Popular expectations were sky-high, buoyed up on a sense of empowerment. ‘We are not rogues and thieves, we are the people, nothing more, and nothing is above us,’ one young craftsman wrote to his family in the country, assuring them of his safety and warning them against the lies of the reactionary press. He then went on to list the Communards’ aspirations: ‘We do not want looting or theft, we do not want pomp and ceremony. Here is what we want and nothing else. A united and indivisible republic; the separation of Church and State; free and compulsory education by lay teachers; the abolition of all permanent armies and every citizen to bear arms, but in his own district, that is, as the National Guard.’ Across France, revolutionary communes were declared in Lyons and Marseilles, Toulouse and Le Creusot, Saint-Etienne, Limoges, Perpignan and Cette. Viewed from Paris, the country appeared to be ablaze with revolutionary fervour.
Yet victory would not be quite so easy to achieve. Even in the capital there were pockets of reaction to be found, with the newly formed ‘Friends of Order’ offering a standard to which those who feared the Commune could rally. And the Commune ignored at its peril the guiding hand of Thiers, who had orchestrated the ‘Friends’ as an early part of his far larger strategy to take back the capital and rid France for good of the troublemaking radicals.
In Versailles, Thiers watched and waited, presiding over the affairs of the Assembly with an air of lawyerly predation, his cropped head and thick neck swivelling within the high, starched collars he favoured, his hooked nose befitting his owl-like nature. The weeks preceding the debacle over the cannon had seen Chancellor Bismarck and other foreign leaders urge Thiers to confront his enemies on the left. Evoking a conspiracy hatched in London, that had supposedly cast its net across France and which, if unchecked, might spread far beyond its borders, their aim was the extirpation of the International, led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. That the German pair’s influence over how the ‘desperate folly’ of the Commune unfolded was quite negligible was disregarded by Europe’s forces of reaction. Colonel Stieber and the Prussian leadership may have vacated Versailles, leaving many tens of thousands of German soldiers to garrison France until the agreed reparations were paid in full, but Thiers, installed in the same offices, needed little encouragement to act resolutely from a shared hatred of socialist sedition.
Some would later suggest that Thiers had conceived the attempt to seize the guns as a ruse to draw the sting out of the revolution, pointing as evidence to the notorious unreliability of the regiment handed the job and the failure of the limbers to materialise. Either way, he had a long-cherished plan available to exploit its failure, following the government’s withdrawal from Paris. During 1848, when wildfire uprisings had spread across Europe, he had been France’s prime minister, advising King Louis-Philippe on how to stamp out radicalism: the fourteen fortresses surrounding Paris, including Mont-Valérien, had been built under his supervision with, some said, half an eye on implementing just such a strategy of internal control. He would now pursue the very policy he had recommended in vain back then: playing for time, to allow the army to regroup outside the capital, he would then launch a massed attack on Paris that would silence radicalism for a generation to come. Nothing, though, was a foregone conclusion.
Had the leaders of the Commune realised the true fragility of Thiers’ position, both political and military, General Duval’s argument for a swift and decisive attack out of Paris might have received a more positive hearing. For Thiers’ very legitimacy, like that of the National Assembly as a whole, was fading by the day, with hard-line monarchist representatives sniffing for any signs of weakness that might allow them to usurp power. Even the crack battalions filled with ‘the flower of French chivalry’ that Thiers claimed to have at his disposal were a chimera, comprising no more than the 12,000-strong residue of the regular army, a force vastly outnumbered by the National Guard in Paris. And most troublesome of all for Thiers’ strategy was the fact that, in the rush to withdraw loyalist units from Paris, the key fortress of Mont-Valérien that loomed over the road out to Versailles had been unintentionally abandoned to the rebels.
