The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  First, there was the election of a man to be head executive of the new Government. The choice fell naturally enough upon Thiers, who, as head of the ‘list for peace’, had been elected by no less than twenty-six different constituencies; compared to Gambetta (whom Thiers derided as a fou furieux) with only ten. A powerful majority of the new Assembly now appointed Thiers to the post of supreme power in France, and he promptly set about forming a Government composed of like-minded men. A small, white-haired, gnome-like figure, with a bespectacled and owlish face of sallow tint, Thiers was already seventy-three but had lost none of his ruthless vigour. He was a consummate politician with almost half a century of experience in the tortuousness of French government, and his knowledge of French history was equally profound. From the very first he gripped the reins with a firmness that neither Trochu nor Favre could have achieved, dominating both the Assembly and the Government. In Thiers’s long career, his first mentor had been Talleyrand; he had helped Louis-Philippe to the throne, under whom he had three times been Président du Conseil and there was no reason to suspect that he had relinquished his Orleanist leanings. He had steadily opposed Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, and had refused to take office under the Republic proclaimed on September 4th, although he was willing to play along with it. Thiers once claimed: ‘By birth I belong to the people; my family were humble merchants in Marseilles; they had a small trade in the Levant in cloth, which was ruined by the Revolution. By education I am a Bonapartist; I was born when Napoleon was at the summit of his glory. By tastes and habits and associations I am an aristocrat. I have no sympathy with the bourgeoisie or with any system under which they are to rule.’ On the other hand, by instinct he was considerably less sympathetic towards poverty, or any of its manifestations. In 1834, when a serious revolt had broken out in Lyons and threatened to spread to Paris, Thiers—then Minister of the Interior—cunningly put the word about that the Lyons revolutionaries were winning the day, thus drawing the dissident Parisian leaders into the open and provoking a revolt which was harshly crushed. For the ensuing ‘massacre in the Rue Transnonain’, immortalized by Daumier, the left wing would always hold Thiers responsible, and it knew that it could now expect little but hostility from the new Assembly.1 Thiers, a supreme realist, was also dedicated to concluding ‘peace at almost any price’ with Germany, and the choice of words was perhaps ominous when one of the Daily News correspondents, referring to the peace terms, remarked that ‘If France is ruined, she is at least sure to get from M. Thiers un enterrement de première classe’.2 In the course of Thiers’s latest mandate, thousands of Parisians would require interment, but it would be far from ‘first-class’.

  Because Gambetta and his Delegation had evacuated themselves there on December 10th, after being driven out of Tours, it was at Bordeaux that the new Assembly first met. By its second meeting in Bordeaux’s eighteenth-century Grand Théâtre, on February 13th, the Assembly witnessed a scene which graphically revealed its mood. Garibaldi, attempting painfully to rise to speak, was booed and finally silenced by shouts of ‘No Garibaldi!’, ‘No Italian!’, and ‘Let him hold his tongue!’ A spectator with a long black beard was heard to shout from a box, ‘You rural majority, listen to the voice of the towns’, and then the President cleared the galleries. Garibaldi also left and was loudly applauded outside; he declared that he had come to France to fight for the Republic and that he felt his mission was now over. That night, clad in his familiar red shirt and broad-brimmed hat, he departed for Caprera, never again to return to an ungrateful France. He was, as Hugo truthfully remarked, ‘the only French general never to be defeated in the war’; but, more than this, in the eyes of the left wing he was the hero of the Republican cause and the insult cut deep.

