I cannot explain why, but I have no confidence; it does not seem possible to rediscover in this boastful plebs these first soldiers of la Marseillaise. They seem to me simply cynical cads, full of fun and frolic, playing politics; lads who have no feeling under the left breast for the vast sacrifices of the nation. Oui, la République….
One thing was certain; as in the case of past revolutions, France was now ruled by a Government formed by Parisians, of Parisians, and for Parisians. The views of the rest of the country had never been considered for one moment.
Among his first duties Trochu took it upon himself to notify Palikao of what had transpired. Trochu found a broken man who had just received word that his son had been mortally wounded at Sedan. His head resting between his hands, Palikao hardly seemed to take anything in, and then announced that he was leaving for Belgium. Meanwhile the Empress had already fled. Courageously she had stayed on at the Tuileries that afternoon long after the invasion of the Palais Bourbon, until two old friends, Nigra and Metternich, the Italian and Austrian Ambassadors, had come and urged her to flee. At first she refused. She remembered the humiliation in which Louis XVIII had left, forgetting even his slippers, and how poor old Louis-Philippe and Amélie had scuttled out of these same Tuileries in an open coach, taking only fifteen francs with them, and leaving their dinner to be finished by the revolutionaries. She had long sworn that none of this would happen to her. But it was already late. The servants were beginning to desert their imperial mistress, flinging off their livery and pilfering as they went. The mob gathering outside could be clearly heard within; then a clatter of muskets in the courtyard and rough voices on the main staircase. Fortunately something still held the mob back, perhaps the memory of Louis-Napoleon’s ruthlessness during the coup d’état of 1851. The Empress at last consented to leave. It was too late to use the gate on the Place du Carrousel, which was filled with people, so the Empress, accompanied by the two ambassadors and her lady-in-waiting, Madame Lebreton, left by a side door and scurried through the galleries of the Louvre. At the Rue de Rivoli exit the diplomats a little ungallantly placed the two heavily veiled women in a carriage and left them to their fate. At first they went to the house of a State Councillor in the Boulevard Haussmann, but he had already gone. It was the same story at the house of the Empress’s Chamberlain in the Avenue de Wagram. Eventually, in despair, she thought of her American dentist, Dr. Evans, the man who had bought up the Civil War ambulance after it had been shown at the Great Exhibition.
The handsome and popular dentist was at home, entertaining two ladies. At once he offered his services. The next day at dawn he smuggled the Empress out of Paris in his own coach, telling the sentries on the barricades that he had with him ‘a poor woman on her way to a lunatic asylum’. Two days later the party safely reached Deauville, where Dr. Evans persuaded an Englishman, Sir John Burgoyne, to take the Empress over to England. It was an extremely rough passage, and the Empress landed feeling so unwell that she had to be taken to see a doctor; by a strange coincidence it was the same that had attended the seventy-five-year-old Louis-Philippe after his flight in 1848.
So the Second Empire ended. The faithful Mérimée wrote to Panizzi that day: ‘Everything is collapsing at once’; and six weeks later he died broken-hearted in Cannes. The rest of imperial society made its way, with Palikao, to Brussels; passing en route that most famous of returning exiles, Victor Hugo, and his ménage. As they encountered the beaten remnants of the Sedan army, Hugo wept and remarked to his companions: ‘I should have preferred never to return rather than see France so humiliated, to see France reduced to what she was under Louis XVIII!’
In Paris the mob had now occupied the Tuileries, finding all the sad signs of an unintended departure; a toy sword half-drawn on a bed, empty jewel cases strewn on the floor, and on a table some bits of bread and a half-eaten egg. In the time-honoured sequence of French revolutions, the mob quickly set about effacing the traces of the fallen regime. Just as at the onset of the ‘Hundred Days’ the fleurs-de-lis had been unpicked from the Tuileries carpets and replaced with Napoleonic bees, so now all the N’s and imperial eagles were chiselled and ripped off the public buildings, and busts of the deposed Emperor joyfully hurled into the Seine. At the main entrance of the Tuileries, later in the afternoon of September 4th, Goncourt saw scribbled in chalk the words ‘Property of the People’. A young soldier was holding out his shako to the crowd and crying ‘For the Army’s wounded’, while others in white shirts had climbed up the pedestals of the peristyle columns and were shouting out ‘Free entry into the bazaar!’
