The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Gladstone’s efforts to remain on good terms with both combatants resulted, as such endeavours so often do, in pleasing neither side. On the German side, there was constant annoyance at Britain’s Olympian offers of mediation; coupled as the true strength of Bismarck’s hand became increasingly apparent, with a certain ‘übermensch’ contempt for Britain’s ineffectuality on the European scene. Before the war was over, Archibald Forbes, the Daily News correspondent attached to the German Army of the Meuse, would record a conversation with a young officer who ‘benignantly announced that the Queen Elizabeth Regiment would, before two years were over, be besieging Windsor Castle….’ Queen Victoria’s exhortatory, but unspecific, telegrams urging ‘magnanimity’ upon King Wilhelm, as well as the steady flow of advice to her daughter, the Crown Princess, provoked mounting resentment in the Berlin Press—ably fanned by Bismarck. Already at the end of October Crown Prince Frederick was noting in his journal ‘I regret to observe that the German Press, but in especial the ‘inspired’ papers in Berlin, continues its spiteful attacks on England…,’ and by mid-December he was deprecating that ‘In Berlin it is now the order of the day to vilify my wife as being mainly responsible for the postponement of the bombardment of Paris and to accuse her of acting under the direction of the Queen of England….’ German public opinion was also highly sensitive to the unfavourable trend in British sympathies; but, as Gambetta’s levies proved to be more and more troublesome, its most tangible source of resentment was the flow of British arms being sold to the French armies in the provinces.

  In the earliest days of the war, French opinion too had been scandalized by the unfriendly attitude then prevailing in the British Press, but once Paris herself was threatened it was widely assumed, not only that sympathies would switch, but that Britain herself would actively enter the lists to rescue the Fount of Civilization. Leaders of all sides (with Hugo well to the fore) applied themselves to this theme; early in October, Louis Blanc, the veteran Socialist, addressed a pamphlet ‘To the English People’, among whom he had spent so many years in exile. ‘Civilization’, he declared, ‘is, for the moment, a prisoner in Paris’. After trying to bring home to Londoners just what to be besieged might mean to them, he ended with the admonition: ‘A nation which by its indifference sanctions the saturnalia of force risks, and deserves, to submit to them.’ The words summed up the feeling of most Parisians, and, when the British knight-errant showed himself totally unmoved by all appeals, great was the sense of bitterness, almost of betrayal. During the Great Sortie, M. Patte wrote caustically to his friend in London, Mrs. Macpherson, ‘The influence of Britain in Europe is down; England is now a merchant’s country as America is…’, and—later—Gulielma Rafinesque to her brother, Louis Hack; ‘I am really ashamed of England for her indifference. I suppose she is afraid of the Prussians, they seem to be very strong—enfin!’ It was a sentiment that grew to be echoed by many of the Britons sharing the Parisian lot; in his letters home, Edwin Child frequently deplored the pusillanimity of Gladstone in the strongest terms, while William Brown wrote his wife, ‘I cannot understand England’s neutrality, it is void of all self-respect or respect of Englishmen abroad…’ He longed ‘for a Pitt or a Palmerston in the place of a Gladstone and Granville…’.

  There were indeed times when it was positively unwise to fly a Union Jack in Paris. When, following the fall of the Empire, Parisian street names were changed, the Press demanded (according to Labouchere) ‘that the Rue de Londres should be rebaptized on the ground that the name of Londres is detested even more than Berlin’; and when the British colliers were sunk, Felix Whitehurst noted down in his diary, ‘We are so hated that this news was as good as that of a victory’. In an article of September, entitled ‘English Spies’, Les Nouvelles had proposed that all the British should be shot at once. But, for the most part, the odium was directed specifically against the British correspondents in Paris. In December one of the Red Clubs passed a vote calling for the arrest of all of them, and at least once Labouchere himself was denounced (by Le Gaulois) as a German spy.

