The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  On the way the procession, already composed of National Guards and some of Lecomte’s own soldiers of the 88th, but chiefly of hangers-on, collected some of the worst riff-raff of the Montmartre slums. They included prostitutes and an appalling group of harpies who had been engaged in stripping an Army horse killed in the early scuffles—figures horribly reminiscent of the tricoteuses of the Terror. They howled for the blood of the captive, and it was with some difficulty that Mayer and his men kept him from their clutches. Progress as a result was slow, and it was not until 2.30 p.m. that the party reached the pleasantly named street which, ‘with its pebbled road, its gardens, its low houses’, made Alphonse Daudet, visiting the scene a few days later, think of ‘one of those peaceful suburbs where the town straggles out and becomes diminished, eventually to die at the edge of the fields’. By this time Vinoy had called off the operation, leaving Lecomte to his fate.

  At No. 6, Rue des Rosiers, to the accompaniment of an ever-increasing barrage of bloodthirsty imprecations, Lecomte’s captors attempted to interrogate him. But at 4 p.m. a new escort of National Guards arrived, bringing with them a second captive, a tall white-bearded old man wearing a frock-coat and silk hat. It was General Clément Thomas, the recently retired ex-Commander of the National Guard. They had seized Thomas on the Place Pigalle whither, it appears, he had foolishly been drawn by curiosity. Long hated for his part in crushing the 1848 Revolution, Thomas was now regarded by those into whose hands he had fallen as chiefly responsible for the massacre of the National Guard at Buzenval. His presence was in effect a sentence of death for both generals. Beyond all control, the mob burst into the house, demanding their immediate extinction. Captain Mayer now rushed back to the Mairie to warn Clemenceau of the imminent danger confronting the two generals. According to a witness, one of the Guard officers yielded to the mob, calling for a show of hands. ‘Everybody raised his hand’, and General Thomas was dragged out into the little garden—‘a real suburban garden in which every tenant has his corner for gooseberries and clematis, separated by green trellises with banging doors’ (Daudet). No proper execution-squad was formed, and after a first ragged volley of shots the old general still stood there. One of the participants later told Rochefort in prison that Thomas had been superbly brave, crying out: ‘Kill me! You won’t prevent me from calling you cowards and assassins.’ Shot after shot was fired until he finally fell, with a bullet through the eye, insulting his executioners to the last breath. Lecomte was then dispatched with one shot in the back. When a post-mortem was carried out, it was discovered that several of the generals’ wounds had been caused by chassepot bullets, with which the National Guard was not equipped, and therefore presumably fired by Lecomte’s own troops.

  Some hideous scenes now ensued. The men continued to discharge their rifles into the dead and mutilated bodies, while mænads from the mob squatted and urinated upon them. Small urchins fought one another for a view of the corpses from the garden wall. At this point, Clemenceau arrived, shouting distractedly, ‘Pas de sang, mes amis, pas de sang!’, to be told ‘It’s too late’. In Clemenceau’s own words:

  … The mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy. Amongst them were chasseurs, soldiers of the line, National Guards, women and children. All were shrieking like wild beasts without realizing what they were doing. I observed then that pathological phenomenon which might be called blood lust. A breath of madness seemed to have passed over this mob:… men were dancing about and jostling each other in a kind of savage fury. It was one of those extraordinary nervous outbursts, so frequent in the Middle Ages, which still occur amongst masses of human beings under the stress of some primaeval emotion.

  All that day Clemenceau seems to have been labouring under false optimism; first assuming that the guns would be delivered without incident, and secondly, that Lecomte would come to no harm. When he saw what had happened, he burst into tears; the last time, it was said, the tough doctor-politician was seen to weep in public until the victory of 1918. He too had grossly miscalculated the temper of the mob, and momentarily his own life seemed in jeopardy. Elsewhere in Paris, Chanzy emerging from the Gare d’Orléans in a general’s full dress had been mistaken by another mob for d’Aurelle, and nearly shared the fate of Thomas and Lecomte; Vinoy too had a narrow escape, though for a time his death was widely rumoured; and Trochu held that he himself was saved only by a timely warning.

