Serio-comic Map of Europe, 1877

Angling in Troubled Waters, 1899

A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia, 1904

Chinese view of the world, 1912

Map 1 from here, Map 2 from here, Map 3 from here, Map 4 from here.

Paris under water

One hundred years ago, the “gayest city in the world” was drenched with water. The Seine river had risen many times before, but it had retreated before it could do any damage to the “City of Lights.” This changed, however, the morning of January 21st, 1910. The following is an eyewitness account of the flood, courtesy of Esther Singleton’s The World’s Greatest Events, v 9:

AT TEN minutes to eleven on the morning of Friday, January 21, 1910, almost the very hour at which on another January 21 Louis XVI. mounted the scaffold, the power station from which all the public clocks of Paris are worked by compressed air was flooded by the Seine; all the clocks stopped simultaneously with military exactitude, and with a start of surprise Parisians began to realize that the Seine in flood was not a harmless spectacle that could be watched with the cheerful calm of philosophic detachment, and that the river in revolt was an enemy to be feared even by the most civilized city in Europe. Crowds, it is true, had gathered on the embankments, 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; they had watched cranes, great piles of stones, and the roofs of sheds emerge for a time from the flooded wharves and then vanish in the swirl of the rising water, while barges and pontoons, generally hidden from sight far below, rose gradually above the level of the streets, notably one great two-storied bathing barge, a vision of unsuspected hideousness, that threatened at any moment, triply moored as it was, to crash into the parapet.

But it was in the order of things that wharves should be flooded; it was sad that the little suburban towns by the river should be swamped, but these incidents could be regarded with altruistic sympathy. The stopping of clocks, however, and the irritating obsession of onze heures moins dix which confronted the Parisian from every street and cafe clock was something new and alarming; with its suggestion that time had stopped dead at the most ill-chosen of moments, this petty but perpetually repeated annoyance was the symbol of all the manifold inconveniences wrought by the flood, the failure of electric light, the disorganization of trams and ‘buses, the bursting of drains and the swamping of houses, and perhaps none of them was more demoralizing.

By the time that Paris woke up to the fact that it was war with water, the most evasive and insidious of enemies, the Seine had made the low-lying suburbs its own. From visits to out-lying districts I retain a vague impression of thick black slime, abject shivering misery and great lakes of yellow water, with here and there the upper story of a house rising like an island from the desolate waste.

From the Ile de la Grande Jatte, where the little restaurants were six feet deep in water, I watched a rescue party row back with difficulty across the river. They had saved a few pathetic sticks of furniture and a great mattress which, as its owner with exultation pointed out to the sympathetic crowd, was perfectly dry. A covered cart was in waiting, but the inside was already full and the mattress was hoisted on to the roof. Alas! for the vanity of human exultation! Hardly had it been tied in place when a storm of torrential rain swept down and drenched the mattress and its poor despairing owner as thoroughly as though they had fallen in the Seine. All the time the Seine was rising remorselessly, and those whose houses were threatened gathered along the banks in the rain, watching the river with the silence of utter dejection, though some of the braver spirits were building walls of masonry across their thresholds— walls over which a few hours later the river had risen.

At Bercy, within the fortifications, the quay was under water. The scene was indescribably desolate: a long row of cheerless houses three feet deep in water, as far as the eye could see; a double row of lighted gas-lamps burning pale and absurd in the gray daylight, because the flood had made it impossible to extinguish them; a punt conveying a workman to his flooded home, poled slowly along by two policemen and bumping monotonously against the poplars and sunken railings; two soldiers on a flimsy raft that the most destitute of mariners would have scorned, steering an erratic course, as one of them paddled desperately with a tin pan; and only one bright touch. From the sixth story of one of the beleaguered houses a scarlet duster shaken by same careful housewife waved defiance to the river.

