Sophie Blanchard
Encyclopedia
Sophie Blanchard was a French aeronaut
and the wife of ballooning
pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard
. Blanchard was the first woman to work as a professional balloonist, and after her husband's death she continued ballooning, making more than 60 ascents. Known throughout Europe for her ballooning exploits, Blanchard entertained Napoleon Bonaparte, who promoted her to the role of "Aeronaut of the Official Festivals", replacing André-Jacques Garnerin
. On the restoration
of the monarchy in 1814 she performed for Louis XVIII
, who named her "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration".
Ballooning was a risky business for the pioneers. Blanchard lost consciousness on a few occasions, endured freezing temperatures and almost drowned when her balloon crashed in a marsh. In 1819, she became the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident
when, during an exhibition in the Tivoli Gardens
in Paris, she launched fireworks that ignited the gas in her balloon. Her craft crashed on the roof of a house and she fell to her death. She is commonly referred to as Madame Blanchard and is also known by many combinations of her maiden and married names, including Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard, Marie Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard, Marie Sophie Armant and Madeleine-Sophie Armant Blanchard.
. Little is known of her life before her marriage to Jean-Pierre Blanchard
, the world's first professional balloonist. The date of her marriage is unclear; sources quote dates as early as 1794 or 1797, but most state 1804, the year of her first ascent. Blanchard had abandoned his first wife, Victoire Lebrun, and their four children to travel round Europe pursuing his ballooning career, and she later died in poverty. Variously described as Blanchard's "small, ugly, nervous wife", "small with sharp bird-like features" and later as "small and beautiful", Sophie was more at home in the sky than on the ground, where her nervous disposition meant she was easily startled. She was terrified of loud noises and of riding in carriages, but was fearless in the air. She and her husband were in an accident on a joint flight in 1807 (her 11th ascent, possibly his 61st), in which they crashed and he sustained a head injury. The shock apparently left her mute for a while.
Sophie made her first ascent in a balloon with Blanchard in Marseilles on 27 December 1804. The couple faced bankruptcy as a result of Blanchard's poor business sense, and they believed a female balloonist was a novelty that might attract enough attention to solve their financial problems. She described the feeling as an "incomparable sensation" ("sensation incomparable"). Sophie made a second ascent with Blanchard and for her third ascent on 18 August 1805, she flew solo from the garden of the Cloister of the Jacobins in Toulouse
.
She was not actually the first woman balloonist. On 20 May 1784, the Marchioness and Countess of Montalembert, the Countess of Podenas and a Miss de Lagarde had taken a trip on a tethered balloon in Paris. Neither was she the first woman to ascend in an untethered balloon: in Blanchard's time, Citoyenne Henri
, who had made an ascent with André-Jacques Garnerin
in 1798, was widely credited with that ballooning first, although the honour actually belonged to Elizabeth Thible
. Thible, an opera singer, had made an ascent to entertain Gustav III of Sweden
in Lyon
on 4 June 1784, fourteen years before Citoyenne Henri. Blanchard was, however, the first woman to pilot her own balloon and the first to adopt ballooning as a career.
In 1809, her husband died from injuries sustained when he fell from his balloon in the Hague after suffering a heart attack. After his death, Sophie continued to make ascents, specialising in night flights, often staying aloft all night.
Sophie conducted experiments with parachutes as her husband had, parachuting dogs from her balloon, and as part of her entertainments she launched fireworks and dropped baskets of pyrotechnics attached to small parachutes. Other aeronauts were making names for themselves by demonstrating parachute jumps from the baskets of balloons, in particular the family of André-Jacques Garnerin, whose wife, daughter and niece all performed regularly. His niece, Élisa Garnerin, was Blanchard's chief rival as a female aeronaut, and it was rare for a suitable event to lack a performance by one or the other. Blanchard may have given some demonstrations of parachuting herself, but her primary interest was in ballooning.
