A gray pall, impenetrable as a Limehouse fog, settled over Paris last week. The long boulevards were veiled, the Arc de Triomphe blotted out. Parisians had never seen anything like it. Some thought it was the edge of a huge and newly invented Nazi smoke screen blown in from the front, for London and the southeast British coast were also sooted. Some believed it came from the suburban fires, others that it was the work of Paris' own Sainte Genevieve. Still others said it was God.
Hidden, confused, perhaps protected by it, Paris entered upon the second great week of tragedy in its long history. Paris that had meant so many things to so many people, the city that stood as Western civilization's tallest monument to art, science, letters, liberty and love, faced abandonment or destruction.
Made to Take. "I shall fight in front of Paris, in Paris, behind Paris," swore France's old tiger, Georges Clemenceau in 1914 when German artillery rumbled 17 miles away. "We shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamppost and every building," declared an official French spokesman last week.
To defend Paris, however, was a task made surpassingly difficult by the plan of the city. Following six decades of revolution and rioting during which its streets were barricaded on some six occasions, Napoleon III commissioned Baron Eugene Georges Haussmann in 1853 to beautify the city and in doing so to eliminate the tangled mass of crooked streets so ideal for riots and street fighting. The wide boulevards and strategically located focal points such as the Etoile thus came into being. Haussmann figured that barricades could not be easily erected across wide boulevards, nor could the favorite technique of shooting and heaving bricks from upper-story windows be so handily employed. The focal points where several boulevards converged were ideal as artillery stations, and the circular boulevards built replacing the old city walls facilitated the rapid shifting of troops.
History was not too kind to Planner Haussmann. Twenty years later Paris fell to the besieging Germans, after which it was seized and held for 80 days by revolting Communards (see cuts, p. 22-23).
Not only is the Paris plan vulnerable to internal disorder, it is far from invulnerable to seizure from without. An invading general whose troops break through the ring of old forts and gain access to the boulevards has the same advantages that Haussmann's revolt-breakers were supposed to enjoy. And the old masonry buildings become bomb traps since the limestone of which they are constructed shatters easily, each splinter becoming itself a missile.
Life in the Shadow. Under the pall of smoke that turned light clothes grey and made eyes smart, Paris life went on last week. The omnibusses and subways continued to run though less frequently, the radio stations broadcast only martial music interspersed with news bulletins and official communiques (as in Warsaw), people journeyed out to the suburbs to see the damage caused by Nazi bombers and to look at the wreckage of planes shot down. The cafes and the Bank of France remained open, and people stood in queues at local banks to withdraw their savings.