  Apart from the acrid reports they sent home on the French conduct of the war (which were picked up from time to time by the Parisian Press), the British Press corps did tend towards eccentricities capable of generating the worst suspicions among a neurotic population. Here Labouchere, liable with the least encouragement to impersonate a demagogue of 1792 and harangue the crowd, occupied an eminent position; there was also the nameless representative of The Times who provoked an amused admission of envy from his colleague, Tommy Bowles: ‘He rides about—insecurely on a horse, or securely in a brougham—covered with Geneva Crosses, and in a gorgeous uniform, with a violet velvet collar, and a képi covered with gold lace and embroidery.’ (The Germans too appear to have had their share of eccentrics among the British correspondents; of one, described as ‘Dr. S—’, Russell of The Times wrote unforgettably:

  His long grey hair falls in tangled masses on his shoulders… his tall, lank figure is draped in an old Arab Burnous, which he requisitioned in his march through France; and his loose baggy breeches are thrust into a pair of dilapidated Wellingtons. He is a man of science; well read; a scholar in many things; and yet in his old age he has come trooping here from home as the correspondent of more than one paper…. He attached himself to the 2nd Company of the 5th Jaegers, and his medical knowledge—or rather his readiness to lend a hand to a wounded or sick man—his pluck and cheerfulness, recommended him to the officers and men, who laughed at him and liked him.

  Apart from his headgear, in the course of the campaign, ‘Dr. S—’ had managed to collect some ‘not valueless spoils of war—vases and China from St.-Cloud, pieces of Sèvres, etc.’, picked up ‘as trophies of his pen and tourniquet.’).

  Of all the British resident in Paris, by far the most personally popular was a tall figure with a grizzled moustache, who, ‘accompanied by a black and tan retriever dog, made his way from one Mayoral centre to another, leaving at each place a large packet of bank-notes for the relief of the poor of the district’.1 His name was Richard Wallace and he was the natural son of the unmarried Marquis of Hertford—who in turn was the son of the depraved 3rd Marquis upon whom Thackeray had modelled the wicked Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair. The 4th Marquis supplemented several of the vices of his father by becoming, in addition, renowned as one of the meanest men of his age. During the potato famine he never gave a penny to help his starving Irish tenants, and when Louis-Napoleon and the Empress called on Hertford at Bagatelle, his sumptuous villa in the Bois, they usually came—with supreme tact—at teatime, so as not to put their host to any undue expense. As the Marquis was dying of cancer in 1869, Goncourt recalled how he had once boasted ‘When I die I shall at least have the consolation of knowing that I have never rendered anyone a service’. But he was also a multi-millionaire and had amassed one of the finest private art collections in Europe (which, indirectly as a result of the Siege, was to end up as a gift to the British nation). To all this Richard Wallace, who had lived all his life in France, had been appointed heir, and he swiftly made up for the iniquity of his forebears by displaying an almost boundless generosity. At his own expense, Wallace organized two full-scale ambulances2 to operate during the siege; one to serve the French wounded, and the second for the benefit of sick and destitute Britons. Repeatedly there appear in contemporary diaries such entries as ‘December 5th. Mr. Wallace has given eight thousand pounds for coals for the poor.’ ‘December 26th. Mr. Wallace has again distinguished himself by his munificence. He has given about twenty thousand pounds in charity.’ By the end of the siege, Wallace’s private contributions are estimated to have totalled 2,500,000 francs,3 an enormous sum in those days.

  In return for his generosity to the Parisians, Wallace was to receive an assortment of honours; when the conservatory at the Jardin des Plantes was shattered by Prussian shells, two prize camellias that survived were presented to Wallace; the last balloon to leave Paris, and later a boulevard, were
named after him; he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, and even the Jockey Club opened its doors to him. Yet it was the British community in Paris which probably owed most to Wallace. As the Siege progressed, many of the foreigners in Paris fell into as great a state of need as the most indigent Parisian; their sources of employment had often withered away, and, cut off from their homes, they found themselves left with limited sums of capital which the spiralling costs of food soon eroded away. Obviously the worst off were the German nationals unable to escape from Paris before the Siege, and who now found themselves stranded in a hostile city which grudged them their every mouthful of food. But at least they had Minister Washburne, who had been requested to act on behalf of the North German Federation, looking after their interests; in addition to those of the American community in Paris. A whole floor of the U.S. Legation was fitted up to house impoverished Germans, and although he had to turn many hundreds away, by the end of the Siege Washburne was actually supporting some 2,400 ‘enemy aliens’.

