The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The armistice talks continued on the 24th, which, the Prussians noted auspiciously, happened to be the anniversary of the birth of Frederick the Great. Bismarck, secure in the knowledge of possessing all the cards, was hard and uncompromising, but Favre obtained terms sufficient for him to return to Paris for his Government’s approval. The only outstanding point was whether or not the National Guard should be allowed to retain its arms. On the 25th, 26th, and 27th he was back again with Bismarck, this time accompanied by a General d’Hautpoul, as military representative, whose strange conduct the Prussian Crown Prince and Dr. Busch both ascribed to drink; though Favre, more charitably, insisted he was reeling from sheer emotion. Bismarck was clad in the uniform of a White Cuirassier; the same that had made Paris stare during the Great Exhibition, those brilliant days of only three and a half years ago which now seemed to belong to another century. ‘He looked a giant’, said d’Hérisson. ‘In his tight uniform, with his broad chest and square shoulders, and bursting with health and strength, his proximity overwhelmed the stooping, thin, tall, miserable-looking lawyer, with his frock-coat wrinkled all over, and his white hair falling over his collar. A look, alas! at the pair was sufficient to distinguish between the conqueror and the conquered, the strong and the weak.’ Such was the new balance of power in Europe. Immediately the conversation returned to the National Guard. Having heard Favre say that France needed to keep at least three regular divisions to maintain order, Moltke declared that he could accept only two and that the National Guard would have to be disarmed. With some passion, Favre cried out, ‘I cannot at any price have the National Guard disarmed. That would mean civil war.’ To this, Bismarck replied coldly, ‘You are being foolish. Sooner or later you will have to bring reason to the National Guard, and you gain nothing by waiting’, and he added cynically, ‘Provoke an uprising then, while you still have an army to suppress it with.’ According to Bismarck, Favre ‘looked at me in horror, as much as to say, “What a bloodthirst fellow you are!” ’

  Finally Favre was allowed to keep the National Guard under arms, but Moltke insisted, in exchange, that he be allowed to retain only one regular division. It was to prove a disastrous compromise for the French forces of order. For the rest of the terms, the Army was to surrender its arms and its colours, but the officers would be left their swords; an armistice would be granted to Paris immediately, and would extend to the rest of France in three days’ time; Paris would pay a war indemnity of two hundred million francs, surrender the perimeter forts to the Prussians, and throw the rampart guns into the moats, but no Prussian troops would enter Paris for the duration of the armistice, which was to last until February 19th; during this time an Assembly would be freely elected, and would convene at Bordeaux to discuss whether or not to resume the war, or on what terms to conclude a definitive peace treaty; and meanwhile the Prussians would do all in their power to permit the revictualling of Paris. As a last favour, Favre begged for Paris to be allowed to fire the final shot of the Siege—which he was granted. It was January 27th, and noting that it was also the thirteenth birthday of his heir, Prince Wilhelm,1 the Crown Prince of the new German Reich added in his diary a pious wish that history was to make sound somewhat ironic: ‘May he grow up a good, upright, true and trusty man, one who delights in all that is good and beautiful, a thorough German who will one day to learn to advance further in the paths laid down by his grandfather.… It is truly a disquieting thought to realize how many hopes are even now set on this boy’s head.’

  That same night Favre and his entourage left Versailles, looking, thought one of the Germans, ‘like poor culprits, who are tomorrow to go to the scaffold. They made me sorry for them.’ Back in Paris, Favre begged his fifteen-year-old daughter to keep him company as the cannons ceased firing. At the stroke of midnight, standing on a balcony of the Quai d’Orsay, he heard the last distant rumble fade, and then collapsed sobbing into the child’s arms.

  * * *

  News of the armistice was received in Paris with a mixture of rage and stupor. Thanks to the indiscretion of the Prussian officer who had first received the request for peace talks that Favre sent via d’Hérisson, the city had known what was afoot from the 24th. Leaving Chez Brébant that night, Goncourt found that ‘on the Boulevard, the word capitulation, which it might have been dangerous to pronounce a few days ago, is in all mouths.’ In low voices he and his circle had been discussing the dire news during which one of them, Du Mesnil, intoned gravely, ‘There is a danger. And that is, one doesn’t know whether, the capitulation having been signed, it will not be rejected by the virile portion of Paris.’ The next day Edwin Child resigned from the National Guard. During the riots of January 22nd, his battalion had been called to arms, offering Child his last chance of the Siege to fire a shot in anger, but he, ‘not having much desire to be killed in a street riot, was exempted as “étranger”.’ By the 25th he had had enough:

  Gave my resignation to the Captain, feeling heartily disgusted with the whole affair. 400,000 men capitulating, granted half of them no use as soldiers, soit 200,000. I pity the people, but scorn the chiefs. After the entire confidence placed in them by the people something might have been done, had half the population been sacrificed to the enemy there would have been no recriminations…. The population seem as if paralysed and unable to comprehend their position, and the Government are afraid to say the word ‘capitaulation’ so call it ‘armistice’. What an end of 20 years uninterrupted prosperity, and what a lesson to a nation fond of flattery and calling itself the vanguard of civilisation. ‘Pride goeth before destruction’, etc.

  And the following day:

  Went to appel at 11. For the last time there heard read before my company that ‘le Garde Child, volontaire étranger, a été rayé de la compagnie, sur sa demande’,1 henceforth having no longer the right to call myself a soldier, having endured a bloodless campaign of 40 days duration without hardly seeing the enemy or firing a shot. And for such services they talk about giving everyone a medal. Why I should be ashamed to wear it!

  In its proclamation announcing the surrender, the Government however did its best to keep up the mystique of the city’s heroism: ‘The enemy is the first to render homage to the moral energy and to the courage of which the entire Parisian population has just given an example….’ Among the Press, Le Siècle echoed: ‘Paris has compelled the respect of Europe’, and Le Soir: ‘France is dead! Vive la France!’ Of the few to strike a more sober note, Le Temps pleaded, ‘It is time to have an end of the charlatanism of rhetoric, which is one of our chief plagues’, and the left-wing Rappel warned ominously, ‘It is not an armistice, it is a capitulation…. Paris is trembling with anger.’ To the private citizen, however, the capitulation evoked a symbol of death without hope. At the burial of Régnault, reckoned by some to be the most promising painter in France, who had been killed at Buzenval, Goncourt recorded ‘an enormous crowd. Over this young body of dead talent, one wept for the interment of France’; and as the guns fell silent a tearful Juliette Lambert scribbled down, ‘I should like to die at this hour’. Among even the moderate left wing, bitter hatred and resentment flared against Favre and his accomplices; Corporal Louis Péguret of the National Guard wrote to his sister, ‘Enfin ca y est!…. Paris has capitulated! The Government consoles us by saying “Armistice”, but for people who are more honest and of greater faith this word is translated capitulation. What can we do? We can only curse and execrate their name, and tell our children one day to condemn their memory….’

  At Fort Issy, as the garrison was about to march out, the Colonel addressed his men: ‘Soldiers! You have had to lay down your arms. Officers! You may keep yours; but I want to say to all of you; you were all, all of you, worthy of carrying them’. Then with a brisk gesture he unbuckled his belt, handed his sword over to his orderly, took up his cane and headed the forlorn exodus from the fort, past a group of Prussian soldiers waiting to take it over. It was finished. After one hundred and thirty days, the Siege was over.
On January 30th, Jules Clarétie the journalist wrote, ‘The forts are occupied. Paris is enveloped by a dense fog which seems to carry the sorrow of its fall…. One sees disarmed Mobiles wandering about, dejected soldiers, and sailors; sandbags and equipment are being handed back, the bloodstained stretchers folded up…. Mais quoi!’ he concluded in a note of that indestructible French buoyancy, ‘Behind this fog hope has not left us.’

