The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  After the forty-eight-hour German bombardment, the Avron plateau presented a forlorn picture. Even the battle-hardened Forbes who visited it in the wake of the Saxons was appalled:

  No man who long followed this war but must have become so familiar with the aspect of slain men, that the original thrill and turn of the blood at the sight had faded into a memory of the past, at which he all but smiled when it dimly recurred to him; but the terrible ghastliness of those dead transcended anything I had ever seen, or even dreamt of, in the shuddering nightmare after my first battle-field. Remember how they had been slain. Not with the nimble bullet of the needle-gun, that drills a minute hole through a man and leaves him undisfigured, unless it has chanced to strike his face; not with the sharp stab of the bayonet, but slaughtered with missiles of terrible weight, shattered into fragments by explosions of many pounds of powder, mangled and torn by massive fragments of iron.

  It was a reaction more or less novel to war correspondents—until 1914, and before familiarity with mutilation bred insensibility.

  On the other side, O’Shea was staggered how Avron had been ‘literally shaven’ by the huge projectiles; but at the same time he noted shrewdly that ‘their very dimensions militated against their destructiveness in instances, as they penetrated to such a depth that their large splinters at bursting lodged in the ground, harmlessly displacing the clay’. And in fact the German shells, filled only with black powder (since T.N.T. was yet to be invented), caused less than a hundred casualties. It was their moral, rather than their physical effect, that drove the French off Avron. But the German success was sufficient to have a telling influence upon both sides. In Paris, morale suffered a serious setback at this first unequivocal sign that the enemy’s offensive potential might be stronger than the Paris defences. The cannonade, heard all too plainly in the centre of the city, sounded a deadly harbinger in Parisian minds of what lay in store for themselves. Wrote Washburne: ‘The Parisians are “low down” today, and I think Trochu is going down. But he is as hard to get rid of as some of the officers we had during the time of the Rebellion.’ At Versailles Avron was regarded as a ‘dummy run’ that had exceeded all hopes. Even the Crown Prince was forced to admit ‘we have enjoyed a fine success we never expected’, and his principal supporter in the anti-bombardment camp, Blumenthal, declared that the ‘brilliant’ results at Avron had now persuaded him; ‘it is quite possible that the time has come when a bombardment of the forts and a portion of the city may be successful’. For, he concluded, it was apparent ‘the French are no longer making a serious stand’. On New Year’s Eve, after a long session, the King of Prussia gave the order for the bombardment of Paris to begin as soon as possible. It was an act fertilizing the ovum of a new monster and a new myth that would long affront and appal world opinion, under the name of ‘Teutonic frightfulness’. The Crown Prince wrote in his diary: ‘May we not have to repent our folly….!’

  In order that the heavy guns could bombard the city unmolested from close-in positions, the southern forts had first of all to be silenced. From Fort Issy, a French corporal of the Mobiles wrote to his father on New Year’s Day ‘… in short, life is tolerable; but alas I have an idea that I shall not long enjoy this relative well-being… there is bombardment in the air.’ Vigorously the garrisons were set to work filling sandbags and carrying out other last-minute preparations on the defences. On January 5th, the same corporal was again writing to his father: ‘At 8 o’clock he [a fellow soldier] had just opened one of our windows looking out on to Châtillon, to empty a certain mess-tin from which one does not eat, when a shell, passing over his head, traversed our barrack room to explode I don’t know where…. In a flash, everybody was at the bottom of his bed, leaping into his boots.’ Within a short time Prussian 220-mm. guns firing from the dominating Châtillon heights (wrenched from Ducrot in September) had smashed most of the gun embrasures, turned the interior court into a zone of death, and rendered uninhabitable the barracks that faced outwards. Supplementing the heavy guns the Prussians also employed a weapon the French gunners disliked even more: low-trajectory ‘rampart guns’ firing a 20-mm. projectile that could penetrate ramparts and kill at 1,300 yards, and thereby make repair work on the defences extremely unpleasant. By 2 p.m. on the same day, the guns of Issy had been silenced; as the French were to discover again in 1914, their fortifications were simply not adequate to face the latest products of Herr Krupp. The story was similar at Fort Vanves, where nine guns had been swiftly knocked out and urgent pleas for support addressed in vain to Forts Issy and Montrouge. Only Montrouge still replied with any vigour, but as Moltke later wrote, ‘the forts never again got the best of it’. Yet even to his shrewd gaze the long-term, material inefficacy of the huge shells of that day remained unrevealed, as indeed it had been during the success at Avron. Throughout the bombardment in which as many as 60,000 shells were rained down on it, Fort Vanves lost only 20 men killed out of its garrison of 1,730. Likewise, only 18 were killed and 80 wounded out of 1,900 in Issy. Although three out of four of Issy’s barracks were destroyed, the ramparts remained intact and in none of the forts was any breach made in the actual defences. These facts were not, however, apparent to Moltke; the demonstrative results at Issy and Vanves were that the Prussian siege batteries could now move forward as much as 750 yards nearer to the heart of Paris.

