The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  One immediate result of the news blockade was a plethora of incredible rumours, which, since no one could refute them, the Paris Press printed with avidity. On September 29th it was reported that the Prussians were in retreat towards the coast, an anonymous American being quoted as having ‘heard them pack up last night’. The following week the Duc d’Aumale was advancing from Le Havre at the head of an army; a magical tunnel had been dug to connect Paris with the provinces, through which sheep and cattle were now pouring into the city; and among a mass of ‘secret weapons’ invented was a deadly new mitrailleuse that could slaughter the enemy three thousand at a time. Moltke was dead and the Crown Prince of Prussia dying; the Prussians outside Metz had been so reduced that any resident wanting to leave the city was chloroformed, in order that he might not notice their weakness as he passed through the lines; Prussia had been so drained of regular troops that the Landsturm were about to launch a revolution in Berlin; and there were even rumours of revolution in England. On October 24th when an aurora borealis turned the sky blood-red, it was said that the Prussians were firing the woods round Paris in the hopes of ‘smoking out’ the Parisians.

  Hand in hand with these spurious reports went column after column of the kind of nonsensical bombast that particularly infuriated the British correspondents in Paris. ‘In order that Paris, whose genius has given her the empire of the world, should fall into the hands of the barbarians’, declared Le Figaro, ‘there must cease to be a God in heaven. As God she exists, and as God she is immortal….’ Another paper complained of the world looking on impassively ‘at the ruin of a nation which possesses the most exquisite gifts of sociability, the principal jewel of Europe and the eternal ornament of civilization’. There was, snorted Labouchere, ‘nothing like having a good opinion of oneself’. When later, after a new series of disasters, an American read in a morning paper the comment ‘Thank Heaven, we can subsist for a while on our antecedents; they are sufficiently illustrious’, he was reminded of the boy on Bunker Hill, who, asked by a stranger what people there lived on, replied ‘Pumpkin Pies and Past Recollections’. The example for this bombast was set from the top, by Trochu with his passion for long-winded grandiloquence and Spartan aphorisms; and certainly as long as Victor Hugo breathed there would be no shortage of material. On September 21st he had marked the anniversary of the First Republic with yet another of his florid orations, proclaiming that ‘Paris, which has been accustomed to amuse mankind, will now terrify it. The world will be amazed….’ These mock heroics may have reduced sympathy for Paris’s plight among the foreign community, but they were lapped up with the greatest zeal by the Parisians. Despite the lack of real news (or perhaps because of it), there had never been a greater demand for newspapers in Paris. Some forty-nine new ones were actually started during the Siege, and to Labouchere it was a constant mystery where they obtained their newsprint. What was even less easy to understand, in the light of subsequent developments, was the fact that throughout the Siege the Government made no effort to control by censorship the steady outpouring of harmful rumours, of bombast, and later of violently seditious attacks on itself. (By comparison, it is worth noting that one of the very first steps taken during the Siege of Leningrad was the confiscation of all radio sets and the disconnection of telephones.)

