The Fall of Paris
Page 15
So no function more active than that of standing watch on the ramparts well behind the actual front, and of helping keep order in the city (although in the long run they created graver disturbances than they quelled) was entrusted to the Garde Nationale. Tommy Bowles watched them at work: ‘They make holes and fill them with spikes; sow their ramparts with nails, points upwards, and propose even to cover these with broken glass, as if the Prussians were so many cats.’ Edwin Child, who in October joined a kindred body, the Garde Civique, found himself delegated to supervising the distribution of meat at his local butcher, and in despair transferred to the Garde Nationale the following month. But, as will be seen later, he was to find service there even more disillusioning. Louis Péguret, a young Frenchman with left-wing sympathies who joined the 115th Battalion on September 16th, found his duties confined to drilling twice a day, and a week later his first ‘operation’ seems to have been to square the eternal triangle: ‘… arresting and conducting to the Commissaire a man, his wife and another woman. You can see it’s not very perilous….’, but at least he felt that out of the uniform issued him he would eventually be able to cut ‘a magnificent pair of trousers and fine waistcoat’.
To the Gardes the sense of their uselessness was understandably demoralizing; as they whiled away the time smoking, drinking, playing cards, and gossiping, the boredom became chronic and led to graver maladies. Paul Verlaine the poet, newly married to a sixteen-year-old bride, had joined the 160th Battalion, standing duty near Issy at the south of Paris: ‘At first, it was veritably charming, veritably, and I am in no way exaggerating. To begin with, it was that delicious month of September with its sharp, pale mornings….’ Then he describes the infiltration of ‘bad habits’—of heavy drinking, culminating in ‘the first quarrel of our youthful household… it happened after I had returned home excessively vinous (to be more precise, it was absinthe) from the ramparts. My wife burst into sobs….’ It marked the beginning of the breakdown of their marriage, and the formation of a vice that eventually ruined Verlaine and drove him into the arms of Rimbaud.
Drunkenness, the opium of the masses under Louis-Napoleon and now an inevitable by-product of the National Guard’s enforced indolence, was to become one of the worst scourges of the Siege. Even when Paris was approaching her last rat, the alcohol never ran out; you could buy a lot of cheap wine on 1.50 francs a day, and besides it kept you warm. ‘Even the cochers de fiacre are drunk upon their boxes, to an extent that is really astonishing’, Tommy Bowles was remarking in November. ‘It is the thirty sous pay that does it all.’ A few years previously, General Grant had banned all alcohol in his army, but this was a measure that was beyond the courage of Trochu. So the Garde spent its days in the bistros, and it was by no means unsual to see them marching to their posts in crooked, erratic lines. Disaffection spread, and the consumption of so much fiery liquor seemed only to add further heat to the anti-Government passions of the ‘Red’ Gardes.
Next to drink, the greatest distraction for the proletarian battalions was to spend their evenings listening to the inspired orators at one or other of the ‘Red’ Clubs. Closed during the last days of the Empire, the first of the Clubs to reopen its doors was the Folies-Bergère (not to be confused, in the spectacles it offered, with its modern successor), but ‘reactionary pressure’ forced it to emigrate eastwards, where it became, more suitably, the Club des Montagnards. In the dense and smoky atmosphere, the audience came to seek warmth and shelter (until the gas was extinguished at 10 p.m.) amid this mass of sulphurous humanity, as well as reassurance against the perils of the outer world; but the Clubs also acted as substitutes for ‘the theatres and salons of the people’. Even when the theatres slowly reopened in October, the Clubs with their wild, often nonsensical, stars combined with the brilliant interpellations of Parisian wit from the hall still presented a steady, very cheap, and extremely amusing source of entertainment. Typical of what the Clubs offered at this level was the blasphemous orator who exclaimed that he would like ‘to scale heaven, and collar the Deity…’ to which a wag in the audience rejoined: ‘Why don’t you go there in a balloon?’ The output of sheer nonsense from the Clubs was quite remarkable, and was undoubtedly what in part prompted U.S. General Burnside’s famous remark after visiting Paris under truce in October: ‘It’s a madhouse inhabited by monkeys’. At one of the Clubs, Tommy Bowles could recall ‘the original flag of Joan of Arc’ being gravely produced. There was always a strong element of anti-religious obsession, and frequent declarations in favour of free love. Above all, the Clubs pullulated with suggestions to the Government on how to win the war, and even more brilliant inventions; including escargots sympathiques which were to carry messages in their shells through the Prussian lines. There was remarkably little time for any serious discussion of such unmilitary topics as Socialism.
