Right, I've waited long enough. The paper obviously isn't going to do anything about the article I wrote for them, so here it is.
On Thursday 8 September 1870, an Englishman was roaming the streets of Paris. He was there as a Special Correspondent for The Observer, and he was looking for news. The Franco-Prussian War was at an effective end. The French army had been routed, Napoleon III had been captured by the Prussian army, and the Prussians were marching on Paris unopposed. Everywhere, Parisians stopped in the street and discussed the situation in loud voices.
“It does seem strange,” the Englishman wrote, “that nowhere are to be found the strong-lunged thousands who shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and ‘Vive l’Empire!’ when the ex-Emperor started for the frontier eight weeks ago.... I have not heard one word of sympathy for the deposed Emperor from any Frenchman to whom I have spoken on the subject. Nothing but savage, unreasoning abuse....”
Everywhere he looked, he found fantastic, absurd happenings, which he reported to The Observer with sardonic detachment.
The man’s name was W.S. Gilbert. He had not yet written any of his comic operas with Sullivan, with their cartoonish, topsy-turvy view of life, love and politics, but his attitudes had already been formed. He saw life as a crazy sideshow of unreasonable events. His experiences in Paris did nothing to shake this view.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In April 2010, I was in the middle of researching and writing a biography of Gilbert. I knew that Gilbert had gone to Paris as a correspondent for The Observer, because late in his life he wrote an autobiographical article called “The Lady in the Plaid Shawl” in which he said as much.
The article was mainly interested in recounting a funny incident which occurred to him at the time, and Gilbert’s biographers take great pleasure in retelling this story. But nowhere, in any biography or in any of the extensive literature on Gilbert and Sullivan, could I find any reference to the actual reports he was supposed to be sending to the paper. According to Gilbert’s account, he spent about ten days in Paris (actually it was six), but he was recalled because the Prussian army was approaching and “no letters from Paris would be likely to reach [The Observer] after the investment.” The biographers seem to have taken this to mean that he sent no reports at all.
However, I decided to check. I wish I could pretend that I made my discovery after an arduous trawl through a dust-filled newspaper archive. But the nature of research has changed immeasurably in the past ten years. All I had to do was click onto the Guardian and Observer website and pay a small subscription fee to search the digital archive. After about two minutes I found two long reports, dated 7 and 8 September, which made me want to rush round the house whooping.
They were published in the issue for Sunday 11 September 1870, under the headline: “War Correspondence. Paris Preparing for the Siege. (From Our Special Correspondent.)” Though unsigned, their authorship is not in doubt. Not only is the style consistent, but one story related in the Observer dispatches is repeated with very little variation in Gilbert’s “Lady in the Plaid Shawl.”
The story goes like this. Gilbert was travelling by train from Calais to Paris, and he shared his compartment with four Frenchmen. They appeared to be suspicious of him, and he wondered if this was because his full name was printed on his hand baggage, and his middle name happened to be a German one (Schwenck). He tried to allay their fears by handing them a visiting card on which he had written the word “Observer”, but this made matters worse, as they considered this might be another word for “spy.” He finally reassured them by pointing out that “a professional Prussian spy would scarcely advertise his calling on his visiting cards.”
Gilbert’s style and world view sing out from the Special Correspondent’s every sentence. At one level I am very puzzled why no one had noticed their authorship before. But actually I know the reason full well. They weren’t found because no one looked.
Gilbert was not really a news journalist. He reviewed plays. He was a prolific contributor to the comic paper Fun, providing humorous and satirical squibs, not to mention the whimsical verses which he called The Bab Ballads. He was a writer of burlesques and farces. It seems an odd choice to send such a man to report on the biggest story in Europe. But all the London papers were dispatching correspondents to the beleaguered French capital, and the supply of suitable men was limited. Gilbert could at least speak and understand colloquial French, having lived for five years in Boulogne when he was growing up. Writing in haste, he produced six thousand words over two days, a direct and honest account of what he saw and heard around him. The incidents are like a series of vivid snapshots, seen for a moment before passing on.
Napoleon had surrendered to the Prussian forces on 1 September. When Gilbert travelled to Paris by train on the morning of Wednesday 7 September, he saw a nation in chaos. Passing through Amiens at five in the morning, he found the station’s waiting rooms crowded with refugees. He noticed a “rough, surly-looking peasant” feeding an old, sick dog with a feeding bottle “with as tender a care as if he had been bringing up a new-born baby by hand.”