Throughout the city an atmosphere of unrestrained carnival reigned, and evidently no-one had time to share Goncourt’s sober thoughts about the new regime. It was a sparklingly sunny day, no blood had been shed, and all Paris now turned out in its Sunday best to celebrate the most joyous revolution it had ever had. George Sand, aged sixty-six, rejoiced: ‘This is the third awakening; and it is beautiful beyond fancy…. Hail to thee, Republic! Thou art in worthy hands, and a great people will march under thy banner after a bloody expiation….’ On the afternoon of September 4th, Edwin Child noted how ‘the army fraternized with the citizens, carrying the butt end of their muskets in the air, and the town presented more the appearance of a grand national fête, than that of the capital of a country that has just received the shock of the greatest capitulation and defeat known in history’. There were some incredible scenes. Juliette Adam, long an enthusiastic Republican, thought that the Concorde presented ‘a marvellous spectacle’:
From the chestnut trees of the Tuileries just as far as the horizon of Mont-Valérien and the hills bathed by the Seine, the scene is on so grand a scale, the crowd feels such a real communion of ideals and desires, that poetry and enthusiasm invade even the coldest and most insensitive hearts. Everything provokes admiration, everything fascinates the vision of these deeply moved Parisians! Around the lamp posts, red crêpe flutters in the breeze… water gushes and sings in the fountains; the dome of the Invalides glitters in the sun…
On the Pont de la Concorde she noticed a young worker in a red fez who had been singing the Marseillaise non-stop for the past three hours, clinging to one of the candelabra. Amid all the celebration, there was a universal intangible feeling that everything was somehow going to be all right now. All had been the fault of the Emperor and his extraordinary mediocrity—no one else’s, certainly not France’s—and now that had been purged. The new sixteen-year-old wife of Paul Verlaine (whose marriage conscription had postponed) voiced the mystique of La République that was so widely shared when she asked, longing for assurance: ‘Now that we have her, all is saved—that’s so, isn’t it? It will be like in…’ ‘Like in ’92, she wanted to say’, explained Verlaine. ‘They won’t dare to come now that we have her’, a workman said, echoing Madame Verlaine. After all, what quarrel could the Prussians have with poor France, now that she had rid herself of the wicked Bonaparte? What the Parisians could not see in this hour of extraordinary rejoicing was the solid German phalanxes, advancing ever closer, nor hear the German Press at home shrieking for the destruction of ‘the modern Babylon’.
After Sedan: Troops encamped on the Champs-Elysees
4. Paris Prepares
WHILE Paris continued to exist in a jubilee atmosphere, effacing the last relics of the Second Empire and, in that time-honoured continental manner, changing street names so that the Rue du 10 Décembre reappeared as Rue du 4 Septembre, the new Government settled down to surveying its assets. With a quarter of a million men captive, one way or another, at Sedan and Metz, little enough remained of the Army Louis-Napoleon had taken to the wars six weeks previously. General Vinoy’s newly formed XIII Corps which, fortunately, had moved too slowly to reach Sedan in time, was now in fact the last major unit left to France. Bedraggled, jaded, and dispirited, its return to Paris had reminded an American observer of the ‘floating in of a wreck upon the beach’. In a letter to their daughter, an English couple wrote
‘There seems nobody here to direct anything—soldiers arriving, worn out with fatigue, and no better rooms to be found for them than a bed on the damp earth in the Avenue de la Grande Armée—not even straw, on which to lay their weary limbs….’ Part of General Vinoy’s corps was also sprawled out in an encampment where that far-away memory, the Great Exhibition of 1867, had once stood. It contained virtually only two good regular regiments, the 35th and 42nd, which had been recalled from Rome where they had constituted the pontifical guard.
