sky.
Other novice aeronauts who rode up into the Paris sky in the weeks that followed would recount how, as the horizon curved with increasing altitude, they experienced a revelatory oneness with the ‘pantheistic “Great Whole”’. The globe was already long established as a potent symbol of the deep brotherhood of man for Reclus, a committed advocate of the fledgling International League of Peace and Liberty, whose congresses called for a United States of Europe as a solution to the hazard posed by feuding dynasties and a precursor to a federal republic that would span the world. Strikingly tall, gaunt and bearded, forty years of asceticism had sculpted him into the image of a medieval saint, and he had the temperament and kind but penetrating gaze to match. Yet his days of religious devotion had long since given way to a faith only in a new and just social order. As he peered down from the balloon, between taking measurements of air pressure, the view below would have revealed to him a future fraught with difficulties.
Away to the south-east, Paris lay spread out below in all its glory, Haussmann’s great radial boulevards arrowing out to the suburbs, evidence of France’s defeat and not far beyond. Along the roads that extended towards the forty miles of walls that girdled the city, lines of yellow tents marked where the reserve battalions of the French army were encamped, mingling with those defeated units that had fallen back on the capital following the recent debacle in Alsace. Meanwhile, in the Bois de Boulogne – laid out by Haussmann as a great, green public space – evidence of the siege was everywhere. Hardly a tree remained standing amidst a stubble of stumps, while the grass was cropped by a flock of 250 sheep brought into Paris in a wholly inadequate gesture towards self-sufficiency.
From time to time, close to the perimeter of Paris, a dark droplet of troops would coalesce and trickle out in formation through the city’s gates to relieve the garrison in one or other of the fourteen great fortresses that comprised the capital’s outermost line of defence. Every suchmovement drew heavy fire from German rifles and cannon. For outside the embrace of the ramparts, 200,000 conscripts from Prussia and the North German Confederation sat warming themselves beside braziers, ready to starve the City of Light into submission.
From his headquarters at Versailles, Colonel Wilhelm Stieber, secret councillor to Bismarck’s government and head of military intelligence for the North German Confederation, could have watched the speck of the tethered meteorological balloon with a degree of equanimity, confident that the dice were increasingly loaded against any aeronautic politician foolish enough to attempt an escape.
For more than a week, Stieber’s agents had been close to choking the last lines of communication in and out of Paris. They had tapped and then cut a telegraph cable laid secretly in the waterways between Paris and Tours as the Prussian armies approached; meanwhile, all possible sites of signal exchange with the semaphore stations on the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon and the roof of the newly built Opéra were under tight surveillance. To interdict the return flights of hundreds of homing pigeons that had been exchanged between Paris and the provinces prior to hostilities, Stieber had equipped the army with trained falcons. And as for the decrepit balloons that occasionally limped out of the city with no hope of return, delivery was expected any day of a new wagon-mounted gun from Krupps, with a trajectory high enough to send whatever small store of the gas-filled leviathans remained in Paris plummeting to the earth in flames. But sealing the city off from the world was only the start of Stieber’s strategy.
Stieber had first applied his talents to military intelligence during Prussia’s rapid victory over Austria in 1866, but it was in the clandestine struggle against revolutionary elements
Other novice aeronauts who rode up into the Paris sky in the weeks that followed would recount how, as the horizon curved with increasing altitude, they experienced a revelatory oneness with the ‘pantheistic “Great Whole”’. The globe was already long established as a potent symbol of the deep brotherhood of man for Reclus, a committed advocate of the fledgling International League of Peace and Liberty, whose congresses called for a United States of Europe as a solution to the hazard posed by feuding dynasties and a precursor to a federal republic that would span the world. Strikingly tall, gaunt and bearded, forty years of asceticism had sculpted him into the image of a medieval saint, and he had the temperament and kind but penetrating gaze to match. Yet his days of religious devotion had long since given way to a faith only in a new and just social order. As he peered down from the balloon, between taking measurements of air pressure, the view below would have revealed to him a future fraught with difficulties.
Away to the south-east, Paris lay spread out below in all its glory, Haussmann’s great radial boulevards arrowing out to the suburbs, evidence of France’s defeat and not far beyond. Along the roads that extended towards the forty miles of walls that girdled the city, lines of yellow tents marked where the reserve battalions of the French army were encamped, mingling with those defeated units that had fallen back on the capital following the recent debacle in Alsace. Meanwhile, in the Bois de Boulogne – laid out by Haussmann as a great, green public space – evidence of the siege was everywhere. Hardly a tree remained standing amidst a stubble of stumps, while the grass was cropped by a flock of 250 sheep brought into Paris in a wholly inadequate gesture towards self-sufficiency.
From time to time, close to the perimeter of Paris, a dark droplet of troops would coalesce and trickle out in formation through the city’s gates to relieve the garrison in one or other of the fourteen great fortresses that comprised the capital’s outermost line of defence. Every suchmovement drew heavy fire from German rifles and cannon. For outside the embrace of the ramparts, 200,000 conscripts from Prussia and the North German Confederation sat warming themselves beside braziers, ready to starve the City of Light into submission.
From his headquarters at Versailles, Colonel Wilhelm Stieber, secret councillor to Bismarck’s government and head of military intelligence for the North German Confederation, could have watched the speck of the tethered meteorological balloon with a degree of equanimity, confident that the dice were increasingly loaded against any aeronautic politician foolish enough to attempt an escape.
For more than a week, Stieber’s agents had been close to choking the last lines of communication in and out of Paris. They had tapped and then cut a telegraph cable laid secretly in the waterways between Paris and Tours as the Prussian armies approached; meanwhile, all possible sites of signal exchange with the semaphore stations on the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon and the roof of the newly built Opéra were under tight surveillance. To interdict the return flights of hundreds of homing pigeons that had been exchanged between Paris and the provinces prior to hostilities, Stieber had equipped the army with trained falcons. And as for the decrepit balloons that occasionally limped out of the city with no hope of return, delivery was expected any day of a new wagon-mounted gun from Krupps, with a trajectory high enough to send whatever small store of the gas-filled leviathans remained in Paris plummeting to the earth in flames. But sealing the city off from the world was only the start of Stieber’s strategy.
Stieber had first applied his talents to military intelligence during Prussia’s rapid victory over Austria in 1866, but it was in the clandestine struggle against revolutionary elements
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