The credulity of the audiences, as Goncourt noted (a shade superciliously) after the opening of the Club de Montmartre, was astonishing:
It is touching to see how these flocks of men are duped by the printed and spoken word, how marvellously deficient is their critical faculty. The sacrosanct word ‘democracy’ is able to fabricate a catechism even richer in miraculous fairy stories than the old one, and these people are quite ready to gulp it down devoutly.
For all the sheer amusement value of the Clubs, the violence of their unchecked attacks on the Government soon began to take root insidiously. Any orator could be certain of frenzied applause whenever he compared the timidity and indecision of the men in the Hôtel de Ville with the ruthlessness of ’93; or whenever he mentioned the Terror or the mystical Commune. Still intoxicated by the memory of how the Government had itself been brought to power by the popular voice of the mob, the Clubs developed an ever-expanding view of their own importance, to the extent that Pyat, typically, was soon offering Trochu the advice that before undertaking any new operation he should ‘consult the Clubs’. But perhaps the most ominous feature of the Clubs was that it was here that the darlings of the mob really electioneered for, and were appointed to, senior military posts in the National Guard.
The kind of officers elected by the proletarian battalions included a dull-witted worker called Mégy, who—on the strength of his once having shot an Imperial policeman come to arrest him—was made an ensign. There was Johannard, a flower-vendor and East End Casanova, who applied to command the 109th Battalion but was given a lieutenancy in consolation: ‘Citizens,’ he had declared in his own support, ‘there is no need to have ever touched a rifle to be a major or a general; men of war reveal themselves on the field of battle; you shall see my deeds.’ (Actually he caught smallpox and never went near the front.) And there was Sapia, commanding a battalion at Montrouge, a ‘Red’ who wrote on paper embossed with a coronet to which he apparently had no claim, who had spent time in a lunatic asylum and had once had himself photographed in the pose of blowing out his brains. Above all, there was Gustave Flourens, who now thrusts himself forcefully upon the Paris scene.
About the same age as Gambetta, Flourens was the son of a respectable, indeed illustrious, physician who had been a member of the Collège de France. His brother was a Conseiller d’État under Louis-Napoleon and later became (despite the notoriety Gustave attained) a Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Third Republic. With a brilliant academic brain himself, Flourens had inherited his father’s chair at the Collège de France for a brief time until dismissed for publishing a revolutionary pamphlet. A Byronic knight-errant in the service of Liberty, whatever its name and however Utopian, Flourens had gone to Crete to offer his services against the Turks. But the Greeks evidently found him too troublesome, and he narrowly escaped being deported back to France. Eventually he drifted home, where involvement in an inept Socialist conspiracy against Louis-Napoleon landed him in gaol. Hardly had he been released than he challenged to a duel one of the most renowned swordsmen of the time, Paul de. Cassagnac, and was promptly run through the chest. He recovered, and when Rochefort was arrested in
turn, it was Flourens who led the erection of barricades in the last year of the Empire. Subsequently he had fled to England (which he thought ‘could be great, if only she had no Lords and no Bible’). In August 1870, estimating that the Empire was finished, Flourens made his way to Switzerland, and thence into France; where he was immediately arrested as a Prussian spy. After the September 4th revolution, he was released by personal intervention of Rochefort and finally reached Paris, where the left wing greeted him with only less acclaim than it had greeted the great Rochefort himself.
