Interview and Book Review: PARIS IN RUINS, by M.K. Tod

I’m always curious about the reasons other historical fiction writers are drawn to the genre. I have friends who write about Kansas City’s past and others who write about places they have traveled (France, Mongolia, and Hong Kong, for example).

M.K. Tod’s latest novel, Paris in Ruins, is set in France in 1870. Here is the book’s blurb:

A few weeks after the abdication of Napoleon III, the Prussian army lays siege to Paris. Camille Noisette, the daughter of a wealthy family, volunteers to nurse wounded soldiers and agrees to spy on a group of radicals plotting to overthrow the French government. Her future sister-in-law, Mariele de Crécy, is appalled by the gaps between rich and poor. She volunteers to look after destitute children whose families can barely afford to eat.

Somehow, Camille and Mariele must find the courage and strength to endure months of devastating siege, bloody civil war, and great personal risk. Through it all, an unexpected friendship grows between the two women, as they face the destruction of Paris and discover that in war women have as much to fight for as men.

War has a way of teaching lessons—if only Camille and Mariele can survive long enough to learn them.

I recently asked Tod a few questions about her book. Here is the result of our online interview:

Q: Why did you choose to write about the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune?

A: Paris in Ruins was prompted by readers’ questions about an earlier novel titled Lies Told in Silence. That story begins in 1914, when a young woman called Helene Noisette leaves Paris along with her mother, grandmother, and younger brother to escape the threat of war by moving to the fictional town of Beaulieu in northern France. Helene’s grandmother, Mariele, is a widow in her mid-sixties, a woman whose past holds tragedy and secrets.

To my delight, readers were taken with Mariele and the role she played in Helene’s coming of age. They wanted to know more about her. What could Mariele’s story be? I pondered this question for a while and eventually asked: What if I went back to a time when Mariele was a young woman and the historical events that might have shaped her life? I did the calculation and landed in 1870. A quick search led me to the Franco-Prussian war, the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. Wonderful! War, destruction, death, starvation, and a ruthless insurrection – all that drama.

My Comment: As a writer, I was fascinated by Tod’s answer. I haven’t written novels backwards in time, though my novels Lead Me Home and Forever Mine overlap in time. Now I’m writing about the next generation of characters in my earlier novels. But my brain is spinning with possibilities after seeing how Tod wrote her characters’ backstory into another novel.

Q: Did you learn any unusual snippets of history as you researched Paris in Ruins?

A: Although I now write historical fiction, I was never a good history student and to be honest, the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune were news to me! The research was a fascinating dive into French history and a few things stand out. One was how active women were in the republican movement of those times. Women took leadership positions in several of the clubs that formed to agitate for change, the even took up arms during the Commune and manned (or perhaps I should say wommaned the barricades.) Women were also at the forefront of social change and had been agitating for women’s rights for decades.

Another snippet involved Sarah Bernhardt. Serendipity led me to Sarah Bernhardt’s role in the siege of Paris. A biography of this famous French actress had been on our bookshelves for years. I think it belonged to my mother, and at some point in the last thirty years, I ‘borrowed’ it with the intention of reading Sarah’s story. When I looked at it again during the research phase for Paris In Ruins, I came across the true story of the hospital Sarah Bernhardt established in the Odeon Theatre during the siege. I definitely had to include Sarah in the novel.

My Comment: One of the aspects of Paris in Ruins that I liked best was the detailed history about the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. I took a survey of European history course in college, and these topics were touched on briefly, but I didn’t know (or remember) the details. Tod clearly did an incredible amount of research to create characters who could tell her readers about what happened. And I was intrigued by the appearance of Sarah Bernhardt in the novel and did a little research on the actress’s life myself. Of course, I had heard of Sarah Bernhardt, but I hadn’t even realized she was French until reading Tod’s novel.

Q: Did you have any real life models for your main characters, Camille Noisette and Mariele de Crécy?

A: That’s an interesting question. I don’t tend to think about people I know as part of developing my characters. In this case, though, I had already written their future selves into one of my earlier novels, Lies Told In Silence. So Camille was already established as a feisty, unconventional woman, while Mariele was strong but a bit more subdued. And the question I asked myself while writing was how did their personalities form, as well as how did the siege affect them?

My Comment: Again, trying to write backstory for characters from earlier novels is a tantalizing proposition for a writer. The author is constrained by the future, rather than the past.

Overall, I thought the detailed history in Paris in Ruins was the book’s strongest point. Tod developed characters with a variety of perspectives on the events she wrote about. The two families were upper middle class—privileged, but still at the epicenter of the politics and military campaigns that hit Paris in 1870-71. Her characters sympathized with the royalists, but interacted with trades people and servants who became Communards.

I like a lot of dialogue in novels I read, and much of the dialogue in Paris in Ruins served to inform readers, rather than to show interaction between the characters. But Tod includes Camille Noisette’s and Mariele de Crécy’s thoughts throughout the novel, and so Camille and Mariele and their families were depicted in some depth.

If you’re interested in 19th Century France, I strongly suggest you read Paris in Ruins.

M.K. Tod also blogs at A Writer of History. It’s an excellent blog on historical fiction. And you can learn more about Paris in Ruins on her blog.

As a reader, what eras of history pique your interest?