Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  Unfortunately, France did not have the military organization to back up its puffed-up patriotism and grandiose aspirations. Military reform had been debated since 1866 but France did not go down the Prussian route of universal conscription and three years’ service in the regular army followed by extended readiness in the reserve. It preferred a ‘professional’ army of hardened soldiers, ‘the grognards of the First Empire’ praised by generals of the Second Empire like Trochu, selected by lot and overwhelmingly of peasant stock because those with money could always purchase their ‘replacement’ by the poor.3 A reform of 1868 increased military service for the minority who were conscripted from seven years to nine, but for everyone else there was only a fortnight’s training a year, after an initial military service of five months, to qualify them for the National Mobile Guard. In 1870 this Mobile Guard existed little more than on paper, and chaotic mobilization meant that the Rhine army that invaded Germany under the personal command of Napoleon III on 2 August was only 202,000 strong instead of 385,000. Forces under Marshal Bazaine were defeated at Wissembourg on 4 August and at Forbach on 6 August, while on the same day a cavalry charge at Froeschwiller under the orders of General MacMahon was decimated by Prussian gunfire. On 9 August, as news of these defeats reached Paris, a crowd of 10,000–30,000 demonstrated outside the Legislative Body urging deputies to declare the Empire finished. They secured the resignation of Ollivier, his political career now over at the age of forty-five, but the Empire remained intact. Panic spread through the country at large and republicans risked being attacked as fifth-columnists in the pay of Prussia. At a fair in the Dordogne village of Hautefaye the mayor’s son, who shouted ‘Vive la République,’ was set upon by a group of locals and murdered. ‘We killed him to save France,’ one of the killers explained at his trial. ‘Our Emperor will save us in return.’4 In fact, the Rhine army was besieged in Metz, and the army sent under MacMahon to relieve it was defeated at Sedan on 1 September. Napoleon III, a sick man, surrendered to the Prussian King William on 2 September and was escorted to the Belgian border while over 100,000 French soldiers became prisoners of war.5

  War destroyed the dynasty, and it also plunged the Catholic Church into crisis. French Protestants were accused by bishops of supporting Protestant Prussia, and Alsatian Protestants in particular of facilitating the Prussian invasion. More than that, the victory of Prussia, condemned by Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot as ‘Europe’s sin’ because of its identification not only with Protestantism but with atheism, was seen in Catholic circles as a divine punishment for France’s apostasy from the Catholic religion, dating from Voltaire and the Revolution and culminating now in the withdrawal from Rome, where they had defended the Papacy since 1849, of French troops in order to fight the Germans.6 The way was now clear for Piedmontese forces to occupy Rome and complete Italian unification, which they did on 20 September 1870. Only a few thousand papal zouaves, among whom were loyal French Catholics such as the division commanded by a descendant of the Vendean leader Charette, defended the Holy City until told by the pope to lay down their arms. These became heroes and martyrs for the Catholic Church, the more so because France now fell into the hands of godless republicans.

  On 4 September 1870 crowds invaded the Legislative Body and demanded that it now proclaim the Republic. The speaker, Eugène Schneider, president of the Comité des Forges, was obliged to suspend the session as the deputies elected for Paris, led by Léon Gambetta and Jules Favre, but without the Orleanist Adolphe Thiers, went to the Hôtel de Ville. ‘The Republic was victorious over the invasion of 1792. The Republic is proclaimed,’ they announced, and formed a provisional government which they called the Government of National Defence.7 ‘Let the lion of 1792 draw itself up and bristle,’ declared Victor Hugo, returning from exile in Brussels to Paris. ‘Let us make war day and night, war in the mountains, war on the plains, war in the forests.’8 Gambetta, as minister of the interior, mobilized the Paris National Guard that had been disbanded by Louis-Napoleon after his coup of 1851 and by the end of September had built it up to a force of 134 battalions and 400,000 men. These supported the 60,000 regular troops and 100,000 Mobile Guards who were commanded by General Trochu, now military governor of Paris and president of the Government of National Defence, whom Juliette Adam hoped would be ‘our Washington’.9

