introduction

Two wars were waged against Paris between September 1870 and May 1871, the first by the German army, the second by the French. The German attack was the siege of the largest fortress in the world, carried out by blockade and bombardment. The French attack was the suppression of an insurrection by the legal government. Their common target was regarded by many, and especially by its inhabitants, as unique: the center and symbol of modern civilization in some of its most admirable, but also in some of its most dangerous, forms. Both attacks were ultimately political, intending not merelly to reduce a fortress but to chastise its inhabitants. The German purpose was to alter the will of the population by privation and intimidation. The French purpose, at first merely to disarm dissidents, became radicalized during the course of the civil war until it became, for some of those in authority, the elimination of sections of the Parisian population regarded as a social and political danger.

Paris was not a fortress like any other in France or Europe. The ramparts of other capital cities were relics of the past. Those of Paris, conceived in the early 1830s, were built only in 1840-41, when the Mehemet Ali crisis made another European war seem likely. The French calculated that modern war, on the pattern of the revolutionary wars, would have as its object the domination of the state and the nation, not merely the seizure of frontier territory. Paris had become the essential target because of its unique political importance in postrevolutionary France, encapsulating the political life, and even the sovereignty, of the country.