The Siege of Paris (1870–1871)
What happened
During the Franco-Prussian War, German forces encircled Paris on 19 September 1870 and held the city under siege until the armistice of 28 January 1871 — roughly four and a half months. (This is the famine siege. The Paris Commune of March–May 1871 was a separate later uprising, born partly of the rage and grievance the siege had bred, but it was not itself the siege; the elephant dinners and rat markets described below belong to the Prussian blockade of the winter of 1870–71.) As the city's food ran out and a bitter winter set in, Paris devoured first its livestock, then its working animals, then its pets and vermin, and finally — most famously — the animals of its zoo.
The food connection
The siege of Paris is the great set-piece of culinary desperation, and also of culinary inequality. As supplies failed, the city worked methodically down the substitution ladder. Horses were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands; dog, cat, and rat meat were sold openly in the markets, the rat becoming a recognized (if grim) commodity. Then the wealthy, with money to spend and an appetite for novelty, turned to the Jardin des Plantes menagerie. Antelopes, camels, yaks, and kangaroos were killed and sold; the zoo's two beloved elephants, Castor and Pollux, were shot, butchered, and sold by the pound, their trunks fetching the highest prices. The hippopotamus survived only because its asking price was set beyond any buyer; the big cats and primates were largely spared.
The siege's defining document is the menu served at the luxury restaurant Voisin on Christmas Day 1870, the 99th day of the siege, composed by the chef Alexandre Étienne Choron. The "siege menu" offered elephant consommé, roast camel in the English style, kangaroo stew (civet de kangourou), roasted bear ribs with pepper sauce, haunch of wolf in a venison sauce, antelope terrine with truffles, and a dish of cat garnished with rats — all accompanied by fine vintage wines from the cellar. It is one of the most extraordinary menus in culinary history, and it is also an indictment: while Choron's clientele dined on zoo animals and truffles, the poor of Paris were boiling rats and burying children dead of cold and hunger.
The human cost
Combat killed soldiers; the siege killed civilians, mostly by disease and malnutrition rather than outright starvation. Mortality in Paris rose sharply through the winter — smallpox, typhoid, and respiratory disease preyed on bodies weakened by hunger and cold — with the death rate climbing well above its normal level and the very young and very old dying in the greatest numbers. Estimates of excess civilian deaths over the siege run into the tens of thousands. The suffering was distributed with savage inequality: the famine that the rich experienced as an exotic novelty, the poor experienced as a death sentence.
Political & economic context
The siege was the climax of a war Napoleon III had blundered into and already effectively lost; the emperor had been captured at Sedan in September 1870, the Second Empire had collapsed, and a new Republic fought on behind the walls of Paris. The German aim was to force capitulation by hunger and bombardment, and it worked: Paris surrendered, France ceded Alsace and much of Lorraine, and the humiliation seeded decades of French revanchism. Inside the city, the gulf between the feasting wealthy and the starving poor — dramatized by those very zoo-animal menus — fed a class rage that erupted weeks later in the Commune.
Historical legacy
The siege of Paris is remembered in France as part of l'année terrible, the terrible year of defeat, siege, and civil war. Internationally it is remembered chiefly through its food — the elephant dinners, the rat markets, the Voisin menu — which have become shorthand for the surreal extremity of a great modern city brought to hunger. The siege also pioneered modern wartime communication under blockade: balloons and carrier pigeons carried mail and microfilmed dispatches out of the encircled city.
Food culture legacy
The siege entrenched hippophagy — the eating of horse meat — in Parisian food culture. Horse butchery, the boucherie chevaline, had been legalized in France only in 1866; the siege normalized it out of sheer necessity, and the dedicated horse butchers, with their distinctive gilded-horse-head signs, persisted in French cities well into the twentieth century. The siege menus, meanwhile, became legendary set-pieces of French culinary lore, endlessly reproduced as the ultimate emblem of haute cuisine confronting catastrophe.
Reference notes
Related entries: The Caloric Mathematics of a Siege; Medieval Siege Foodways (the same substitution ladder, now in an industrial city); future cross-links to horse meat / hippophagy, boucherie chevaline, and French cuisine. Related cuisines: French. Content advisory: standard. Editorial flag: carry the Commune-versus-siege clarification prominently so the platform never repeats the common conflation.
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