  Thiers’s most immediate task on his accession to power was to conclude a peace treaty with the conquerors. Time was running out. The armistice was due to expire on the 19th, but he managed to gain an extension; first to the 24th, and then again to the 26th. On February 21st he arrived at Versailles, and for six days the talks dragged on. Thiers at once proved a tougher negotiator than Favre. On the 26th, Bismarck, still unwell, testily refused any further extension of the armistice and declared that if a treaty were still not concluded, the German forces would resume hostilities against ‘whatever they could find to fight’; to which Thiers replied, by warning the Iron Chancellor that such an action would incur the odium of all Europe. Finally, that night, the treaty was signed. On his way back to Paris, Thiers broke down and wept in his coach. France was to lose all Alsace, and most of Lorraine, two of her fairest and most valuable provinces, including the bastion cities of Metz and Strasbourg. By hard negotiating and appealing to the greed for glory of the Prussian military, Thiers had managed to save the city of Belfort (which, despite a long siege, had never capitulated) in return for subjecting Paris to the shame of a triumphal march by the conqueror. The Germans had demanded the payment of an unprecedented war indemnity of six milliard francs, or £240 million; but they acceded to strong British representations that France could never pay this amount, and it had accordingly been reduced to five milliards—still an astronomical sum.1 Until it was paid off, France was to submit to partial occupation. ‘The peace terms seem to me so ponderous, so crushing, so mortal for France’, groaned Goncourt when he heard of them, ‘that I am terrified the war will only break out again, before we are ready for it’. Even beyond the frontiers of France, there were many Europeans who agreed with him.

  On February 28th Thiers presented the Treaty to an appalled Assembly for ratification. Edgar Quinet declared prophetically that ‘the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war to perpetuity under the mask of peace’, which was approximately what Thiers had warned Bismarck. Victor Hugo made a speech (as a contemporary British chronicler described it) of ‘unexampled silliness’, but predicted that ‘the hour will sound—I can feel already the coming of that immense revenge’. The France of 1792 would ‘stand upright again! Oh! then she will be a power to reckon with. We shall see her, at a single stroke, resume possession of Alsace, resume possession of Lorraine! Is that all? No, we shall see her, at a single stroke, resume possession—mark well my words—of Tréves, Mayence, Cologne, Coblence… of all the left bank of the Rhine as well.’ Having said this, he addressed himself to the Germans, amiably recommending to them the benefits of a Republic; ‘You got rid of my Emperor, I shall come to get rid of yours!’ However, the Assembly ratified the Peace Treaty by 546 votes to 107, with 23 abstentions. Paris fumed in impotent rage and disgust; Gambetta and the deputies from Alsace-Lorraine resigned in a body, as did six of the extreme Left from Paris—including Rochefort and Pyat. They were followed on March 8th by Victor Hugo, after a debate in which he had vigorously opposed a motion to pronounce Garibald’s election null and void. A rural vicomte had shouted at him, ‘The Assembly refuses to listen to M. Victor Hugo, on the ground that he does not speak French.’ No doubt the Assembly regarded the departure of the old demagogue with some relief, but his resignation came as yet another outrage to raw Parisian feelings.

  The new Assembly could not, would not, comprehend the state of mind of the city which had for so long dictated to the provinces. ‘We provincials were unable to come to an understanding with the Parisians’, admitted the Vicomte de Meaux, a newly elected deputy and the son-in-law of the Catholic leader, Montalembert; ‘It seemed as if we did not even speak the same language, and that they were prey to a kind of sickness.’ What the nature of this ‘sickness’ was, most of the deputies did not inquire too deeply; preferring to accept, simply, Viollet-le-Duc’s view that ‘Paris is a monstrous agglomeration that must be liquidated for the peace of France and of all Europe….’ When the Parisian Deputies arrived at Bordeaux, ‘still vibrating with patriotism, their eyes hollow but glowing with Republican faith’, wrote a left-wing chronicler savagely, ‘they found themselves confronted by forty years of greedy hatreds, provincial notables, obtuse châtelains, grainless musketeers, clerical dandies…
a completely unsuspected world of towns ranged in battle against Paris; the atheistic, the revolutionary city which had created three Republics and shattered so many idols’.

  There seemed to be no end to the extent to which the Assembly could rub salt into the wounds of Paris. Next, it was announced that General d’Aurelle de Paladines was to succeed Clément Thomas as commander of the Paris National Guard. It was not a happy choice. D’Aurelle was by repute a reactionary, a former Bonapartist and violently anti-Parisian; and moreover he was regarded now, not as the victor of Coulmiers, but as the man who had failed to come to the aid of Paris. It was also clear that by his appointment Thiers intended to curb the power of the National Guard.

