by Douglas Boyd
What was Bazaine doing all this time? Cut off at Metz without hope of relief, he held out for fifty-four days until the end of October. Although later accused of traitorous inactivity, he was usefully tying up more than 200,000 Prussian troops who might otherwise have stormed Paris before its defences were ready. His unconditional capitulation on 27 October allowed 173,000 men, 1,570 cannons and fifty-three regimental flags to fall into Prussian hands. Living on much reduced rations, with their mounts and pack animals dying of starvation and then eaten as the only meat available in the treeless waste within the siege lines, they had rations left for only four days. Bazaine’s capitulation was nevertheless treated as meriting the sentence of death.
By 2 November Gambetta’s government had fled as far as Bordeaux, where it was attempting to raise and arm another half-million men. Paris was in ferment and starving. At the market in front of the Hôtel de Ville skinned rats were being sold at 50 to 75 centimes apiece, while a cat cost 8 francs – well outside the pocket of the workers. All the animals in the zoo at the Jardins d’Acclimation had been eaten long since, as had every horse within the siege lines. On 31 October, realising that the fall of Metz would release German forces to intensify the siege of Paris, the mob invaded the Hôtel de Ville. A battalion of the National Guard went over to the demonstrators’ side and order was restored only with difficulty.
On 3 and 4 November Adolphe Thiers was at Versailles, trying to arrange peace terms with Bismarck. At Orleans, von der Tann was now outnumbered five to one by Gen Aurelle de Palladines’ reinforced Army of the Loire. Seeking open ground to confront this threat, von der Tann moved his forces on 8 November out of the city to Coulmiers, 20km to the west. As the battle commenced the following morning, one of the German staff officers was Ernst Milson von Bolt, the ex-Legion lieutenant who had killed Antonio Diaz during the Mexican intervention and been awarded the Légion d’Honneur for it. Facing him in the Army of the Loire were many men he might have recognised through a telescope, had he the leisure to scan the thousands of faces marching towards the Prussian cannons.
One was that of Camarón survivor Félix Brunswick from Brussels, now promoted to sergeant. It may have been he who originated the legend that von Bolt ordered the German guns to cease firing on men with whom he had fought side by side in Mexico. The more likely truth is that firing ended when the Prussians disengaged to execute an orderly retreat northward. From Bordeaux, a jubilant Gambetta ordered Palladines to convert Orleans into an armed camp. Next day, batteries of artillery were already being moved in and trenches dug by the legionnaires.
To the government in Bordeaux, the symbolic recapture of Joan of Arc’s hometown was seen as the first step in liberating Paris. To spur on the legionnaires digging-in in Orleans, Gambetta telegraphed de Palladines, ‘Paris is hungry!’ But dinner was not on the way. The 200,000 Prussians and allied forces released by the capitulation of Metz now sealed off the capital from the rest of the country even more effectively, to prepare for the final assault.
There was an unexploited army of 80,000 Bretons cooling its heels at Conlie, just north of Le Mans. In the last desperate days of November, Gambetta promised it arms, only to change his mind the next day lest they be used for a secessionist uprising, as had happened under the First Republic. Nor was von der Tann on the run yet. On 1 December he made a sudden stand and counter-attacked, pushing the Army of the Loire right back to Patay outside Orleans and re-taking the city briefly on 4 December. With their backs to the Loire, the Legion and Zouaves were ordered to stand firm on the ‘wrong’ bank, covering the safe withdrawal of the rest of the army across the river.
It is a popular misconception that the French climate, apart from in the Alps and Pyrenees, is always milder than north of the Channel. Every few winters high pressure over Scandinavia brings Siberian weather as far south as the Dordogne. The leafless vines look like crosses in a white landscape. Mediterranean vegetation dies. Birds drop dead out of the sky from hypothermia. The mercury plunges to minus 25o Centigrade and lower. The winter of 1870-71 was like that. By 6 December the Legion was down to half-strength. The two battalions from Algeria had lost 210 men – some casualties, some prisoners and some killed by the severe cold as they slept in the open air. On 10 December, the sorry remnants were amalgamated as a single bataillon de marche ordered to strengthen the Eastern Army of Gen Charles Denis Nicolas Bourbaki, which was tasked with cutting German supply and communications lines in the Franche-Comté.