The couple had still been in debt at the time of Blanchard's death, so to minimise her expenses Sophie was as frugal as possible in her choice of balloon. She used a hydrogen
-filled gas balloon
(or Charlière), as it allowed her to ascend in a basket little bigger than a chair, and there was no requirement for the volume of material necessary for a hot air balloon
. A hydrogen balloon also freed her from having to tend a fire to keep the craft airborne. Because she was small and light, she was able to cut back on the amount of gas used to inflate the balloon. Sophie had used, or at least owned, a hot air balloon; Colonel Francis Maceroni
recorded in his memoirs that she sold it to him in 1811 for 40 pounds.
She became a favourite of Napoleon, and he appointed her to replace André-Jacques Garnerin in 1804. Garnerin had disgraced himself by failing to control the balloon that he had sent up to mark Napoleon's coronation in Paris; the balloon eventually drifted as far as Rome, where it crashed into the Lago di Bracciano
and became the subject of many jokes at Napoleon's expense. The title given to her by Napoleon is unclear: he certainly made her "Aeronaut of the Official Festivals" ("Aéronaute des Fêtes Officielles") with responsibility for organising ballooning displays at major events, but he may have also made her his Chief Air Minister of Ballooning, in which role she is reported to have drawn up plans for an aerial invasion of England
.
She made ascents for Napoleon's entertainment on 24 June 1810 from the Champ de Mars
in Paris
and at the celebration mounted by the Imperial Guard for his marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria
. On the birth of Napoleon's son
, Blanchard took a balloon flight over Paris from the Champs de Mars and threw out leaflets proclaiming the birth. She performed at the official celebration of his baptism
at the Château de Saint-Cloud
on 23 June 1811, with a firework display launched from the balloon, and again at the "Féte de l’Emperor" in Milan
on 15 August 1811. She made an ascent in bad weather over the Campo Marte in Naples to accompany the review of the troops by Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat
, the King of Naples, in 1811. When Louis XVIII
entered Paris on 4 May 1814 after being restored
to the French throne, Blanchard ascended in her balloon from the Pont Neuf
as part of the triumphal procession. Louis was so taken with her performance that he dubbed her "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration".
Known throughout Europe, Sophie drew large crowds for her ascents. In Frankfurt
she was apparently the cause of the poor reception of Carl Maria von Weber
's opera Silvana
on its opening night, 16 September 1810: the people of the city flocked to see her demonstration while only a few attended the opera's debut. She gave many displays in Italy. In 1811 she travelled from Rome
to Naples
, splitting the journey in half with a stop after 60 miles (97 km), and later ascended again from Rome to a height of 12,000 feet (3,660 m) where she claimed that she fell into a profound sleep for a while before landing at Tagliacozzo
. In the same year she again lost consciousness after having to ascend to avoid being trapped in a hail
storm near Vincennes
. She spent 14½ hours in the air as a result. Sophie crossed the Alps
by balloon, and on a trip to Turin
on 26 April 1812 the temperature dropped so low that she suffered a nose bleed and icicles formed on her hands and face. She almost died on 21 September 1817 when, on a flight from Nantes
(her 53rd), she mistook a marshy field for a safe landing spot. The canopy of her balloon became caught in a tree which caused the chair to tip over; Blanchard, entangled in the rigging, was forced into the water of the marsh and would have drowned had not help arrived soon after her landing. Sympathising with Marie Thérèse de Lamourous who was attempting to run a shelter for "fallen women" (La Miséricorde) in Bordeaux
, she offered to donate the proceeds from one of her ascents to the venture. De Lamourous refused the offer on the grounds that she could not be the cause of another risking their life.
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On 6 July 1819, while making an ascent to start a display over the Tivoli Gardens
in Paris, her hydrogen-filled balloon caught fire and Blanchard, entangled in the net which surrounded it, fell to her death. She was reported as being unusually nervous before starting this ascent.
