Behind Flourens came Blanqui, Delescluze, Pyat, Millière, and most of the ‘Government’ proposed that morning in Belleville. One notable absentee was Hugo, whose invective had done so much to raise the temperature of the ‘Reds’ to its present level, but who was now prompt to dissociate himself from the results. To make himself heard and his will felt above the hubbub, Flourens leaped up on to the conference table. Up and down it he strode, issuing orders right and left, kicking over inkwells and scuffing up the green baize with his spurs, his boots on a level with Trochu’s nose. Labouchere, who had infiltrated in Flourens’ wake, heard him (before being hustled out again by the mob) call upon both Trochu and the Trochu Government to resign, an invitation which Favre politely declined. Millière then passed up to Flourens a draft order decreeing the arrest of Favre, but Flourens refused to sign it on the grounds that the insurgents had insufficient force with which to effect an arrest. Despite the Government’s refusal to be deposed (which manifestly discountenanced the ‘Reds’), the process of replacing it now ensued regardless. Once again the spectacle of September 4th was repeated, with a snow-flurry of paper slips descending on the expectant mob in the Place below. Many of the lists of the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ (as the traditionalist-minded ‘Reds’ intended to call themselves) began with the name of Flourens, especially those that the brash major had scribbled out himself. But it was Dorian whom the mob most persistently called for, just as less than two months ago it had in its fickleness howled for Trochu: Dorian, former industrialist and now Minister of Works, the most universally respected man in the ‘old’ Government.
A reluctant candidate, who sped from one group to another displaying a truly remarkable diplomatic flair, Dorian affably told the ‘Reds’ that he could not, under the circumstances, accept their offer. Confusion and indecision set in, revealing the ‘Reds’’ lack of planning behind the coup of that day, as well as their inherent disorganization that was to feature so largely in bringing them to disaster the following spring. Swiftly the insurgents broke up into groups and caucuses to discuss a substitute for Dorian. As Lissagaray, the ‘official’ historian of the Commune, later wrote, ‘Each room had its own government, its orators, its tarentules…. Thus that day which could have revitalized the defence vanished in a puff of smoke. The incoherence of the avant-garde restored to the Government its virginity of September.’ Tempers rose. The insurgent leaders began to quarrel among themselves; Blanqui declined to have Flourens on his ‘list’, and Delescluze did not want Pyat. Meanwhile more and more of the mob were pressing into the Hôtel de Ville, the real canaille of Paris, many of them drunk. With no particular political aims, some invaded and looted the kitchens; furniture was smashed and a superb plan of Paris drawn up by Haussmann himself was cut to pieces. As they surged up the great staircase, even the heavy iron banisters were seen to give menacingly. Reaching the rooms where Flourens and the ‘Red’ leaders were wrangling, these agents of the ‘dark people’ added to the chaos by themselves standing on tables and demanding a hearing. As he opened his mouth, one was neatly felled by a heavy inkstand hurled from out of the mob; another incessantly blew a trumpet, while a third beat a drum. Blanqui became submerged, was kicked, had his venerable white beard pulled by toughs who did not recognize the frail old man, and was buffeted hither and thither, until he collapsed in a corner half-senseless. The air inside the Hôtel de Ville had become almost unbreathable. Of it, the fastidious Captain d’Hérisson remarked:
The mob brought with it its particular odour. The smell of its pipes and cigars alone contended with a stink as of wet dogs… and of dried sweat which exhales from a mass of troops, especially when those troops are dirty and have only been partially washed by the rain.