The legionnaires had been issued with two days’ rations for a journey that should have taken thirty-six hours. In unheated open wagons officially labelled fit ‘for 8 horses or 40 men’, they froze for two weeks as their trains were snowed in, thawed out, shunted, coupled to engines and frozen up again. De-training at Ste Suzanne near Montbéliard in the Franche-Comté, they were immediately put into the line with their numbers swollen by 2,000 hastily armed but untrained Bretons whose numbers brought the regimental strength up to 3,000 on paper. Gen Grisot recounted how hard-pressed officers created new units by seeding these men with a mixture of inexperienced NCOs and veteran legionnaires.[163] Discipline was a major problem, with hungry men deserting their posts and using their weapons to hunt small game for the pot, cutting down fruit trees in the orchards for firewood and selling equipment for food and drink in the sub-zero weather.
The Prussians were more accustomed to, and better equipped for, the extremes of winter. On 5 January Krupp’s cannons began a sustained artillery bombardment of Paris. Next day, revolutionary committees of the twenty arrondissements called for an end to Gambetta’s Government of National Defence. The uprising had begun.
In Bismarck and von Moltke the Germans had a unified leadership that knew exactly what it wanted. On the French side all was confusion. In the east, where the Legion was, Gen Bourbaki – a fine-looking man with splendid moustaches and a chestful of medals – had a number of insurmountable problems: his provisional government was still in Bordeaux, his supplies were inadequate and the infrastructure of his country was falling to pieces around him.
In such circumstances it was hard for his troops, including the Legion, to maintain morale against so competent a commander as Edwin von Manteuffel, the man who had prevented the Crimean War from escalating and had distinguished himself during the previous year’s invasion by winning the battles of Amiens and Rouen. In the war-within-a-war between these two ill-matched generals Bourbaki began well, with a minor victory over the Germans at Villersexel near Belfort on 9 January. His main problem was the government from which he took his orders, and which at one time ordered him to march southwest to Dijon and relieve the pressure on Garibaldi’s Italian volunteers, who should have been supporting him in the rear! The new legionnaires’ lack of training made them sitting ducks for the well-drilled enemy. On 19 January, not only was their paymaster killed in action and his pay-chest containing 4,341 francs captured by the Germans, but worse was to come during the night. No sentries having been posted by the inexperienced NCOs, a German patrol captured an entire company of shivering men warming themselves around their campfires. Yet, astonishingly, these ill-disciplined and largely untrained men marched into a German artillery barrage at Ste-Suzanne and briefly captured the enemy position before being driven off.
Unable to break through the enemy lines to relieve besieged Belfort, Bourbaki was finally too demoralised to command after being badly trounced at Héricourt, 10km short of the beleaguered city. Finding himself trapped between Manteuffel and the Swiss border with an exhausted army whose supplies were non-existent, he made the last of several unsuccessful attempts to kill himself on 22 January, and was replaced by Gen Justin Clinchant, a veteran of the Crimea and Mexico.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel, desperate for reinforcements, Gambetta ordered the Armée d’Afrique to ship to France the French-officered native cavalry still called Spahis from Ottoman days. However, the Spahis had no intention of dying for a France that was already beaten, and responded by murdering their of
ficers and launching a stab in the back campaign to get the French out of North Africa.
With tens of thousands near death from starvation in the capital, on 23 January Foreign Minister Jules Favre met secretly with the Prussians at Versailles to request terms. On 28 January a three-week armistice was granted by Bismarck to enable the election of a new legislature, with whom he could negotiate. The price for the armistice was the surrender of Paris and a fine of 2,000 million francs.