Flourens’ flamboyant allure, his biting eloquence, and sheer panache promptly gained him leadership of the five Belleville battalions of the Garde; but there was absolutely nothing proletarian about him. He paraded in a magnificently embroidered uniform of his own design that had a strong Grecian flavour, with five rings on the sleeves (though, as a commandant, he was in fact only entitled to four), and was usually mounted on one of the two finest horses once belonging to the Imperial Stables, ‘Capitan’ or ‘Passiflor’, which he had requisitioned for himself. Fair-haired (though prematurely balding), with a beard and flowing red mustachios, an aristocratic nose and commanding blue eyes, he was so tall and slender as to look almost effeminate. Some of the roughnecks under his command nicknamed him ‘Florence’, but appearances deceived. His consumption of women was notable (‘Where is your mistress, Flourens?’ he had once been assailed, to which he retorted acidly, ‘Humanity is my mistress!’). And, while he shared Rochefort’s mob appeal, Flourens was a man of action—which Rochefort was not.1
‘The blood was boiling in our veins, the earth burning under our feet’, admitted Flourens, and certainly his blood was beginning to boil over at the inaction of Trochu’s Government. For its members, he had nothing but contempt; Favre was ‘this Judas who helped the Empire last for eighteen years…’, Ferry ‘an eighteenth-grade lawyer’, and even Gambetta was dismissed as ‘un révolutionnaire manqué’. At Trochu’s obsession with minor irrelevancies of civic administration during the siege, he mocked scathingly:
Imagine the Greeks of the Eastern Empire getting in a frenzy to find out whether the light that emerged from the navel of Jesus Christ was organic or inorganic, while the Turks were in the act of putting their ladders up against the wall of Byzantium!
(The comment might have applied with equal force too to the ‘Opposition’, the Red Clubs.) Why, asked Flourens, had Trochu not been harassing the enemy every night since the day the Siege began? Why was there no plan? Why had a levée en masse throughout France not yet been proclaimed? Above all, why was the vast military potential of the Garde being so outrageously wasted? The whole defence of Paris, Flourens was beginning to conclude, was ‘nothing but a lie and a farce’.
The patience of Flourens was reaching breaking-point, and by October 5th the ‘Red’ leaders had talked themselves into taking action. That day the Belleville and Ménilmontant battalions of the National Guard, some 10,000 men, headed by a resplendent Flourens and accompanied by their bands, marched to the Hôtel de Ville. While the bandsmen thundered out the Marseillaise on the Place outside, Flourens presented his demands to Trochu in person, in the name of the whole Garde. They were: an immediate sortie by the Garde; modern chassepots instead of the old tabatière muskets; new uniforms; immediate municipal elections; and a vague request that Garibaldi be called to aid the Republic. Trochu explained that ‘purposeless sorties by large masses of undisciplined men… were hazardous’, while Dorian, the Minister of Works and the one man in the Government universally respected, told Flourens ‘I could more easily give you cannons then chassepots’. Trochu, who throughout the interview had deferentially adressed Flourens as ‘Monsieur le major’, ended by sermonizing him in a parental fashion: ‘I could be your father. Your place is at the ramparts, and not at the Hôtel de Ville.’ Captain d’Hérisson, one of the aides present, was astonished by the mildness with which Trochu treated the demonstration. ‘I was simple enough to believe that violent hands would be laid upon the Major of the Ramparts and that he would be cast into the deepest of dungeons until the end of siege’. But not at all. The Garde was allowed to march off unmolested, booing as they went both Trochu and their own general commanding, Tamisier, and loudly cheering Flourens. ‘Then’, added d’Hérisson, ‘everybody went to dine.’
Thus the first demonstration against the Government ended, with Flourens evidently realizing that he had not yet the support to force the issue further. But three days later a second, noisier, and far less disciplined march was made on the Hôtel de Ville. This time Flourens prudently played no part; instead the leader was the semi-demented Sapia. There also marched with him a far saner and eventually more significant figure, Eugène Varlin, commander of the 139th Battalion and one of the French leaders of the International, who had returned from exile in Brussels. Cartridges had been issued, and the mob which accompanied the Belleville Garde that day had a menacing air absent during the previous manifestation. One of its members attempted to pull Captain d’Hérisson off his horse, and spat in his face. Apoplectically, General Tamisier shouted ‘Do you hear the cannon? Pretty moment you choose to sow discord!’, which hardly helped matters. For the first time there were cries in unison of ‘Vive la Commune!’, and the atmosphere in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville resembled one of revolt rather than of demonstration. But on this occasion, forewarned by what had occurred three days earlier, Trochu had taken the precaution of having some ‘loyal’ battalions of the Garde from the bourgeois arrondissements standing by. Now, for the first time, the two factions faced each other stolidly, armed and glaring. It was an ominous preface to what was to come. Yet, confronted with the rival Gardes, even the fieriest Bellevillite sensed that Sapia had overstepped the mark, and a strange thing happened. Suddenly, in the midst of a rabble-rousing diatribe, Sapia was seized by some of his own men, bound, bundled into a waggon, and handed over to Trochu outside his office at the Louvre. All that was now needed to disperse the ‘Reds’ was a short speech from Jules Favre and a violent shower of rain.
