LETTER FROM PARIS:As damage from the recent storm is tackled, Paris remembers its own 1910 disaster, writes RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC
THE SEINE had already risen 10 feet above its normal level and the water was surging violently downriver, but it was when the clocks stopped, at 10.53pm on January 21st, that many Parisians got their first sense of the strange calamity to come. The water came quickly. No sooner had the plant that pumped compressed air around the city been submerged – knocking out the clocks, lifts and ventilation systems that relied on it – than the streets were inundated and hundreds of gallons of water started cascading down into the metro stations near the river.
As the days passed and the water kept rising, the city gradually grew darker. Many gas street lamps couldn’t be lit, so municipal workers rowed around the city, mounting hastily-bought oil lanterns wherever they could reach. A sense of panic grew. Families were forced to flee their homes on makeshift rafts and excitable journalists dispatched word that the City of Light, like a latter-day Pompeii succumbing to nature’s wrath, was about to disappear.
For the past fortnight, communities along France’s western coast have been planning the reconstruction of their towns and villages after one of the most destructive storms in a generation killed more than 50 people, wrought extensive damage and left hundreds of homes stranded in newly formed lagoons. But just as one part of the country begins to rebuild in the aftermath of its disaster, the capital is remembering the centenary of another: its own Great Flood of 1910. At the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, an exhibition draws on hundreds of photographs, newspaper stories and postcards to chart the events of that winter 100 years ago. We see the Eiffel Tower rising out of a lake where the Champ de Mars should be, Haussmanian boulevards where only the treetops rise above the water and municipal workers steering their boats with long wooden poles.
Although the death toll from the deluge would be surprisingly low, 20,000 buildings were destroyed and 200,000 people were left homeless. With the city at a standstill, people remarked on the serenity that fell over it. But as the American historian Jeffrey Jackson recounts in a new book on the flood, a choking stench filled the streets, raising fears of illness and disease and inducing a sense of dread. "It's the end of the world!" cried a man on the street, quoted by the newspaper L'Intransigeant. Pledges of aid came from across the world and troops were deployed to help in the construction of an elaborate network of improvised wooden walkways that allowed people to move around the city. As with Hurricane Katrina and other more recent disasters, it was the poor who felt the worst effects of the flood, the outer suburbs being least equipped to resist the swelling water.
And yet for all the hardship, many Parisians were keenly aware that the grotesque transformation of their city was something to behold. One witness described crowds gathering on the embankments to watch the spectacle, "admiring the headlong rush of the silent yellow river that carried with it logs and barrels, broken furniture, the carcasses of animals, and perhaps sometimes a corpse, all racing madly to the sea". Amid the chaos, rumour swirled. Was the Eiffel Tower really about to collapse? Was it true that animals had escaped from the city zoo? And then, on January 29th, with the Seine 20 feet above its usual level and the city struggling to cope, the sky finally cleared. "The water didn't rise during the night," reported La Vie Illustréethat morning. "The sun is shining. Hope is reborn." When the waters eventually receded, Jackson suggests, Parisians were left with a sense of betrayal – not just by city officials, but by science, technology and the idea of progress. "We were taught to have faith in science," Le Matin observed. "But today everyone is asking the same question: how could science, so sure of itself, be defeated by primitive waters?" Before long, the Great Flood had been transformed into a mythic story of social unity, common purpose and shared sacrifice, of people coming together to repel the assault of the capricious river. Just four years later, of course, Parisians would be asked to muster those very same qualities with the outbreak of another great cataclysm, the first World War.
The traces of the flood of 1910 have long gone from the streets of Paris, though perhaps an antique dealer on some little backstreet could track down one of the medals specially created by the city that year and given in gratitude to the countless soldiers, sailors, police and civilians who played their part in saving the city. The medal bears the city's motto: Fluctuat nec Mergitur. "She is tossed about by the waves, but does not sink."