Blanchard had performed regularly at the Tivoli Gardens, making ascents twice a week when she was in Paris. She had been warned repeatedly of the danger of using fireworks in her exhibitions. This display was to be a particularly impressive one with many more pyrotechnics than usual, and it appears that the warnings had made an impression on her. She was implored not to make the ascent by some spectators, but others, eager to see the show, urged her on. One report suggested that she finally made up her mind and stepped into her chair with the words "Allons, ce sera pour la dernière fois" ("Let's go, this will be for the last time").
At about 10:30 p.m. (accounts differ as to the exact time), Blanchard began her ascent, carrying a white flag and wearing a white dress and a white hat topped with ostrich plumes. The wind was blowing strongly, and it appears that the balloon struggled to rise. By shedding ballast Blanchard managed to get some lift, but the balloon brushed through the trees as it ascended. Once she had cleared the treetops Blanchard began the display by waving her flag. The balloon was illuminated by baskets containing "Bengal fire", a slow-burning, coloured pyrotechnic.
A few moments after beginning the display, and while still ascending, the balloon was seen to be in flames. Some reports say that the balloon momentarily disappeared behind a cloud and that when it reappeared it was on fire—whatever the circumstances, the gas in the balloon was burning. Blanchard began to descend rapidly, but the balloon, caught in the wind, continued to move off from the pleasure gardens even as it went down. Some spectators thought these events were part of the show and applauded and shouted their approval. The balloon had not risen very high and, although the escaping gas was burning, the gas within the balloon maintained sufficient lift for a while to prevent the craft plummeting directly to the ground. By rapidly shedding ballast Blanchard was able to slow the descent. Most reports say she appeared to be calm during the descent, but she was said to be wringing her hands in despair as the craft approached the ground. Rumours later circulated that she had gripped the chair of her craft so tightly that "several arteries had snapt through the effort."
Just above the rooftops of the Rue de Provence the balloon's gas was exhausted, and the craft struck the roof of a house. It was thought likely that she would have survived had that been the end of the incident, but the ropes holding the chair to the body of the balloon may have burnt through, or the impact thrown her forward, with the result that Blanchard, trapped in the netting of the balloon, pitched over the side of the roof into the street below. John Poole, an eyewitness, described her final moments:
Some reports credit her with crying out "À moi!" ("help", or literally, "to me"), as she struck the roof. Although the crowds rushed to her assistance and attempts were made to save her, she had either died instantly, from a broken neck, or at most ten minutes later.
The most likely cause of the accident was thought to be that the fireworks attached to her balloon had been knocked out of position by a tree as she ascended, possibly because the balloon was heavily loaded and failed to rise quickly enough. When she had lit the fuses the fireworks headed towards the balloon instead of away from it, and one of them burned a hole in the fabric, igniting the gas. One man reportedly spotted the problem and shouted to her not to light the fuses, but his cries were drowned out by the cheering of the crowd. Later reports suggested she had left the gas valve open, allowing sparks to ignite the gas and set fire to the balloon, or that her balloon was of poor construction and allowed gas to escape throughout the ascent.
, who had witnessed Blanchard's ascent and the accident, recorded:
On hearing she had died, the proprietors of the Tivoli Gardens immediately announced that the admission fees would be donated for the support of her children, and some spectators stood at the gates appealing to the citizens of Paris for donations. The appeal raised 2,400 francs
, but after the collection it was discovered that she had no surviving children, so the money was used instead to erect a memorial, topped with a representation of her balloon in flames, above her grave in the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Her tombstone was engraved with the epitaph "victime de son art et de son intrépidité" ("victim of her art and intrepidity"). The remainder of the money, about 1,000 francs, was donated to the Lutheran Église des Billettes which Blanchard had attended. Though not rich, at the time of her death she had cleared the debts left to her by her husband and was financially secure. Each of her ascents had cost her around 1,000 francs, not including the cost of maintenance of the balloon. In her will she left property worth between 1,000 and 50,000 francs to the daughter of some acquaintances. In total, she had made 67 balloon ascents.