Parisian life during the Flood

A day or two later the Seine was working havoc. havoc in the very heart of the city. On the left bank the defenses were weakened by the low level railway lines running from the great Orleans terminus of the Quai d’Orsay to the Austerlitz Station and from the Esplanade des Invalides to the Auteuil viaduct. The whole length of these lines was flooded twenty feet deep. The Seine actually flowed through the Orsay terminus as the water poured on to the line higher up the river and then fell back into the Seine through the ventilation shafts of the station, which looked for all the world like a swimming bath. Only the iron gallery, on a level with the entrance from the road, was left unsubmerged; the central depth had been converted into a huge tank of muddy water, while the sightseer looked vainly for the engines and carriages that lay drowned beneath. The unfinished works of the Metropolitan railway, running from north to south, had been converted into a subterranean river at right angles to the Seine two miles long, and were flooding squares and streets a mile away near the Saint Lazare Station.

On the right bank the river was threatened to overflow the embankments, and the problem of defense became a difficult one; for the damage done by the inundation of the Saint Germain quarter by the water from the Orsay Station, and of many streets in the central districts by percolation, would have been nothing to the havoc that would have been wrought by the direct sweep of the Seine over the embankments on the right bank. One of the difficulties of the situation was the Pont de I’Alma, which, with its low arches, was almost submerged, and held back in the center of Paris great masses of water that threatened to sweep over the quays.

Up the Seine on the right bank men were working for dear life by the light of naphtha flares to raise the earthworks along the parapet of the embankment. The Quai de la Conference and the fashionable avenue of Cours la Reine were deep in water, but a thin line of sandbags backed here and there by wooden screens still kept back the surface flood. As the river rose, and it rose eventually over five The seine feet above the level of the embankment, the military engineers raised the height of the barrier, which was half a mile long. That night the water was steadily creeping higher and higher, while a civil engineer, mud-bespattered, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his button-hole, was standing on the corner of the sandbag bastion by the Pont de la Concorde and measuring its advance. He turned to a stranger beside him and said: “The river is still rising as fast as ever. If the barrier goes, five feet of water will sweep across the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevards—over everywhere,” he added with an expressive gesture, “until it meets the flood that the Metropolitan is pouring out round the Saint Lazare Station.” Then abruptly he turned to a non-commissioned officer awaiting orders behind him: “Give me another tier of sandbags.” Orders were hoarsely shouted, and a crowd of little black figures, each shouldering a sandbag, swarmed like ants along the narrow earthwork, on the one side a few inches above the river, on the other a foot or so above the flood that lay deep on the embankment and on the avenue of Cours la Reine.

Weary as they were, after three days’ unceasing toil, each man swung his sandbag into its place with a will and burst into a soldiers’ chorus that sounded strangely merry amid the desolation around. That night the Quai du Louvre was barred off by the police, and a silent crowd gathered at the barrier, though nothing could be seen, anxious for the safety of the collections that are the pride of France. In the mist the Seine seemed as broad as the Rhine at Cologne, and the eye of fancy could descry Notre Dame between two raging floods, splendid and fearless in the majesty of its builders’ faith. At this point the river flows beneath the Pont des Arts, and as its water poured through the iron supports of the bridge it made the little rippling noise of a hundred small cascades, a sound like malicious laughter even more terrible than its silence.

The roadway along the southern facade of the Louvre was all uneven with the pressure of the overflowing drains beneath it, as though an earthquake had passed, and it sagged down suddenly just beneath the balcony of the splendid Jean-Goujon door. Here out of sight of the anxious crowd there was a scene of feverish activity. Men were tearing up cobbles from the road and building a rough wall across a gap in the parapet, where a flight of steps goes down to the river. There was need of haste; for the water that looked black and stagnant in the glare of the naphtha flares was creeping up apace and licking the lowest tier of cobbles. Others were recklessly digging great holes in the footpath between the poplars, and ramming the earth into bags, or nailing together great pieces of driftwood, fished from the river, to form a screen behind the sandbags on the parapet and hold them against the pressure of the current, while carts kept rumbling in and unloading piles of stone and rubble against the wall and screen. I glanced over the screen that reached my chin, expecting to see the river five feet or so below me, and drew back with a start of alarm when I saw the gleam of water above the stone parapet and realized that it was only held back by the flimsy barrier. A few hours later and the river would have won; all the basements of the Louvre would have been flooded, and the water would have carried ruin across the Rue de Rivoli and Palais Royal.