Throughout this spectacle of mounting bedlam Trochu had maintained an almost superhuman sang-froid. While Flourens and his fellows paced up and down the conference table above him, he had calmly puffed away at a cigar, observing their antics. One of the British correspondents claimed that ‘a sardonic smile played round the soldier’s mouth’, and in some curious way he seems almost to have enjoyed the humour of the situation. Then, as the ‘Red’ leaders began to row among themselves and the mob grew more unruly, Trochu quietly removed his epaulets and decorations and handed them to one of his aides. His conduct, thought O’Shea, was thoroughly ‘noble’, and it set an example that was followed by the rest of the Government—with the possible exception of Garnier-Pagès. The old man with his comic high collar and flocks of white hair divided neatly down the centre had collapsed completely when, in the midst of expatiating to the mob ‘I have witnessed three glorious revolutions’, he was rudely told to ‘shut up’. Sobbing and laughing at the same time he mumbled to Flourens, ‘I am going home, to my family; and tomorrow I shall no longer take any part in politics’. Otherwise the calm inspired by Trochu, while it averted any incident that might easily have led to bloodshed, also had a subversive effect on the insurgents, torn as they were by indecision and fraternal wrangles. The sergeant of the Garde detailed off to keep Trochu under surveillance appears to have been particularly impressed by the general’s bearing. Proudly explaining that he had served a long time in the Zouaves, he treated Trochu with marked deference, and while the bickering was at its height remarked to him, ‘Voyez-vous, mon général, these are the sods who have made us take arms at the double, and led us here without knowing what to do’; and then yelled to Flourens at the top of his voice:
Florence, ma vieille, tu faiblis!1
It was now beginning to get dark. The Trochu Government had been held captive for several hours, and so far no serious attempt had been made to liberate it from the outside. To the exterior world it looked as if the ‘Reds’ had pulled off a fait accompli. The ever-vigilant Goncourt, having read on people’s faces signs ‘of the great and terrible things that are in the air’, had made his way through the rainy darkness and sodden crowds to the Hôtel de Ville. There the sight of ‘the workers who had led the movement of September 4th sitting on the sills with their legs dangling outside’ told him the worst. ‘The Government had been overthrown and the Commune established….It was all over. Today one could write: Finis Franciae….’. At this moment, with superb irrelevance, he was asked by an old lady if ‘the price of Government stock was quoted in my paper’. As he walked home, he saw a young National Guardsman ‘running along the middle of the Boulevard, shouting at the top of his voice ‘To arms, damn you!’ Gloomily he speculated: ‘Civil war, with starvation and bombardment, is that what tomorrow holds in store for us?’ His pessimism was shared by Minister Washburn, who had come away from a visit to the Hôtel de Ville at six o’clock with the conviction that ‘the revolution had been practically accomplished, and that we should have a genuine Red Republic’.
Though Flourens and his ‘Tirailleurs’ had achieved what looked effectively like a siege within a siege, the blockade of the Hôtel de Ville was in fact as far from perfect as a ‘Red Republic’ was from establishment. Jules Claretie, who had tried to enter the building, had been told by a ‘Red’ sentinel, ‘You cannot pass without a laissez-passer…. Signed by whom, I don’t know, but it has to have a blue stamp’. But despite this requirement, he had got in and out again without much difficulty. As the hours wore on numbers of the Tirailleurs had wandered off to find food and drink—or just to get out of the pouring rain—and the blockade became even laxer. Somewhere about this time, Picard, who had been so unhappy about going to the Hôtel de Ville in the first place, managed to slip out undetected through a small side door and safely reached the Ministry of Finance in the Place Vendôme. From his office there, the only member of the Government at large, he set about organizing the liberation of his colleagues.
Well might it be asked why, with the enormous forces at the Government’s disposal in Paris, this liberation had not already been effected. The answer was simply that there was no one to give the orders. General Tamisier, the commander of the National Guard, was a prisoner in the Hôtel de Ville, and
so was Edmond Adam, the Prefect of Police; General Schmitz, like a good soldier, was still awaiting written orders from Trochu. Ducrot, commanding the most powerful and dependable units in Paris, was isolated in his H.Q. out at Porte-Maillot, and heard no rumour of the uprising until about 5 p.m., roughly the time when Picard was making his escape. The fire-eating general, who had long wanted to settle the ‘Reds’ once and for all with a ‘whiff of grapeshot’, promptly and on his own initiative ordered a whole infantry division to arms, plus one battery of 12-pounders and one of mitrailleuses, and stood by to march on the Hôtel de Ville.