  Unfortunately, 1792 did not materialize in 1870. Paris was surrounded by German armies after 19 September and cut off from the rest of the country. On 7 October Gambetta left Paris by balloon to take command of a delegation of the Government of National Defence that had been set up at Tours on the Loire, as minister of war as well as of the interior. He took the engineer Charles de Freycinet as his right-hand man to build up a Loire army of 200,000 regular troops for the relief of Paris and appealed to citizens of all French departments on 9 October to launch a ‘national war’ in which national guardsmen, mobile guards and irregular units of francs-tireurs would take part, enrolled into an Auxiliary Army with the same rank and pay as regular soldiers on 14 October.10 Francs-tireurs defended Chateaudun, west of Orléans, attacked by the Germans on 18 October, and provoked German reprisals against surrounding villages. What for the French was the highest manifestation of the nation-in-arms was for the Germans resort to unlawful guerrilla warfare, and it bred a fear of the hidden enemy, civilian rather than soldier, which returned to haunt them during later occupations after 1914 and 1940.11

  In fact, Gambetta’s ‘people’s war’ was not generally supported by the Government of National Defence. Having told European governments on 6 September that France would not cede ‘an inch of her soil or a stone of her fortresses’, foreign minister Jules Favre visited Bismarck in James de Rothschild’s pastiche Renaissance château of Ferrières, east of Paris, on 19–20 September, to learn that Prussia would not return Alsace-Lorraine, placed under German administration on 26 August. Between 12 September and 12 October Thiers, at the request of the government, toured the European capitals from London to Vienna and from St Peterburg to Florence, trying to convince the powers to intervene on France’s side, but to no avail, so he came to Tours to urge peace. Neither could Gambetta rely on the commanders of the regular army, who were Napoleon III’s appointees, had no love for the Republic and feared that Gambetta’s patriotic war would lead to social revolution, as in 1793. Bazaine, besieged in Metz, surrendered with 100,000 troops on 28 October, a gesture that was condemned by Gambetta as a ‘sinister epilogue of the military coup of December [1851]’.12 At his court martial in 1873 Bazaine argued that the army was the ‘palladium of society’ and must be kept intact for the maintenance of social order as much as for the defence of the frontier.13 Trochu, far from being a French Washington, refused to make use of the Paris National Guard on several occasions when sorties were made in an attempt to break through the Prussian ring round Paris. He later claimed that a tenth of the National Guard was made up of criminals and professional revolutionaries indulging in ‘armed demagogy’ and attacked Gambetta for being obsessed by ‘the military tradition of 1793’.14

  The German occupation of northern France had a traumatic effect on the French people. ‘I do not know how I am not dead, I have suffered so much for the last six weeks,’ Flaubert wrote to George Sand on 11 October. ‘The Prussians are now twelve kilometres from Rouen and there is no order, no command system, no discipline, nothing, nothing.’15 The system of administrative centralization set up in 1800 buckled and the country threatened to fragment into its constituent cities and departments. With Paris surrounded by nearly 250,000 Prussian and other German troops, southern France began to separate from the north. Republican feeling in cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Toulouse had given a majority of ‘no’ votes in the plebiscite of May 1870, and military setbacks now opened a political breach for republicans. In Marseille the town hall was invaded by republican hotheads, led by a young Jewish lawyer, Gaston Crémieux, at the news of the first imperial defeats on 8 August. Municipal elections held on 27–28 Augu
st put moderate republicans in charge of the city, but on 5 September, the day after the Republic was declared in Paris, Crémieux and his friends occupied the prefecture and set up a departmental commission, rivalling the city hall. As minister of the interior Gambetta sought to regain control of the country by purging the prefectoral administration and appointing his own men to eighty-five of the eighty-nine prefectures in the ten days to 14 September. His nominee for Marseille was Alphonse Esquiros, a Montagnard deputy of 1849 who had gone into exile after the coup of 1851. Unfortunately for Gambetta, Esquiros went native and on 18 September set up a Ligue du Midi which federated thirteen departments in the south-east of France, from Marseille to Lyon and from Nice to Montpellier. Its declared ambition was to raise forces to save the One and Indivisible Republic, but this was also the rhetoric of the federalist movement of 1793 which defended the interests of the cities and departments against Paris. Gambetta was forced to dismiss Esquiros and send a more reliable Montagnard of 1849, Alphonse Gent, to wrest control of the Marseille prefecture from Crémieux’s commission on 2 November and preside over new elections which returned Bory to office. Lyon constituted another challenge for Gambetta. It declared the Republic on 4 September ahead of Paris and established a committee of public safety in the town hall which introduced itself to Gambetta’s prefect, Challemel-Lacour, as ‘the government of Lyon’. Municipal elections on 15 September returned a combination of moderate republicans and members of the committee of public safety to the city council, under the sensible hand of Louis Hénon, a professor at the Medical School and one of the five republicans elected in 1857 to take the oath to the Empire. On 28 September the town hall was again invaded, this time by a band led by the Russian anarchist Bakunin and Albert Richard, leader of the Lyon silkweavers and local architect of the International Workers’ Association founded in 1866. They proclaimed the abolition of the state and called for a federation of communes across the country to set up ‘committees for saving France’, taxing the rich and raising volunteers, but Richard panicked and Bakunin and his crew were soon ejected by the Lyon National Guard. Cities such as Lyon and Marseille wanted not social revolution or the abolition of the state but a decentralizing republic that would merely allow them to enjoy municipal autonomy.