It was no wonder that a sense of impending disaster hung over Paris; yet there was much in the situation that was simply comic. The special envoys of the King of the Belgians, invited to a lunch at the Foreign Office, were carried there in a large, flat-bottomed boat poled by a couple of watermen. Naval boats of the collapsible Berthon pattern were to be seen on wagons in the Avenue de l’Opera, while bare-footed sailors splashed contentedly in the lake opposite the Saint Lazare Station. At times the incongruity of these things was scarcely realized.

Bridge after bridge was closed to the public as great masses of driftwood that could not be dislodged formed against them, until at one moment traffic was forbidden over all the nine bridges that lie between the Pont Neuf and the Pont de Crenelle. Cabs, carts, and every kind of vehicle concentrated in the unflooded streets, were blocked into a solid mass that surpassed the wildest nightmares of congested traffic. Part of the Place de l’Opera began to collapse, and a cab might take two hours to get from the Opera to the Madeleine, five minutes’ walk. An unreasoning panic seized the cabmen and chauffeurs; they were possessed with the fixed idea that no bridge across the Seine was safe, and no bribe would persuade them to cross the river; while they refused to take fares for even the shortest distance. Men left their homes dry-shod in the morning, and returning from business had to wade up to their knees through unlighted streets or creep perilously along a narrow plank gangway, only to find that it stopped short just where the water was deepest.

One evening I was walking down a street which a few hours before had been thick with traffic. A single cart passed down beside me, and at once, without the slightest warning, the road began to undulate; and the next minute I was in water up to the knees, and one wheel of the cart had sunk through the wood pavement up to the axle. Once wet I plodded on through the water and in the darkness blundered against a plank which formed part of a trestle bridge some five feet from the ground; then climbing up, found myself at a perilous elevation on two exceedingly narrow planks. After cautiously venturing forward some little way, a woman’s shriek sounded so close to me that I almost lost my balance. Then in the obscurity a long row of black figures was discernible all on the bridge and coming in the opposite direction to myself. I succeeded in helping the young woman who had shrieked to pass me; then an elderly business man slipped between the two planks at my feet, and was hauled up with difficulty; then finally there was a crack, a plank broke and some unfortunate person fell flat on his face in two feet of filthy water. At last, somehow or other, I reached higher ground, and found a pathetic group of men and women, lighted by a policeman’s lantern, waiting to take their turn on the remains of the gangway. They were returning to their homes in the street which had been flooded since they went out.

On Saturday, January 29, Paris awoke to a bright sunny morning and the end of its nightmare. Early in the morning crowds gathered along the embankment, no longer murmuring in melancholy chorus, “Qa monte, qa monte” ; but laughing and chattering as they watched with uproarious satisfaction the broadening of the thin dark line which showed that the Seine was no longer rising or stationary, but slowly falling.