The Eastern Army was not included in the peace negotiations but left to fend for itself. Clinchant retreated, leaving two divisions including the Legion to hold Besançon, while Manteuffel chased him and the rest of his tattered army right into Switzerland. Crossing into the safety of neutral territory near Geneva, 87,847 weary men handed over to the Swiss an armoury including 285 cannons. Such was the confusion no one ever knew exactly how many men died in combat, from ill-tended wounds or from frostbite and starvation. Clinchant himself was interned and released in March.
It was all over bar the shouting. On 28 January the Ministry of the Interior had ordered all French units to lay down their arms. Deluding himself, or attempting to delude the voters about to go to the polls, Gambetta grandly declared that although Paris had been beaten, France itself was not defeated! In a general confusion that would be repeated in June 1940, the country’s politicians were divided between those like him who wanted other people to go on dying for a lost cause and Adolphe Thiers, who could say in all honesty, ‘I told you so. Stop the fighting.’
Thiers won, but inherited a country irrevocably divided and financially on the verge of ruin. One of the National Assembly’s first acts was to stop the salaries of the National Guard and order them disarmed. On 6 March all Legion foreign volunteers and 415 conscripts enlisted for the duration were demobilised to save money. Although Belgian, Sgt Brunswick survived this purge to find himself a senior NCO commanding mostly Bretons in a rump Legion of sixty-six officers and 1,003 men.
By then, the Prussians had been in the western suburbs of Paris for three days. In the city centre on 18 March the National Guard occupied the Hôtel de Ville and ten people were killed when the forces of order tried to eject them. The army attempted to seize the artillery installed by the Communards on the hills of Montmartre and Belleville, but the National Guard’s refusal to give way incited the soldiers to disobey orders and execute the two generals in command.
The flame of revolution spread like a forest fire before a strong wind. On 23 March the National Guard in Marseille stormed the Prefecture. On 24 March they proclaimed a commune in Toulouse. On 27 March what remained of the Legion was ordered to join the Army of Versailles. By 29 March Paris was governed by the Communards,[164] who promulgated their own laws, abolishing conscription and imprisoning anyone suspected of loyalty to the Second Empire.
The red flag was flying on public buildings and all the churches were turned into debating clubs where restive audiences were harangued from the pulpit to support a workers’ republic by men and women speakers, the latter demanding equal political rights and equal pay for equal work. While the many talked, a few extremists were already murdering hostages. Some were shot out of hand, others kept for show trials. In provincial cities such as Limoges, Communards stopped troops leaving for Versailles and Paris to suppress the rebellion. When the army suppressed the Commune in Marseille on 4 April, 150 Communards were shot and 900 arrested, to be transported at bayonet-point to the offshore prison-fortress of Château d’If in the Gulf of Lion. The rebels in Besançon failed to prevent the much-reduced Legion from leaving by train for Versailles, where it arrived on 1 April, with its dirtiest job ahead of it.
In Algeria another headache was brewing for Gambetta. On 8 April a jihad placed 3rd and 4th Battalions of the Legion – mostly stay-behind Germans – up against 150,000 armed Kabyles threatening to drive all French forces into the sea. By now hardly meriting the adjective ‘foreign’, the Legion in France was reinforced on 20 April by six officers and 370 conscripts from line regiments, bringing the strength up again to seventy-two officers and 1,373 men. Although almost all were French or Breton, the stigma of their next ‘operation’ has unfairly blighted the escutcheon of the Legion ever since and been the cause of both Communist and Socialist parties threatening to abolish it a century later.
On 2 May Paris trembled at the opening shots of the second bombardment that year, but this time the shells were French. On 10 May 1871 the peace treaty was signed in Frankfurt, with Bismarck refusing to evacuate the army of occupation before order had been restored in France. To that end, he agreed that the Versailles government might maintain an army outside Paris and ordered all the POWs held in Germany to be released so that they could strengthen it.