The story of her death was recounted throughout Europe. Jules Verne
mentioned her in Five Weeks in a Balloon
and, in The Gambler
, Fyodor Dostoevsky
likened the thrill of committing oneself in gambling to the sensation that Blanchard must have felt as she fell. For others, her death proved a cautionary tale, either as an example of a woman exceeding her station (as with Grenville Mellen, who said that it proved "a woman in a balloon is either out of her element or too high in it") or as the price of vanity for attempting such spectacular shows. Charles Dickens
commented "The jug goes often to the well, but is pretty sure to get cracked at last". With the advent of powered flight, ballooning and Blanchard's story were relegated to the margins of aviation history. A novel inspired by Blanchard's story, Linda Donn's The Little Balloonist, was published in 2006.
Aeronautics
Aeronautics is the science involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of airflight-capable machines, or the techniques of operating aircraft and rocketry within the atmosphere...
and the wife of ballooning
Balloon (aircraft)
A balloon is a type of aircraft that remains aloft due to its buoyancy. A balloon travels by moving with the wind. It is distinct from an airship, which is a buoyant aircraft that can be propelled through the air in a controlled manner....
pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard
Jean-Pierre Blanchard
Jean-Pierre Blanchard , aka Jean Pierre François Blanchard, was a French inventor, most remembered as a pioneer in aviation and ballooning....
. Blanchard was the first woman to work as a professional balloonist, and after her husband's death she continued ballooning, making more than 60 ascents. Known throughout Europe for her ballooning exploits, Blanchard entertained Napoleon Bonaparte, who promoted her to the role of "Aeronaut of the Official Festivals", replacing André-Jacques Garnerin
André-Jacques Garnerin
André-Jacques Garnerin was the inventor of the frameless parachute. He was born in Paris.His early experiments were based on umbrella-shaped devices...
. On the restoration
Bourbon Restoration
The Bourbon Restoration is the name given to the period following the successive events of the French Revolution , the end of the First Republic , and then the forcible end of the First French Empire under Napoleon – when a coalition of European powers restored by arms the monarchy to the...
of the monarchy in 1814 she performed for Louis XVIII
Louis XVIII of France
Louis XVIII , known as "the Unavoidable", was King of France and of Navarre from 1814 to 1824, omitting the Hundred Days in 1815...
, who named her "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration".
Ballooning was a risky business for the pioneers. Blanchard lost consciousness on a few occasions, endured freezing temperatures and almost drowned when her balloon crashed in a marsh. In 1819, she became the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident
Aviation accidents and incidents
An aviation accident is defined in the Convention on International Civil Aviation Annex 13 as an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft which takes place between the time any person boards the aircraft with the intention of flight and all such persons have disembarked, in which a...
when, during an exhibition in the Tivoli Gardens
Jardin de Tivoli, Paris
The Tivoli gardens of Paris were located at what is the current site of the Saint-Lazare station. These were several similarly named gardens, named after the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli near Rome. None of these remain today....
in Paris, she launched fireworks that ignited the gas in her balloon. Her craft crashed on the roof of a house and she fell to her death. She is commonly referred to as Madame Blanchard and is also known by many combinations of her maiden and married names, including Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard, Marie Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard, Marie Sophie Armant and Madeleine-Sophie Armant Blanchard.
Early life and career
Sophie Blanchard was born Marie Madeleine-Sophie Armant to Protestant parents at Trois-Canons, near La RochelleLa Rochelle
La Rochelle is a city in western France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Charente-Maritime department.The city is connected to the Île de Ré by a bridge completed on 19 May 1988...
. Little is known of her life before her marriage to Jean-Pierre Blanchard
Jean-Pierre Blanchard
Jean-Pierre Blanchard , aka Jean Pierre François Blanchard, was a French inventor, most remembered as a pioneer in aviation and ballooning....