As officers sent out on reconnaissance returned with progressively worse news and still no orders arrived from Schmitz, Ducrot became almost overwhelmed with impatience. Finally, at 6.30 p.m. a telegram arrived from Picard, calling on Ducrot to report to him at the Ministry of Finance. Preferring to remain at the head of his ‘expeditionary force’, instead he dispatched a major from his staff to tell Picard that he was only waiting for the word ‘go’ to enter the city and ‘chase out the insurgents’. Ducrot’s emissary found Picard in his office, surrounded by people, in an atmosphere dense with hubbub and movement.
All over Paris drummers had beaten out the rappel (a sound that struck a chill in the hearts of people in whom it was associated with the ‘Terror’ of the Great Revolution), calling all the National Guard to arms, and already the Place Vendôme was crammed with loyal battalions. Picard told the major what he had done, and at once gave the authorization for Ducrot to march. On his way back to the Porte Maillot, the idea occurred to Ducrot’s emissary to call in on General Schmitz at the Louvre. There he was confronted with even greater confusion than chez Picard, with order heaping upon counter-order. Schmitz, though completely distracted, agreed to transmit Picard’s authorization to Ducrot by telegraph. At about 8.30 p.m. the major was in the act of mounting his horse to return to Ducrot, when who should appear on the threshold of the Louvre, surrounded by an immense crowd and wearing the képi of a simple National Guardsman, but Trochu himself?
One of the ‘loyal’ battalions of the National Guard to obey Picard’s summons, the 106th commanded by Major Ibos, had marched to the Hôtel de Ville, where the heavy rain had already thinned out the mob outside, and had managed to penetrate the building. There had been some buffeting with the proletarian Guards there, but no shooting. Indeed, the 106th seems to have been greeted with a certain amount of bonhomie by the rival elements, who no doubt expected to convert it to their cause. Reaching the ‘Salon Faune’, Ibos found Flourens still pacing the conference table, and immediately leaped up beside him.
Something resembling a brawl ensued, during which a section of the maltreated table collapsed. In the uproar that followed (perhaps aided by the turning of a blind eye by Trochu’s disgruntled guard, the ancient Zouave), a posse of Ibos’s men surrounded the Head of State, hustled him down the stairs and thence out of the Hôtel de Ville, with Jules Ferry clinging to his wake. More than one account describes Trochu as being literally carried off in the arms of a gargantuan National Guardsman; a version he strenuously denied, though admitting that someone did thoughtfully remove his general’s képi with its tell-tale gold braid and replace it by his own.
On regaining his headquarters, Trochu, apparently greatly shocked to learn of the orders that had just been transmitted to Ducrot, at once countermanded them. His motives seem to have been governed less by fear that the Prussians might choose this moment, when Ducrot’s forces were deployed elsewhere, to launch an all-out assault on the city, than by fear of the carnage his subordinate would wreak upon the mob. Post-haste Ducrot’s major rode forth with his new orders, but was astonished to learn at Porte-Maillot that the general, finally overcome by impatience as he had been once before, at Châtillon, had already left for Paris at the head of an immense column at 7.30 p.m. Meanwhile, Ducrot had sent on ahead another orderly, Captain Neverlée of the Dragoons, to inform Schmitz at the Louvre of his impending arrival. Neverlée too was turned about by Trochu with orders for Ducrot to halt immediately and report in person to the Louvre. By the time Neverlée returned, Ducrot had reached the Étoile. Although fuming with rage, he did what he was told. On his arrival at the Louvre, Ducrot forcefully represented that the Government ‘had to act immediately with energy, crush the insurgents and liberate their prisoners by force’. He begged Trochu to let him fire into the mob; he could disperse it in five minutes, and his Mobiles were eager to sink their teeth into the Garde. Trochu refused. The prevailing view was that extreme methods should be shunned, that the remaining members of the Government held by the insurgents—Favre, Simon, Arago, Dorian, Le Flô and others—should be liberated by negotiation, and that repressive measures should be postponed till the morrow.
