The Government itself had little idea just how much food it had in stock, or indeed how many mouths there were to feed. Vaguely it calculated there was enough flour and grain to last for eighty days and fuel for about the same time; and this in itself was assumed to be comfortably in excess of what might be required, on the Micawberish reckoning that before little more than a month was up Paris would be rescued by the provinces she had abandoned, or by some more or less divine form of intervention. Certainly no one imagined that there would be a siege lasting well over four months. Thus, although a rudimentary system of price controls was established, there was no idea of rationing. The actual control of supplies lay in the hands of the mayors of the twenty different arrondissements, which resulted in some grave inequalities. Eventually, and inevitably, high prices and interminable queues became the only effective method of rationing. From the very first this danger had been loudly predicted by Blanqui and the Socialist factions, and as early as September 14th the Central Committee of Workers had urged the Government to have all food expropriated and equitably distributed. Later that month, Labouchere, writing as the ‘Besieged Resident’ of the Daily News, wrote gaily to his paper ‘I presume if the siege lasts long enough, dogs, rats and cats will be terrified’; little did he know that he would soon be eating more than just his words.1
It was here that the Government of National Defence made one of of its worst miscalculations. No effort was made to get useless mouths out of the city; and indeed it was hardly reckoned that any effort would be needed. The herdsmen driving their beasts into the city were confronted daily with a solid mass of impatient coaches leaving it; and there were fearful scenes of chaos at all the railway stations, which—as departing Britons discovered to their sorrow—already refused to accept any luggage. Many foreigners and most of the corps diplomatique had pulled out; including Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador (which was to be a source of great bitterness to the remaining British community), but with the important exception of the American Minister, Mr. E. B. Washburne. Edwin Child’s employer, M. Louppe, hastened off to Geneva with most of his jewels, but Child himself, although he had got his passport ready, finally decided to stay and see the fun. There were many Frenchmen who with their passion for excitement shared his feeings, and ‘Il faut être là’ became an impulsive slogan.
The trains seemed to bring people in as fast as they took them out. ‘One might have thought Paris was the only safe place upon earth’, an English commercial traveller called Brown wrote to his wife in England; ‘thousands were crowding in all directions towards the barriers…. Men, women and children of all classes were carrying, wheeling or dragging some kind of vehicle, and the richer ones employed carts of every description from the costermonger to the brougham.’ There was an additional factor which was not without its impact upon the thrifty Parisians; the Government ordained a ‘fine’ on any resident leaving the city, proportional to their rents.
As Lord Lyons left, so young Tommy Bowles, who had been sailing on a private yacht in the Solent when the revolution took place, arrived to constitute himself de facto Special Correspondent of the Morning Post. Among his journalist colleagues hastening to Paris, Bowles was preceded by Henry Labouchere, who was to gain fame as the ‘Besieged Resident’ of the Daily News. An Englishman with Huguenot ancestry, ‘Labby’ was something of a character. Aged thirty-nine at the time of the siege, in his youth he had once joined a Mexican circus in pursuit of a lady acrobat. Lover, wit, cynic, stage manager, and diplomat; he had filled all these roles, and had then been elected to Parliament in 1865, where—as a radical and a republican—he was to be apostrophized by Queen Victoria as ‘that viper Labouchere!’ Inheriting £250,000 at approximately the same time as he lost his seat, Labouchere bought a quarter share in the Daily News and promptly appointed himself to Paris; an appointment which was to treble the paper’s circulation. During the September 4th ‘Revolution’ he had terrified his companion and fellow-radical, Sir Charles Dilke, by ‘making speeches to the crowd in various characters…’, causing Dilke to fear they would both be seized as Prussian spies. Thick and fast flowed other curious British and Americans, into the city, so that enterprising estate agents were soon circulating advertisements that read; ‘Notice for the benefit of English gentlemen wishing to attend the Siege of Paris. Comfortable apartments, completely shell-proof; rooms in the basement for impressionable persons.’ Thus, with the influx of foreigners, refugees, outsiders, and—above all—the armed forces, instead of having 1,500,000 inhabitants to feed as the Government estimated, there were in fact considerably over 2,000,000.
