and expensive animals were consumed by the capital’s wealthiest citizens.
Food prices became stratospheric during the siege, even as the average French worker still only earned a few francs per day. In a remarkable journal recounting those days, Edmond Pascal describes the worsening situation on December 22:
The rich . . . still find ways to live and maintain their habits of good food, they can pay 30 fr. [francs] for a chicken, 35 fr. for a rabbit, 70 fr. for a goose, 25 fr. for a pound of butter, and 18 fr. for a pound of Gruyère cheese, but my mother cannot buy a leek to make soup, because it would cost her 1 fr. 25 . . . Everything that can be eaten has in the past few days increased by 50 percent on the already excessive prices being asked. I will give you a small example by saying that a sparrow, a vulgar sparrow, is sold for 2 fr.4
On January 1, 1871, Pascal reported: “Our situation with regard to food becomes more and more critical, a cauliflower is 7 fr., a cabbage 8 fr., and butter is now 40 fr. per pound, and yesterday I saw a crow bought for the price of 2 fr. 50.”5 Bread was becoming darker and darker, as unknown substances were used to bulk up the grains. It was an intolerable situation, and the people of Paris grew increasingly malnourished and ill. Infant mortality soared.
The final straw came when Prussian forces began bombarding the capital in early January. After several weeks of shelling, with virtually no food of any sort left in the city, Paris surrendered, and the war came to an end. The Prussian victory transformed Bismarck’s dream into reality, with the proclamation of the German Empire on January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germany was now the ascendant power on the continent. The peace settlement transferred Alsace and part of Lorraine from France to Germany, a wretched loss with a number of lingering consequences, including in the gastronomic realm.
For instance, while Alsace had long been the most Germanic region of France, the harsh imposition of a Prussian regime and the influx of more than 100,000 German settlers led one out of every eight residents to flee to other French provinces. This exodus helped the brasserie, a type of Alsatian restaurant that served beer and choucroute, become popular throughout the rest of France. Brasseries were more informal and open for longer hours than typical French restaurants, and for a while they popularized beer drinking in previously wine-devoted regions. Over the decades, their association with brewing faded away and they lost their overtly Alsatian flavor. But something of their original spirit can be seen in the revival of the craft beer industry in France, which is slowly attracting more interest from French drinkers.
Alsace is an ideal wine-growing region, with the Vosges Mountains creating a cool and dry microclimate for the production of white wines. At the time of the war with Prussia, Alsace produced some exceptional Riesling and Gewürztraminer wines, often considered superior to those produced by German winemakers. But after annexation, the region was tasked with delivering inferior varieties in bulk for the domestic market, thus removing a key competitor for German wines from the international market. Further catastrophe ensued with the arrival of phylloxera in Alsace in 1890, and the local wine industry did not recover its former status for many decades.
But perhaps most important, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine was a humiliation deeply felt throughout France, leaving an emotional scar that was preserved by successive French governments. French schoolbooks began to emphasize the nation’s Gallo-Roman heritage over its Germanic-Frankish roots.6 France never really accepted the German annexation, although residents of the provinces gradually resigned themselves to their political fate. More than four decades later, the unwavering French desire to reclaim Alsace and Lorraine became a critical dynamic in the causes and course of World War I.
As for Paris, the lifting of the siege brought much-needed food supplies into the capital. But stability remained elusive, as leftist and working-class activists in Paris objected to numerous policies of the conservative postwar government and feared plans were afoot to restore the monarchy once again. When the government attempted to disarm Parisian National Guard units in March 1871, the city rose in insurrection. A diverse coalition of radical republicans and socialists established the famous Commune of Paris, a revolutionary municipal government that during its ten-week existence attempted to implement a left-wing program, with some success. Karl Marx considered it the first great proletarian uprising and wrote a pamphlet called The Civil War in France to dissect its lessons for the socialist cause. Lenin also wrote at length about the lessons of the Commune, and it became a beacon of hope and inspiration for leftists throughout Europe for decades.
The French government, of course, could not allow the Commune to continue, and Paris was once again gradually besieged, this time by French government forces. On May 21, they moved into the capital, and over the course of the following week drove the Communard defenders farther and farther inward. A last stand ensued in Père Lachaise Cemetery, with the final resisters shot against the Mur des Fédérés (Federalists’ Wall), a leftist pilgrimage site ever since. As many as fifteen thousand Communards were killed in the fighting or executed on the spot during the so-called Bloody Week.7
The fall of the Commune was a staggering blow to the French left, but it may have helped save the Third Republic and prevent a royal restoration. By cracking down on the Commune, the republican government firmly set itself on the side of law and order, thus reassuring conservatives and monarchists of its moderate intentions. Over the next two decades, the Republic slowly became more stable and institutionalized, with a range of political freedoms restored. A free press returned, trade unions were allowed to form, and the state education system was secularized. But sharp political divisions and opposition remained, both among leftists eager for more radical reform and among the increasingly nationalist and authoritarian right wing. Extremists within the new anarchist movement married their utopian vision with the recent invention of dynamite in a terrifying campaign of bombings and assassinations. France was on the verge of one of its most fabled and prosperous eras, but beneath the glamour of the Belle Époque lay deep social divisions and the rumor of approaching war.