After several voices had raised themselves in support of Ducrot, however, Trochu produced one of his typical compromises. The ‘loyal’ National Guard that had congregated in the Place Vendôme would alone march to surround the Hôtel de Ville; while at the same time two battalions of Mobiles, notably Bretons, that were housed in the nearby Napoléon Barracks would carry out an ingenious Trojan-horse tactic. There was, as one of Trochu’s staff pointed out, a subterranean tunnel some one hundred yards long linking the barracks with the Hôtel de Ville, built by Napoleon I so that the Hôtel de Ville could be garrisoned against an uprising within five minutes. In all probability its existence was unknown to the insurgents, who could be taken by surprise by armed Mobiles emerging in their midst. At about 10 p.m., with drums beating and trumpets sounding, the ‘loyal’, bourgeois Garde marched out of the Place Vendôme, headed by Jules Ferry.
The scene now switches to the Prefecture of Police where Juliette Lambert had spent an afternoon of ‘mortal anguish’. That morning her husband, Edmond Adam, the Prefect of Police, had gone to the Hôtel de Ville in response to Arago’s call. To distract herself from worrying about Adam, Juliette paid a vist to Fort Romainville at the east of Paris. On her way back she had passed through Belleville, which she found ‘in full mutiny’. The ‘menacing’ faces everywhere filled her with alarm. Reaching the Hôtel de Ville she interrogated the huge crowd in the Place as to what was going on within: ‘They answered quite gaily “tout est fini”. I continued my questions and understood nothing from the replies’. The worst seemed to be confirmed by the appearance of Flourens, riding in triumph among the mob on one of his splendid mounts, to the acclaim of his supporters, whom ‘he thanked with a look, with a gesture, or with words’. Returning to the Prefecture at about 4.30 p.m., she learned to her great concern that Adam had still not returned from the Hôtel de Ville and that nothing further had been heard of him. For two nerve-racking hours she waited. Then news of Adam arrived, via an extraordinary figure: Frontin, a retired police superintendent now serving with the National Guard. According to Frontin, Adam had been taken with the Government, but it was some hours before his identity had been revealed. There were then angry howls of ‘Arrest him’ and, as chief of the mob’s traditionally greatest enemy, the police, prospects looked extremely unpleasant for Adam. At this moment, however, Frontin appeared, ‘arrested’ him, briskly marched him down the corridors of the Hôtel de Ville, and ‘escorted’ him to freedom, whence Adam had immediately reported to Schmitz at the Louvre.
Juliette stayed on at the Prefecture, awaiting her husband’s return; then suddenly three to four hundred insurgents appeared on the Quai outside. At their head was a young man who, until that morning, had been a simple clerk at the Prefecture and who had only come to notice through the unusual interest he had shown in the police dossiers. His name was Raoul Rigault, the fugitive that Renoir had helped in the Forest of Fontainebleau a few years earlier. Rigault now stalked into the Prefecture, producing a paper signed by Flourens stating that he, Rigault, was to replace Adam as Prefect. Pouchet, Adam’s deputy, coolly and deferentially informed Rigault that only an hour previously he had received a similar order appointing someone else, and politely suggested that Rigault return to sort matters out with
Flourens. Rigault flew into a tantrum, called Flourens ‘idiot, bruyant,1 imbécile!’ and stamped out again. A short while later another note arrived from Flourens, this time begging the Police to look for his horse, which had strayed in the mêlée outside the Hôtel de Ville, and ending with the P.S. ‘Please remit the horse to the bearer’. Next, the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ figure of ex-Superintendent Frontin reappeared, this time very smartly dressed and carrying a rifle, with fresh news about Adam. The Prefect, it appeared, had gone on to the Place Vendôme, in quest of the National Guard battalions he had ordered to stand by that morning, only to be told that twenty-five had been despatched to the Hôtel de Ville, but that most of them had strayed on the way. It was disheartening news. Then Trochu had been released and the plan to reoccupy the Hôtel de Ville drawn up; whereupon Adam had promptly volunteered to lead the detachment which was to ‘Trojan horse’ the insurgents.
The Fall of Paris Page 17