  Even as the forts were still being pounded into submission, on January 5th the bombardment of Paris proper began; in the coldly technical words of Moltke, ‘an elevation of 30 degrees, by a peculiar contrivance, sent the shot into the heart of the city’. What was probably the first shell burst in the Rue Lalande on the Left Bank, scattering its fragments over a baby asleep on its cradle. Other great masses of iron furrowed up the Montparnasse Cemetery, whose occupants were beyond harm, but one which fell near the Luxembourg literally sliced in two a little girl on her way home from school. Tragedy followed on tragedy; Henry Markheim, writing under the sobriquet of the ‘Oxford Graduate’, recorded morbidly how he had seen, that first day, ‘an old woman’s head blown off’, and three days later his own house near the Invalides was struck; one unhappy mother, said Juliette Lambert, returned home to find her two children obliterated by a shell; among the foreign community, a young American—Charles Swager of Louisville, Kentucky—who had come to France ‘for his health’, had his foot carried away and died a month later from the injury; six women were killed in a food queue; in the Quartier Latin a cantinière of the National Guard was killed in her bed, and in a bistro several tipplers were killed by a shell bursting in a street that must have seemed, to the survivors, appropriately named—Rue de l’Enfer. Wrote Goncourt on the 6th: ‘The shells have begun falling in the Rue Boileau… Tomorrow, no doubt, they will be falling here; and even if they do not kill me, they will destroy everything I still love in life…. On every doorstep, women and children stand, half frightened, half inquisitive….’

  The shells fell at a rate of between three and four hundred a day: a small proportion of those devoted to the southern forts, yet they fell with a regularity that reminded Goncourt of ‘the action of a steam-engine piston’. In general, the bombardment did not begin before 10 p.m. and went on for four or five hours at night, which Dr. Alan Herbert thought was ‘very good-natured’ of the Prussians. Sir Edward Blount disagreed, noting on January 17th: ‘The noise is tremendous, and even in the Rue de la Paix I cannot sleep’, although nothing had fallen closer than the Invalides. The range of the German cannon, using heavily increased charges and firing at maximum angles, surprised both sides. No shells actually fell on the Right Bank of the Seine, though one reached the Pont Notre-Dame, but hitherto unheard-of ranges of 7,500 yards were steadily registered. The domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides became favourite targets, and the areas around them suffered the most heavily. The Salpetrière Hospital, a prominent building with a large Red Cross on its roof and two thousand aged women and a thousand lunatics, was hit repeatedly, giving rise to the suspicion that the Prussian
s were deliberately firing on hospitals. The Odéon Theatre, also in use as a temporary hospital, was hit twice, and shells ruined the priceless collection of orchids under glass in the Jardin des Plantes. Other shells hit the beautiful church of St.-Sulpice off the Boulevard St.-Germain and destroyed a painting of the Last Judgement. More usefully, hits scored on the balloon workshops in the Gare d’Orléans forced this highly inflammable industry to seek refuge in the Gare de l’Est; at the same time they also hit the house of the daughter of the inventor of the balloon Mlle de Montgolfier killing two men.