, the world's first professional balloonist. The date of her marriage is unclear; sources quote dates as early as 1794 or 1797, but most state 1804, the year of her first ascent. Blanchard had abandoned his first wife, Victoire Lebrun, and their four children to travel round Europe pursuing his ballooning career, and she later died in poverty. Variously described as Blanchard's "small, ugly, nervous wife", "small with sharp bird-like features" and later as "small and beautiful", Sophie was more at home in the sky than on the ground, where her nervous disposition meant she was easily startled. She was terrified of loud noises and of riding in carriages, but was fearless in the air. She and her husband were in an accident on a joint flight in 1807 (her 11th ascent, possibly his 61st), in which they crashed and he sustained a head injury. The shock apparently left her mute for a while.
Sophie made her first ascent in a balloon with Blanchard in Marseilles on 27 December 1804. The couple faced bankruptcy as a result of Blanchard's poor business sense, and they believed a female balloonist was a novelty that might attract enough attention to solve their financial problems. She described the feeling as an "incomparable sensation" ("sensation incomparable"). Sophie made a second ascent with Blanchard and for her third ascent on 18 August 1805, she flew solo from the garden of the Cloister of the Jacobins in Toulouse
Toulouse
Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...
.
She was not actually the first woman balloonist. On 20 May 1784, the Marchioness and Countess of Montalembert, the Countess of Podenas and a Miss de Lagarde had taken a trip on a tethered balloon in Paris. Neither was she the first woman to ascend in an untethered balloon: in Blanchard's time, Citoyenne Henri
Citoyenne Henri
Citoyenne Henri was a woman who accompanied André-Jacques Garnerin on a trip by balloon on 8 July 1798 from the Parc Monceau in Paris....
, who had made an ascent with André-Jacques Garnerin
André-Jacques Garnerin
André-Jacques Garnerin was the inventor of the frameless parachute. He was born in Paris.His early experiments were based on umbrella-shaped devices...
in 1798, was widely credited with that ballooning first, although the honour actually belonged to Elizabeth Thible
Elizabeth Thible
Élisabeth Thible, or Tible, born in Lyon was one the first women of aeronautic history and the first woman on record to ride in an hot air balloon....
. Thible, an opera singer, had made an ascent to entertain Gustav III of Sweden
Gustav III of Sweden
Gustav III was King of Sweden from 1771 until his death. He was the eldest son of King Adolph Frederick and Queen Louise Ulrica of Sweden, she a sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia....
in Lyon
Lyon
Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....
on 4 June 1784, fourteen years before Citoyenne Henri. Blanchard was, however, the first woman to pilot her own balloon and the first to adopt ballooning as a career.
In 1809, her husband died from injuries sustained when he fell from his balloon in the Hague after suffering a heart attack. After his death, Sophie continued to make ascents, specialising in night flights, often staying aloft all night.
Solo career
The couple had still been in debt at the time of Blanchard's death, so to minimise her expenses Sophie was as frugal as possible in her choice of balloon. She used a hydrogen
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the chemical element with atomic number 1. It is represented by the symbol H. With an average atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant chemical element, constituting roughly 75% of the Universe's chemical elemental mass. Stars in the main sequence are mainly...
-filled gas balloon
Gas balloon
A gas balloon is any balloon that stays aloft due to being filled with a gas less dense than air or lighter than air . A gas balloon may also be called a Charlière for its inventor, the Frenchman Jacques Charles. Today, familiar gas balloons include large blimps and small rubber party balloons...
(or Charlière), as it allowed her to ascend in a basket little bigger than a chair, and there was no requirement for the volume of material necessary for a hot air balloon
Hot air balloon
The hot air balloon is the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology. It is in a class of aircraft known as balloon aircraft. On November 21, 1783, in Paris, France, the first untethered manned flight was made by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes in a hot air...
