The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The body of the flamboyant adventurer was then thrown upon a dung-cart, and wheeled in triumph to Versailles (where, it was reported, elegant ladies prodded the corpse’s shattered cranium with the ferrules of their umbrellas). The first of the Commune’s leaders had been eliminated. Elsewhere other summary punishments were being exacted; at least five captured insurgents were put to death on Gallifet’s orders, on the grounds that they were deserters from the regular Army, but it was fairly clear that these were regarded as reprisals for the shooting-down of Surgeon-Major Pasquier the previous day. Indeed, Gallifet issued a proclamation that same day, declaring that his soldiers had been ‘assassinated’, and that ‘I proclaim war without truce or mercy upon these assassins. This morning I had to make an example; let it be salutary.’ One woman at Courbevoie told a Times correspondent that many prisoners had been ‘first treated with the grossest cruelty by the Gendarmes’, and then shot. The same correspondent quoted rumours to the effect that General Vinoy himself had ordered the shooting out of hand of all surrendered National Guards, and the fate of Duval, the leader of the Communard left flank, suggests there may have been truth in these rumours. By the night of the 3rd, Duval had successfully installed himself, with some 1,500 men, on the Châtillon plateau. But the Versaillais counter-attacked the following morning, and Duval and his men were forced to surrender—apparently on promise of their lives. All who still wore any vestige of regular Army uniform were shot on the spot, while the remainder, including Duval, was marched off to Versailles. On the way they were intercepted by Vinoy. The general inquired if there was a leader among the Communards, and Duval stepped forward. Two others came to his side; Vinoy addressed them as ‘hideous scum’, turned to his staff and ordered the three prisoners shot.1 The order was duly executed, and a captain dragged off the dead Communard ‘general’’s boots as a trophy. It was an episode that was to mark the beginning of the terrible tragedy of the Commune ‘hostages’.

  Everywhere the Commune drive on Versailles had collapsed in ruins. All that had been achieved was the recapture of the Pont de Neuilly. Paris was in a turmoil. In the afternoon Washburne encountered a body of several hundred exhilarated women formed up in the Place de la Concorde, ready to march upon Versailles

  in poor imitation of those who marched upon the same place in the time of Louis the Sixteenth. They paraded up the Champs Elysées and through the Avenue Montaigne…. Many of them wore the ‘bonnet rouge’, and all were singing the Marseillaise. Whenever they met an omnibus they stopped it, caused the passengers to get out, and took possession themselves. One old woman, sixty years of age, mounted on the top of an omnibus, displayed the red flag, and gave the word of command. How far they went and what became of them I do not know.

  Elsewhere the Rev. Gibson found National Guardsmen wandering about in twos and threes, looking extremely dejected; ‘fatigued and worn, covered with dust; so changed in their appearance from what they were when they marched out on Sunday evening’. On the 6th, there was a magnificent state funeral for the ‘heroes’ who had died in the two days of action. Three large hearses, containing the dead,1 covered in black with red flags at each corner, were drawn solemnly through Paris. Delescluze and five Communard leaders, heads bare and wearing red scarves, led the procession. Behind came several battalions of National Guards; the men, thought Gibson, ‘looking thoughtful and sad’, though Edwin Child—less charitably—considered that ‘a few hundredweights of soap would have done them good’. In the background muffled drums beat, and women sobbed as the corpses were lowered reverently into a communal grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

  It hardly needed the sombre procession, so reminiscent of those of a few months earlier, to make Parisians grimly aware that they were now under siege for a second time. The gates were shut and the trains ceased running. Hearing of this, the Rev. Gibson echoed the feelings of most Parisians when he exclaimed: ‘So we are shut up as in a cage!’; his concierge admitted, ‘I never felt afraid during the Siege, but now I shiver’. Despite the closing-down of communications, people contrived to leave Paris by the thousand; Gibson heard it said that they were leaving at a rate of 50,000 a day. Many men, fearful of being conscripted into the National Guard, took to their heels or went into hiding. As the Commune authorities required that a laissez-passer be obtained by anyone leaving Paris, Washburne (in his capacity as chargé d’affaires acting for the Germans) was besieged with Alsatians wanting a passport and claiming to have become German citizens. For the fourteenth time since the previous August, Edwin Child was instructed to pack up his shop’s stock of watches and chains for the nervous M. Louppe to take them with him out of Paris. On Easter Sunday, he was surprised to notice how empty the church seemed; the boulevards had become more and more deserted; the principal shops shut because their owners had departed. Wandering into Voisin’s on the Saturday, Goncourt asked for the plat du jour, to be told, ‘There isn’t any; there’s no one left in Paris’. He spotted only one old lady whom he had seen there throughout the Siege. Outside, the emptiness gave him the impression ‘of a city where there’s a plague’.

  At the Hôtel de Ville, the Commune rulers had reacted to the first military reverses in the true revolutionary spirit of ’92. Assi and Lullier, suspected of treachery in their negligence at not occupying Mont-Valérien, were promptly flung into prison and the overconfident Bergeret followed them shortly afterwards. A brief announcement disclosed that a ‘Citizen Cluseret is delegated to the Ministry of War’. But shock at the dismal failure of the Commune’s counter-attack was quite overshadowed by indignation and fury at the killing in cold blood of Duval and the other captured National Guardsmen. There was much talk about exacting ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, and it was not long before an obscure Communard called Urbain proposed a measure that was to gain everlasting notoriety as the ‘Law of Hostages’. Passed against some opposition on April 5th, the law opened with the preamble, ‘Seeing that the Government of Versailles openly treads under foot the laws of humanity and those of war, and that it has been guilty of horrors such as even the invaders of French soil have not dishonoured themselves by…’, it decreed as follows: every person accused of complicity with Versailles shall be imprisoned; juries to be instituted to try these parties within forty-eight hours; those convicted to be held as ‘hostages of the people of Paris’; and the execution of any Commune prisoner of war to be followed immediately by the execution of three hostages, ‘drawn by lot’. The ineluctable way that civil war has of escalating from atrocity to atrocity, horror to horror, was now clearly signposted in France. Who would be the hostages? A new chill of uneasiness settled over the anti-Communard elements of Paris; Goncourt predicted gloomily, ‘If Versailles does not hurry up, we shall see the rage of defeat turn itself into massacres, shootings and other niceties by these tender friends of humanity….’

  But Thiers was in no hurry. It was not his plan. Like Napoleon III, he wanted to ‘ne rien brusquer’. Despite the boost to morale provided by the hopeless performance of the Commune forces, he felt he could not yet rely too much upon his regulars.1 There were still disquieting défaillances, soldiers going over to the Commune. If Moltke had hesitated to rush Paris, was not Thiers well advised to pause too? Until he possessed crushing superiority in numbers, he would take no risks of in-fighting inside the city, where revolutionaries entrenched behind their traditional barricades could slaughter his troops. Besides, he was determined that repression of the uprising must be thorough and lasting. Contrary to the pessimism of Lord Lyons, Washburne, and others, Thiers was now convinced that time was on his side. Abroad, apart from the lone voice of Karl Marx and his Internationalists, the Commune had gained little or no support;1 even professional revolutionaries like Garibaldi and Mazzini had turned their backs on it. So had Victor Hugo. In the French provinces the sympathetic revolts there had all been suppressed or were fizzling out, though Bakunin continued to cause spasmodic trouble at Lyons. At Marseilles, where Gaston Crémieux had proclaimed a
Commune, the end came on April 8th after Government troops shelled the seized Prefecture at point-blank range, killing over 150 rebels and arresting another 500. It looked as though an investment of Paris could be maintained once again, so there would be little danger of fresh revolt radiating outwards from it; and this time there would be no Gambetta at large in the provinces to harry the investing forces.

  So, instead of attempting to follow up his successes of Holy Week, Thiers settled down to ‘regroup’ his forces. On April 6th the elderly and unpopular Vinoy was adorned with a Légion d’Honneur and replaced as Thiers’s commander by MacMahon, who, after seven months of internment beyond the Rhine, was urging for an opportunity to requite the humiliations of Sedan. Meanwhile Favre, the negotiator, had been sent to Prussian Headquarters to atone for his grave miscalculations of January by obtaining permission to increase the French regular Army beyond the limits prescribed in the Peace Treaty. Bismarck, who had at first taken a cynically detached attitude towards the humorous spectacle of Frenchmen killing Frenchmen, was now beginning to fear the impact the Commune might have upon his arch-enemies at home, the German Socialists, and he readily acquiesced to the Army being inflated first to 80,000, then to 110,000, and ultimately to 170,000 men. The return of the 400,000 French prisoners of war was speeded up; back to France they poured, into special camps organized by General Ducrot among others, to be rehabilitated and prepared for their new role—the second Siege of Paris.

  The Second Siege of Paris: Inside the Porte Maillot

  21. Besieged Again

  WITH the death of Duval and Flourens, and the fall from grace in various degrees of Brunel, Lullier, Eudes, and Bergeret, a vacuum had been created in the military command of the Commune. A new figure was now drawn into it; Gustave-Paul Cluseret. Then aged forty-seven, Cluseret was a true soldier of fortune like Flourens. Although, as a character, he was altogether less colourful and less appealing, as well as deficient in the romantic idealism of Flourens, he could look back on an even more extraordinary career as an adventurer, and his military background was considerably wider. Commissioned at St.-Cyr, he had taken part in the suppression of the 1848 uprisings, but he then became involved with the Clubs and as a result was placed on the reserve. He was recalled during the Crimean War, where he was wounded, promoted captain, and awarded the Légion d’Honneur. From the Crimea he was sent to Algeria, to be cashiered in 1858 for complicity in the theft of stores, and from there he travelled to seek his fortunes in the United States. In the Civil War he re-emerged as a volunteer on the side of the North, attaining the rank of brigadier-general after a brief spell as A.D.C. to McClellan. Washburne recalled having been in conversation with President Lincoln at the Capitol when Cluseret was introduced by a Senator as a “gallant Frenchman” with the highest references, come over to offer his services to the Union. The Senator urged that Cluseret be appointed brigadier-general; Lincoln, according to Washburne, was not much taken by him and seemed disinclined to give him a commission at all, but eventually yielded to pressure. But soon after his appointment, the Union High Command apparently found him too incompetent for any operational duties and relegated him to an insignificant post in Baltimore. Cluseret, Washburne added acidly, ‘remained in the army long enough to get his naturalization papers, which seemed to be his principal object’. After the Civil War, he hitched his waggon for a brief spell to the star of a kindred spirit, John C. Frémont, the ‘Pathfinder’, and then became involved with the Fenians, conspiring to raid Canada in the name of Irish freedom. Nominated their ‘General-in-Chief’, Cluseret followed the Fenian cause to England, where he took part in the 1867 attack on Chester Gaol. With England grown too hot, he returned to France and within a year had been sentenced to prison for seditious activities; but, on pleading his American citizenship, was deported instead. Having formed a tenuous link with the International, he was back in France after the overthrow of the Empire as an emissary of the anarchist, Bakunin, embarrassing Gambetta by proclaiming (on October 31st) a Commune at Marseilles and nominating himself ‘Commander of the Armies of the South’.

  According to his associate, Rossel, Cluseret was tall, ‘with a white skin, black hair and beard, and a coarsely handsome face. He must have been rather a favourite with women. He had the fluency of a journalist, and knew how to introduce misplaced declarations of principle.’ Seldom seen without a cheroot in the corner of his mouth—a habit picked up during the Civil War—Cluseret was a character whose shadiness gave rise to a variety of versions about his past career; one claimed that he had actually fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War; another that he had been condemned to death, in absentia, by the South, as well as by a British court for his complicity with the Fenians. Thus whatever he did, his motives tended to be open to mistrust. He was both cynical and lazy. When he took up his appointment at the beginning of April, he reckoned the prospects of Paris no greater than had Trochu during the first Siege; and, as an erstwhile regular, he shared Trochu’s contempt for the National Guard. This opinion was something he was quite incapable of keeping to himself—with unfortunate results. Nevertheless, he possessed more practical experience than any other Communard on how an army should be run, and it was for this reason that he had been pushed forward by the Comité Central of the National Guard, chafing as it was at the display of military ineptitude the Commune leaders had shown to date. Although Cluseret had been appointed to be military commander of the Commune on April 2nd and strongly disapproved of the riposte projected for the following day, he had done nothing to stop it, beyond arresting Bergeret for ‘insubordination’ on his return. Now, after the calamitous failure of the April 3rd expedition (he said it reminded him of Bull Run), Cluseret ordered the Commune forces to take up a strictly defensive posture behind the forts and ramparts of Paris which had kept the Prussians at bay for so many months. In the breathing-space granted by Thiers’s period of consolidation, he settled down leisurely to reforming the National Guard.