At Creil, “I saw one family who must have been miserably poor, marching along the high road away from the station. They were six or seven in number and one bag, about the size of a bolster case, held all their moveable property. This was carried, not by either of the two strong young men, who formed part of the dismal procession, but by an elderly woman, apparently 60 years of age. This family actually had no means to pay a railway fare at such a crisis, and were hurrying away from the danger on foot.” This was a topsy-turvy world that he was entering, where heavy loads were carried by grandparents in order to save the strain on young and vigorous men.
On 4 September, when the Government in Paris learned of Napoleon’s capture at Sedan, they declared a new Government of National Defence, and the Empire silently became a Republic ruled by moderate leftists. Gilbert, arriving in Paris three days later, found the city in a state of stunned confusion.
It was a wet, dismal day. He wandered the streets in search of the excitement that must surely accompany “a new-born revolution and an irresistible enemy within 50 miles.” But Paris had all the seething excitement of a wet blanket. “The Boulevards are all but deserted, the proprietors of the innumerable cafés have taken in their chairs and their tables.”
He found a crowd outside the Hotel de Ville, where the provisional government was set up, but “it was a quiet and orderly crowd, and appeared utterly depressed by the rain in which they were standing.” When he tried to sneak into the hotel and get a scoop, his plan was foiled by a “stout and bespectacled” National Guardsman who spotted him and said he needed a pass. Gilbert noted the man’s comments and made a strategic retreat.
Walking across the Place de la Concorde, he found the statues decorated with tricolours and garlands, and patriotic inscriptions scrawled at their base. A “draggle-tailed battalion of the Line, the 39th,” crossed his path, “untidily dressed and apparently lax in discipline, the men falling out of their ranks to talk to passers-by. Some had stoppers in their chassepots [rifles]; some had great coats and some had none.”
Gilbert considered himself an expert in military matters, having been a member of various volunteer forces in Britain since 1859, and he was not impressed by the military discipline of the volunteer militia, the Francs Tireurs, which consisted largely of muscly Bretons and other provincials. He noted in horrified tones that he had seen them throw their rifles into a pile in the middle of a road: “The rifles had no muzzle stoppers, and the drenching rain poured into the open barrels. One stack of arms had fallen, and lay in the thick mud.”
He investigated the Francs Tireurs’ encampment behind the Palais de l’Industrie, peering into their tents until he was challenged by a non-commissioned officer. The man barked: “Que desirez vous, monsieur?” Gilbert replied nonchalantly, “Monsieur, j’admire votre magnifique bataillon,” and strolled off. This was about as far as he got in the field of investigative journalism.
“Altogether, considering that a besieging army is within fifty miles of the capital,” he wrote, “this has been a particularly dull day in Paris.” The shops remained open, though after a thorough investigation he found the theatres closed, rather to his disappointment. He had hoped to vent a little virtuous anger at the expense of a theatre-going public who still wished to be entertained as the Prussians marched down on them, but in the event it seemed they didn’t, so he couldn’t.
He was woken on the Thursday morning by battalions of the Gardes Mobile passing under his window on their way to meet the Prussian army. “I hope their innate bravery will compensate for their unmilitary appearance,” he wrote, “for a more miserable, weedy set of men I have never seen, even in an English militia regiment.” They carried their tabatiere rifles with “an air of pleased curiosity” which didn’t inspire him with much confidence. “They will fight bravely enough, poor fellows, but it is hardly to be expected that they will fight well.”
Later, strolling down the Rue de Rivoli, he found a highly symbolic scene. A toy shop had arranged a window display of a toy siege. “The pasteboard battlements are defended in the most heroic fashion by undaunted Frenchmen, and the attacking party, consisting of grotesque Prussians, are flying ignominiously, terrified by the dramatic attitudes of their irresistible enemies.” The display was surrounded by a crowd of appreciative Parisians. Gilbert concluded: “Frenchmen are children.”
He was baffled by the attitudes he encountered. He always expected people to behave rationally, and he was always disappointed. The fact is that the people of Paris were in a state of heightened nervous apprehension and reacted in ways which Gilbert did not understand. They were sometimes boastful and melodramatic, sometimes cool and phlegmatic, and never, from Gilbert’s point of view, reasonable. Though bemused by much of what he saw, he was enough of a journalist to be able to report it. His account reads like a show of mad events passing before the reader’s eyes.
In the train to Paris, Gilbert had heard the four Frenchmen in his carriage discussing the situation, and telling each other that every man, woman and child in Paris would rush to defend the city. Gilbert interrupted to suggest that women and children would not be much use on the battlements. But the Frenchmen had their reply: the women would cut off their hair and the children would twist it into bowstrings. Gilbert asked them whether they were about to join one of the volunteer forces in Paris, but that replied that on the contrary they planned to travel on to Marseilles that evening. He commented: “The loudest and most frothy declaimers throughout Paris appear to be those who are on the point of leaving it for a haven of absolute safety.”