A bric-à-brac of other troops escaped from Sedan and elsewhere, numbering perhaps 10,000, made up the total to somewhere over 60,000. There were also 13,000 well-trained naval veterans, including marines and gunners with their weapons, which someone had farsightedly ordered to Paris; as well as a sprinkling of well-disciplined units formed of gendarmes, customs officers, firemen, and even foresters. Then there were a force of over a hundred thousand Mobiles, or ‘Moblots’, young Territorials from the provinces who had been organized too belatedly to have received more than the sketchiest training. These included twenty-eight battalions of Bretons, many of whom spoke no French and were regarded with contempt by the proletarians of the Paris National Guard (the feeling was mutual), although they were to prove themselves to be among the most reliable of Paris’s defenders. Thus with this concentration of forces upon the capital, Trochu had virtually denuded the rest of France.
Finally, there was the Paris National Guard. At the outbreak of hostilities this had numbered only 24,000 volunteers. Then it was expanded to some 90,000, and the Government of National Defence now vastly augmented it by introducing compulsory registration. Its members were paid 1.50 francs a day and—as a Republican sop to the extreme left-wingers of Belleville—were allowed to elect their own officers. To everyone’s astonishment the enrolment of the National Guard produced some 350,000 able-bodied males; a fact which in itself revealed the inefficiency of France’s war mobilization. What was to be done with this great untrained mass of men? Only a small percentage of them would be required to fill the role for which they were originally intended, that of relieving the regulars and Mobiles on the fortifications. And who was to control the unruly elements of the city, now that they had rifles placed in their hands? From the first Trochu and the regular Army generals had doubts about the National Guard’s military value; ‘We have’, said Trochu, ‘many men but few soldiers’. But nobody could then foresee what a terrifying crop would spring from this sprinkling of dragon’s teeth. The force, actual and potential, of over half a million men was supported by more than 3,000 cannon of varying sizes. Some of these guns were mobile field artillery, some were mounted in floating batteries and chaloupes1 of the Seine flotilla (they had originally been designated for service on the Rhine), but about half of the heavy pieces were stationed in the city’s external fortifications. And herein lay Paris’s principal hope of surviving a siege. The whole city was surrounded by an enceinte wall, 30 feet high and divided into ninety-three bastions linked with masonry ‘curtains’. In front of the wall was a moat 10 feet wide, and behind ran a circular railway supplying troops to the ramparts. Beyond the moat, at distances varying between one and three miles, lay a chain of powerful forts. There were sixteen in all, each mounting between fifty and seventy heavy guns and each within artillery range of its immediate neighbours. From Vauban’s day until the Maginot Line, the French have been unrivalled in the building of fortifications, and every one of the Paris forts was placed in a superbly commanding position. The most powerful of all was Mont-Valérien, perched on its great hill in the loop of the Seine to the north of St.-Cloud. Today, though the wall has gone and Paris has long since enveloped the line of forts, they still offer fascinating and unexpected panoramas out over the city.1 Unfortunately, however, the forts which had been built on M. Thiers’s instance in 1840 were already to some extent out of date by 1870. Nothing had been done to incorporate the lessons about plunging fire learned from the Crimea, and worst of all the range of heavy cannon had roughly doubled during the past thirty years. As a result, several of the forts could be commanded by artillery fire from neighbouring heights (notably those of Châtillon at the south), from which parts of the city itself could actually be bombarded. And then, as Viollet-le-Duc, that great restorer of medieval fortresses who was then serving as a colonel of the Engineers pointed out, there was something marvellously anachronistic about a modern city like Paris, in a country as centralized as France, withdrawing into its keep, while abandoning the country at large to the marauders.