By mid-September a truly remarkable transformation had occurred in Paris. As a Frenchman, Louis Péguret, wrote to his mother in the provinces, ‘If you saw Paris today, you would be astonished. It’s no longer a city, it’s a fortress, and its squares are nothing more than parade-grounds. Everything is cluttered up with soldiers and Mobiles carrying out manœuvres in rivalry against each other.’ The Champ-de-Mars was a seething mass of troops, among whom Edmond Goncourt ironically spotted pedlars selling paper and pencils for them to write out their wills. Observing the workers out at St.-Denis, the ubiquitous Goncourt noted that ‘everybody who eats or drinks outside the cabarets holds a rifle between his knees’, and grocers had taken to selling sugar clad in National Guard képis. There was indeed ‘a smell of saltpetre in the air’.
This new-found martial enthusiasm had its unpleasant side: a mounting obsession for uncovering Prussian ‘spies’. A M. Patte wrote to a friend in England; ‘We are surrounded by spies. The other day… we arrested two German spies, disguised one in Garde Mobile and the other in woman [sic]; under the dress he had a loaded pistol and a German letter.’ Nobody—least of all anyone with a foreign accent or any eccentricity of dress—was safe. Among the first foreigners to be arrested was young Tommy Bowles of the Morning Post, as a suspected ‘Uhlan’, and soon after his release he watched a ‘very handsome and elegantly dressed lady’ picked up wearing mens’ clothes, and claiming that she had ‘been in the artillery’. She too was released when her case was discovered to have a simple, romantic explanation to it. Another Englishman saw a woman dragged off triumphantly by the National Guard, amid exclamations of ‘It is Madame de Bismarck!’, and from this episode he concluded that ‘it was positively dangerous for any flat-breasted female of more than the ordinary height, and with the suspicion of down on her upper lip, to venture on the streets.’ A Philadelphian and his daughter were seized while sketching in the Bois, and the Anglo-American school attended by one of Minister Washburne’s sons was ransacked by troops after an innocent pigeon was reported to have flown out of its garden and over the ramparts. After the Germans had arrived at the gates, a spinster’s garret was broken into because people in the street mistook the flapping of her scarlet and green macaw for some kind of semaphore signalling to the Germans, and as the Siege wore on such episodes became commonplace.
Often the ‘spy-mania’ led to situations that were far from comic. On September 16th, eighty-year-old Marshal Vaillant, the head of the fortifications committee, was manhandled by a mob which claimed he had been spying out the defences, and came within an inch of being shot out of hand. According to Bowles, one wretched drain-worker was actually ‘stalked by three hundred National Guards and… blown to pieces the next time he put his head out of his sewer’. Suspicions were whipped up further by the Paris Press, with even Le Figaro alleging that a consignment of French uniforms had been intercepted on its way to the King of Prussia’s headquarters; the most rational of men became susceptible, and Goncourt himself admitted that one day as he passed the shuttered mansion of La Païva he wondered ‘if this has not been a great bureau of Prussian espionage in Paris’. For the foreign community in particular things became so dangerous that one Englishman at least was to be found advertising in the press, ‘Mr. Crummles is not a Prussian, having been born at Chelsea’. Eventually, special passports were issued; nevertheless, by the end of the Siege one Engli
sh doctor could claim he had been arrested no less than forty-two times.
There was no mistaking the miraculous extent to which Trochu seemed to have repaired the morale of the shattered Army, and by September 13th he felt he was able to risk a mass military parade of the troops in hand. Stretching all the way from the Bastille to the Étoile, it struck one of Trochu’s staff officers, Captain d’Hérisson, as ‘the finest review I have ever seen’. In the background there were distant rumbles as the last Seine bridges were blown up, but there was comic relief when an elderly admiral with long white whiskers was carried out of sight by a bolting horse. Trochu took the salute astride a magnificent steed, which did not bolt; the drums beat and the bugles sounded, and there were rousing and reassuring shouts of ‘Long live Trochu!’ that were heartily echoed by the civil population. Certainly there had been nothing quite like it since that famous Longchamp parade held by Louis-Napoleon for the Tsar and the King of Prussia in 1867. The following day Trochu exhorted the Paris National Guard to ‘be completely confident in the knowledge that the enceinte of Paris, defended by the resolute effort of public spirit, and by three hundred thousand rifles, is unapproachable’. An eminent British banker in Paris who watched the review, Edward Blount, felt so reassured by what he had seen that he wrote to a friend in London expressing the conviction that the French ‘will not accept dishonourable conditions—I mean by this territory or ships. They will rather fight to the end, and, when Paris is lost, retreat to the last fortress left in France’. Tommy Bowles was already full of praise for Trochu, thought that Paris ‘will fight and fight well’, and sharply criticized the English armchair critics who didn’t agree. An Englishwoman on her last trip to Paris came away feeling more respect for the Parisians than hitherto, and thinking that they would not easily give in; while Mr. Brown wrote his wife on the day of the review ‘If it ever comes to fighting (which I do not think it will), I do not think Paris will fall.’ Of the British community in Paris, one of its most distinguished members, Dr. Alan Herbert, was in something of a minority when he wrote to his brother, the Earl of Carnarvon, ‘I believe the Parisians will not allow a regular siege. The general impression is that it is not possible to support one….’ and again the following day ‘I do not believe that there will be any serious defence of Paris….’, predicting (on more certain ground) that after the war ‘we shall very likely have a revolution more or less bloody’. In England, The Times, which had had its nose badly put out of joint by the unexpected performance of ‘Pumpernickel’, had now switched to supercilious forecasts of how long the ‘city of luxury and pleasure’ could take it.