To capitalise on the challenging circumstances that prevailed, Thiers required all the considerable cunning he could muster. Desperately needing time for the army to rebuild, he deftly confided to the press that he expected the city to be back under the rule of the Assembly within three weeks. Meanwhile, protracted talks with the Communards, carried out through proxies, allowed him to pose as a peacemaker. By indulging the hopes of conciliation still harboured by those who had found themselves Communards more by accident than design, he delayed for the moment any military offensive from the capital.
Meanwhile, Thiers set about harnessing the defeated French army to his will by manipulating its impugned sense of martial honour. The Communards flattered themselves that they were the true defenders of the republic, who alone had held out when the rest of France buckled. To counter the perception of their diehard patriotism, Thiers labelled them as treacherous fanatics whose subversion of the state was to blame for the fall of France and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine: they were ‘communists’ not ‘Communards’, the Paris administration’s choice of name twisted to conjure the phantasm of global conspiracy against which the Catholic Church so vehemently inveighed, as a heretical pestilence that threatened civilisation. Eliminate the communists, Thiers seemed to wink at the troops, and your own, unfairly tarnished reputation will be restored.
In their naïve enthusiasm, the insurrectionists played into his hands. Publishing a letter from a general at Prussian headquarters to the new government in Paris, Paschal Grousset, a firebrand journalist, colleague of Rochefort and now the Commune’s minister for foreign affairs, carelessly translated as ‘friendly’ the general’s far vaguer assurance that ‘peaceful’ relations existed between Germany and the Commune. It was all grist to a Versailles propaganda mill that was busy grinding out rumours, including one that detailed how the Prussians had stood on the terraces of their billets around the city and laughingly watched through telescopes the events of 18 March unfold, while military bands played a jaunty accompaniment to the folly of the French.
Meanwhile, resentment of the Commune was further fermented by the cost to the National Assembly, in money and pride, of the predicament in which it now found itself. Lacking access to the National Bank of France, there were humiliating delays in paying the indemnity due to Germany. ‘Paris has given us the right to prefer France to her,’ Thiers had announced after the killing of generals Lecomte and Thomas, and la France profonde now rallied to his cause.
After a fortnight’s hiatus, on Palm Sunday, 2 April, the supporters of the Versaillais government were finally given something to cheer when its guns opened up with a brief bombardment of the suburb of Courbevoie. ‘Thank God!’ Thiers confided to his diary, ‘civil war has begun.’ His Catholic and monarchist opponents would have been gratified that the deity’s shadow fell heavily over the first clash of arms. ‘Vive le roi!’ shouted the Zouaves as they charged and broke the Communard lines; only six months earlier they had been serving in the international regiment that protected Pope Pius IX as he strong-armed a fractious Vatican Council into declaring him infallible in all matters of faith and morality. The atheistic Communards may not have considered themselves to have much in common with the Protestant Huguenots massacred 300 years earlier in the French Wars of Religion, but in the weeks and years to come they would discover a growing affinity with their heretical forebears.
Despite the initial rout of the Commune’s forces, optimism in Paris was undimmed. The previous two weeks had seen so many changes. Labourers and artisans had emerged from the sumps of poverty into which Baron Haussmann’s social zoning of the city had penned them, blinking into the bright light of freedom and self-rule. Their ‘descents’ into the affluent heart of the city revealed to many a world of opulence and luxury that previously they had seen, at best, from afar. A small contribution to a fund for recent war widows bough
t them admission to the Tuileries Palace, the one-time home of emperors, with its acres of gilding, while they could sample the refined musical fare on offer at the new Opéra entirely gratis. Surrounded by the conspicuous pleasures and privileges of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, yet with no cause now to be daunted by rank, Parisians greeted each other as ‘citoyen’ and ‘citoyenne’.