  Every hue and shade of French politics was represented by this mass of Parisian journals. On the extreme Left were three notable organs which, not satisfied by a simple effusion of bombast like most of their competitors, had already started baring their teeth at the new Government. There was La Patrie en Danger and Le Réveil, edited respectively by Blanqui and Delescluze, those two professional revolutionaries who between them had spent so much time in various imperial gaols; but the most scurrilous of all was Félix Pyat’s Le Combat. Pyat was sixty years old, and in common with Blanqui and Delescluze had passed twenty-nine of these in prison, and much of the remainder in exile. His experience had given him a remarkable sixth sense which somehow enabled him to turn up invariably at the critical moment of a revolution or a conspiracy; more remarkable still was his facility for disappearing when things went wrong. His companion in exile, Louis Blanc, once remarked of him to Juliette Lambert: ‘His mistrust is extraordinary; in London we never knew his address. His best friends were kept in ignorance of it. Félix Pyat never even told it to Félix Pyat for fear that Félix Pyat would betray it’. Having helped precipitate the June uprising of 1848, when others came to pay the bill Pyat had vanished, and in May 1871 this slippery figure would be one of the few leading Communards to wriggle out of the net. His appearance belied his outstanding lack of physical courage; slightly resembling Louis-Philippe, he has been described by one writer as ‘superbly tall, with a romantic mane and beard, proud leonine gaze and a voice that could carry incredible distances… the purest romantic terrorist that ever flung a paper bomb…’ Pyat was a kind of backroom Rochefort, devoid of the letter’s appeal for the masses, but almost as brilliant a journalist and even more capable of being seduced into folly by the power of one of his own metaphors. It was Louis Blanc again who described him as ‘a distinguished man of subtle ideas and sensible speech. But as soon as he writes he becomes a madman, incapable of controlling himself…’ To Rochefort he was simply ‘a misanthrope embittered by twenty years of exile, grumbling at not filling the position in the Republic that was his due’. A renegade bourgeois, no one was more effective at enraging the class he had deserted; at the same time, among the extreme Republicans there was no one whose political ideas were more ineffectual and inchoate than Pyat’s.

  Returning from exile in London when the Empire fell, Pyat had launched Le Combat on September 16th. His first stunt had been to set up a subscription fund for a ‘rifle of honour’ to be bestowed upon any Parisian sniping the King of Prussia, and it was only a matter of time before Le Combat was making it plain that it would equally welcome the dispatch of General Trochu. The uneasy truce between the ‘Reds’ (as they had become known in more moderate circles) and the Government which had followed September 4th had not survived the initial disaster at Châtillon. In their assaults on the Government, Le Combat and its allies were now thoroughly representative of proletarian opinion in Paris, while at the same time they fanned the embers. Behind this rapidly growing opposition to the Government were a number of complex causes, not altogether explicable in terms of pure reason. The extreme belligerence of proletarian France towards the Prussians has already been noted, but is worth commenting on again; especially since it is a phenomenon that contrasts strangely with the tendency in intervening years for left-wing and ‘popular’ movements all over the world to become indentified with antimilitarism. At the beginning of the Siege, elements from Belleville held daily patriotic manifestations outside the American Legation, on which Hoffman, the Assistant Secretary, commented acidly, ‘Day after day Washburne was called out to thank them for this démonstration patriotique; I got very heartily sick of it.’ However odd its flavour from time to time, this left-wing patriotism was nevertheless ardent and sincere, but there was also a strongly particularist element to it. For it was Paris, sacred Paris, that was now more directly in danger than the rest of France, and Paris had to be defended à outrance. To its working classes especially Paris was France, while the rest of the country consisted principally of feudal landowners, reactionary peasants, and clerics. Paris was the sacred city of revolution, and as Dantonesque memories were revived of how the foreign invaders were repelled in 1792, so for the first time there began to be heard clamours for the rebirth of a Commune de Paris which, like its famous predecessor, would in some mystical way repeat the miracle.

  As far back as the year of the Great Exhibition, Prosper Mérimée had remarked that ‘the bourgeois regard war with horror; but the people… are longing to eat Prussians’, and since September 4th the divergence between the two classes in Paris had become if anything wider. As the Siege progressed it seemed likely to grow wider still; for one thing, though the harshness of Bismarc
k’s terms at Ferrières had temporarily united all France in favour of continuing the war, the supreme binding element of terror with which the Nazis (in their folly) confronted Leningrad by stating their intention of destroying the city and its whole population, regardless of surrender, was absent. To the property-owning and commercial classes, the war as it dragged on was bound to equal a waste of material assets; assets which the Paris proletariat had never possessed. Meanwhile, in the latter’s minds, the war since September 4th had taken a vital ideological turn. Before that date, there had been a somewhat equivocal situation where the Prussians were also enemies of the enemy, Louis-Napoleon. But now they were threatening the Republic, the glorious new revolution, which had to be defended at all cost. And not only against the Prussians.