As the Prussians drew closer, one thing was fairly apparent; there had seldom been a more powerfully armed fortress than Paris, or one apparently so strongly defended. The big question, and one which nobody seemed to bother to ask at the moment, was just how, and with what long-term strategy, the new leaders were going to use these considerable assets. The commissars of Leningrad in 1941 had had a generation of absolute power and a ready-formed ruthless apparatus upon which to base their conduct of affairs, but the Government of National Defence could claim no such advantage. Its men had spent a lifetime in hopeless and helpless opposition; they had been swept into power before being able to formulate any united policy, or forward strategy; and by conviction they were kindly-minded liberals, not revolutionary Dantons. Fundamentally theirs was a weak position in that they had no other title to be in power than the acclaim of the Paris mob. The Government’s enemies to the Left were to taunt it constantly that it regarded its chief function as being to maintain order, and thus the ‘bourgeois’ status quo, as much as to make war on the Prussians; and there was more than a grain of truth in it. There was certainly truth in Rochefort’s complaint that there were too many lawyers in the Government. Jules Favre, who with his high hat and badly-made legal frock-coat might have been a Daumier model, seemed to set the tone. Ollivier once remarked unkindly that Favre ‘considered a political discourse was just one more counsel’s speech’, and it was perhaps typical of his eloquent oratory that, having assured the immortality of his client, Orsini the bomb-thrower, he had then abandoned him to the death sentence. Simon, Ferry, Picard, and Crémieux were all lawyers; old Garnier-Pagès, whose long white hair, neatly parted over his forehead, flowed at the back past an enormous collar and down on to his shoulders, spoke as windily as any advocate; Gambetta was also a lawyer, but he was a different proposition altogether, as will be seen later. But it was Trochu, the man of September 4th, whose personality predestined what the Government of National Defence was to become, and in whose mind the strategy (such as it was) for the whole siege was determined.
In his portraits, one sees a short man with a round and bony head; bald, but with a waxed moustache and the inevitable little ‘imperial’ of the epoch. He had a lively voice and there was a look of intelligence in his eye. He enjoyed iron health, a phlegmatic, even temper, and was capable of working eighteen hours a day. He was a pipe-smoker.
As he had told his colleagues on his appointment as President, ‘Je suis Breton, catholique et soldat’ (to which the cynical Rochefort remarked that all this was ‘a matter of perfect indifference’). His father had striven, against great hardship, to make a living as a farmer on wind-swept Belle-Île off the Brittany coast. In 1866 Trochu’s elder brother had died, leaving eleven destitute children. Trochu, whose wife was barren, adopted the seven younger children and brought them up as his own. His long, rather sermonizing letters to them, constantly referring to ‘la philosophie de la vie’, are in the true tradition of the provincial bourgeois of the age, as well as being revealing of Trochu’s character. In his distinguished work L’Armée francaise of 1867 he had also harped on the urgency of finding a ‘moral philosophy’ to replace that of material self-seeking in the Army. Profoundly religious, he would have been extremely contented in the contemplative and sanctified atmosphere of a monastery. Jules Favre wrote ‘With Trochu, the Christian philosopher dominates the soldier’. It was true; though he was an extremely able soldier, it was as a military thinker rather than a man of action. Washburne, the American Minister, who was once received by the new President in slippers and dressing-gown, thought that ‘he did not look much like a soldier’, and General Burnside was equally surprised during a visit he paid him. On that occasion Trochu had spoken for half an hour on how wicked France had been, how she had fallen away from the Catholic faith and how the sins of her people were now being visited upon her, and then he burst into tears. Even among a Government of lawyers, he could outdo any of them when it came to long-winded, tedious speechifying. As Maxime du Camp remarked unkindly, ‘When he spoke, he believed himself; and as he spoke without cease, he always believed himself’. His lack of worldly ambition, commented on earlier, made him a kind of Ferdinand the Bull among generals, but at the same time he was a man of great personal honour. As the Siege progressed, he would steadfastly refuse any privileges and insisted on drawing the same rations as the troops; to the astonished annoyance of their colleagues, he and Rochefort alone declined the 20,000 francs salary the new Government had voted itself. After the war, he would accept neither the Légion d’Honneur nor the marshal’s baton that were offered him.