‘We are free,’ proclaimed Louise Michel, ‘able to look back without unduly imitating ’93 and forward without fear of the unknown.’ They were bold words but her hopes were not without foundation. Idealistic decrees had begun to pour from the Hôtel de Ville. Gambling was banned to save the poor from themselves, the Church disestablished, and a three-year moratorium declared on debt. It was only the beginning of what would become an extensive programme of legislation, yet immediately the virtuous example of the Commune seemed to begin trickling down. As the spring sun shone, observers claiming impartiality recorded that, in the absence of envy and oppression, crime spontaneously ceased. Only cynics whispered that the explanation lay in the abductions of troublesome elements by the Commune police under cover of night, or else suggested sarcastically that the criminals no longer had time to break the law, now that they themselves were in power.
It was a holiday mood, too, that infused the tens of thousands of the National Guard who mustered in the squares and parks of western Paris before dawn on 3 April, ready to march on Versailles. Some blithely likened the atmosphere to that of a picnic party setting out for the country, and hopes were high that by nightfall they would have secured the heights of the Châtillon plateau and control of the road to Versailles, barely a dozen miles further on. Elisée Reclus was there, as was his brother Elie, posted to different regiments. Leading the central tine of the trident of three columns was the flamboyant Flourens, his blond locks floating in the wind, the heroic role he had so long imagined finally his to command. Such was the abounding optimism that no one had thought to deploy the big guns that had seemed so precious to their defenders in Montmartre only a fortnight before.
‘Vive la République!’ cried the first Versaillais battalion to engage the National Guard on the right flank, as if in fraternal greeting. The Communard troops felt vindicated in their hopes and lowered their rifles as the seemingly congenial foe advanced from cover. Once at bayonet’s length, however, the Versaillais jerked back into an offensive posture. ‘Vive la République is all well and good,’ they barked, ‘but now surrender!’ Beaten by a ruse, the credulous men of the Guard were bound together at the wrists, five and six abreast, and made to submit to a gauntlet of sticks and curses by the bourgeois inhabitants of Versailles as they were led through the town towards an uncertain fate. The absurd hopes that had allowed the Commune troops to become so fatally trusting was less damaging, however, than the Commune’s complete failure in military intelligence concerning Mont-Valérien, the fort abandoned by the Assembly’s troops in their rush to withdraw from Paris but whose massive gates had subsequently been left invitingly open by the National Guard entrusted with its defence.
Undaunted by the setbacks on his right flank, Flourens had ridden on, the romantic spirit of the Commune embodied. Intent on punching through to Versailles, his column followed the straightest route, directly under the fortress’ imposing walls. Were he and his generals ignorant of its reoccupation by the enemy, some days earlier, or did men whose previous campaigns had been fought at second hand, in bars and revolutionary clubs, merely underestimate the significance of its loss? Holding fire until the head of the column had passed, the fort’s cannon and mitrailleuses then roared out, ripping into the ranks of the National Guard at close range. Within minutes, scores of bodies lay shattered in the fort’s lines of fire, with many hundred more untried recruits limping or carried back towards the city. When the Versaillais cavalry rode in to finish the job, what remained behind of the straggling column was too disorientated to mount any effective resistance. It was not yet midday.
Taking shelter at an inn, Flourens allowed himself a brief rest, but awoke to find himself surrounded. The witty intellectual and eloquent rabble-rouser must finally have realised how utterly different a real-life revolution was to the stage-play antics in which he had indulged a year before, using weapons from a theatre’s props store. Immune to the charms of ‘Florence’, a Versaillais gendarme serving under Boulanger strode forward, raising his sabre, and cleaved the vaudeville general’s handsome head in two.
Alone now, on the left flank of the attack, General Duval showed what might be achieved if the National Guard was marshalled with a degree of professionalism. His men, Elisée Reclus among them, managed to fight their way up on to the Châtillon plateau. But lack of logistical foresight meant a night without cover or rations, and in the morning Duval had no choice but to order his men to lay down their weapons. Herded along in a pathetic column of the defeated, Reclus witnessed those of his comrades who had deserted the regular army to join the Guard lined up for summary execution. Duval himself was dragged out from the ‘miserable scum’ and gunned down, to the jeering of the victors, in front of a sign advertising ‘Duval, Horticulturalist’.