The city murmured with windy talk and crazy rumours. They said that the catacombs were filled with barrels of petroleum, to be exploded as the Prussians entered Paris. They said that the cellars of the Hotel de Ville were full of gunpowder, also the Louvre, that the gas mains would be pumped full of petroleum when the occasion arose. “In short, no scheme for the destruction of the invaders, should they ever desecrate the sacred soil of Paris, is too horrible or too extravagant to find ready credence just now.”
The streets teemed with soldiers. The Francs Tireurs handled their arms clumsily as Gilbert looked on, unimpressed. At intervals, crowds gathered round some battle-scarred hero who displayed his wounds and told his tale of courage. “Showers of sous, half-francs, and francs fall into his cap, and occasionally a broad five-franc piece clatters among the humbler coin.”
The United States had recognised the legitimacy of the provisional government, and that afternoon he saw a band of soldiers and others heading for the house of the American minister as a gesture of goodwill, carrying flags and shouting, “Vive la Republique!” and “Vive l’Amerique!” Gilbert unfortunately couldn’t get close enough to hear the details of what happened when they reached the house, but, he reported drily, “everything was quite satisfactory, and [the minister] and the procession parted on the very best of terms.”
He saw a man, “a miserable-looking creature,” arrested as a spy. He probably felt rather vulnerable himself, as a foreigner in a volatile war-torn city. If he had been arrested the British Embassy would probably have left him effectively unprotected. As he explained, the British Ambassador refused to recognise the new government and would only deal with the Corps Legislatif, “which no longer exists.” It was a thoroughly Gilbertian situation, and a frightening one.
Nothing of what he saw or heard made any sense to him. The boastfulness, the extravagant gestures, the absurd rumours, the soldiers marching and the lower-class roughs buying swordsticks and the newly-formed corps of police trying to keep order without weapons of any sort, the atmosphere of suspicion, the wounded soldiers displaying their injuries to the admiring crowd, the men of all classes standing in the streets and making speeches to the passers-by, all had the vivid inconsequence of a dream. He tried to understand the politics, but could only communicate his bewilderment. In other times he had been willing enough to mock Napoleon III, but now he found himself with nothing but sympathy for the deposed Emperor. “To renounce an Imperial regime and go to the other extreme because their Emperor has disappointed them is about as reasonable as it would be to renounce money for ever, because you have been swindled into taking a bad shilling. So, indeed, it seems to me, who am in truth but a poor politician.”
On the Friday, Gilbert dispatched his Thursday letter by travelling to Boulogne and posting it there. He then returned to Paris. The lines of communication were starting to close. If he wrote further dispatches, we do not have them. He left the city on Monday 12 September, the railway bridge at Creil being blown up just after his train had crossed it. The Siege of Paris began, lasting over four months. The heightened absurdities he had seen developed into something more grim.
The dispatches are hasty pieces of journalistic record, and they don’t pretend to be anything else. Most of his writings are, frustratingly for a biographer, personally unrevealing. He seemed to take great care to wrap himself in a cloak of impersonality. But these two Observer letters tell us much about his attitudes and philosophy.
Some people go through life radiating empathy: they have an instinctive understanding of other people’s points of view, even those that are radically different from their own. Gilbert was the precise opposite of this kind of person. He seemed to go out of his way to view other people with a kind of detached and intelligent incomprehension. It’s as if he wished to be alienated from his own society. The Special Correspondent of these reports, drifting through the streets of Paris and observing the bizarre events around him, tells us clearly and for sure one very startling thing: Topsyturvydom was not just a comic technique. It was how Gilbert saw the world.
The operas take great delight in mocking the powerful in their fancy costumes. Gilbert clearly considered that all pomp and circumstance were in some measure idiotic. But in these articles he more or less tells us that he was politically a Conservative. He was certainly no friends of the Socialists. Working people were “roughs”, and the Parisians were fools for having deserted their Emperor. Perhaps he remembered his Paris adventures when he wrote The Gondoliers nearly twenty years later and made fun of Venetian “red Republicans” who want to impose absolute equality on everyone: “The Noble Lord who rules the State--/The Noble Lord who cleans the plate--/The Noble Lord who scrubs the grate.” But more importantly, his Paris experiences confirmed his deep-held belief that human behaviour made no sense whatsoever.