  Amid these scenes of commotion and ferocity there passed incongruously, another manifestation of death. An old man, bare-headed and clad in deepest mourning, was marching at the head of a long, motley funeral procession, composed of men of letters, staggering drunks, and armed National Guards gathered up at random on the way to the Père-Lachaise cemetery. It was Victor Hugo, following the coffin of his son Charles, dead suddenly of apoplexy. ‘Coup sur coup, deuil sur deuil, Ah! L’épreuve redouble.’1 The words applied to France as well. Goncourt found himself shocked by the levity with which the fellow mourners around him joked about Thiers and ‘the terrible revolution building up about us. I am very sad and full of the most painful presentiments.’

  That same day, in marked contrast, Berlin in the most festive of moods was celebrating the triumphal return of her conquering monarch. From the statue of Frederick the Great floated a banner on which was inscribed a long poem, beginning ‘Hail, Kaiser Wilhelm! Hail to thee and to the brave German host thou leadest back from victory, ghost-like from afar…. Old Fritz looks down with proud glance upon his descendants, approving greatly their valour.’ For several days the festivities continued, during which the giant French cannon from Mont-Valérien was dragged triumphantly through the streets; but what seemed to please the jubilant Berliners most was the appearance on the royal balcony of their future ruler, thirteen-year-old Prince Wilhelm, dressed in the full regalia of an Uhlan. In the midst of all this, a shabby former Emperor of the French was released from his incarceration at Wilhelmshöhe and allowed to move without ceremony to his permanent place of exile in Britain.

  By the time Generals Thomas and Lecomte were being done to death, Vinoy had withdrawn his troops from the trouble-centres of Paris, and concentrated them around the Invalides. Captain Patry had arrived there from the Bastille and was learning of the appalling news when he saw a carriage pass by, drawn by one horse, and containing a gentleman in a grey overcoat. ‘It was the Minister of War effecting his retreat in good order to Versailles.’ The Captain was astonished.

  Since 5 a.m. that morning the leading members of Thiers’s Goverment had been waiting anxiously at the Quai d’Orsay as bad news succeeded bad. After all the tribulations most of them had undergone since the previous September, nerves were not good. Towards the end of the morning, General Le Flô, the Minister of War—who had just escaped being mobbed at the Place de la Bastille—reckoned that no more than 6,000 out of 400,000 National Guards could now be counted on as loyal to the Government. The situation seemed desperate; it was no longer merely a question of retaking the Montmartre guns, but of maintaining ascendancy in Paris itself. Thiers’s sense of history now dictated a fateful decision; the Government would withdraw from Paris to Versailles, ‘completely and immediately’. During the Revolution of 1848 it was what he had told Louis-Philippe to do—‘then return with Marshal Bugeaud and 50,000 men’—and he considered that, if his advice had been taken, the July Monarchy would still have been at the Tuileries; in that same revolutionary year, he recalled, Windischgrätz had done just this in Vienna, reculer pour mieux sauter, and returned to reconquer the insurrectionary city a few weeks later. With some reason, Thiers argued that if the Government remained in Paris, ‘the moral contagion of the insurrection would spread to the regular Army, which would lose no time in abandoning us’. Simon, Favre, and Picard protested; it was unthinkable to abandon Paris. Why not instead create a centre of resistance around the Hôtel de Ville, so strongly fortified since last October 31st? But Thiers was adamant; besides, Ferry, as Prefect, had already report
ed from the Hôtel de Ville one attempt by followers of Blanqui to seize it.

  The argument was settled by the appearance, at about 3 p.m., of several battalions of hostile National Guards on the Quai below the Foreign Office. ‘We’re done for!’ cried Le Flô. By a concealed staircase Thiers escaped into the Rue de l’Université, and guarded by an escort hastily provided by Vinoy, he decamped to Versailles. The other Ministers followed shortly afterwards, and beind them marched the whole of Vinoy’s regulars, jeered at by an amazed Paris.

