Unforeseen Events - 1900s
The flood of 1910
The Paris flood of 1910 reached the height of 8.5 meters on the scale measuring the river's level on the pont de la Tournelle. The Seine rose above its banks and flooded along the course it had followed in prehistoric times; the water reached as far as the gare Saint-Lazare and the place du Havre. It was the second-highest flood recorded in the history of Paris (the highest was 8.1 meters in 1658), and was the third major flood of the Belle Époque (the others were in 1872 and 1876), but it received much more attention than earlier floods, largely because of the advent of photography and the international press. Postcards and other images of the flood spread around the world. The municipal authorities made a special survey of the city to measure exactly its extent. It also demonstrated the vulnerability of the city's new infrastructure: the flood stopped the Paris Metro, and shut down the city's electricity and telephone system. Afterwards, new dams were constructed along the Seine and its major tributaries. No comparable floods have taken place since.
Czar Vargo’s Crusade
"It almost worked. It might have worked. If the Etherite idealist called Czar Vargo had not dared too much and gone too far in his attempt to stop the First World War, the 20th century might have been a very different place. But when Vargo’s airship armada darkened skies across the world in 1914, armed with devices that could theoretically deactivate every modern weapon on Earth, he stepped over reality’s threshold... and disappeared over it as well."
"After a huge flash, the entire armada vanished. Every man, woman, and device went elsewhere. Czar Vargo, his followers, and whatever technologies they had planned to employ all ceased to exist. Most records and memories of that event disappeared as well; the few that remained behind were inconclusive, contradictory, and often absurd. It’s as if the entire day had rewound itself, producing faint ghosts of its events but obliterating the actual parties involved."
"The Society of Ether maintains that Czar Vargo was destroyed by the Technocracy, with all accounts of his adventures written out of existence by the New World Order. Such an event, however, seems beyond the reach of even the greatest Technocratic influence. It’s more likely that Reality itself swallowed Czar Vargo. And if that’s true, then perhaps the entire century that followed has been the greatest Paradox backlash in history."
"Talk about good intentions leading to Hell."
World War I: The End of the Belle Époque
On June 28, 1914 the news reached Paris of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo. Austria declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and following the terms of their alliances, Germany joined Austria, while Russia, Britain and France declared against Austria and Germany on August 1. 1914. On the day before the declaration of war, the leader of the French socialists, Jean Jaurès, was assassinated by a mentally-disturbed man in the café du Croissant near the headquarters of the socialist newspaper L'Humanité, in Montmartre. The new war was supported by both French nationalists, who saw an opportunity to gain back Alsace and Lorraine from Germany; and by most on the left, which saw an opportunity to overthrow the regimes in Germany and Austria. Parisian men of military age were ordered to report to mobilization points in the city; only one percent did not appear.
The German army rapidly approached Paris. On August 30, a German plane dropped three bombs on the rue des Récollets, the quai de Valmy and the rue des Vinaigriers, killing one woman. Planes dropped bombs on August 31 and September 1. On September 2, a bulletin of the military governor of Paris announced that the French government had left the city "in order to give a new impulsion to the defense of the nation." On September 6, six hundred Parisian taxis were called upon to carry soldiers to the front lines of the First Battle of the Marne. The offensive of the Germans was stopped and their army pulled back. Parisians were urged to leave the city; by September 8, the population of the city had fallen to 1,800,000, or 63 percent of the population in 1911. For the Parisians, four more years of war and hardship lay ahead. The Belle Époque had become just a memory.