. A hydrogen balloon also freed her from having to tend a fire to keep the craft airborne. Because she was small and light, she was able to cut back on the amount of gas used to inflate the balloon. Sophie had used, or at least owned, a hot air balloon; Colonel Francis Maceroni
Francis Maceroni
Colonel Francis Maceroni , born Francis Macirone , was a soldier, balloonist , author and inventor....
recorded in his memoirs that she sold it to him in 1811 for 40 pounds.
She became a favourite of Napoleon, and he appointed her to replace André-Jacques Garnerin in 1804. Garnerin had disgraced himself by failing to control the balloon that he had sent up to mark Napoleon's coronation in Paris; the balloon eventually drifted as far as Rome, where it crashed into the Lago di Bracciano
Lake Bracciano
Lake Bracciano is a lake of volcanic origin in the Italian region of Lazio, northwest of Rome. It is the second largest lake in the region and one of the major lakes of Italy...
and became the subject of many jokes at Napoleon's expense. The title given to her by Napoleon is unclear: he certainly made her "Aeronaut of the Official Festivals" ("Aéronaute des Fêtes Officielles") with responsibility for organising ballooning displays at major events, but he may have also made her his Chief Air Minister of Ballooning, in which role she is reported to have drawn up plans for an aerial invasion of England
Napoleon's invasion of England
Napoleon's planned invasion of the United Kingdom at the start of the War of the Third Coalition, although never carried out, was a major influence on British naval strategy and the fortification of the coast of south-east England. French attempts to invade Ireland in order to destabilise the...
.
Champ de Mars
The Champ de Mars is a large public greenspace in Paris, France, located in the seventh arrondissement, between the Eiffel Tower to the northwest and the École Militaire to the southeast. The park is named after the Campus Martius in Rome, a tribute to the Roman god of war...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and at the celebration mounted by the Imperial Guard for his marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria
Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma
Marie Louise of Austria was the second wife of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French and later Duchess of Parma...
. On the birth of Napoleon's son
Napoleon II of France
Napoléon II , after 1818 known as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Marie Louise of Austria...
, Blanchard took a balloon flight over Paris from the Champs de Mars and threw out leaflets proclaiming the birth. She performed at the official celebration of his baptism
Baptism
In Christianity, baptism is for the majority the rite of admission , almost invariably with the use of water, into the Christian Church generally and also membership of a particular church tradition...
at the Château de Saint-Cloud
Château de Saint-Cloud
The Château de Saint-Cloud was a Palace in France, built on a magnificent site overlooking the Seine at Saint-Cloud in Hauts-de-Seine, about 10 kilometres west of Paris. Today it is a large park on the outskirts of the capital and is owned by the state, but the area as a whole has had a large...
on 23 June 1811, with a firework display launched from the balloon, and again at the "Féte de l’Emperor" in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
on 15 August 1811. She made an ascent in bad weather over the Campo Marte in Naples to accompany the review of the troops by Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat
Joachim Murat
Joachim-Napoléon Murat , Marshal of France and Grand Admiral or Admiral of France, 1st Prince Murat, was Grand Duke of Berg from 1806 to 1808 and then King of Naples from 1808 to 1815...
, the King of Naples, in 1811. When Louis XVIII
Louis XVIII of France
Louis XVIII , known as "the Unavoidable", was King of France and of Navarre from 1814 to 1824, omitting the Hundred Days in 1815...
entered Paris on 4 May 1814 after being restored
Bourbon Restoration
The Bourbon Restoration is the name given to the period following the successive events of the French Revolution , the end of the First Republic , and then the forcible end of the First French Empire under Napoleon – when a coalition of European powers restored by arms the monarchy to the...
to the French throne, Blanchard ascended in her balloon from the Pont Neuf
Pont Neuf
The Pont Neuf is, despite its name, the oldest standing bridge across the river Seine in Paris, France. Its name, which was given to distinguish it from older bridges that were lined on both sides with houses, has remained....
as part of the triumphal procession. Louis was so taken with her performance that he dubbed her "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration".
Known throughout Europe, Sophie drew large crowds for her ascents. In Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
she was apparently the cause of the poor reception of Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....
