Couldn't happen today

With regard to the French portion of the story, it was not until I had written the first part that I saw from a study of my chronological basis that the Siege of Paris might be brought into the tale. The idea was seductive; but I hated, and still hate, the awful business of research; and I only knew the Paris of the Twentieth Century.

Now I was aware that my railway servant and his wife had been living in Paris at the time of the war. I said to the old man, “By the way, you went through the Siege of Paris, didn’t you?”

He turned to his old wife and said, uncertainly, “The Siege of Paris? Yes, we did, didn’t we?”

The Siege of Paris had been only one incident among many in their lives. Of course, they remembered it well, though not vividly, and I gained much information from them. But the most useful thing which I gained from them was the perception, startling at first, that ordinary people went on living very ordinary lives in Paris during the siege, and that to the vast mass of the population the siege was not the dramatic, spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair that is described in history.

Arnold Bennett – Preface to Old Wives' Tale (1908)


Today that old man and his wife would be bombarded with the dramatic, spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair. The vast mass of the population would be induced to feel part of it, which of course they were, but not in the modern, mass media sense.