Yet, however grave its deficiencies, the line of forts filled out a circumference of nearly forty miles; which meant that any investing army would be required to occupy a front of approximately fifty miles for a siege to be watertight, and this might require every spare soldier of even Moltke’s vast army. Meanwhile, to make up for the valuable time lost in August when his every endeavour as Governor had been thwarted by Palikao, Trochu set to work energetically to supplement the defences. Twelve thousand labourers were employed digging improvised earthworks in the weak places and laying electrically-fired landmines; the catacombs were sealed, and elaborate barrages placed across the Seine; the beautiful trees in the Bois were felled to make barricades and provide fuel; and Bessy Lowndes, an Englishwoman living out at St.-Cloud, watched while a huge gun was installed in the former Emperor’s park there. There were inevitable delays owing to legal wrangles over land appropriation, and personal tragedies as houses on the outskirts of Paris were demolished to improve fields of fire. There was the sad story of M. Flan, a famous vaudeville artist of the Second Empire, who had retired with his magnificent library to Neuilly. Now the engineers came to tell him that his house was to be demolished that same evening; ‘But it will take at least a week to shift my library’—‘So much the worse for your bibliothèque!’ That night the poor man took a room in a neighbouring hotel and was found dead of a broken heart in the morning. As work progressed, Goncourt paid a visit to the interior circular road running behind the ramparts and noted ‘the lively animation and grandiose movement of the National Defence’:
Throughout the length of the road, the manufacture of fascines, gabions, sand-bags, and in the trenches the digging of powder magazines and petroleum stores. On the paving of the former customs barracks, the dully echoing thud of cannon-balls tumbling off waggons. Above, on the ramparts, gunnery practice by civilians; below, musketry by the National Guard. The passage of silent groups of workers; the passage of the blue, black and white blouses of the Mobiles; and in a kind of grassy canal where the railway runs, the flashing-past of trains with only their superstructures visible, red with military trousers, stripes, epaulets and caps of this completely martial population, improvised in the midst of the bourgeois population. And amid all this, everywhere the uncontrolled scurrying-about of little open carriages, displaying slightly infatuated feminine curiosity.
For a visit to the fortifications was rapidly replacing a drive in the Bois as the smart Parisian’s favourite Sunday-afternoon entertainment.
In the centre of Paris, the Tuileries stables and gardens had been turned into a vast artillery park, and with grim foresight common graves were dug in the wasteland at Montmartre to prevent the possible spread of disease. As it was discovered that there were only two hundred rounds per heavy gun, Dorian, the vigorous new Minister of Works, ordered the rapid transformation of Paris factories into munitions plants and cannon foundries. Trainloads of treasures from the Louvre were shipped off to Brest (Goncourt had watched while a weeping functionary crated up La Belle Jardinière, ‘as if in front of a dead sweetheart when she is being nailed into her coffin’), and the empty galleries became another arsenal. The cocottes and other members of the profession that had grown so inflated under the Second Empire were chased off the boulevards and into workshops making uniforms. The partially completed new opera-house was turned into a military depot, the Gare du Nord became host to a flour-mill, and most of the theatres (closed in national mourning after Sedan) bec
ame hospitals, as did other such large buildings as the Luxembourg, the Palais Royal, the Palais de l’Industrie, and the Grand Hôtel. At the Bourse were billeted staff officers of the National Guard. On the top of the highest buildings, including the Arc de Triomphe, were installed semaphore stations; many of these were later taken over by the Jesuits, doubtless because of the legendary excellence of their grapevine communications.
Of all the factors confronting a city about to stand siege none is obviously more fundamental than the state of its provisions. How long would Paris be able to feed its vast population? It was a question the new Government asked itself daily. Fortunately the most efficient of Palikao’s late Government, Clément Duvernois, had as Minister of Commerce shown great initiative in amassing foodstuffs inside the city. The Bois de Boulogne had been transformed into an incongruously bucolic scene; ‘As far as ever the eye can reach,’ wrote the Manchester Guardian’s Paris correspondent, ‘over every open space, down the long, long avenue all the way to Longchamp itself, nothing but sheep, sheep, sheep! The South Downs themselves could not exhibit such a sea of wool.’ In the Bois alone, there totalled some 250,000 sheep, as well as 40,000 oxen, and there were even animals grazing in the smaller city squares. But by one grave oversight, Duvernois had overlooked the need for milch cows, which was later to cause terrible suffering among the children. On the outskirts of Paris Goncourt watched a cavalcade of market-gardeners, bringing into Paris all that ‘must not be left for the enemy, carts of cabbages, carts of pumpkins, carts of leeks….’ In the forest around Paris murderous public hunts were carried out to prevent any game falling into Prussian hands. Unfortunately the sight of all the beasts in the squares and groaning granaries encouraged Parisians in the belief that the city was more than well provided for, and therefore few thought of accumulating more than modest private stocks of food. The poor, in any case, could not afford to.
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