Sunshine restored, even in the flooded quarters, the true Parisian gaiety that had for a time been overclouded with a terrible sense of powerlessness and insecurity. The flooded streets were bright and gay in the sunlight, as boats plied to and fro carrying men and women to their work. Every one was good-humored, and even a portly business man swarming down a rope from a first-story window into a police boat, while his wife and children watched his gymnastic prowess with undisguised horror, was laughing heartily, and fully conscious of the humor of the situation. Throughout the day crowds flocked to all the quarters that the river had attacked. To make the scene more gay, soldiers were everywhere, standing on guard at dangerous points or gathered round fires of wood paving blocks and drinking coffee and hot wine. Every one had an air of triumph; for the Seine had at last confessed itself defeated, and it only remained for Paris to show once again its superiority to disaster. In almost every street between Montmartre and the river pumps were hard at work: encouragement came from the news that the Seine was failing to resume what had been before the hopeless task of emptying cellars and basements; there were pumps of every kind, large and small, hand-pumps, smart electric pumps, steam pumps, and monstrous indescribable pieces of machinery that took up half the roadway, obscured the sunshine with clouds of filthy smoke and looked as if they had been rescued from the scrap-heap. Half Paris was in the streets gaping at the excavations, where the water had entangled planks and masonry, s«j>«o< pipes and cables in inextricable confusion and examining the barricades with eager interest while their elders compared them with the barricades of the Commune.

Further Reading:
Flooding in Paris in 1910 – The Guardian
Photos of Paris Flood
Postcard collection of the Paris flood
Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 by Jeffrey H. Jackson
The Knowledge of Water by Sarah Smith (fiction) ****!

Europe, 1900–1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele—but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.

In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society—as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.

From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.

Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

First, could you explain your background for those unfamiliar with you? How did you come to be a writer?

I was born in Germany and drawn to history, I suppose, through my love of stories, the layers of the past. I also lived in several European countries, and so the connections and differences between the countries began to interest me. I finally wound up doing a PhD in Oxford, where I also published my first novel. From there on I went into journalism to finance my first books – and the rest is history, at least as far as my work is concerned.

What is your objective with The Vertigo Years? Do you feel the fifteen years before WWI are vital to historians and to people? Does the study of that brief period have relevance to today?

The period I call the Vertigo Years, 1900-1914, is often seen as a sort of idyllic Indian summer before the great catastrophe of the War. Many people who were alive back then would be very surprised by this view, which we have imposed on history because we know what came afterwards – the terrible slaughter in the trenches. If you look at the evidence, I think, you can see a great deal of movement and upheaval even before the War, and reading peoples’ letters and diaries or newspapers of the period, the time seems to have been anything but idyllic and restful. There was change everywhere, in every area of life, and that is precisely what I want to convey by looking at the period, as far as that is possible, without seeing it through the prism of the War. Why is this period still so vital? Because it was the foundational moment of our world. Everything that makes up our world today, from globalization to quantum physics, from consumer society to feminism, from democratization to terrorism, was already formulated during this time. Does that have relevance to our time? Of course it does. It is perhaps asking too much for people to “learn from history”, but we can clearly recognize ourselves in the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents, and in the things that dominated their lives.

How did you approach writing The Vertigo Years? What prompted you to write it in a chronological fashion?

I think it is important to gain the reader’s trust, to seduce him or her into following me to what I’m getting at, to the point I want to make, which may well be a theoretical one. The vehicle for this is storytelling. The chronological structure simply turned out to be a convenient way of telling stories. Life does not happen in an orderly fashion, it is a chaotic mass of experiences and events, and every structure we impose on it is artificial. Chronological, thematic, subject-based, by country, take your pick, they are just different ways of unraveling a dense and inextricably intertwined ball of facts and perceptions.

What sources did you draw from when writing your book? Were there any new discoveries that corrected or elaborated on past histories of the Edwardian era?

I tried to use the greatest possible variety of relevant sources. The period is very extensively researched and written about, so there was little point of trawling through statistics and government documents in archives, especially since I wanted to write a history of mentality, not a political history. I did spend some time in archives, and a lot with personal correspondences and newspapers from the time, though. Novels and other works of art are useful sources, too, as they can show you how someone particularly sensitive gave form to a particular experience. Once one has identified such an experience, however, it is important to create a wider picture, to see how many people were affected. Much of what we regard as seminal, avant-garde art today only affected a handful of people, and even Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams sold no more than 300 copies when it was published in 1899, but when we look at popular culture, at best-selling novels and stories in newspapers with large circulation, we get a much better sense of what most people where thinking and feeling. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

Did you find much similar today with this period in history? Anything very dissimilar?