  The most serious problem for the Government of National Defence, nevertheless, was Paris itself. While Gambetta ruled from Tours, the rest of the government, including Jules Ferry, was still based at the Paris Hôtel de Ville. Yet almost immediately after 4 September the revolutionary currents which had been dammed by the Empire, wholly until 1868, then partially, broke free. The bookbinder Eugène Varlin had organized a Paris Chamber of Workers’ Unions in December 1869, which joined the Paris federation of the International. These workers followed the teaching not of Marx, who believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nationalization of industry, but of Proudhon, who had died in 1865, but believed in a stateless society of trade unions, co-operatives and communes freely associating. Moreover, although the Paris International had been devoted to international socialism before the fall of the Empire, on 4–5 September, much to the dismay of Marx, it sent an address to the German people quoting article 120 of the constitution of 1793, ‘the French people… does not make peace with an enemy occupying its territory,’ and calling on them to ‘recross the Rhine!’16 Based at the place de la Corderie du Temple, the Paris International was behind the setting up of vigilance committees in the twenty arrondissements, each of which maintained surveillance of their own municipal council and mayor, in order to ensure that they remained radical and patriotic. Varlin was a key figure in the vigilance committee of the 6th arrondissement, dyeworker Benoît Malon in that of the 17th. That of the 18th arrondissement, Montmartre, was the power-base of the red schoolteacher Louise Michel, who made it her business to extract food from hoarders during the siege and distribute it to the poor.17 In December the twenty vigilance committees elected a central committee, the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, which also sat at the Corderie and maintained a ‘dual power’ opposite the Government of National Defence, intending to fight any sign of ‘bourgeois reaction’.18

  Vying with the Internationalists for radical and patriotic influence were the professional revolutionary Auguste Blanqui and his followers. Blanqui launched La Patrie en Danger on 7 September 1870, or 20 fructidor Year 78 according to the revolutionary calendar it resurrected. It was bitterly critical of the failure of the Government of National Defence, Gambetta as well as Trochu, to pursue the war and contain reaction. ‘’92 saved the Revolution and founded the Republic, but the Hôtel de Ville is destroying them,’ he declared on 30 October/9 brumaire Year 79.19 The formation of a revolutionary, all-Paris Commune, on the model of that set up on 10 August 1792, when the monarchy was overthrown, was a frequent demand in clubs which mushroomed in halls and cafés all over the capital. ‘If you had the Commune,’ said an orator at the Club Reine-Blanche, Montmartre, on 4 November, ‘you could act like revolutionaries. You could send emissaries to stir up the shit in the departments.’20 The battalions of the National Guard, which elected their own officers, were also forums of revolutionary debate, although they remained fairly autonomous until the formation of a republican federation of battalions of the National Guard at the end of February, with a central committee that was to be the guiding force behind the insurrection of 10 March 1871.

