Richard Holmes - Falling Upwards

In 1812, the third Aeronautical Exhibition was held at the Champ de Mars. With all eyes on Napoleon advancing towards Moscow, it was not a great success, so Sophie again crossed the Alps with her balloon to make ascents at Turin. On 26 April she flew so high, and the temperature dropped so low, that she suffered a nosebleed and icicles formed on her hands and face.

On her return to Paris, Sophie was surprised to receive a letter on 9 June from André-Jacques Garnerin. He gracefully invited her to dinner at the Hôtel de Colennes to discuss ‘a project that might be of mutual interest’. This probably involved a proposal to make double ascents and parachute drops above the Jardin du Tivoli or the Parc Monceau with her old rival Lisa Garnerin. It is highly unlikely that Sophie would have accepted what she must have regarded as a demeaning and unsuitable proposition. 16

The defeat and subsequent exile of Napoleon seemed to pose Sophie Blanchard few problems. When the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, entered Paris for his official enthronement on 4 May 1814, Sophie made a spectacular ascent from the Pont Neuf, with fireworks and Bengal lights. King Louis was so taken with her performance that he immediately dubbed her ‘Official Aeronaut of the Restoration’. Evidently Sophie had no qualms about this shift of political allegiance. Her only loyalty was to ballooning.

Four more years of brilliant public displays followed, with Sophie established as queen of the fireworks night at the Tivoli and Luxembourg Gardens. Her small balloon lifted more and more complicated pyrotechnical rigs, with long booms carrying rockets and cascades, and suspended networks of Bengal lights, all of which she would skilfully ignite with extended systems of tapers and fuses. At the height of these displays, her small white figure and feathery hat would appear like some unearthly airborne creature or apparition, suspended several hundred feet overhead in the night sky, above a sea of flaming stars and coloured smoke.

Towards midnight on 6 July 1819, a hot, overcast summer evening, Sophie Blanchard, aged forty-one, began one of her regular night ascents from the Jardin de Tivoli, accompanied by an orchestra in the bandstand below. At about five hundred feet, and still climbing, she began to touch off her rockets and Bengal lights, dropped little parachute bombs of fizzing gold and silver rain, and ignited a lattice of starshells suspended on wires twenty feet below her gondola. As the gasps and applause of the crowd floated up to her through the darkness, she became aware of a different quality of light burning above her head. Looking up, she saw that the hydrogen in the mouth of her balloon had caught fire. It was amazing that it had never done so before. Many of the crowd thought it was just part of the firework display, and continued to applaud.

The flaming balloon dropped onto the roof of number 16, rue de Provence, near the present Gare Saint-Lazare. The impact largely extinguished the fire. Sophie was not severely burnt, but she was tangled in the balloon rigging. She slid down the roof and caught onto the parapet above the street. Here she hung for a moment, according to eyewitnesses, calmly calling out ‘ A moi, à moi! ’ Then she fell onto the stone cobbles beneath.

There are numerous accounts of this fiery descent from the Paris sky. They appeared in all the Paris newspapers, and also in English journals like the Gentleman’s Magazine . 17One of the clearest, most poignant descriptions was written by an English tourist, John Poole, who witnessed the event from his hotel room.

I was one of the thousands who saw (and I heard it too) the destruction of Madame Blanchard. On the evening of 6 July 1819, she ascended in a balloon from the Tivoli Garden at Paris. At a certain elevation she was to discharge some fireworks which were attached to her car. From my own windows I saw the ascent. For a few minutes the balloon was concealed by clouds. Presently it reappeared, and there was seen a momentary sheet of flame. There was a dreadful pause. In a few seconds, the poor creature, enveloped and entangled in the netting of her machine, fell with a frightful crash upon the slanting roof of a house in the Rue de Provence (not a hundred yards from where I was standing), and thence into the street, and Madame Blanchard was taken up a shattered corpse! 18

The death of the Royal Aeronaut profoundly changed the reputation of ballooning in France. A public subscription was raised in her honour, but it was found that Sophie Blanchard had no family, and was reported to have left fifty francs in her will ‘to the eight-year-old daughter of one of her friends’ (perhaps an illegitimate child?). So the two thousand francs raised was used to erect a notable balloon monument, which still exists in the 94th Division of Père Lachaise cemetery. fn10

Sophie Blanchard’s death in 1819 effectively ended the first great wave of ballomania and the celebration of ballooning in France. Something similar happened in England with the equally shocking death of Thomas Harris five years later. Amazingly, Harris was the first English aeronaut to be killed on home ground. A glamorous young naval officer, he made a much-advertised ascent in his new balloon the Royal George on 24 May 1824. As part of his publicity, he took with him a dazzlingly pretty eighteen-year-old cockney girl, known to the newspapers only as ‘Miss Stocks’, who was generally assumed to be his mistress. Miss Stocks and the balloon, which had cost Harris a thousand guineas to construct, had both been exhibited at the Royal Tennis Court in Great Windmill Street, and stirred much excitement and comment. 19

The balloon had a new kind of duplex release valve, which Harris said would allow him and Miss Stocks to make a perfectly controlled landing. One valve was housed inside the other at the top of the balloon. The smaller, inner valve was the conventional safety mechanism, as invented forty years previously by Alexander Charles, designed to release excess gas pressure during flight, or to commence a controlled descent. The larger outer valve was a radical solution to the problem of keeping the balloon safely on the ground once it had landed. When the larger valve line was pulled, it would deflate the entire balloon in a matter of seconds (the equivalent of the ‘rip panel’ in a modern hot-air balloon). This, claimed Harris, would prevent the terrible bouncing and dragging across fields which had caused so many injuries, and so much damage to crops and property (especially chimneys and rooftops) which had undermined the general popularity of balloonists.

Harris circulated a campaigning pamphlet saying that he was trying to save the declining art of ballooning in England. ‘The Science of Aerostation has lately fallen into decay, and has become the subject of Ridicule,’ he lamented. This decline was caused by the ‘total want’ of serious technical inventions by recent aeronauts, who had been content (like that Frenchman Garnerin) to exploit frivolous novelties like parachutes and fireworks. The Royal George , with its new system of valves and its beautiful young passenger, would show the way ahead. In the event it showed something quite else.