The following day Blanqui in his La Patrie en Danger was predicting, not without accuracy, that henceforth ‘…the good Germans will await phlegmatically the end of our cattle and our flour. After which, the Government of National Defence will declare in unison that Paris has defended herself heroically, and that it is now time to think of the pot-au-feu…. October 8th will mark in history the day that the first article of the Capitulation of Paris was written by bourgeois bayonets; the others will follow of their own accord….’ Flourens wrote to Rochefort urging that he should ‘not remain any longer with the traitors’. But Rochefort, who, like many a rebel placed in a position of authority, was enjoying it, declined, although asseverating that he had ‘descended to all but the most impenetrable cellars of my conscience…’ At the same time, the Government let it be broadcast that, as a result of Flourens’s demands of the 5th, it had speeded Gambetta on his way to organize the provinces; it temporized on the holding of municipal elections, but otherwise did little else. Little, that is, except to fling the unfortunate Sapia (who had been delivered so opportunely into the Government’s hands) into the Mazas Prison. An example should be made of him, Trochu was determined. He would be court-martialled. (He was, but, to Trochu’s fury, acquitted.) Kératry, the Chief of Police, wanted to follow up by arresting Flourens and Blanqui, but found that none of his men would risk such a duty when the victims were safely in their stronghold at Belleville. His further suggestion, that Flourens be deviously lured to General Tamisier’s H.Q. and then seized, was rejected indignantly by Trochu; whereupon Kératry resigned and took the next balloon out of Paris.
After these two discouraging events, Labouchere summed up gloomily: ‘What will be the upshot of this radical divergence of opinion between the two principal classes which are cooped up together within the walls of Paris it is impossible to say….’
October 31st, the Government besieged at the Hôtel de Ville
7. The Triple Disaster
It would be hard to judge which was more remarkable, the magnification of the commandant’s telescope or the accuracy of his cannoneer, as the village of L’Hay stood at least two miles away. Even allowing, however, for an element of exaggeration, the incident recorded by the ardent Madame Lambert was typical of the operations to which the battle for Paris had now settled down: sniping, outpost skirmishes, artillery duels, minor pinpricks here and there. At the time of Châtillon, Paris had reminded Minister Washburne of Washington after the Battle of Bull Run: ‘nothing was completed and the confusion everywhere was immense. Had the Prussians known the weakness of Paris, they could have come right in….’ But since then the city fortifications had become so well established that to Washburne they seemed just about impregnable; and in any case it was now quite clear that the Prussians had no intention of trying to take the city by storm. By their unobliging attitude, one of the main pillars of Trochu’s strategy had been swept away (if it had ever existed), and a ‘phoney war’ had set in, wherein neither side seemed prepared to undertake any major initiative. But time, however, was clearly not on the side of the besieged. As October drew to a close, chilly damp weather replaced September’s superb Indian summer, and the lengthening nights brought a gloomy warning of the winter to come. O’Shea of the Standard reported that a National Guardsman had dropped dead one cold night in the Rue de Clichy, and depression was penetrating into the austere and draughty encampments of even the regular Army and the Mobiles. Officers were beginning to feel the nervous strain of gross and continued inaction, and impatience was no longer by any means the sole prerogative of Flourens and Belleville. A young Englishman, Charlie Carter, acting as tutor to General Ducrot’s nephews, grumbled in a letter to his sister Fanny: