The great circus performer known as Charles Blondin was born as Jean-François Émile Gravelet near St. Omer in France on 28th February 1824. His father, André Gravelet, was himself a tightrope walker as well as a veteran of Napoleon's grande armée. From the age of five, when he became spellbound watching a group of visiting entertainers, Jean-François wanted to be a tightrope walker. After receiving tuition from a former sailor, he convinced his parents to enrol him at the École de Gymnase, the famous school for acrobats in Lyon. Within months he made his professional début as "The Little Winder" and at the age of seven appeared before the King of Sardinia in Turin.
Tragically he became an orphan when he was only ten-years-old and after finishing his schooling he found a surrogate families in the circus troupes he travelled around Europe with for the next eighteen years. In 1851 he joined the Ravel Family of acrobats with whom he travelled to the United States to work for the leading circus impresario of the age: Phineas T. Barnum. While sailing across the Atlantic, Blondin (as he was now known) saved the life of a young nobleman who fell overboard during a storm.
In 1858, three years after arriving in America for the first time, Blondin conceived the feat that was to make his name: crossing the Niagara Falls on a tightrope. He planned the stunt meticulously but still had convincing his agent and prospective investors of the feasibility of the plan. Nevertheless, in spite of not being able to cross at his preferred location but with the support of a local newspaper, the Niagara Falls Daily Gazette, and a small amount of financial backing, he finally set a date for his exploit.
In the late afternoon on 30th June 1859, Charles Blondin stepped out on to the three-inch-wide, 1100-foot-long rope which spanned the falls 160 feet above the water. Between 10,000 and 25,000 spectators watched on as he carried his 30-foot-long 40lb balancing-pole to the middle of the rope, where he had a lie down and a drink from a bottle that he hoisted up from a boat moored below. He then completed the crossing. In all the spectacle lasted around seventeen minutes to the acclaim of the crowds. As the bands on both sides of began to pack up, he announced that would make a return journey, which he completed in around seven minutes.
Blondin crossed the Falls many more times, always with some sort of gimmick to attract the crowds: carrying a passenger; cooking an omelette half-way across; crossing on stilts. His celebrity status achieved, Blondin, his wife, and their five children toured the world making a fortune with his act before returning to Great Britain, which he became a subject of in 1868. Following some sort of financial disaster he was forced out of retirement in 1880 and his last performance was in Belfast in 1896 when he was seventy-one years of age. He died of diabetes the following year and was buried in Kensal Green
The Niagara Falls Public Library web site has a number of images of Blondin available from their Historic Niagara Digital Collections.
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30 June 2010
On this day in history: Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on tightrope, 1859
29 June 2010
On this day in history: Cisalpine Republic created, 1797
In April 1792, France declared war on Austria beginning the French Revolutionary Wars, which lasted until 1802. Following initial defeats, the French army started to make gains against the coalition of nations that opposed them, in part due to the institution of the levée en masse (mass conscription) but also due to the tactical skills of the French generals. In 1796, one general in particular made a name for himself with a series of victories in northern Italy: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Following decisive victories at the Battle of Montenotte over the armies of Sardinia and Austria, and the defeat of the Austrians at the Battle of Lodi, Bonaparte captured Milan and Mantua. The Papal forces had little choice but to sue for peace, which he accepted in February 1797. With no belligerents left in northern Italy, Napoleon was free to take his army into Austria, but before he did so he created a two republics in captured territories as client states of France - the Cispadane Republic to the south of the River Po, and the Transpadane Republic north of the river. These republics comprised part of the Republic of Venice, the Romagna, the former duchies of Milan, Modena, and Parma, along with the Papal legations of Bologna and Ferrara
On 29th June 1797, Bonaparte merged the province of Novara with these two republics to form the Cisalpine Republic, which, although nominally independent, was effectively ruled from France. The promulgation of a constitution the very next month created a republic that followed the French model: they adopted the Republican calendar; the territories were divided up into departments; a minority of the populace elected representatives to two councils who chose an executive. Nevertheless, the commander of the occupying French forces retained ultimate authority. By the end of 1797, the Austrians had capitulated and signed the Treaty of Campo Formio by which they recognised the legitimacy of the Cisalpine Republic.
The fate of the Republic became intimately linked to that of its founder. Following his seizure of power in France, the Cisalpine Republic became the Italian Republic in 1802, with Bonaparte as its President. The year after Napoleon became Emperor of the French he added Venetia to the Republic to create the Kingdom of Italy and took the crown for himself. The Kingdom was broken up by the Congress of Vienna after his final defeat in 1815.
If you wish to learn more about Bonaparte and the Cisalpine Republic, Project Gutenberg has a copy of John Holland Rose's The Life of Napoleon I (London, 1910)
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28 June 2010
On this day in history: Battle of Berestechko begins, 1651
In the mid-seventeenth century, one of the largest and most populace states in Europe was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (also known by the rather the delightful name of Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations). This elective monarchy extended from Poznan in the west to Smolensk in the east; it included Latvia and much of modern day Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine. As such the Commonwealth's population consisted of many ethnic groups, not all of whom were content to be ruled by a Polish-Lithuanian monarch.
In 1648, a number of ethnic groups within the Ukraine rebelled against the Roman Catholic King John II Casimir. Initiated by Cossacks the war of liberation soon attracted their fellow Orthodox Christians: Ukrainian peasants and Crimean Tatars. The rebels - commanded by Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, a Zaporozhian Cossack who gave his name to the uprising - managed to drive the Polish nobles, Catholic priests, and Jewish leaseholders from their land in the first few months of the insurgency - massacring those who did not flee. Meanwhile, the King was building an army to take back the Ukraine.
On 28th June 1651, the largest battle of the seventeenth century began when approximately 140,000 rebels engaged just over 50,000 Commonwealth soldiers under the command of the king at Berestechko in the western Ukraine. The battle lasted for three days by the end of which between forty- and seventy-thousand rebels lay dead (including women and children at their camp), while the Polish-Lithuanian army had lost less than one-thousand men. The rebels were forced to capitulate and signed the Treaty of Bila Tserkva on 28th September.
In spite of the defeat, Khmelnytskyi (aka Chmielnicki) had not given up hope of forcing the Commonwealth out of the Ukraine, but he realised that he needed allies to do so. Initially he approached the Ottoman Sultan who offered the rebels vassal status; however, the Ukrainians were not keen on a Muslim overlord. So it was that Khmelnytskyi signed the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654, making the Ukraine a vassal state of the co-religionist Russian Tsar, finally ending Polish-Lithuanian domination of the Ukraine.
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