  The British, however, far more numerous than either the Germans or the Americans,1 had no representative of the flag to whom they could turn. On September 18th, as has been noted previously, Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador, and most of his staff had left Paris for Tours. The representatives of only six nations remained in Paris: Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, and Holland—and of course Washburne of the U.S.A. In December Washburne was granted discretion by Washington as to whether he too should leave Paris, but he chose to remain. With Lord Lyons had also departed the British Consul, and at the beginning of November he was joined by Wodehouse, the secretary who had assumed seniority at the Embassy; finally, in December, Colonel Claremont of the Horse Guards, the Military Attaché, departed. There was now no official left in the British Embassy, save a concierge whose duty, according to one dis-grunted Englishman, was ‘to shrug his shoulders to all enquiries and reply in the most amiable manner possible “I cannot give you any information!” ’

  Before Claremont departed, he placed Edward Blount, the banker, in charge of the Embassy. But Blount found himself in a highly invidious position; he had neither funds nor authority, and was not in fact officially appointed Consul until January 24th, a few days before the capitulation. One of Blount’s few official actions was to marry Wallace to the former parfumerie assistant with whom he had been living for the past thirty years,1 though doubts about the legality of the ceremony induced Wallace to repeat it at a mayoral office after the Siege. The ‘bolting’ of the British diplomats provoked considerable anger, both among the British in Paris and at home. Tommy Bowles regarded it as ‘the most extraordinary and monstrous thing’, and recommended that on his return—the Ambassador’s expense account should be overhauled. In the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel denounced Lord Lyon’s departure as an ‘ungenerous and unmanly flight;’ though, as Gladstone pointed out in defence of Lyons, it was not really his fault, in that he had acted ‘on the direct injunctions of the Government at home’, and the British Ambassador’s ‘primary duty is to take care of the interests of his country…’. Gladstone added, rather unconvincingly to those whose sole livelihood lay in Paris, that ‘there was no occasion for any to reside in Paris who could et out of it’.

  Over nine hundred British subjects had indeed been persuaded to leave before the completion of the Prussian investment, but some four thousand still remained in the city. Although at various times efforts were made to evacuate more of these, only small driblets succeeded in obtaining a laissez-passer through both the opposing lines. On September 22nd Labouchere had watched sceptically while four Britons clambered gaily into a carriage loaded ‘with hampers of provisions, luggage, and an English flag flying’. They got as far as the Pont de Neuilly, where they were seized and taken before General Ducrot who told them unkindly ‘I cannot understand you English; if you want to get shot we will shoot you ourselves to save you trouble.’ The threat evidently did not deter the insouciant Britons from trying afresh the next day; after which Labouchere claimed ‘nothing has been heard of them since’. At the end of October, forty-eight Americans and a few British presented themselves at the outposts with official permits; the Americans were let through, but—to their chagrin—the British were turned back on the grounds that their permits had not yet received clearance from Prussian Headquarters at Versailles. On November 8th, however, Wodehouse of the Embassy succeeded in getting through with seventy-five of his compatriots, of whom twenty-six travelled at Wallace’s expense, having been given 100 francs each by him as well as a packet of provisions for the journey. And this was about the sum of those who left Paris. As explained by Trochu, the Government of National Defence was reluctant to allow large batches of foreigners to leave the city, because ‘the effect is so demoralizing to the army and the citizens’. It was a policy which puzzled many Britons when at every turn they were accused of being so many ‘useless mouths’ or worse.