  Paris in the autumn of 1870 was defined as much by the siege as by the rising revolutionary temperature. Madeleine Brès, the first French woman to enrol in the Paris Faculty of Medicine, was taken on as an intern at the Hôpital de la Pitié, although only for the duration of the siege. Juliette Adam rediscovered her expertise as a doctor’s daughter and organized a hospital for wounded soldiers in the Music Conservatory in the 9th arrondissement. ‘All day I am with the wounded who moan, are dressed, amputated, whose tortures afflict me,’ she wrote, although she was still in a position to maintain something of a salon in the evening, not least because her husband Edmond was prefect of police.21 Despite the hardships Paris society still existed to a limited extent. Jules de Goncourt died in 1870 but his brother Edmond hosted Tuesday literary dinners at Brebant’s restaurant, attended by Théophile Gautier, Ernest Renan, the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, Auguste Nefftzer, editor of Le Temps, and later Louis Blanc, with his ‘priest’s physique and his Levite’s frock coat… secretly bitter that his name, so popular in ’48, has so little weight with the masses’.22 At the other end of the spectrum, reported the writer Francisque Sarcey, ‘Victor Hugo is finally having the day he has awaited for eighteen years,’ his attack on the Second Empire, Les Châtiments, being read to 3,000 spectators at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, before transferring to the Comédie Française. The Popular Sunday concerts of Pasdeloup began their autumn season on 23 October and the Folies Bergère was still frequented by Parisians who wanted to ‘smoke a cigar and have a good joke, which is the nature of every boulevardier’.23

  The wit and resourcefulness of Parisians could not disguise the fact that the situation was becoming increasingly desperate. Frustration with the Government of National Defence, which seemed to prefer surrender to using the energy of the armed people to lift the siege of Paris, came to a head with news of the capitulation of Marshal Bazaine at Metz on 28 September and the decision of General Trochu to abandon Le Bourget outside Paris on 30 October. On 31 October the Hôtel de Ville was invaded by revolutionaries led by Blanqui and Flourens, who commanded the Montmartre and Belleville (20th) National Guard, taking the Government of National Defence hostage. Leaping on to a table, Flourens proclaimed the formation of a committee of public safety that was to include Blanqui, Delescluze and Victor Hugo, to oversee the election of a Commune. In the event, the government was liberated by loyal National Guards led by Jules Ferry and Edmond Adam. A deal was reached with the insurgents under which there would be no arrests, but a referendum would take place testing support for the Government of National Defence. In addition elections would b
e held, not for a Commune, but for new municipalities in the twenty arrondissements. This appeal to the electorate marginalized the revolutionaries. The Government of National Defence was acclaimed by 90 per cent of the vote on 3 November, and municipal elections on 5/8 November returned radical mayors to only two town halls in north-east Paris, Delescluze to the 19th and the Blanquist woodworker Gabriel Ranvier to the 20th. To offset them Jules Ferry was appointed mayor of Paris.

  The survival of the Government of National Defence did nothing to relieve the military situation. The Army of the Loire, sent to liberate Paris, captured Orléans but was driven out again on 4–5 December. The Army of the North took Saint-Quentin on 18 January, but was forced out the next day. The government retreated to Bordeaux as the so-called artists’ battalion of the National Guard built a huge snow statue entitled Resistance above the city defences of the 19th arrondissement.24 Conditions in Paris, however, were making resistance difficult. An attempted breakout to Champigny on 30 November ended in disaster two days later. Food prices rose astronomically: a chicken worth 3 francs before the siege was sold for 15 francs, ham went up from 2 francs 50 to 16 francs a kilo. Eggs were a franc each when a worker’s wage was 4 francs a day if he was in work, but only 1 franc 50 if he was a national guardsman.25 The poor were reduced to eating dogs and cats, the bourgeoisie to eating wildlife and zoo animals. Juliette Adam served camel’s hump on 23 December and a portion of the elephant Castor, partner of another called Pollux, on New Year’s Day 1871. On 14 January Edmond de Goncourt ate a blackbird he had shot in his garden. Trees in the Bois de Boulogne were stripped and wooden fences knocked down for firewood.26 On 27 December the Prussians opened up an artillery bombardment, clearing the Avron plateau, and began a bombardment of Paris itself on 5 January. ‘The barbarians,’ wrote Juliette Adam, ‘more than three thousand bombs fell around the Jardin des Plantes and the Luxembourg… One woman returning home found her two children in shreds.’27 A final breakout attempt to the west of Paris on 19 January came to grief at Buzenval. This triggered another attack on the Hôtel de Ville on 22 January, orchestrated by the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements, which ended with the opposing sides for the first time shooting at each other. Trochu was finally dismissed as governor of Paris but this was not to steel Parisian defences. On 26 January Jules Favre went to discuss an armistice with Bismarck, who was now chancellor of the German Empire that had been proclaimed in the château of Versailles on 18 January.