  The hour was late, very late, and the task Augean. The bad habits acquired during the first Siege had become deeply rooted. At least two of the battalions deployed at Courbevoie on April 1st had been ‘completely drunk’. With officers of the National Guard still elected (often on any basis but that of military efficiency) discipline was non-existent at any level; the moment an officer gave an unpopular order, a fresh election could be called to depose him. As one Communard admitted to Colonel Stanley: ‘We are all ambitious, we all want to be commanders’.

  With little exaggeration, Cluseret remarked of his take-over: ‘never have I seen anything comparable to the anarchy of the National Guard in 1871. It was perfect of its kind….’ The whole force was impregnated with the thoroughly unmilitary, old-fashioned Jacobin beliefs (as it had been during the first Siege) that all that was needed for military victory was the surging, irresistible levée en masse; ignoring that the science of war had advanced somewhat since the eighteenth century. Anything that required staff-work was deficient; the commissariat, communications, and ambulance service were in a hopeless state of muddle; there were no cavalry and practically no engineers. It was hardly surprising that on April 3rd many of the National Guard had gone into battle unfed and short of cartridges, nor that the artillery was left behind. Despite the imposing number of battalions participating in Brunel’s march past of March 28th, many of them had no commanders. At the top of the scale, ‘generals’ like twenty-eight-year-old Eudes had never even seen action in command of a battalion, and they were constantly drawn hither and thither by conflicting orders issued from their own headquarters in the Place Vendôme, from the Comité Central, from the Commune, as well as the local commissions in each arrondissement, none of which seemed to have any ascendancy over the others. ‘The greater part of my time’, declared Louis Rossel, a former lieutenant-colonel of the regular Army whom Cluseret designated as his Chief of Staff, ‘was taken up by importunate and useless individuals; delegates of every origin, inquirers after information, inventors, and, abo
ve all, officers and guards, who left their posts to come and complain of their chiefs or of their weapons, or of the want of provisions and ammunition. There were also almost everywhere independent chiefs, who did not accept or did not carry out orders….’

  Following upon the example of the Tirailleurs de Flourens (who had now rechristened themselves the Vengeurs de Flourens), a proliferation of ‘private armies’ had sprung up. There were the Lascars, the Enfants Perdus, the Éclaireurs de Bergeret, the Volontaires de Montrouge and the Turcos de la Commune. Each was costumed according to its own whim, and the taste for bizarre and extravagant uniform had also infected many senior officers, who bedizened themselves superbly—on credit—at eminent army tailors. Some of their wives did not lag far behind; a frequently-seen, dashing figure at National Headquarters was Mme Eudes, who demanded to be known as ‘la générale Eudes’, dressed either as a pistol-packing Amazone or (according to Alphonse Daudet) ‘like the Empress, in gants à huit boutons’. Cluseret, perhaps mindful from his American Civil War memories of how slovenly had been the dress of that military giant, Ulysses Grant, was determined to begin by purging this unproletarian magnificence. On April 7th he announced the suppression of the rank of general, accompanying this with the qualification that, in future, there were to be ‘no lanyards, no more glitter, no more gold braid rings…’. The order did not endear Cluseret to many Parisians, with their thoroughly Latin passion for ‘glitter’, and ultimately the Commune would have its generals back again.1