  Although the doughty eighty-six-year-old spinster was one who refused to budge, the unnerving and ever-present threat of death or mutilation without warning in the middle of the night—not unlike what Londoners experienced from the V.2 rockets in 1944–5—drove many inhabitants of the Left Bank from their homes. They numbered perhaps as many as 20,000. The refugees reminded Théophile Gautier of a ‘migration of Indians carrying their ancestors rolled in bison skins; the women follow, pressing against their meagre breast a pale suckling which they try to envelope in a shred of shawl…. Other fugitives walk bent beneath the weight of some piece of furniture; nothing more picturesquely sinister than this cortege advancing in the shadows, lit up by the livid reflection of the snow and the red fire from the shells.’

  Even Goncourt’s circle was affected, with the Germanophile Renan being among the first to retire under the hail of Teutonic steel. The refugees added yet another strain to the already extenuated provisioning system, and many on leaving their arrondissement were threatened with total loss of their rations.

  After the initial fear of the unknown had passed, indignation became the principal reaction to the bombardment; indignation that reached a climax on January 11th with the solemn funeral of six small children, killed by the same shell. It was the defilement of the ville lumière, the holy city, as much as the random disembowelling of innocent children or the shelling of hospitals that outraged most Parisians, while the affront to humanitarian principles earned France stronger support abroad than at any other time during the war. Edward Blount, then acting as Consul in the absence of any senior British representative, wrote: ‘At first I did not believe that the Prussians picked out particular buildings, churches, hospitals, etc., but as they have thrown their missiles into the Salpetrière, it appears to me that they must have meant it….’ (The volcanic Rochefort, strangely enough, was one who did not believe ‘the enemy laid their batteries intentionally on the hospitals’, but when, in answer to a protest from Trochu, Moltke replied to the effect that he hoped soon to push his guns near enough to spot the Red Cross flags more clearly, the Prussian case was hardly assisted.) Most of the British correspondents felt particularly disgusted by the brutality of the indiscriminate bombardment. Bowles commented: ‘It might perhaps have been expected that the God-fearing and laws-of-war-respecting Prussians would have followed the ordinary usages in such cases, and would have given notice before bombarding a city full of defence-less people…’ and O’Shea even more outspokenly condemned the bombardment as ‘a Massacre of Innocents, a Carnival of Blood’. ‘Although I was a neutral’, he wrote in his memoirs published sixteen years later, ‘and individually suffered nothing from this bombardment, it kindled ire and resentment in my breast; and now, although I have erased many very bitter reflections in my diary, I look back upon it with loathing.’ Even Russell at Versailles, who had been led to believe by the Prussian High Command that shells were not to be thrown into the city, was shocked to ‘see their guns were fired at the very highest angles consistent with safety and I could watch the explosions far inside the enceinte…’. One of the few dissentient voices in Paris itself was that of Felix Whitehurst, who observed with dispassionate logic, and some justification: ‘Like a door, a city must be ouverte ou fermée. If it is an open city, the law of nations says you must not fire on it, only summon it, and then take it by an attack. If it is a fortified city, behind forts, you may bombard it when and how you can.’ Nevertheless, all the principal nations made diplomatic protests to the Prussians—with the exception of the unrepresented British, which, as Edward Blount remarked, ‘produced a painful effect’.