  Now, as the Assembly’s session at Bordeaux neared its end, it hastened through a veritable flurry of legislation unpalatable to a wide variety of factions in the capital. In a deplorable ex post facto ruling, Blanqui, Flourens, and two other agitators were sentenced to death, par contumace, for their parts in the October 31st uprising; and six left-wing journals, including Pyat’s Le Vengeur and the scurrilous but popular Père Duchesne, were suspended. But no act of the new Assembly caused more justifiable, and widespread, resentment than the Law of Maturities. This ordained that all debts, on which a moratorium had been declared during the war, were to be paid within forty-eight hours; while a similar law decreed that landlords could now also demand payment of all accumulated rents. The two bills were as cruel as they were stupid, and they dealt a staggering blow to hundreds of thousands of Parisians. With industry and commerce at a standstill for four months, and still virtually paralysed, only the wealthy minority had the funds with which to pay. At the same time, as yet another measure designed to diminish the National Guard’s potential, the Assembly voted to end the pay of 150 francs a day, which for so many had provided a form of dole during the Siege. Thus with these three unenlightened strokes a vast cross-section of Parisian society—the petite bourgeoisie of clerks and shopkeepers, artisans and minor officials, few of whom owned their own dwellings—now found themselves thrust into the same camp asthe under privileged proletariat, whom they had hitherto despised and distrusted. Their mood was rebellious, typified by Louis Péguret when he wrote to his sister: ‘the landlords have no reclaim against those whose only fortune is in their daily work…. We shall pay when we can, and there will be many who will never pay.’

  The last act at Bordeaux of this ‘Assembly of country bumpkins’, as Gaston Crémieux described it, was to adjourn itself on March 10th and decide (by 427 votes to 154) to reconvene in Versailles on the 20th. Mindful of the humiliation Trochu and Favre had been subjected to on October 31st, and of the shootings of January 22nd, the Assembly certainly had reason to consider that somewhere outside of inflamed, disordered, atheistic Red Paris would be more conducive to good government. Reporting to Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, at the beginning of March, the British Ambassador, Lord Lyons, used some ominous words: ‘The majority of the Assembly, which is decidedly anti-Republican, hardly expects to establish a Government to its taste, without some actual fighting with the Reds in Paris and other large towns. It therefore does not at all like the idea of moving the Assembly to Paris…. I cannot help thinking that the sooner the Government settles in the Capital, and has its fight (if fight there really must be) with the Mob over, the better.’ The possible motives behind this latest slight were also apparent to the Parisians, but the choice of Versailles was taken as a sign not only of distrust, but—more dangerously—of weakness.

  * * *

  At the same time as the Assembly, in its heavy-handed insensitivity, was heaping injury upon injury from Bordeaux on to wounded Paris, the city itself had been subjected to the worst humiliation that any proud capital can know. France’s part of the bargain by which Thiers had saved Belfort was to allow the Germans to make a triumphal march through Paris and occupy the city for two days. Unfeelingly Labouchere wrote, ‘I am fully convinced that this vain, silly population would rather that King William should double the indemnity which he demands from France than march with his troops down the Rue de Rivoli’, and indeed few Parisians felt that the fate of this distant provincial town merited submitting Paris—after all she had suffered—to such depths of shame. Indignation was universal and violent; and with it went an additional sense of betrayal, in that the Government had proclaimed on February 4th: ‘The enemy shall not enter into Paris’. It recalled all too painfully Trochu’s promise ‘The Governor of Paris will not capitulate’—or Favre’s ‘not an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses’. Louis Péguret wrote to his sister, Octavie: ‘What shame, what dishonour, these Royalists have brought upon their country!… The whole population has rage in its heart, and if the Prussians should give the least suspicion of mockery it would not be at all surprising if some patriot, for whom the shame was too much, fired a random shot.’ The veteran Socialist, Louis Blanc, told Juliette Lambert that what was being said in the Clubs ‘terrified’ him, and that he ‘feared some folly’ if the Prussians should march through Paris. The Lyon brothers, who had just entered Paris, found that when the news became known, ‘angry crowds of armed men were going about vowing vengeance on the Prussians’, and added ominously that ‘The National Guards had taken forcible possession of their arms and ammunition and were very excited’.

  There were those in the German camp too, including the Prussian Crown Prince, who had their doubts about the wisdom of the triumphal entry, but on the appointed day the sheer splendour of the occasion swept all misgivings aside. At 8 a.m. on March 1st, a young lieutenant and six troopers of the 14th Prussian Hussars rode up to the Étoile, jumped their horses over the chains and other obstructions Parisians had placed around the Arc de Triomphe, and continued insouciantly through the sacred edifice. Edward Blount, who was watching, was ‘astonished by the Prussians’ bravery’, and the populace too seems to have been taken by surprise. The march had begun.

