Bazar de la Charité
The Bazar de la Charité was a charity event that started in Paris in 1885 . The aim was to raise money through the sale of works of art, jewelry, paintings and books that was donated to the poor. Since high society women also sold at this charity bazaar, good income was achieved because of the prominent saleswomen. The Bazar de la Charité gained notoriety because a sensational fire disaster occurred there on May 4, 1897, in which well over 100 people were killed.
The fire disaster of May 4, 1897
In 1897, a new location had to be found for the annual Bazar de la Charité, as the previous location - the Palais de l'Industrie - was demolished to make room for the upcoming World Exhibition in Paris. The organizers found alternative accommodation in the form of a vacant lot in the nearby Rue Jean Goujon, which was made available free of charge by a millionaire.
A wooden building , 80 meters long and 30 meters wide, was erected on the vacant property . The interior was decorated with backdrops from a theatrical exhibition designed to represent a 15th century street in Paris with stalls. The decoration consisted of cardboard lids and canvas painted with oil paint. Light spruce boards formed the floor, the roof was improvised with a canvas impregnated with bitumen to protect against water . In total, the building had five exits, two large doors to the street and three smaller exits that led to the narrow remainder of the property.
The Bazar de la Charité offered its visitors two special attractions: on the one hand, a small, hydrogen-filled Montgolfière that floated in space. On the other hand, there was a cinematograph machine from the Lumière brothers , which was used to show film recordings in a small room. This apparatus was the starting point of the fire disaster: The lighting of the film projector needed a lime light as a light source that worked with an ether flame . The projectionist's assistant spilled ether when filling the lamp, which ignited on contact with the hot lamp that had not yet cooled down. In a matter of minutes, the entire wood and canvas building burned down. The canvas stretched across the ceiling in particular contributed to the spread of the fire very quickly.
Victim
It is estimated that on the afternoon of May 4, 1897, well over 1,500 people were in the Bazar de la Charité. The death toll fluctuates, sometimes it is said to be 126 victims, in other places 140. The large number of women and children who were among the dead is particularly striking. The most prominent victim was Duchess Sophie Charlotte von Alençon , the youngest sister of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary and former fiancee of the Bavarian King Ludwig II. The duchess could only be identified by her dentition with the help of her dentist.
The horrors associated with the disaster and the high number of victims drew condolences and donations from all over the world. A small memorial chapel was built on the site of the event, which still exists and can be visited today. Oscar Amoëdo from Cuba , known as the father of forensic dentistry , interviewed the doctors involved in identifying the burn victims based on their teeth and published the results in the first book on forensic dentistry, L'Art Dentaire de Medicine Legale .
The American choreographer Clint Lutes dedicated his production Get a Leg Up to the fire disaster in the Bazar de la Charité - a contemporary dance piece for 9 dancers (world premiere: January 7, 2010, Berlin).
The Netflix series "Bazaar of Fate" addresses the catastrophe.
Web links
- L'incendie du bazar de la charité ( Memento of July 10, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (French)
- The Paris Dead List , New York Times, May 6, 1897
Individual evidence
- ^ Christian Sepp: Sophie Charlotte. Sisi's passionate sister. Munich: August Dresbach Verlag, 3rd, revised edition 2017, pp. 242–244.
- ^ Christian Sepp: Sophie Charlotte. Sisi's passionate sister, pp. 243 and 247.
- ↑ memorail You Bazar de la Charité
- ^ O. Amoedo: The role of the dentists in the identification of the victims of the catastrophe of the "Bazar de la Charite" , Paris, May 4, 1897. Dental Cosmos 39, pp. 905-912.
- ^ David R. Senn, Paul G. Stimson: Forensic Dentistry, Second Edition . CRC Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4200-7837-4 , pp. 17 ( google.com ).
- ↑ Press release on the world premiere of "Get a Leg Up"