For particular service, details for the theatres, balls, private clubs,
etc., the number of men is fixed by the Préfet de Police, and there is
extra pay in all these cases. The department is also called upon in
case of street accidents, falling buildings, asphyxia in sewers, etc.
The service material includes special apparatus for respiration in
cellars, basements, etc., where the presence of gas or smoke is to be
apprehended; and the great ladder, carried on a special truck, has a
length of twenty mètres, greater than the average height of the Parisian
houses. It is stated that the time allowed to elapse between the receipt
of an alarm in the stations and the departure for the fire is often
under a minute, and never exceeds two; in 1896, the time between the
alarm and the attack of the fire was less than five minutes in ten
hundred and seventy-nine fires out of a total of twelve hundred and
four. In seven hundred and eighty-four cases, in the same year, the
conflagration was completely extinguished in five minutes, and the very
longest fire lasted six hours and a half.
At the entrance of each of the twelve casernes, or barracks, of the
regiment, the names of the officers and soldiers who have been killed in
the discharge of their duty are engraved on a slab of black marble, the
Golden Book of the regiment. In the court of the état-major the names of
the forty sapeurs-pompiers who have thus died since 1821, are engraved
on a marble panel. In his order of the day, March 11, 1888, "the colonel
informs the regiment, with profound grief, of the deaths of Corporal
Toulon and former sergeant Sixdenier, who perished yesterday, at noon,
victims of their devotion, in endeavoring to save an imprudent workman
who had descended, without taking precautions, into an excavation of the
Rue des Deux-Ponts." Three citizens were also asphyxiated in trying to
save him, two of whom died; "and the deaths of Sixdenier and Toulon will
be for all another and a grand example to add to the history of the
regiment."
A Parisian merchant or manufacturer, Dumourrier-Duperrier, in 1699,
furnished the first effective, organized system of combating fires in
the city, and in 1717 he received, by letters-patent, the direction of
the _Compagnie de Garde-Pompes_, the origin of the present organization.
In 1792, the total effective of this force was two hundred and
sixty-three men, officers included, with forty-four force-pumps, twelve
suction-pumps, and forty-two casks. The men were provided with uniforms
and, later, armed with sabres; in the year IX of the Republic, the
corps, then four hundred strong, was placed under the direction of the
Préfet de police, under the general administration of the Préfet de la
Seine. The frightful conflagration which ended the fête given by the
Austrian ambassador, Prince von Schwartzenberg, to the Emperor, in honor
of his marriage with Marie-Louise, in 1810, awoke public attention to
the insufficiency of the arrangements for extinguishing fires, and in
the following year measures were taken to secure a larger authority and
more energetic action. Napoleon decided that the gardes-pompes should be
put on a strictly military footing; an imperial decree of September 18,
1811, created a battalion of sapeurs-pompiers consisting of four
companies with thirteen officers and five hundred and sixty-three men.
For the first time, they were armed with muskets, and as a military
force were held as an auxiliary in the police service and in the
maintenance of public order. One of the articles of this decree provided
for the payment of this force by the city until the establishment of a
company to insure against fire,--which was held to foreshadow an
intention to place this expense, at least in part, upon these companies,
and thereby relieve the municipal budget.
During the Revolution of 1848, the provisory government thought it
prudent to deprive the pompiers of their muskets; and in April, 1850,
the President of the Republic disbanded the battalion and reorganized
it, retaining a small proportion of the former members. Down to this
date, it had been recruited from the engineers and the artillery of the
army, but since then, from the infantry only. In 1860, the annexation of
the banlieue necessitated a new reorganization; the successive
augmentations of the force brought its total effective, in 1866, up to a
regiment of twelve hundred and ninety-eight men, divided into two
battalions of six companies each. The efficiency of the organization was
greatly augmented by the introduction of steam fire-engines in 1873.
* * * * *
By the law of December 29, 1897, all the communes of France were
authorized to suppress their octroi duties upon "hygienic beverages,"
wines, ciders, beers, perry, hydromel, and mineral waters, and replace
them by others, after December 31, 1898. As the entrance duty upon these
_boissons hygiéniques_ constituted a very important fraction,--in Paris,
in 1895, sixty-eight million five hundred thousand francs out of a grand
total of a hundred and fifty-five million six hundred and one
thousand,--the question of supplying this deficiency in the municipal
budget is exciting discussion. In case the octroi is not suppressed
altogether, the communes are obliged to diminish the tax in certain
proportions, according to their population and their locality,--the
cider-producing departments standing on a different footing from the
wine-growing ones. To replace the octroi, they are given their choice of
five other taxes--upon alcohol, or upon horses, dogs, billiards, clubs,
and various other articles of luxury. It was generally predicted in
Paris that the consumer of alcoholic beverages would not experience any
benefit from the removal of this tax.
Under the ancient régime, the octroi, like most other imposts and
duties, was in the charge of the _fermiers généraux_, who obtained the
royal authorization to enclose Paris within a wall to facilitate its
collection. Consequently, one of the first manifestations of the
Revolution was the demolition of these barrières by the people, on the
very day of the taking of the Bastille. On the 1st of May, 1791, at
midnight, all the gates of Paris were thrown open to the hundreds of
vehicles, boats, and barges which had been waiting for weeks for this
moment of free entry; a triumphal mast was erected in honor of the
Assemblée and to celebrate the abolition of "the most odious of
tyrannies;" the National Guard, under Lafayette's orders, paraded around
the demolished barriers in the midst of the universal rejoicing. But,
seven years later, the necessities of the municipal finances constrained
many of the thus emancipated cities, Paris included, to return to the
system of levying a tax on articles entering their gates, and the masons
continued the work of enclosing the capital again within walls.
[Illustration: GUARDS OF THE OCTROI AND THEIR DOGS IN THE ENTREPÔT OF
WINES AT BERCY.