's opera Silvana
Silvana (opera)
Silvana is an opera by Carl Maria von Weber, first performed in Frankfurt am Main on 16 September 1810. The libretto, by Franz Carl Hiemer, is a reworking of an earlier, unsuccessful opera by Weber, Das Waldmädchen...
on its opening night, 16 September 1810: the people of the city flocked to see her demonstration while only a few attended the opera's debut. She gave many displays in Italy. In 1811 she travelled from Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
to Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, splitting the journey in half with a stop after 60 miles (97 km), and later ascended again from Rome to a height of 12,000 feet (3,660 m) where she claimed that she fell into a profound sleep for a while before landing at Tagliacozzo
Tagliacozzo
-History:Near the modern city was fought the Battle of Tagliacozzo between Conradin of Hohenstaufen and Charles I of Anjou.-Main sights:*The Palazzo Ducale , built by Roberto Orsini....
. In the same year she again lost consciousness after having to ascend to avoid being trapped in a hail
Hail
Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is referred to as a hail stone. Hail stones on Earth consist mostly of water ice and measure between and in diameter, with the larger stones coming from severe thunderstorms...
storm near Vincennes
Vincennes
Vincennes is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the eastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris. It is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Europe.-History:...
. She spent 14½ hours in the air as a result. Sophie crossed the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....
by balloon, and on a trip to Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
on 26 April 1812 the temperature dropped so low that she suffered a nose bleed and icicles formed on her hands and face. She almost died on 21 September 1817 when, on a flight from Nantes
Nantes
Nantes is a city in western France, located on the Loire River, from the Atlantic coast. The city is the 6th largest in France, while its metropolitan area ranks 8th with over 800,000 inhabitants....
(her 53rd), she mistook a marshy field for a safe landing spot. The canopy of her balloon became caught in a tree which caused the chair to tip over; Blanchard, entangled in the rigging, was forced into the water of the marsh and would have drowned had not help arrived soon after her landing. Sympathising with Marie Thérèse de Lamourous who was attempting to run a shelter for "fallen women" (La Miséricorde) in Bordeaux
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
, she offered to donate the proceeds from one of her ascents to the venture. De Lamourous refused the offer on the grounds that she could not be the cause of another risking their life.
Death
Jardin de Tivoli, Paris
The Tivoli gardens of Paris were located at what is the current site of the Saint-Lazare station. These were several similarly named gardens, named after the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli near Rome. None of these remain today....
in Paris, her hydrogen-filled balloon caught fire and Blanchard, entangled in the net which surrounded it, fell to her death. She was reported as being unusually nervous before starting this ascent.
Blanchard had performed regularly at the Tivoli Gardens, making ascents twice a week when she was in Paris. She had been warned repeatedly of the danger of using fireworks in her exhibitions. This display was to be a particularly impressive one with many more pyrotechnics than usual, and it appears that the warnings had made an impression on her. She was implored not to make the ascent by some spectators, but others, eager to see the show, urged her on. One report suggested that she finally made up her mind and stepped into her chair with the words "Allons, ce sera pour la dernière fois" ("Let's go, this will be for the last time").
At about 10:30 p.m. (accounts differ as to the exact time), Blanchard began her ascent, carrying a white flag and wearing a white dress and a white hat topped with ostrich plumes. The wind was blowing strongly, and it appears that the balloon struggled to rise. By shedding ballast Blanchard managed to get some lift, but the balloon brushed through the trees as it ascended. Once she had cleared the treetops Blanchard began the display by waving her flag. The balloon was illuminated by baskets containing "Bengal fire", a slow-burning, coloured pyrotechnic.
