When Parisians Ate Minced Saddle of Cat : French capital’s history at the moment the glitter of the empire succumbed to the rigors of war : PARIS BABYLON: The Story of the Paris Commune, <i> By Rupert Christiansen (Viking: $23.95; 435 pp.)</i>

Is Paris a modern Babylon, a city so decadent, so free with sex and every other indulgence that it regularly brings down upon itself the retribution of war and revolution? This is the question that guides Rupert Christiansen’s compelling chronicle of Parisian life at the end of Napoleon III’s imperial reign (1852-70). The query may be a bit melodramatic, but the narrative that surrounds it glistens with arresting detail.

Despite the book’s subtitle, this is not really an account of the Paris Commune; the city’s short-lived rebellion of spring 1871 occupies only the final quarter of the book. Instead, Christiansen gives us a history of the French capital at the moment when the glitter of empire succumbed to the rigors of war. Elegantly written, the book draws interestingly on diaries and dispatches written during the period. Christiansen’s goal is not to reveal new insights about the meaning of the era, but to allow us to relive a particularly exciting moment in Parisian history. “Paris Babylon” is popular history at its best.

Perhaps the most notable accomplishment of Napoleon III’s authoritarian Second Empire was the transformation of a still medieval Paris into a modern commercial and imperial capital. Under the direction of the zealous Baron Haussmann, the slums that blighted the city’s core gave way to the broad boulevards, elegant shops and splendid public buildings familiar to habitues of 20th-Century Paris. In the process, however, tens of thousands of humble working people lost their homes; many others felt unmoored. The cantankerous Goncourt brothers, on whose fascinating, if idiosyncratic, diaries Christiansen regularly relies, condemned the new Paris for being “no longer redolent of Balzac’s world and conjuring up only some American Babylon of the future.”

While the Goncourts groused, property owners and speculators profited handsomely from the real estate boom. There was money to burn, and the newly enriched, Christiansen writes, spent their lucre on the great variety of pleasure the capital had to offer. There was food, of course--an English guidebook warned that one French meal was more than enough for two Anglo-Saxons--but above all there was sex.

For the right price, men could retain one of the city’s many cancan dancers, ballerinas and actresses for the night. The extent of the sexual barter was doubtless exaggerated by moralistic observers like the Goncourts, whose accounts Christiansen accepts a bit too uncritically. Still, there is no question that the streets and theaters of Paris offered men a copious menu of sexual fare.

A wide variety of observers condemned this Parisian immorality and the social breakdown they believed it caused. The love of luxury, the excessive eating, the culture of frivolity and material pleasure “depraves and ruins and ultimately leads to a national misfortune.” So wrote Queen Victoria’s cousin, the Crown Princess of Prussia, as her country’s troops approached the gates of Paris in September, 1870.

About two months earlier, Bismarck had skillfully maneuvered Napoleon III into a war that was uniquely in Prussia’s interest to fight. A weak and disorganized French army succumbed in less than six weeks, and Napoleon III himself became a prisoner of war. Back in Paris, his political opponents abolished the empire and declared a provisional republican Government of National Defense dedicated to resisting the Prussian advance. In response, Bismarck’s troops encircled Paris and laid siege to the city.

At this point in the narrative Christiansen shifts from seamless prose to diary-style entries, a technique I found enormously effective. The book now becomes a day-to-day chronicle of the siege of Paris, heightening the drama of the ensuing events and giving the reader a rare sense of immediacy. Here, Christiansen gives us a journal within a journal, for a great many of his sources are themselves diary entries penned in the midst of the siege. Thus, one Edmond Deschaumes noted in his diary the Parisians’ increasingly creative efforts to contend with the shortage of food. A recent lunch, he wrote, “was made up of minced saddle of cat, mayonnaise, and cutlets of dog . . . salmi of rat was also on the menu.” Dessert featured “a pudding of horse marrow.”

As fall turned to winter and disease took its toll, especially in the poor neighborhoods, the laboring population of Paris became increasingly restive. Not only did working people blame the government for the unequal burdens of the siege; they denounced the regime for being insufficiently energetic in resisting the Prussians. The poor wanted social reform, and they accused the rich of secretly siding with the enemy in hopes of staving it off.

Sentiments such as these underlay the emergence of radical and revolutionary groups centered around the city’s militia or National Guard. When the French government finally sued the Prussians for peace in January, 1871, the left began to agitate in earnest. As Vice President Jules Favre wrote, “Civil war was few yards away, famine a few hours.”

Civil war came first. On March 18, the city’s radical National Guards took control of the city when members of the regular French army refused to fire on them. Paris now belonged to the revolutionaries, who declared the city an independent Commune. Its leaders advocated a decentralized socialism in which workers would jointly own their firms. Because nearly half of the Commune’s directors hailed from the skilled working class, this episode would be canonized in Marxist lore as the world’s first proletarian revolution.

But Paris could not hold out very long. Bismarck may have been unwilling to invade the city, but France’s new Chief Executive Adolphe Thiers longed to drive his radical countrymen from their precarious perch. On May 22, he sent in the troops. Despite his relative ease of victory, Thiers was not content merely to retake the city. He resolved to exact retribution and did so with unspeakable brutality. Soldiers rounded up thousands of their Communard compatriots and had them summarily shot. The toll of the Commune’s “bloody week” reached some 100,000 Parisians killed, jailed or deported.

Christiansen relates one incident in which regular soldiers led a contingent of captured Communards into a prison and proceeded to mow them down with machine-gun fire. Those still moving after the barrage received a bullet in the ear. One who had survived the original blast remained so still that the soldiers deemed it unnecessary to finish him off. He lay for hours under a pile of corpses until he finally called out to the guards: “God has saved me! Save me!” The soldiers took out their revolvers and shot him dead.

Napoleon III is often accused of anticipating the authoritarian excesses of the 20th Century. It may be that the distinction goes instead to those who restored revolutionary Paris to order.