I can recognize us quite clearly in that time, especially the sense of living with an open, uncertain history in which the only certainty appears to be change.

Based on reviews I’ve read, The Vertigo Years strips away the fond memories of the “golden summers” of myth. Did you find anything positive of the pre-WWI era? Was this era a study of deep contrasts, or was it full of gray areas?

But why would it not be positive? It was a tremendously creative time, intellectually and artistically the most seminal moment in Europe’s history, all compressed into less than a generation. Industrial development surged ahead, scientists and engineers made huge strides – it just helps to take away the idea of sepia-tinted quaintness and see the time as one as vital and as pulsating as our own.

Many histories on the Edwardian era tend to focus on royalties and personalities, such as King Edward VII, as representing the age. Do you find this true?

Of course that is true, to some extent. Personalities like Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm are representative in many ways, but the fact that so much is written about them may also have something to do with the almost insatiable nostalgia people appear to feel for a time in which, they think, everything was still solid and somehow better, more gentle and more graceful than today. Not so for most people! I am more interested in seeing how whole societies lived. That is never absolutely possible, especially as the most numerous class, the workers and agricultural labourers, are the ones who leave the fewest written documents, certainly of a personal kind. They appear in statistics, but you have to look at the middle classes for a wealth of diaries, letters, novels, etc. The higher you go up the ladder, the more plentiful the documentation. I regard it as a challenge to redress the balance a little, as far as possible.

Were the years 1900-1914 a complete break from the manners and mores, fears and doubts, and attitudes of the 19th century, or do you think there was a natural, gradual change that occurred even before the turn of the century?

There is never any such thing as a complete break with the past. Even today, we carry with us attitudes, feelings and longings from pre-modern and even pre-civilized days. Things don’t just vanish within a generation and of course change is gradual and uneven, between regions, countries, classes, sexes, generations, and even within individuals. We are always many things at once, but one can observe that the preoccupations of a society appear to change, as do the ways of articulating them and reacting to them. To describe that is, I think, the business of a good historian.

Did you think WWI inevitable?

No, much against received opinion it certainly was not. There is an idea that war was simply inevitable because of attitudes, colonial policies and the arms race, but would we today (assuming we would have lived) have regarded a Third World War inevitable if the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had led to hostilities between the US and the USSR?

There were other international crises before 1914 (think of the two Moroccan crises 1905 and 1911 or the Balkan wars in 1912) which presented much stronger reasons for going to war, but each time, diplomacy prevailed, and it might have prevailed in August 1914, but for the fact that many decision makers were away from the centres of government, on holiday. I am no conspiracy theorist and I do not believe in the Grand Plan that is supposed to have existed all along, and recent research demonstrates that great parts of the population were anything but enthusiastic about the outbreak of war when it finally happens. Lead articles in patriotic newspapers were full of fervour and high rhetoric, but personal letters and diaries are not. If anything, there was a dangerous sense of fatalism, a resigned idea that war would break out at some point, the question was only when. It is true that the empires were competing with each other and that there was a dangerous arms race going on in a very heated-up atmosphere, but the actual decision to go to war was made by no more than a dozen people around Europe. I believe that there might have been a crisis in 1915, another one in 1917 and 1921, and then the nations might simply have moved on. The financial strain on national economies was already colossal, and counter movements such as the Socialists and Social Democrats were gaining force, particularly in Germany and France. So no, nothing is inevitable in history.

Lastly, do you feel you have done the period justice with one volume? Were there things you could have added but chose not to?

Have I done justice to the period in under 500 pages? Could I have done in 5,000 pages? Certainly not. But I can give a sense, a central idea, an interpretation that might shed new light on familiar things. History needs to be rewritten every generation, and I am part of this process. There is no definitive history, and in a while someone will come along and rewrite the early twentieth century in a different mold.

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