Trochu was by nature a Cassandra, and from the moment of his taking office he was frankly pessimistic about the prospects for Paris. As early as August 18th he had told the Empress’s Council on his return from Châlons that ‘tout etait perdu’, and he admitted later in his memoirs that the rejection of his plan to have Bazaine and MacMahon fall back on Paris ‘had extinguished in my eyes the last gleam of salvation… Paris besieged could no longer expect help from outside and must inevitably fall after a defence of long or short duration…’ By prolonging the defence of Paris as long as possible, Trochu as a regular Army officer felt that at least the honour of the Army could be salved; and that was the most that could be expected. Throughout the Siege, in contrast to the fiery and optimistic Gambetta, this question of ‘honour’ was to oc
cupy his thoughts quite as much as success, in which he never really believed. Part of his pessimism lay in the misgivings he felt right from the start about the forces at his behest; if the best of the regular Army had been so mauled by the Prussians, how could this armed rabble in Paris do any better? Although he had drawn the last of France’s Army into Paris, he feared that its quality would render any adventurous strategy immensely hazardous. ‘I had neither any strategic, nor tactical idea’, he later admitted in a passage of his memoirs that was to be ferociously attacked by his enemies. And it was roughly true; such little strategy as he devised was strictly opportunist and entirely dependent upon Moltke’s intentions. ‘In our Government deliberations’, wrote Rochefort ex post facto, ‘we were just like a gardener who, instead of watering his plants, waits for rain, certain that it will come sooner or later.’ Obsessed by the experience of his old chief, Marshal Bugeaud, at the Siege of Saragossa in 1808 (which lasted eight months), Trochu was convinced that Paris’s only hope was to sit tightly on the defensive and wait for the Prussians to pound themselves to death against the forts and bastions of the city. But what if they never attacked….?
In mid-September this was a thought that did not greatly exercise the Government, and still less the populace in whose hearts confidence had grown by leaps and bounds since the grand review of the 13th. The mood reflected by Goncourt and his circle on September 6th, when they had parted at Brébant’s with the words ‘perhaps in a fortnight the Prussians will be dining at this table’, had completely evaporated. Indeed, once more there was possibly more confidence than was healthy. The continuing superlative weather certainly helped to allay anxieties; though it was a little marred by the dust and the occasional unpleasant smell, since the street-cleaners and water-carts seemed to have gone out with the Empire, and most of the sewage-disposal men had apparently been Germans. An atmosphere of benevolent unity—something not seen in Paris for many a year—was now displayed by all segments of the population. The Place de la Concorde had become a kind of open-air patriotic theatre, and Britons in Paris began to weary of the never-ending strains of the Marseillaise. America—the first nation to do so—had recognized the new Republic, and Washburne conveyed her ‘congratulations’. The Bourse fluttered optimistically upwards as Italy, Spain, and Switzerland followed suit, and beliefs were revived that the rest of the world could not possibly leave Paris in the lurch for long. Mr. Brown passed on to his wife the rumour that ‘we hear America has put in a word to say she cannot look upon France being further humiliated…’, and Paris buzzed with other canards—that Britain and Russia would soon intervene, that the Prussians would give up the war as they had declared that only Louis-Napoleon was their enemy. Above all, there was growing incredulity that Paris, la ville lumière, the marvel of the world, should really be compelled to submit to the fate of any ordinary provincial fortress. If there was to be a siege, it was society that would be shut out from Paris, not vice versa, and this was clearly a situation that the world would not long tolerate.
The Fall of Paris Page 11