  The war might have ended for Paris, but in the provinces it still continued. Rumours of Favre’s armistice had only reached the unconsulted Gambetta at Bordeaux on the 27th, throwing him—not unreasonably—into a thoroughly meridional rage. At once he issued a denial, declaring, ‘We cannot believe that negotiations of this kind could have been undertaken without the Delegation being previously notified.’ On January 27th Favre had in fact dispatched a thirty-year-old volunteer called Lacaze aboard the Richard Wallace, the last but one balloon to leave Paris, with instructions to inform Gambetta of the armistice; but, in the final tragedy of the Siege, Lacaze never reached his destination. The Richard Wallace, named after Paris’s great British benefactor, was last seen sailing out over the Bassin d’Arcachon near Bordeaux. Why Lacaze never opened the gas-valve as he crossed the coast has never been explained; perhaps he had a heart attack; possibly he passed out from prolonged malnutrition; or perhaps, quite simply, he could not bear to return to the soil of a conquered and humiliated France. Whatever the cause, a small plaque in the Gare du Nord still commemorates the second, and last, fatality of the brave balloonists of Paris.

  Thus it was only on the morning of the 29th that Gambetta was awakened by a curt telegram from Favre, informing him of the capitulation. Outraged, his first instinct was to refuse to comply, and he issued a decree urging that the armistice be utilized ‘as a school for instruction for our young troops’. But even he now began to realize that the fight was hopeless, and when Favre’s emissaries reached Bordeaux on February 6th the Churchillian dictator of the provinces greeted them with his resignation.

  There was, however, still one disaster of the war, emanating from the exiguity of Favre’s instructions to Bordeaux, which had yet to be played out. Down in the south-east corner of France, Bourbaki had received no word of the surrender. After the brief success in forcing a temporary evacuation of Dijon, his campaign had gone progressively awry. Two Prussian armies under Werder and Manteuffel were now pressing his ragged, starving, and beaten forces back into the icy slopes of the Jura by the Swiss frontier. Their plight was desperate: ‘As there were no leaves on the trees for the men to eat. wrote Rochefort, ‘they tore the bark from the trunks and ate it, while the horses gnawed the wood of the gun-carriages before falling dead on the road.’ Bourbaki himself tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide, and finally the remnants of his army straggled over into Switzerland to beg refuge there. It was, to quote Michael Howard’s classic study, The Franco-Prussian War, ‘one of the greatest disasters that has overtaken a European army’.

  And so ended the most disastrous war in the long course of French history.

  By comparison with what defeat cost the nation, and with the lives that would be forfeited to redeem this defeat half a century later, the total French losses were not excessive; some 150,000 killed and died of wounds, and a similar number of wounded (the German totals were only 28,208 and 88,488 respectively). During the Siege of Paris itself, French military casualties (including the National Guard) totalled only 28,450, of which less than 4,000 were killed. According to Professor Sheppard’s figures, deaths from all causes during the Siege amounted to 6,251; of these, only six persons are listed as having died ‘apparently from want of food’, though there were a further 4,800 infants, infirm, and aged ‘whose death may be said to have been hastened by want of food or by bad food’.1

  But, in Paris, the real killing had yet to begin.

  PART TWO

  THE COMMUNE

  ‘Purification’ after German troops leave Paris

  16. The Uneasy Interlude

  As the guns fell silent, the divergent emotions of shame at the capitulation and of satisfaction that it was all over were immediately overshadowed by one thought common to all Parisians. Food! In his first letter home after the cease-fire, ex-Guardsman Child wrote to his parents on January 30th: ‘Once more a free and enlightened citizen, capable of judging of my own actions and for the moment without being humbugged by Colonel, Commandant, Captain or any other species of the coward race whatever, the moment I can leave this gay(?) city I shall pay a visit to the native hearth and trust to your parental feelings to prepare me a good substantial welcome, in the shape of roast beef or a leg of mutton, fresh eggs (etc.)….’ With relief in sight, the longing became almost more agonizing than during the last days of the Siege. To his brother-in-law Louis Hack in London, Jules Rafinesque wrote: ‘I do not think that we will die of hunger since the revictualling approaches—oh, Loulou, provided the first leg of lamb that is given to us to eat is tender and well done!! enough am more nectar more nectar!’

