The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  In fact, outside the Red Clubs, Hugo himself remained one of the most fertile sources of entertainment in the besieged city—at the same time as he entertained himself. Visiting him one night in December, Goncourt found ‘the God’ dressed in a red pea-jacket with a white scarf round his neck, surrounded by actresses and conversing about the moon. Later, Goncourt recounted with obvious envy and admiration how the septuagenarian had somehow maintained his noteworthy libidinous energy during the Siege, unimpaired by malnutrition or the lack of heat:

  Every evening towards ten o’clock, leaving the Hotel Rohan, where under the pretext of keeping his grandchildren, he had housed Juliette,1 he returned to the Maison Meurice, where one—two—even three women awaited him… and through the window of the ground floor, where Hugo had selected his room, Madame Maurice’s maid while strolling in the garden, used to see—morning and evening—naked portions of strange priapics.

  ‘This’, commented Goncourt, ‘seems to have been Hugo’s main occupation during the Siege’. Such demands on his time did not, however, hinder the vigorous old man from proclaiming, in December, as a gesture of contempt at the Government’s inertia, that he intended to go out single and unarmed against the enemy; an intention which drew a large crowd outside his house, attempting to dissuade him—which it succeeded in doing.

  All the time the flow of bombastic proclamations and heroic couplets continued, though the tone had become more sober.

  Les cercles de l’enfer sont là, mornes spirales;

  Haine, hiver, guerre, deuil, peste, famine, ennui.

  Paris a les septs nœuds des ténèbres sur lui.2

  wrote Hugo; as December progressed, all seven spheres of hell were well established in the city, and there was no distraction sufficient to dispel their effect. Goncourt compared the lethal boredom provoked by the Siege to that of ‘a tragedy which reaches no climax’. Occasionally the tragedy was relieved for a moment by the advent of falsely optimistic news, as on December 8th when it was widely rumoured that Bourbaki had reached Chantilly. ‘Nothing is more painful’, wrote Goncourt, ‘than this situation where one does not know whether the armies of the provinces are at Corbeil or Bordeaux, or even whether they exist or not. Nothing crueller than to live in obscurity, in the night, in complete ignorance of the tragedy that threatens you….’ By December 15th, Labouchere sensed that ‘a dead, apathetic torpor has settled over the town’. It was having its effect on the Army. Slackness was on the increase, particularly in the forts where boredom was most acute. At Fort Issy an officer reported that roll-calls, normally taken by an officer, had been passed on to a sergeant-major, then to a sergeant, and finally on to a mere corporal. Absenteeism rose. Clearly, with the mounting lack of food and fuel, the onset of hard winter and the failure of the Great Sortie, morale was slipping.

  But it was perhaps extraordinary that it had not already slipped further. In a letter dated December 12th to Fish, the American Secretary of State, Washburne noted with surprise that the recapture of Orléans ‘seems to have made but very little impression on the people of Paris’, and there were even going the rounds such jokes as ‘The Army of the Loire is cut in two… so much the better! that now gives us two armies!’ Among the pious Catholics of Paris, there was still a belief that the patron saint, Ste. Geneviève, would somehow intervene with a miracle before it was too late. There were people too who found encouragement in the increasing flow of cannon from Dorian’s factories; one National Guardsman, Louis Péguret, wrote to his sister in the provinces on December 17th ‘… now everything is functioning very well, and every day we feel stronger,, for every day our armament becomes more considerable, our young troops more hardened to war.’

  That there had been no recurrence of the October 31st demonstrations after the bitter disappointment of the Great Sortie was doubtless in part due to the narcotic effects of hunger and cold, and to proletarian Paris’s preoccupation with the mere struggle to survive. But there were two other factors. In a curious way, the city had grown acclimatized to the routine of Siege life—it was almost hard to remember any other form of existence. And at the same time, a new element of pride, a more sober kind of pride, was growing among the population; having come so far, Paris could not now give in. M. Patte, writing to an Englishwoman, spoke for the defiant mood of many Parisians:

  Pascal has said thinking of the Christian Church: ‘Il y a plaisir d’être dans un vaisseau battu par l’orage, lorsqu’on est assuré qu’il ne périra pas….’1 Well, I say that of Paris, of France: ‘Elle ne périra pas!’ They said, she was daid [sic]; but she moves and they say now; she is not daid.

  * * *

  Following the failure of the Great Sortie, there had been the inevitable post-mortems and soul-searchings in the Government, protracted over several days. Ducrot, better placed than anyone to know by what margin the attempt was defeated, was now convinced that, militarily, Paris had expended her last hope. Moltke’s letter informing Trochu of the recapture of Orléans he regarded as a sign of war-weariness on the part of the enemy, and urged the Government to utilize it as an excuse for reopening the stalemated armistice negotiations. This was, he argued, France’s last chance of obtaining reasonable terms from the Prussians; if the war were allowed to drag on further, they would only be more prone to making France pay for the extra cost to themselves; and meanwhile the French bargaining-power could only diminish. Favre and Picard agreed with Ducrot, but almost more than any other member of the Government, Trochu was in favour not only of continuing the fight, but of making another major attempt at a sortie. It seemed a curious reversal of form; in the days when there had been any hope at all of a Parisian initiative succeeding, Trochu had played the role of Cunctator; now, when prospects were, to say the least, poor, Ducrot appears as the pessimist, attempting to lay a restraining hand upon his chief.

