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the Boulevard Poissonière outside the offices of Le Matin, most popular of the French yellow
papers, in whose windows were posted the latest bulletins. There were the inevitable fights.
But no longer was it simply the opponents of Caillaux against his supporters. Brawls were
now breaking out over national security, between those who opposed the extension of military
service and the partisans of the Réveil National, the new patriotic movement.
Also gold coins began mysteriously to vanish from circulation. Having been burned by dis-
astrous experiments with paper money twice before once in the early eighteenth century
during the ill-fated Mississippi Bubble, and then again by the assignats issued during the Re-
volution the French had developed a healthy mistrust of banks and all but the hardest metal-
lic currency. At the first sign of trouble, gold coins disappeared into those countless bas de
laine, the proverbial long woolen stockings in which every French peasant was said to keep
his little hoard of gold under the mattress or into those notaries strongboxes where the bour-
geoisie kept their savings.
After eight days of court proceedings, at 9:30 p.m. on the night of July 28, the all-male jury
voted 11 to 1 to acquit Mme. Caillaux. They concluded that she had been so uncontrollably
distraught over the revelations in Le Figaro as to be driven to violence the murder was
therefore to be deemed un crime passionel. For all its drama, the verdict came as something
of an anticlimax. Fighting did break out outside the Palais de Justice, and a large contingent
of policemen had to be deployed to disperse the royalist ultras of Action Française who hated
Caillaux. But most Parisians were now more concerned about how to pay for their grocer-
ies gold or silver coins were hard to come by; the shops, even the cafés, had stopped ac-
cepting banknotes, and even the food markets at Les Halles had come to a grinding halt.
By 4:00 the next morning, several hundred people gathered around the Banque de France
to convert notes into gold. That afternoon, the crowd swelled to more than thirty thousand in
a line that wove for over a mile along the side streets surrounding the Hotel du Toulouse,
where the Banque was headquartered, along the Rue de Radziwill, past the Palais Royale,
and up the Rue de Rivoli to the Jardin des Tuileries. Two hundred and fifty policemen kept or-
der. The Times s reporter was taken aback by the scene.  All classes of society mingled in the
interminable queue and it was significant of the universal thriftiness in France that numbers of
quite humble persons had evidently savings to withdraw from the guardianship of the National
Bank.
The Banque announced that it was prepared to continue paying out gold for as long as
was necessary. After all, it had the largest single hoard of gold in the world. In 1897, its in-
coming governor, Georges Pallain, had gathered his staff to tell them that the Banque s duty
was to prepare for  every eventuality, his code word for a war of revenge against Germany to
reverse the disaster of 1870. Under Pallain, the Banque de France had steadily begun to ac-
cumulate gold. Every time the Reichsbank s gold reserves increased, the Banque was a step
ahead a sort of arms race with gold as the object. By July 1914, it had over $800 million in
bullion.
The French central bank had not, however, painstakingly built up this mountain of pre-
cious metal just to see it dissipated into the hands of its own nervous citizens. The treasure
was there to support the state in a national endeavor. For more than a decade, every man-
ager of the Banque s more than 250 branches had kept locked in his safe, in a place that he
was instructed should be  always easily accessible, a secret envelope, to be opened only in
the event of a general mobilization. Inside this envelope was Le Circulaire Bleu.
Written on grayish blue paper over Governor Pallain s signature it contained each man-
ager s instructions in the event of war. With general mobilization, he would face  immense
and perilous duties. He was to meet this  formidable test with  calmness, vigilance, initiative,
and firmness. The first and immediate task would be to cease paying out gold immediately.
Should the branch s town fall into enemy hands, he was to defend the assets in his care with
 all [his] authority and . . . energy. Thus, when the order for general mobilization was issued
at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 1, French gold reserves were immediately immobilized.
An hour later, it was also impossible to get a taxi in Paris. All public transport cars, wag-
ons, and buses was requisitioned to move troops. The only way to get about was on foot.
Within twenty-four hours, public services came to a grinding halt as every able-bodied male
headed for the railway stations, the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l Est. Even the grandest
hotels, such as the Ritz and the Crillon, lost their waiters; dinner was served by chamber-
maids.
Within days of the outbreak of war and for the next few weeks, an unnatural calm settled
over the city as it basked gloriously in the August sunshine. The grand department stores for
which Paris was famous were deserted; there was no traffic the buses had disappeared to
the front; and the métro ran only sporadically. Theaters and cinemas were closed; the cafés
shut at 8:00 p.m., the restaurants at 9.30 p.m. Before the month was out, with all the foreign-
ers gone, the big hotels lay empty.
At the end of August that silence was shattered. The German army swept through Belgi-
um and across northern France in a great flanking movement around the French left wing,
and by August 29 was just twenty-five miles from the city. Gunfire could be heard in Paris and
there were reports that German soldiers had been seen on the outskirts. The next day, a
Sunday, a lone German plane circled overhead and dropped three bombs, filled with lead bul-
lets, near the Gare de l Est. No one was injured. On Monday a second plane swooped across
the rooftops and let go of its bombs near the Rue Quatre Septembre, intending them, it was
said, for the Banque de France. Again only a few windows were broken.
Few people certainly not the Germans were yet aware that on August 18, with the in-
vaders still two hundred miles away in Brussels, the Banque de France had already set in mo-
tion its emergency plan Paris, after all, had fallen to foreigners three times in the previous
hundred years. Its gold reserves 38,800 gold ingots and innumerable bags of coins valued
at $800 million and weighing some 1,300 tons had been shipped in the utmost secrecy by
rail and truck to safety at prearranged sites in the Massif Central and the south of France. The
massive logistical operation went off without a hitch until one of the trains carrying coins de-
railed at Clermont-Ferrand. Five hundred men had been required to get it back on the tracks,
collect the money, and keep off curious spectators. By early September, the Banque s vaults
in Paris were empty.
Lords of Finance
6. MONEY GENERALS
CENTRAL BANKS: 1914-19
Endless money forms the sinews of war.
 Cicero, Philippics
As THE LIGHTS started to go out over Europe that fateful first week of August, every [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]