  Following the departure of the Ambassador and his staff, Wallace took it upon himself to look after the interests of the abandoned Britons in Paris, through an organization called the British Charitable Fund (B.C.F.). Dr. John Rose Cormack (later knighted for his work), the head of one of Wallace’s ambulances, was Chairman of the B.C.F., and another doctor, Alan Herbert—the younger brother of the Earl of Carnarvon, who had been practising medicine in Paris since 1859—was its hard-working secretary. In London Herbert’s brother Carnarvon, as Patron of the B.C.F., did much to raise funds for the besieged Britons; but in effect it was from the pockets of wealthy Britons in Paris, such as Wallace and Blount, that most of the charity flowed.

  As hardships in Paris became increasingly oppressive, this charity was often desperately needed. To Carnarvon, Alan Herbert wrote that one of his team, the. Reverend Dr. J. W. Smyth, who made regular rounds of the British community, ‘told me he never had seen so great distress’. Speaking to Labouchere in mid-October, Herbert admitted that the Paris Britons were more numerous than he imagined; ‘he estimates their number at about 4,000, about 800 of whom are destitute.’ The B.C.F. was then ‘helping to keep alive 502 people’; two months later Herbert confided to Labouchere, in some despair, that the Fund already had a thousand names on its list, while ‘unknown and mysterious English emerge from holes and corners every day’. Labouchere added the comment that ‘If the siege goes on longer it is difficult to know how all these poor people will live’, and by January those drawing relief from the B.C.F. were to number 1,200. To control the doling-out of relief, Herbert instigated ‘a system of tickets’, or ration cards, which appear to have worked more fairly than that sponsored by the Parisian authorities—as will be seen in the following chapter. In exchange for Herbert’s tickets, each Briton on the B.C.F.’s list received a weekly ration of two ounces of Liebig’s meat extract, one pound of rice, between eight to twelve pounds of bread, and a small sum of money: one franc per individual, three francs for a family of four to five members. To check up on possible frauds, Dr. Smyth and two sharp-eyed spinsters, Miss Ellen (who later married the Reverend Doctor) and Miss Annette Sparks, kept up a round of visits to those Britons claiming ‘extreme poverty’. The relief these received was not much, but to many it was to mean the difference between probable starvation and survival.

  If Parisian animosity towards the British had Gladstonian neutrality as its focal point, the principal and recurrent bone of contention against the United States was that the American Minister was withholding news from the city. Before food became seriously scarce, news from outside was by far the most eagerly sought-after commodity in Paris. And in this respect Elihu Washburne was uniquely privileged. After the Siege was over, an admiring American lady, Lillie Moulton, remarked to him ‘What would those shut up in Paris have done without you?’, to which Washburne replied with becoming modesty ‘Oh I was only a post-office’. In fact, because of his appointment to represent North German interests in Paris, Washburne had been granted by Bismarck the unique privilege of being the only diplomat allowed to send sealed di
spatches out of Paris; he was also permitted—and this was of far greater value—to receive one copy of The Times per week, sent by the U.S. Legation in London. The proviso attached, however, was that he should keep the contents of his weekly newspaper strictly to himself. Throughout the Siege he was under constant pressure to divulge his knowledge. One Parisian journal pleaded eloquently ‘We gave you Lafayette and Rochambeau, in return for which we only ask for one copy of an English paper’, and on one occasion old Père, the doorman at the Legation, was offered a bribe of 1,000 francs for the latest Times. Washburne appears to have used his discretion in handling this much-coveted privilege; certain selected British correspondents were evidently allowed occasional access to the closely guarded copies of The Times, and from time to time Washburne disseminated carefully edited fragments of news to the city at large. But it was, a thankless task. ‘If we gave the Parisians news’, commented his assistant Wickham Hoffman, ‘they said that we gave them only bad news. If we withheld it, they said that we were withholding the news of French victories….’ Then Labouchere thoughtlessly wrote in the Daily News ‘Go to the Legation of the United States on any day, and there you find the latest London journals lying on the table’.