  All the events of March 18th had taken the various Red principals. as well as the Comité Central, thoroughly by surprise. None had anticipated the surprise Government move on Montmartre of that morning, nor the hideous retaliation it had engendered; but least of all had they foreseen that the Government, thwarted, would pull out. For such a contingency nothing like a plan had been prepared, and—like everything else that had happened that day—the reaction to the Government’s withdrawal was completely spontaneous and uncoordinated. While the Comité Central staggered, Paul-Antoine Brunel, who had been liberated from Ste.-Pélagie prison during the demonstrations of February 26th, acted. A resourceful and effective leader, as soon as he realized that the Government forces were abandoning control, Brunel seized the initiative himself. At the head of a group of National Guards, he surrounded the Prince-Eugène Barracks which was tenanted by the 120th Regiment, locked up its officers, and disarmed the men, many of whom seemed disposed to take sides with the rebels. From there, joined by other National Guard units, Brunel marched on the Hôtel de Ville. At the Napoléon Barracks, linked to the Hôtel de Ville by its secret tunnel through which loyal troops had come to wave the Government on October 31st, there was a brief exchange of fire in which three people were hit. Then members of the line regiment inside came out shouting ‘Vive la République!’, and handed over their weapons.

  By 7.30 that evening the Hôtel de Ville was completely surrounded. Fortified as it had been by the Trochu Government, it still represented a powerful stronghold, but gradually the troops and gendarmes manning it faded away, seeking refuge down the subterranean passage. Before much more than another hour had passed, Ferry found himself virtually deserted and out of touch with his Government. While Brunel and the hostile crowd still held off before the formidable building, Ferry escaped by ladder out of a back window. Hiding that night with a friend, he too departed for Versailles the next morning. Close on his heels, Brunel now entered the Hôtel de Ville, and amidst tumultuous applause unfurled a red flag from the belfry of the building. Lest the Government should mount a surprise counter-attack, he quickly ordered that barricades be erected in the Rue de Rivoli and dispatched detachments to occupy the other Government buildings.

  That night as Elihu Washburne returned from his day in the country with the Moultons, he was astonished to discover ‘the movement of carriages interdicted on the principal streets, and I was obliged to turn into the by-streets. I soon found my way impeded by the barricades which had been improvised by the insurrectionary National Guard. After showing my card to the various commanders, I was enabled to go through the obstructed quarters. While I saw so many evidences of great public commotion, I had no adequate conception of how serious matters were until the next morning….’ For the first time since ’93, revolutionaries were undisputed masters of Paris. With the superior force now at their disposal, would they go on to seize control of all France?

  ‘Massacre’ in the Place Vendóme

  18. The Commune Takes Over

  On the morning of Sunday, March 19th, Paris awoke to a day of brilliant spring sunshine; though still cold, it was sufficiently full of sparkling promise to gladden men’s hearts after the passage of so harsh a winter. As people began to move about the streets, a festive atmosphere developed—at any rate in the proletarian districts—that was strongly reminiscent of the September 4th ‘revolution’ by which Louis-Napoleon had been overthrown. It contrasted curiously with the grim events at Montmartre the previous day. ‘Paris could hardly be said to be “agitated” ’, noted the Rev. Gibson; ‘the people promenading as usual on Sunday, and the National Guards marching along the middle of the streets. Indeed, all had a complete holiday air. Preceding most of the battalions of the National Guards were young women (one to each battalion) dressed in képi and Bloomer costume with a small cask suspended by a strap flung over the shoulders’. The only visible intrusion upon normal life was that ‘the omnibus traffic was suspended’. Outside the Hôtel de Ville were an estimated 20,000 National Guards, peacefully encamped, with loaves of bread impaled upon the points of their bayonets. Edwin Child, now returned from England, strolled ‘round the Louvre, meeting many battalions of National Guards promenading some for and some against the events of yesterday’. Goncourt was also out, his bourgeois aversions immediately aroused by the ubiquity of the dissident National Guard: ‘One was overcome with disgust at the sight of their stupid, abject faces, in which triumph and intoxication created a sort of dissolute radiance…. On the way home, I read on people’s faces dazed indifference, sometimes melancholy irony, most often sheer consternation, with old gentlemen raising their hands in despair and whispering among themselves after looking cautiously all around.’ Russell of The Times, who, going against the current, had just arrived from Versailles, observed Government employees at the Louvre packing up: ‘There was a crowd of twenty men around the door of the caserne, watching with angry interest the men of the Garde de Paris and Gendarmerie, who were hastily removing and piling in a few carts at hand their military chests….’ In his opinion ‘the surrender of the suffering capital of Western Europe to the foes who were more to be feared than “Goth or Vandal, or destroying Hun” ’, was ‘all but incredible’. He hastened to impart the news to Lord Lyons. The Ambassador viewed the departure of Thiers with considerable gloom, not untinged with personal feelings, in that he had only re-established himself in the Paris Embassy four days previously and, being of a distinctly sedentary disposition, did not relish the prospect of yet another move to Versailles.