  One of the factors encouraging Trochu was the report of successes being registered by Gambetta’s recently constituted Army of the North, commanded by General Faidherbe. Following the eclipse of d’Aurelle and the defeat of Chanzy at Orléans, Faidherbe, a colonial soldier and former Governor of Senegal, had emerged as the ace in Gambetta’s hand. A strict disciplinarian, he had managed to impose upon his force some of the military virtues, such as obedience, which were notably lacking among many of Gambetta’s other levies. Within a week of the failure of the Great Sortie, Gambetta ordered Faidherbe to move towards Paris with a view to assisting a break-out through St.-Denis, towards the north-east. On December 9th, though racked with fever, Faidherbe seized Ham on the river Somme, thereby severing the rail link between Reims and Amiens. The local enemy commander, General von der Groeben, panicked and ordered the evacuation of Amiens. Although Faidherbe’s action was little short of brilliant, it was of necessity a limited and ephemeral one, for he had fewer than 50,000 men, of whom probably only about half could be considered as effectives. And Ham was at least sixty-five miles away from Paris. Yet the news of its capture was sufficient for Trochu; and Ducrot, acting for all his new pessimism like a good military subordinate, at once threw himself into the plan for a new sortie to link up with Faidherbe somewhere north of Paris. The sector chosen was Le Bourget, the scene of the disaster precipitated by de Bellemare in October. On this flat plain, Trochu reckoned that his infantry would be able ‘to form proper battle lines’, under heavy covering fire from the fortresses of the north, and even Ducrot agreed that they would have the advantage of their batteries not being constantly dominated from superior heights as they had been on the Marne.

  The operation began on December 21st. On the previous day, Goncourt, paying a visit to his brother’s grave, had encountered the National Guard preparing to move at Place Clichy:

  They are in grey cloaks with, on their backs, large packs surmounted with tent pickets. Women and children surround them, keeping them company until the last minute. A little girl carrying a tiny pack on her back, with a ship’s biscuit as make-believe army rations, is clutched between the legs of her father. Yo
ung women, at the same time embarrassed and a little frightened, hold the rifle of a brother or a lover who has made his way into a wineshop….

  Juliette Lambert, woken at dawn in another part of Paris by the same spectacle, found that the sound of the drums and the singing of the Marseillaise aroused in her ‘an extraordinary emotion’: ‘A sortie was going to be made, and the National Guard was going to be used! It will win, I feel it, I am sure, because we are at the apogee of patriotic exhortation and of courage.’ Her optimism echoed the surprising resurgence of morale after the failure of the Great Sortie, but it was shared by few of the war correspondents in Paris; Bowles wrote on December 19th ‘I greatly fear a great disaster’, and his views were largely shared by a totally unconcerned Bismarck, engulfing great portions of wild boar sent from his Varzin estates and complaining, as news of the new sortie came in, ‘there is always a dish too much’. The strategy of the Paris leaders, he remarked between mouthfuls, reminded him of ‘a French dancing-master, who is leading a quadrille, and shouting to his pupils, now Right! now Left!… Il va de ci, il va de là. Comme là queue de notre chat.’

  For, once again, the Prussian High Command had got to know about the impending sortie at least as early as the population of Paris. It had been the old story of poor security; on the 18th Trochu had issued one of his lengthy proclamations; the next day the city gates had been closed. All of this reached German ears by means of the Paris Press, and urgent activity at the forts adjacent to Le Bourget had revealed to them the exact locality of the sortie. Since (and doubtless as a result of) de Bellemare’s action in October, the Prussians had already greatly strengthened their positions around Le Bourget, and now the whole of the Second Guard Division was alerted. With all advantage of surprise forfeited, the thermometer next threw in its lot against the attackers. On the 15th, Blumenthal had been noting in his journal ‘very warm and unhealthy weather’, but on the eve of the sortie the mercury plunged. From the moment the French assault troops began to advance across the flat, coverless plain in the searing cold of the 21st, the operation resembled with tragic fidelity what their grandsons were to experience in the First World War. According to Archibald Forbes1 of the Daily News who was in the Saxon camp, ‘the French fire was quite furious, half a dozen guns flashing out at once; but it seemed wild. The Germans’ was regular as the beats of a pendulum of a clock.’ Shells from well-established Prussian cannon tore into the massed formations, and men fell cursing an enemy they never saw. In many ways it was worse than Villiers; certainly the attackers saw even less of the enemy infantry. An armoured train of mitrailleuses scuttled back and forth, but the invisible enemy infantry seemed impervious to its bullets. Some of the French troops, notably the Marines, fought with great gallantry, sustaining heavy losses; by the evening of the 21st the Prussians could count some 250 dead on the southern approaches of Le Bourget alone. Once again, there were serious lapses in the higher command; for no very clear reason, a whole Army Corps holding St.-Denis stood idly by throughout the day without giving Ducrot’s men any support. And, once again, there were reports of défaillances among the National Guard; according to Labouchere, ‘One battalion did not stop until it had found shelter within the walls of the town.’