  Old hands like Blanqui, Delescluze, and Pyat could recall all too vividly how in those previous revolutions the bourgeois had usurped the workers’ birthright, and they had fears that it was going to happen all over again. Every utterance from the moderate camp claiming that the ‘Reds’ constituted as grave a menace as the Prussians was seized upon as a warning of what to expect. Sooner or later the treacherous bourgeois would do a deal with the reactionary Prussians, and conjointly they would then set about stamping once more on the true Republicans of Paris. Favre’s interview with Bismarck was itself regarded with gravest mistrust, as revealed by Blanqui writing in La Patrie en Danger of September 22nd: ‘Since the Fourth of September the Government of the so-called National Defence has had only one thought: peace. Not a victorious peace, not even an honourable peace, but peace at any price… it does not believe in resistance….’ Every fresh military setback, every sign of flaccidity (of which there was to be no shortage) on the part of Trochu and his colleagues, henceforth came to be interpreted as evidence of ill faith, of collusion; worse, of treachery.

  From all sides they bombarded the Government with suggestions on how to conduct the war more vigorously, while at the same time seizing the opportunity of pushing through whatever municipal reforms they could in areas of Paris under their control. As early as September 15th a body describing itself as the ‘Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements’ published a manifesto demanding ‘Municipal elections, the control of the police and the election and responsibilities of all magistrates to be placed in the hands of these municipalities, absolute rights of the Press, the right to hold meetings and to form affiliations, the expropriation of all essential foodstuffs….’ A week later the Central Committee issued another manifesto, declaring ‘Point One: The Republic may not negotiate with an enemy occupying its territory. Point Two: Paris is resolved to let itself be buried under its own ruins rather than surrender….’ This then went on to demand the suppression of the Prefecture of Police and the election of an all-powerful Commune of Paris. At Belleville a meeting of 3,000 ‘citizens’ unanimously ‘deposed’ the mayor of the 19th arrondissement, ordaining his ‘immediate arrest by the citizens’. The innate anticlericalism of the extreme Republicans was not long in bursting to the surface; on October 9th, a letter published by a Citizen Berthydre outraged bourgeois opinion by suggesting that churches should be used to house the ‘brave National Guard’ as well as cattle and sheep, and not long afterwards La Patrie en Danger was dictating that ‘all the hospitals must be purged of priests who are to be arrested, armed and placed before the patriots in the most dangerous places’. Meanwhile, fresh grist was added to the ‘Red’ mill when, at the end of September, the Government feebly adjourned the holding of municipal elections from one day to another, finally announcing on October 8th that they would postpone them altogether until the Siege was raised.

  And now a source of power potential such as the Paris extremists had never known before was there to lend immense amplification to their voices. The Garde Nationale had rapidly established itself as the storm-centre of the Left. From the Government’s point of view it was turning out, in more ways than just one, worse even than the most sceptical regular soldiers, like Trochu, had predicted. Originally, in the minds of such rosy-spectacled liberals as Ernest Picard (and, indeed, Gambetta too), the creation of the Garde would fulfil three functions: it would quickly produce a mass of trained soldiers; it would provide relief for the poor of Paris, now confronted with widespread unemployment; and it would keep the ‘Reds’ quiet by giving them an outlet for their bellicosity. But in only the second respect had the Government hopes shown any likelihood of vindication. For their services, National Guardsmen received the handsome emolument of 1·50 francs a day, and their wives half-pay (Pyat had promptly demanded that ‘unmarried wives’ should be accorded the same benefits).1 Undoubtedly it was to save a great many of the poorer Parisians from starvation during the Siege, but even these benefits had their built-in dangers, as the shrewd eye of young Tommy Bowles quickly noted: ‘These thirty sous will constitute a formidable difficulty when the war is over, for the recipients have already come to consider they have a right to State pay and will strongly resist its withdrawal…’

