September 10th Paris Ephemeris: Tornado wreaks havoc in the heart of Paris

On Thursday September 10, 1896, a natural and meteorological event of unprecedented magnitude and violence tore through the streets of Paris. This tornado, the first and last to pass through Paris, caused extensive material damage and the death of five people as it passed between Place Saint-Sulpice and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

For several weeks now, Paris and the Ile-de-France region have been battered by violent thunderstorms, culminating on July 26, 1896 in a particularly severe hailstorm affecting the Montsouris and Belleville districts, as well as the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne. The storm uprooted trees, ravaged flowerbeds, ripped off roofs and smashed shop windows; streetcar traffic was disrupted by fallen tree trunks.

Two Parisian women, a little girl of eleven and a woman in her twenties, lost their lives, the first in the collapse of a washhouse in the 13th arrondissement, the second from a fall from the top of the fortifications at the Porte d'Ivry. But what Parisians thought would be the climax of the bad weather ofsummer 1896 was not, in fact, reached.

On September 10, 1896, just before 3 p.m., Paris was once again hit by a thunderstorm, but this one soon took a far more terrifying and dramatic turn than its predecessors. In the heart of the 6th arrondissement, between the northern Luxembourg Gardens and Place Saint-Sulpice, a tornado formed before the astonished eyes of onlookers.

With gusts of up to 220km/h, this category EF2 tornado on the Fujita scale is moving in a straight line towards the north of the capital, through the 6th, 1st, 3rd, 10th and 19th arrondissements. It crossed the Place Saint-Sulpice, took the Quai des Grands-Augustins , where trees were uprooted and books scattered to the four winds, crossed the Seine, where several damaged barges ended up sinking, and reached the west of theIle de la Cité via the Pont-au-Change.

On the right bank, the tornado, which averaged 300 meters in width, continued its devastating path, reaching the Place du Châtelet, where it tore off the roof of the theater, passed in front of the Tour Saint-Jacques, where it decapitated a gargoyle, climbed the Rue Réaumur and then the Rue de Turbigo, before reaching the Place de la République. But the phenomenon doesn't stop there!

It then moved on to boulevard Saint-Martin, boulevard de Magenta and the canal Saint-Martin, where a woman and her child were thrown into the water. The tornado finally ended its run on boulevard de la Villette, passing through the Buttes-Chaumont park, but not before wreaking havoc on a nearby funfair.

In just 3 to 4 minutes, the column crossed Paris from southwest to northeast, covering 6.3 kilometers and sweeping everything in its path. Chestnut, elm and plane trees were smashed, roofs and lampposts were torn off, and an omnibus was even lifted up and overturned on the sidewalk by the force of the wind, as were numerous carriages.

But material damage was not the only misfortune to be deplored: nearly 70 Parisians were seriously injured and 5 even lost their lives, dying of contusions and skull fractures, including an English jockey named Eyears, a 30-year-old coachman, Jean Portal, ejected from his carriage, Léon Vanderhagle, a day laborer crushed by a 300kg lead plate that fell from a roof, or overturned, depending on the version, on boulevard Magenta, or Antoine Rouché, a 5-year-old boy, lifted by the force of the wind and thrown against the parapet of Pont-au-Change.

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The very next day, the municipality organized a clean-up of the streets of Paris and set aside 10,000 francs for the victims' funerals, while the newspapers seized on the subject and collected statements from those who had witnessed the phenomenon. Headlines that must have surprised many Parisians!

In fact, despite its violence, the tornado only affected a tiny part of the capital. Le Figaro was astonished by this in its September 11, 1896 edition: "The curious thing is that during this time, in Montmartre, in the ninth arrondissement, on the Champs-Elysées, on the Champ-de-Mars, no one suspected that a terrible cyclone was wreaking havoc in Paris. It rained, and that was that. By four o'clock, the cyclone had passed. The sky was clearing. The rain stopped altogether."

The tornado of September 10, 1896 is the first and only known tornado in thehistory of the French capital, and also the only tornado in France to have occurred in an exclusively urban environment, from its formation to its dissipation.

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