  Matters soon proved to be worse than even the Government had suspected. In its last display of incompetence, it had gravely overestimated the food stocks remaining in the city: earlier, Jules Ferry had appointed two officials to keep account of the dwindling stocks as a check on each other, but—incredibly enough—it appears that instead of being compared, their two estimates had been added together. Thus on the actual day of capitulation there was probably no more than a week’s food left at the present subsistence-level. Archibald Forbes, the Daily News correspondent attached to Moltke’s Army of the Meuse, managed to ride into Paris on the 31st, and was much shocked by the emptiness of the foodshops.1 The whole city, he noted, ‘was haunted by the peculiar half-sweetish, half-fetid odour which horse flesh gives out in cooking….’, and he was constantly alarmed lest his own well-fed steed be seized and devoured. What few wares the shops had to offer now commanded astronomical prices: 2 francs for a small, shrivelled cabbage; 1 franc for a leek; 45 francs a fowl; 45 francs a rabbit (generally cat); 25 francs a pigeon; and 22 francs for a 2-lb. chub. A few days later, Forbes’s colleague with the Crown Prince was still more appalled by the sight of the hungry Parisians begging for bread on the bridge at Neuilly; it was, he declared, something ‘not soon to be forgotten’. Nor could the well-fed Prussian soldiery, engaged in oiling their rifles and mending worn equipment, look on unmoved at ‘delicate ladies, with jewels on their fingers, grubbing in the fields of frosted vegetables’. Clearly, the revictualling of Paris had become a matter of the utmost urgency. But although each day more and more herds of cattle were to be seen being driven by French peasants towards the hungry city, France herself—the countryside devastated and communications disrupted—could do little. Even the former enemy showed his anxiety; the Kaiser himself instructed that six million army rations be sent into Paris; while fortunately, with remarkable prescience, the Prussians had begun repairing bridges and railway tunnels well before the armistice.

  It was to Britain and America that Paris chiefly turned in her hour of need. The response was immediate. Mr. Gladstone’s Government requisitioned Navy ships loaded with Army stores; at Deptford, twenty-four great ovens were set to work night and day baking bread and hard-tack; the Lord Mayor’s Relief Fund was inundated with donations. According to Edward Blount, who was responsible for distributing the food in Paris, in the early days of February alone the London Relief Committee sent ‘nearly 10,000 tons of flour, 450 tons of rice, 900 tons of biscuits, 360 tons of fish, and nearly 4,000 tons of fuel, with about 7,000 head of livestock’. Some $2,000,000-worth of food was sent from the United States, but much of it was held up at Le Havre because no one could be found to unload the ships. The British experienced similar difficulties. On January 31st Blount, writing to his wife that ‘the misery is appalling’, added, ‘We hope for provisions at the end of the week, but the railways are in an awful state. There is no way of getting to Boulogne or Calais. I am overloaded with work…. I bought horse flesh, which I distributed a
mong my own clerks and others to save them from starvation.’ There were also hitches, such as when the French authorities insisted on sending back pheasants included by thoughtful British donors, on the grounds that ‘these things are for the aristocracy and not for the people—it would be more prudent not to distribute them’.

  But gradually the food supplies began to reach Paris. On the morning of February 4th a British correspondent recorded being awakened by drums heralding the arrival of the first convoy; on the 7th, delegates from the Lord Mayor’s Relief Fund arrived and the trickle of food became a torrent. Two brothers called Lyon, coming to collect notes for lectures they intended to give in England in aid of the hungry, passed on the outskirts of the city ‘a long train of provisions; each waggon labelled in large letters “The Gift of the British Government”. We felt proud of our country and went into Paris a couple of inches taller on that account.’ For a nation not over given to such demonstrativeness, there were immediate responses of gratitude; Jules Ferry telegraphed the Lord Mayor, declaring that ‘In the extremity of its misfortunes, the voice of the English people has been the first that has been heard by it from outside with an expression of sympathy. The citizens of Paris will never forget….’ Much of the resentment felt towards Britain because of her ‘splendid isolation’ during the war vanished. The food had come only just in time; the unloading of the first of the British food waggons at Les Halles provoked an uncontrollable riot, accompanied with pillage and leading to a deplorable wastage of the precious victuals. Eggs, vegetables, butter, and chickens were trampled underfoot, while for seven hours the police seemed powerless to intervene.