The bad news at the negotiating table for Thiers and Favre was that the indemnity imposed was raised to the figure of 5,000 million francs, with the Prussian armies to remain on French soil until it had been all paid! ‘French soil’ did not include the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, now declared German territory.[165] There was no choice. On 18 May the surrender terms were ratified by the National Assembly meeting in Versailles, after which, relying on the Prussians to prevent any insurgents from fleeing the capital to the north and east, the French army was ordered to suppress the rebellion. The anarchy of the Communards meant that orders given by their officers were habitually disobeyed, so that the massed artillery inside Paris was ill-commanded, with the gunners taking two hours off for lunch at midday and stopping when it was time for their evening apéritif. After dinner, it was sporadic at best. And yet by 19 May the Legion had lost three officers and fifteen legionnaires killed and nine officers and 102 men wounded – which often amounted to the same thing, given conditions in the field hospitals.
On 22 May the army discovered the city gate at St-Cloud unguarded and open. The Legion was among the units that immediately marched in and massacred 300 Communards in front of the Madeleine church to show that the government meant business. Atrocities multiplied on both sides, the immediate response of the people being to execute a group of six hostages that included the archbishop of Paris. Escalating the violence, the army shot 700 civilians in retaliation. This provoked a mob to break into the prison of La Grande Roquette and carry off forty-nine of the hostages locked up there, including priests and police, who were harried through the streets to cries of ‘Kill the cops!’ and ‘Death to the Jesus-lovers!’ They were pelted with filth, then shot and beaten to death in the rue Haxo.
By next morning the Tuileries and many of the government buildings and churches were aflame. In torrential rain and choking smoke, the Legion and other army units pursued the armed Communards into the Père Lachaise cemetery. There, they made a last-ditch stand among the tombs and family vaults until the ammunition ran out and they were finished off by bayonet and rifle-butt.
Such was the hatred this engendered among Parisians that legionnaires were warned not to loot liquor stores after a corporal died from drinking poisoned wine. On 26 May a Legion company shot prisoners after taking a barricade and ten cannons near the Porte de la Villette. The scale of massacres is unattested, but probably exceeded tenfold the victims in Robespierre’s better-documented Terror of 1794. The Legion’s regimental diary contains terse entries such as ‘Numerous executions were carried out,’ and ‘The morning (of 30 May) was spent burying the bodies of (those shot on) 28 and 29 May.’[166]
By the beginning of June the rebellion was over, but revenge continued. In retaliation for the murders under the Commune, both men and women were denounced and summarily shot as the government restored order. Long columns of prisoners were marched under escort through the Porte de la Muette, where Gen Gaston-Alexandre Galliffet conducted a personal Selektion, ordering individuals who caught his eye for no particular reason to be hauled out of the ranks and shot on the spot. The rest continued their doleful way under armed guard to prison camps at Satory, a military training area outside Versailles.
The politicians were also once again
re-shaping the Legion. To soak up the flood of refugees fleeing from annexed Alsace and Lorraine, it was allowed to recruit only men from these areas. Gen Alfred Chanzy, a future Governor-General of Algeria, who had seemingly forgotten how it had fought for him in the Army of the Loire, argued for the abolition of the Legion on the grounds that it was too dependent on its German NCOs. To redress the nationality imbalance, demobilised NCOs from regular regiments were offered the chance to re-muster into the Legion. Those who did, found themselves deprived of their French pension rights and treated as foreigners by a bureaucratic sleight-of-hand. When the news got out, the flow dried up. As a result, Alsatians and Lorrainers became the backbone of the Legion until after the end of the First World War, constituting about 45% of NCOs even though from October 1881 French nationals were at last allowed to enlist.
The trial of the leading Communards began at Versailles on 17 August and ended on 22 September, with predictable results. By December the number of people shot was officially 30,000, with 40,000 more in prison, many facing transportation to New Caledonia and other prison colonies. Among victims of this purge were those Paris firemen who had stayed at their posts and fought fires during the siege after being ordered to abandon the city and join the army of Versailles. Because they were under military discipline[167], they were judged traitors and shot.