  Near Drancy Labouchere ran into Ducrot: ‘The General had his hood drawn over his head, and both he and his aide-de-camp looked so glum, that I thought it just as well not to congratulate him upon the operations of the day.’ From the other side of the lines, Forbes spotted a man galloping about on a white horse, whom he thought ‘might have been Ducrot himself’, trying to rally the forward troops; ‘but all was of no use. He could not get his fellows’ steam up… the battalions went about, the white horse bringing up the rear at a slow walk, as if marching to the funeral of his honour….’ When it was clear that the frontal attack on Le Bourget had failed, Trochu (who had assumed over-all command of the battle from Fort Aubervilliers) ordered that saps and parallels be dug, as if laying siege to a town. The order was utterly unrealistic; the frozen ground far too hard to dig. That day it had already been so cold as to prompt O’Shea to remark of the attackers: ‘How they could have fingered a trigger is more than I can make out. It was as much as one can do to hold the telescope for a minute’, but by nightfall the temperature had fallen to – 14°C. (about 7°F.) It was difficult even to erect tents on the exposed and concrete-hard ground; there was no fuel for fires, and through the usual sloppy muddle of the Intendance, some French troops were left out on the battlefield for thirty-six hours without food or wine. Bowles found them miserably attempting to huddle together in shallow holes; to Ducrot the plight of his troops ‘made one pity to see them… heads wound about with scarves, their blankets folded and re-folded round their bodies, legs enveloped in rags…’ They no longer resembled soldiers; it was indeed, as Ducrot described, ‘Moscow at the gates of Paris’. The next day Felix Whitehurst with the British Ambulance, spotting a white flag waving in no-man’s-land, found a slightly wounded man who had tied a handkerchief to his tent-pole to attract attention; but he had frozen to death in the night, unfound. Another party came across a poor peasant, shot while trying to dig up vegetables, his knife still frozen to his hand. Sentries froze to death at their posts, and a total of over 900 frostbite cases were reported.

  ‘The cold’, said O’Shea, ‘literally froze the martial ardour out of the French.’ Back into Paris the Army shambled; never had suffering been greater, never in the war had French troops looked quite so wretched. Juliette Lambert who saw them on the 22nd felt all her previous hopes disintegrate; ‘there was the desolation of desolations among the officers, revolt among the troops’. Apart from the frostbite victims, the French had suffered over 2,000 casualties (including a general whom some said had been shot by his own troops); compared with 14 officers and less than 500 men lost by the Prussian Guard. Meanwhile, unbeknown to Paris, Faidherbe had been beaten back by the grim-faced Manteuffel, and with him Paris’s last chance of relief from the outside. The Government’s reputation fell to a new low, with red placards springing up all over Paris demanding the resignation of Trochu. After the second battle of Le Bourget Ducrot declared, ‘Hope of forcing the lines of investment abandoned even the most intrepid hearts’, and finally, on the 22nd, the Government felt itself forced to send to ‘Tours a balloon message warning that Paris would have no rations left after January 20th.

  The prospects for Christmas could hardly have been gloomier.

  Gambetta’s Army of the Loire in Retreat

  13. Over the Hill

  ALTHOUGH the Prussians constantly seemed all too well informed about conditions in Paris, the defenders knew little of what life was like for the besieging forces. Perhaps it was just as well, for on the few occasions when Trochu’s men captured an enemy redoubt it depressed them to discover just how solidly and how comfortably the invader had installed himself. W. H. Russell, The Times correspondent attached to the Prussian Crown Prince’s army, remarked: ‘I could not but compare the extraordinary energy or gusto with which the German Line regiments worked with the lassitude and dislike for siege works exemplified by our soldiery in the Crimea’. On his expeditions, Russell noted how each village around Paris had been transformed. He marvelled how, out of many a pleasant villa, ‘the Prussians had made the most of them and thrown up beams inside for their men, and pierced them with loopholes, strengthening the line with stockades and wooden block-houses. Thus every vilage around Paris is a little fortress. Each is connected with the other by trenches, and the approaches are covered with abattis, with emplacements for field-guns’. Viollet-le-Duc, the expert on medieval fortresses then serving under Trochu as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the engineers, was also vastly impressed by what he saw of the Prussian positions once the Siege was over: ‘… there is not one metre of earth shifted without purpose. The least fold in the ground is utilized’ In open country between the fortified villages, the Prussians had dug deep shelters in the shape of a cone. At the centre of the cone was a large fire, aroun
d which, in cold weather, the troops slept, their heads pointing outwards. One such cone was taken during the Great Sortie and the contrast it offered with the miserable, wet, cold and exposed positions of the French was more than distressing. It was a contrast that would be repeated with dismal regularity as the German entrenched themselves upon French soil forty-four years later.