A few moments after beginning the display, and while still ascending, the balloon was seen to be in flames. Some reports say that the balloon momentarily disappeared behind a cloud and that when it reappeared it was on fire—whatever the circumstances, the gas in the balloon was burning. Blanchard began to descend rapidly, but the balloon, caught in the wind, continued to move off from the pleasure gardens even as it went down. Some spectators thought these events were part of the show and applauded and shouted their approval. The balloon had not risen very high and, although the escaping gas was burning, the gas within the balloon maintained sufficient lift for a while to prevent the craft plummeting directly to the ground. By rapidly shedding ballast Blanchard was able to slow the descent. Most reports say she appeared to be calm during the descent, but she was said to be wringing her hands in despair as the craft approached the ground. Rumours later circulated that she had gripped the chair of her craft so tightly that "several arteries had snapt through the effort."
Some reports credit her with crying out "À moi!" ("help", or literally, "to me"), as she struck the roof. Although the crowds rushed to her assistance and attempts were made to save her, she had either died instantly, from a broken neck, or at most ten minutes later.
The most likely cause of the accident was thought to be that the fireworks attached to her balloon had been knocked out of position by a tree as she ascended, possibly because the balloon was heavily loaded and failed to rise quickly enough. When she had lit the fuses the fireworks headed towards the balloon instead of away from it, and one of them burned a hole in the fabric, igniting the gas. One man reportedly spotted the problem and shouted to her not to light the fuses, but his cries were drowned out by the cheering of the crowd. Later reports suggested she had left the gas valve open, allowing sparks to ignite the gas and set fire to the balloon, or that her balloon was of poor construction and allowed gas to escape throughout the ascent.
Legacy
Norwich DuffNorwich Duff
Admiral Norwich Duff was a Royal Navy officer.The son of Captain George Duff RN, and Sophia Dirom, he was born at 9 South Castle Street, Edinburgh. He entered the Royal Navy in July 1805, just before his 13th birthday, serving aboard his father's ship HMS Mars as a midshipman...
, who had witnessed Blanchard's ascent and the accident, recorded:
On hearing she had died, the proprietors of the Tivoli Gardens immediately announced that the admission fees would be donated for the support of her children, and some spectators stood at the gates appealing to the citizens of Paris for donations. The appeal raised 2,400 francs
French franc
The franc was a currency of France. Along with the Spanish peseta, it was also a de facto currency used in Andorra . Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money...
, but after the collection it was discovered that she had no surviving children, so the money was used instead to erect a memorial, topped with a representation of her balloon in flames, above her grave in the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Her tombstone was engraved with the epitaph "victime de son art et de son intrépidité" ("victim of her art and intrepidity"). The remainder of the money, about 1,000 francs, was donated to the Lutheran Église des Billettes which Blanchard had attended. Though not rich, at the time of her death she had cleared the debts left to her by her husband and was financially secure. Each of her ascents had cost her around 1,000 francs, not including the cost of maintenance of the balloon. In her will she left property worth between 1,000 and 50,000 francs to the daughter of some acquaintances. In total, she had made 67 balloon ascents.
The story of her death was recounted throughout Europe. Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
mentioned her in Five Weeks in a Balloon
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen is an adventure novel by Jules Verne.It is the first Verne novel in which he perfected the "ingredients" of his later work, skillfully mixing a plot full of adventure and twists that hold the reader's interest with...
and, in The Gambler
The Gambler (novel)
The Gambler is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky about a young tutor in the employment of a formerly wealthy Russian general. The novella reflects Dostoyevsky's own addiction to roulette, which was in more ways than one the inspiration for the book: Dostoyevsky completed the novella under a...
, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
likened the thrill of committing oneself in gambling to the sensation that Blanchard must have felt as she fell. For others, her death proved a cautionary tale, either as an example of a woman exceeding her station (as with Grenville Mellen, who said that it proved "a woman in a balloon is either out of her element or too high in it") or as the price of vanity for attempting such spectacular shows. Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
commented "The jug goes often to the well, but is pretty sure to get cracked at last". With the advent of powered flight, ballooning and Blanchard's story were relegated to the margins of aviation history. A novel inspired by Blanchard's story, Linda Donn's The Little Balloonist, was published in 2006.