  If there was relative calm on the streets of Paris, it was by no means reflected inside the captured Hôtel de Ville, where a widely diverse collection of ‘revolutionaries’ and dissidents of all hues was debating the circumstances that had been thrust upon them. All were astonished by it, some were appalled, most were overawed. Although later it became widely believed that March 18th had all been a carefully prepared plot engineered by that sinister and shadowy group, the International, no one was more surprised than its leaders, including Karl Marx. Everything that had happened that day bore the keynote of spontaneity, and—as has already been seen—it was only on the initiative of junior commanders like Brunel that the abandoned Government offices had been occupied at all. The Comité Central of the National Guard had organized nothing, planned nothing; with the result that it was now caught critically off balance. What course of action should be adopted? Who or what should fill the vacuum created by the departure of the Government?

  Vigorously, and often chaotically, the argument raged. Brunel wanted to march on Versailles at once and arrest the Government, while Louise Michel was heard fiercely urging those who would listen to expedite the assassination of Thiers. One member of the Comité Central declared: ‘As for France, we do not presume to dictate laws to her—we have suffered too much under hers—but we do not wish any longer to submit to rural plebiscites.’ This outraged the veteran Socialist, Louis Blanc, who in his later years had become imbued with a sense of the sanctity of the State; he protested, ‘You are insurgents against an Assembly most freely elected!’1 About all that emerged from the meetings was the ascendancy of the Comité Central as the only body capable of governing Paris. Under the chairmanship of an ineffective member of the International called Adolphe-Alphonse Assi, who had a passion for delicate embroidery and had helped mount the big Le Creusot strikes early in 1870, the Comité Central now took over the reins.

  No single issue was debated more heatedly in those fi
rst sessions at the Hôtel de Ville than the killing of the two generals. Neither the Comité Central nor any individual Red leader bore responsibility for this spontaneous act of mob frenzy. Yet could they repudiate it? Le Rappel expressed its profound grief, while pointing out that National Guards on the spot did attempt to hold back the mob, and even some of the most extreme left-wingers were deeply shocked. André Gill the cartoonist gloomily predicted ‘La Commune est foutue!’ and Babick, a Polish revolutionary on the Comité Central, protested against the killings and urged that the Comité should dissociate itself. But he was shouted down by another who cried, ‘Beware of disavowing the people, lest in their turn they disavow you!’ By and large, the feeling was—recalling ’93—that such regrettable occurrences were unavoidable in revolutions. Great indignation, however, was provoked by the reading out of an editorial in the Journal Officiel of that morning; ‘That frightful crime’, it said, ‘accomplished under the eyes of the Comité Central, gave the measure of the horrors with which Paris would be menaced if the savage agitators, who troubled the city and dishonoured France, should triumph.’ It was decided that ‘these calumnies’ would have to be stopped at source, so that one of the first actions of the new regime was to dispatch emissaries to take over the publication. Reappearing under its new management the following day, the Journal Officiel promptly absolved the Comité of any responsibility for what it described as the ‘executions’ of ‘two men who had made themselves unpopular by acts that as from today we rate iniquitous’. In its second issue, the Journal went further and spoke of the two generals as having been executed ‘according to the laws of war’.