  But as relief grew at the relatively little damage and casualties caused, indignation was rapidly replaced by a remarkable indifference to the bombardment. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of the London blitz, this new common menace temporarily united the various strata of Paris society as it never had been at any other stage of the Siege. Already by January 8th, Washburne could write: ‘The carelessness and nonchalance of the Parisians in all this business is wonderful…. Ladies and gentlemen now make excursions to the Point du Jour to see the shells fall.’ The bombardment in fact became a valuable distraction from the drab grimness of Siege life. Wrote another American, Nathan Sheppard: ‘Last night we were a thousand or two strong on the Place de la Concorde, looking at the bombs. Everybody enjoyed it hugely.’ The normally unadventurous Labouchere left his hotel for the Point du Jour to ‘see myself what truth there was in the announcement that we were being bombarded’. There he found that speculators ‘with telescopes, were offering to show the Prussian artillerymen for one sou’. Later he overheard a mother threatening an undisciplined child, ‘If you do not behave better I will not take you to see the bombardment’. In his favourite vein of cynicism,1 Labouchere remarked how ‘the number of persons who have been all but hit by shells is enormous’. Everybody had his bombardment anecdote, and with the acute commercial sense of the true Parisian, small boys made a killing in the sale of shell-fragment souvenirs. Juliette Lambert overheard one street urchin saying to another ‘I tell you that the shells are falling here! You can see the hole, it’s a good place!’, and towards the end of the Siege Goncourt suffered some anxiety on a bus through ‘a man in a white overcoat, holding out a shell to the conductor of the omnibus: “Hold this for me while I get on, and be careful! For Gods sake, be careful!” ’ Familiarity bred a remarkable degree of contempt; a Professor of History lecturing at the Collège de France when a shell exploded said calmly ‘If it does not incommode you, Messieurs, we shall continue!’, and an absentminded friend of Jean Renoir was heard to inquire in the middle of the bombardment ‘Who’s firing?’

  Life went on remarkably as usual. Pails of water were ordered to be kept at the ready in every house, and doors left unlocked in case passers-by should seek refuge from the shells. Most of the prizes from the Louvre had already been evacuated to Brittany before the investment began; the Venus de Milo had been crated up and stowed in a secret vault by the Prefect of Police; and now stacks of sandbags encased the Arc de Triomphe and such works of art as the Chevaux de Marly. Goncourt noticed on January 9th an absence of people in the streets of the Left Bank, and the local bus service was disrupted when a shell fell on the depot, killing eight horses; but otherwise ‘there is no panic or alarm. Everybody seems to be leading his usual life, and the café proprietors, with admirable sang-froid, are replacing the mirrors shattered by the blast of exploding shells.’ Indeed, in some hearts the beginning of the bombardment had awoken new optimism. Trochu for one reckoned that the all-out Prussian attack he had awaited so long was about to begin; while National Guardsman Edwin Child noted in his diary for January 5th: ‘A most terrible cannonade going on all day, we were in hopes of being sent out.’ Expectations, however, had soon been dashed and he added gloomily: ‘but it seems as if we should make a campaign without a chance of fighting tant pis ou peut-être tant mieux’. Four days later, he was contenting himself with dodging shells at the Point du Jour: ‘after a few minutes I could tell by the sound whether they would fall to the right or left and when I fancied one was likely to come unpleasantly close I ran behind a tree. Returned homeward without a scratch, and in Rue Rivoli met Maria and her mistress. Walked to Trocadero assisting them in turns to a slide.’ The following day, after an extensive exploration of the Left Bank, he drew an important conclusion that other Parisians were also reaching: ‘Became more and more convin
ced of the impossibility of effectually bombarding Paris, the houses being built of such solid blocks of stone that they could only be destroyed piecemeal. One bomb simply displaces one stone, in spite of their enormous weight….’

  The Prussian bombardment was proving a failure. Although Herr Krupp had personally offered Roon six of the 560-mm. giant mortars firing a 1,000-lb. shell that had been displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1867, none of these were actually delivered, and the other guns used—monsters as they were by nineteenth-century standards—were simply inadequate to the task. Added to this, the increased charges used had caused a large number to wear out, or blow up in the faces of their crews. Thus, when the final reckoning came to be made, it was found that in the three weeks the bombardment of Paris lasted only 97 people were actually killed and 278 wounded, and 1,400 buildings were damaged for an expenditure of approximately 12,000 shells; while the Prussians themselves lost several hundred gunners to French counter-battery fire.1 Well might Washburne declare on January 16th that the bombardment ‘had not so far had the effect of hastening a surrender. On the other hand, it apparently had made the people more firm and determined.’