‘Never had the beautiful city, the city of revolutions, appeared more lovely to me,’ Reclus would remember, the panorama of Paris before him as he gazed down from the pathetic column of the defeated, only for a Versaillais officer to interrupt his reverie. ‘You see your Paris! Well, soon there will not be a stone left standing!’ Further on Reclus might have watched local women prodding the brains that spilled from Flourens’ split head with their umbrellas. After such experiences, not even the most idealistic believer in the perfectibility of man could fail to comprehend the visceral passions that had riven French society, nor the depth and intensity of the hatreds that had taken root.
Only days before the National Guard had marched out, the artist Daumier had made a drawing that envisioned the apocalypse that might engulf Paris in almost mystical terms. ‘Death disguised as a shepherd playing his pan pipes among the flowers of a water meadow beside the Seine, every flower a skull’ was how Jules Verne described Daumier’s picture, published in the magazine Charivari. Already, the image seemed horribly prescient and if the credulity, unprofessionalism and lack of organisation demonstrated by the National Guard’s catastrophic sortie proved representative of the Commune as a whole, further tragedy was inevitable. As long as the opportunity remained to them, however, the Communards would allow themselves to dream.
During the hard winter of the siege, Louise Michel had been a vocal advocate of the immediate needs of the poor, as well as of their wider aspirations, petitioning the mayors of the arrondissements to assist with food for the starving and help meet the educational needs of the young. Clemenceau had responded to her pleas as best he could in Montmartre, and in Belleville it was Benoît Malon who had answered her call, a figure familiar to Michel from visits before the war to the Paris offices of the International on the rue de la Cordonnerie, where it seemed to her that the narrow, dusty staircase led to ‘the temple of a free and peaceful world’.
If Bismarck and Thiers truly believed the International to be a tight-knit and disciplined conspiratorial network, they could not have been more wrong. When attending its founding conference in London seven years earlier, Malon had, he would insist somewhat disingenuously, known of Karl Marx merely as ‘a German professor’. Whilst Marx and Engels had imposed their will on the organisation in the years since, the French section had yet to be converted to their ideological dogmatism. ‘I frequent all the parties, democratic, radical, Proudhonian, positivist, phalansterist, collectivist…Fourierist cooperations, etc…. I see everywhere men of good faith and that teaches me to be tolerant,’ Malon had written of his pre-war position. Despite Marx endorsing Leo Franckel and the young Elizaveta Dmitrieva as his two emissaries to the Commune, while he stayed in London to nurse a conveniently recurring kidney complaint, the same pragmatic ecumenicalism now applied to the Commune’s attempts to mould a new and ideal society in microcosm.
Malon’s own sympathies lay with the federalism of the Russian Bakunin, Marx’s rival for influence over the International, but it was the older anti-authoritarian theories of the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with which the experiment in social revolution now initiated in Paris was most strongly stamped. On 16 April, reviving the legacy of the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848, all workshops that had been abandoned or stood unused were taken into national ownership. The initiative provided the basis for a federalised, cooperative model of industrial organisation, and less than a fortnight later the system of fines imposed on workers as a means of unjust social control was abolished. Franckel’s efforts to secure a prohibition on night baking, which had entailed notoriously inhumane working conditions, provided Marx with a rare success.
For all Louise Michel’s admiration for the late Proudhon, however, she could hardly condone his conservative and some said misogynistic views on the role of women. For whilst the deliverance of the working men of France appeared to be at hand, Michel was adamant that for the social revolution to be truly radical, women would have to win their portion of liberty too; not only for reasons of justice and equality, but because it was they whose experience of oppression taught them the extent of what was required. ‘Men are like monarchs, softened by their constant power’ had been the sermon preached at the women’s clubs in which she had been so active over the winter. To break through the final barrier of male tyranny she would embrace whatever alliance was necessary, even with one of Marx’s envoys.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 11