  Whether through the allure of the thirty sous, or genuine patriotism, in sheer numbers the recruitment of the National Guard had been an unexpected success, and the initial enthusiasm in its ranks quite enormous. Between September 5th and 13th alone, 78 new battalions (each of roughly 1,500 men) had been formed, and by the end of the month the National Guard numbered 360,000 men; twice as many as had been anticipated by the Government. Everybody seemed to be in it; Cresson, later Prefect of Police, alleged that no less than 25,000 fugitives from justice had enrolled, while an Englishman calling at Rothschilds in the city met Monsieur le Baron himself in uniform, waiting to go on duty on the fortifications. Each battalion was composed on a regional basis, and the proletarian units from Belleville and Ménilmontant presented a marked contrast to those from the richer arrondissements, who sometimes provided themselves with seductive young vivandières, got up like the regimental daughters of comic opera. Uniforms presented an extraordinary motley: some battalions were clad in chocolate brown, some in brilliant green, while others (presaging 1914–18) wore a romantic bleu horizon, and in the earliest days the Garde mounted watch on the ramparts in anything from tartan to sheepskins. But the force quickly divided itself into two components, proletarian and bourgeois, and equally quickly there sprang up grievances at the size and composition of each others’ forces. In the opinion of at least one critical British observer, Labouchere, there was absolutely no doubt in the early days as to which of the two rival sets gave the better impression (though this was an opinion he later changed): ‘I have been struck with the difference between one of these poor fellows who is prepared to die for the honour of his country… and the absurd airs, and noisy brawls, and the dapper uniforms of the young fellows one meets with in the fashionable quarters. It is the difference between reality and sham….’

  To command the National Guard, Trochu had appointed General Tamisier, a regular officer of bourgeois origins who completely shared his superior’s misgivings about ‘irregular’ forces, and whose only recommendation in the eyes of the ‘Red’ battalions was that he had spent seventeen days in prison for having helped try to suppress Louis-Napoleon’s putsch in 1851. Jules Favre later remarked of him: ‘Authority floated in his hands and his courage, which would have done wonders before the enemy, was impotent to vanquish the timidity of his character.’ And, more scornfully, the leader of one of the Belleville battalions, the flamboyant Flourens, regarded him as ‘a fine old man, of the stamp of a retired grocer, who must twenty years ago have had some energy’. But in the ‘Red’ battalions the real power lay in the hands of the demagogues, for they had insisted on the right to elect their own officers—to which the Government had weakly consented. The elections proceeded, regardless of any military qualifications, and it was usually the notorious soap-box orators and the red-hot revolutionaries who grabbed the top ranks. Quoting a ‘dandy’ he met one day at his club, Bowles recounts a typical situation:

  ‘ “What bores me is that my sergeant is my conci
erge. He drinks a good deal at the wine-shop of our quarter, and so he was known, and so, ma foi, they elected him. Fancy, I was obliged to ask his permission to come and dine!” ’ It was hardly surprising that discipline in the Garde as a whole was all but non-existent. In one of its very first engagements, troops from one of its battalions had broken into a nunnery and dressed themselves up in nuns’ clothing’. Later, a ‘curious-looking’ colonel arriving to inspect a unit of the Garde was exposed as a woman; the mistress, in fact, of the real colonel, who had not wished to break up his game of cards. Such episodes—added to the contrast between the noisy braggadocio of some of the battalions and their actual performance when confronted with the enemy—established the Garde as an object of ribaldry in Paris; which, if nothing else, at least helped maintain Parisian spirits as the Siege wore on.

  ‘… however the war may end, it has given the French proletariat practice in arms, and that is the best guarantee of the future.’

  Too many Parisians agreed with Labouchere’s cockney coachman—‘Why, sir, giving them fellows chassepots is much like giving watches to naked savages’; or with Prosper Mérimée, who had predicted gloomily to his friend, Panizzi, as early as August: ‘Paris is quiet, but, if one distributes arms to the faubourgs as Jules Favre demands, here is a new Prussian Army that we shall have upon our necks’. Nothing would convince the military that the Garde could be turned into proper soldiers, and nothing could dispel from bourgeois minds Machiavelli’s warning that ‘he who commands the defence of a town will shun arming the citizens tumultously as he would shun a reef’. And indeed, if they could have read what Karl Marx would be writing to his old friend, Dr. Kugelmann, from London in a few weeks time, the Paris bourgeoisie would have felt even more cause for fear: