Is Paris Burning?

On August 30, 1914, the first German plane bombed Paris. Two were killed. An excerpt from the article:

"While the First World War did not see such a devastating attack on the city, there were repeated bombardments. Paris was, after all, closer to the front than any of the other belligerent capitals. Historian Susan Grayzel provides a careful chronology of air raids on Paris in ‘The souls of soldiers”: civilians under fire in First World War France’ (Journal of modern history 78 (2006) 588-622), and it’s clear that the major bursts of activity were at the beginning and the end of the war: August-October 1914 and a crescendo between January-September 1918. All told, Grayzel’s tabulations (from Jules Poirier’s Bombardements de Paris) show that attacks from German aircraft killed 275 people and injured 610 in the city and in the banlieu.


On 30 August 1914 a two-seater German Taube (‘Dove’) aircraft circled in the sky over Paris, and at 12.45 p.m. began to drop the first of four 5lb. bombs. The final ‘bomb’ was a sack of sand with a message attached: ‘The German Army is at your gates. You can do nothing but surrender.’ This was the first propaganda drop in aviation history and, like most subsequent leafleting raids, had little effect.


But the Germans continued to send Tarben over the city at regular intervals – and in fact at the same time each day. The regularity turned the flights into a routine for Parisians too..."