A “POMPEII OF HAVOC” rained flame and ash on Paris the 24th of May, 1871, with the burning of Napoleon III's Tuileries palace and other traditional sites of state, financial, and religious authority. Scorched bits of paper fell across the city and suburbs. The diarist and novelist Edmond de Goncourt called it “black rain.” The fire added ruins to those from the Prussian bombardment and the provisional government's shelling. The fraternal conflict stained the world's perception of nineteenth-century French civilization.

National war devolved into civil war as French and Paris Communard governments and press demonized each other while trying to define what the future of the French state would be. Both factions dreamed of accomplishing French political development in terms of universal male suffrage and republican state institutions but imagined this catastrophically as a revisiting of the French Revolution of 1789, called “the Great Revolution” by French historians. The conflict between those who wished to preserve and those who wished to dissolve the France of 1789 led to the burning of Paris as well as militant hostilities among Frenchmen, all under the watchful eye of the Prussian Army.

Paradoxically, Parisian centrality in the life of the nation and literary imagination made the city an ideal site for unimagined destruction. Revolution was a political ritual, but physical destruction and societal trauma had been the stuff of romantic poetry and nineteenth-century imagined epic, not immediate reality.

Paris had symbolized a central point of continuity for European culture as well as for the historical development of international and economic affairs. It was an international city where writers’ careers were made, culture was created, argued, and applauded, and the treaties of nations and emperors crafted. As a crossing and collection point for ideas, Paris was a place for judgments, in salons and publishing houses as well as in the halls of worldly power. Centuries of European politics and letters had accustomed the French, and the international community, to regard Paris as a theater for ideas and rituals. In government and art, it was a sacred site for the life of the mind, not an arena for actual war.

It may be a critical cliché to term Paris “the capital of the nineteenth century” now, but it was an article of faith for the French middle class, especially its literary and artistic elites before, during, and for some after the calamitous year of 1871.