  Out at Longchamp, where less than four years ago another march past had been held in honour of the King of Prussia, but under rather different circumstances, the 30,000 troops picked for the triumphal entry were passing in review before him: 30,000 of the troops who had elevated him from a king to an emperor in those four years. Standing in the fallen Louis-Napoleon’s pavilion, the Crown Prince noted that ‘all the woodwork is burnt, and only the iron framework holds the walls precariously together. Obscene insults in word and picture scrawled on the bare walls revile the banished ruler’. As the men who had fought at Wœrth and Gravelotte, Orléans, and Dijon, and from Sedan to Paris, goose-stepped past, a sense of history overwhelmed Archibald Forbes who was attempting to record the event for the Daily News: ‘Out rings the clarion of the trumpets, clash goes the silver music of the kettledrums, tempered by the sweet notes of the ophicleide. The horses, ever lovers of sweet sounds, arch their necks, champ the bits, and toss flecks of foam on the polished leathers of the riders. They are as proud as if they realised the meaning and the glory of the day.’ As the procession formed up to move off, Forbes noted a touching encounter that seemed to epitomize the strength and solidarity of this new nation; ‘The Kaiser turned his horse and met his son face to face. Hand went out to hand, and the grip was given of love and mutual appreciation.’ Behind followed what looked to Forbes like ‘half the Almanack de Gotha’.

  On the way to Paris, there was an unplanned touch of the absurd when some of the Uhlans lost their way in the Bois de Boulogne and had to be redirected by French bystanders. But as the columns debouched into the Champs-Élysées, even Parisians—never able to resist a parade, nor stifle their curiosity—could hardly withhold grudging envy of the conquerors. ‘A company of Uhlans, with their spears stuck in their saddles, and ornamented by the little flags of blue and white, headed the advancing column’, Washburne reported to his Secretary of State; ‘They were followed by the Saxons, with their light blue coats, who were succeeded by the Bavarian riflemen, with their heavy uniform and martial tread. Afterward followed more of the
Uhlans, and occasionally a squad of the Bismarck cuirassiers, with their white jackets, square hats and waving plumes, recalling to mind, perhaps, among the more intelligent French observers, the celebrated cuirassiers of Nansouty and Latour-Maubourg in the wars of the First Napoleon. Now come the artillery, with its pieces of six, which must have extorted the admiration of all military men by its splendid appearance and wonderful precision of movement….’ ‘What a solid and stately array’, gasped O’Shea, homeward bound for England; ‘The spectacle was one of the most thrilling I had ever witnessed.’

  When the German troops were dismissed, they crowned themselves with laurels in the Tuileries, and strode proudly about the city in small groups. Some were followed by groups of urchins, hooting and whistling, while other elements booed from a safe distance. But, despite all the omens, no attacks were made on the Germans; in fact one of the British correspondents claimed ‘there was a gala look about the place, which was revolting under the circumstances’, and another noted how Parisian women ‘openly expressed their admiration of the fine manly proportions, the martial look and gallant bearing, of the invaders’. There was an ugly moment when Bismarck found himself surrounded by a glaring crowd on the Place de la Concorde, but with superb aplomb he took out a cigar and asked the most hostile-looking spectator for a light. Writing from what they called ‘Passy-Prusse’ during those ‘two sad days’, the Rafinesque family reported that Belleville had ‘barricaded itself, armed with cannons and machine-guns and swore that the Germans would never put a foot on its territory’. Fortunately, however, the Prussians were prudent enough not to enter this hornets’ nest. Most of the shops in Prussian-occupied Paris remained firmly closed, their windows draped with black, and bistro-owners accused of having served the enemy had their windows smashed and premises sacked. Savage retribution was also meted out to civilians appearing to be too friendly to the conqueror, and a number of women had their clothes torn off them on the slimmest of pretexts. Forbes himself, observed doffing his hat to the Crown Prince of Saxony, was seized after the troops had passed by, beaten up, and narrowly escaped being thrown in the Seine.