The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Cluseret’s next reform made him even more unpopular. This was to split the National Guard (as Trochu had once attempted during the Siege) into ‘active’ and ‘sedentary’ battalions, by hiving off in the latter all the men of over forty. The Guardsmen grumbled that this measure ‘broke up the bonds of solidarity and fraternity formed during the Siege’, but it made sense if any of the National Guard battalions were to be made battle-worthy. Cluseret’s greatest contribution undoubtedly lay in his choice of subordinates; Rossel as his Chief of Staff, and the thirty-five-year-old Pole, ‘Jaroslaw’ Dombrowski, as Commandant of Paris in succession to Bergeret. These were to prove the Commune’s two ablest leaders’, and it was greatly owing to Dombrowski’s talents as a commander and to Rossel’s energy in carrying through Cluseret’s reforms that the fighting capacity of the Commune forces showed a striking improvement after their dismal performance on April 3rd.

  Dombrowski belonged to the impoverished Polish nobility, had been commissioned into the Russian Army but condemned to fifteen years deportation to Siberia for taking part in the Polish insurrection of 1863. On his way through Moscow he escaped and made his way to Paris. During the Siege he had offered his services to Trochu, which were declined—no doubt out of mistrust, in so far as many of the troops fighting under Moltke were also of Polish origin. Now Dombrowski, entrusted with active command over the Commune’s fighting troops, took up position at the threatened sector of Neuilly, with his brother Ladislas holding part of the line to the right. The appearance in the advance posts of Jaroslaw’s slight figure and wispy moustache seems to have given new heart to the National Guards. (About Rossel, the chief-of-staff, more will be said in a later chapter.) On April 9th a surprise night attack by two Montmartre battalions inflicted a sharp reverse on the Versailles forces at Asnières, across the Seine to the north-east of Courbevois, capturing several guns. The rise in fighting spirit was noticeable even to Goncourt, no friend of the Communards: ‘Why this stubborn resistance which the Prussians did not encounter?’ he asked for a second time on April 12th concluding—with some accuracy—that it was ‘Because in this war the common people are waging their own war and are not under the Army’s orders’. In these days, he complained elsewhere, ‘one cannot curse sufficiently that inept Government of National Defence for not having turned this valiance to its own advantage’.

  Although no serious attempt to re-enter Paris was contemplated until the regrouping of the Versaillais could be complete, Thiers kept up the pressure on the suburb of Neuilly. The bridge was recaptured, but throughout most of the rest of April fighting surged back and forth from street to street, with Dombrowski’s men defending from behind barricades built from ripped-up pavé, against an attack whose principal component was devastating and persistent artillery fire that echoed across Paris. Under it the Communards, now standing on the defensive, with their backs to their homes, instead of deployed on any ambitious offensive tactics, stood remarkably steady. Each day resistance increased with familiarity. During a lull in the fighting the ubiquitous Louise Michel was even to be found playing the organ in a deserted church. Casualties were not light. Colonel John Stanley of the Grenadiers, sent to Neuilly with a British ambulance, found nonchalant Communard doctors ‘in stained aprons over their uniforms… smoking and stirring their coffee with the instruments with which they had extracted the bullets’. A few days later, ‘I saw one man that was hit by a bit of a shell run for half a minute as though nothing had happened, and then he fell. We picked him up; his leg was cut off…’ Stanley was moved to pity1 at the wretched condition of the wounded he tended, still suffering from the after-effects of the Siege superimposed upon years of deprivation; ‘what pains me most is not the wounds but to see their poor shrivelled legs, really not larger than a strong man’s thumb’. Losses among the wounded were discouragingly high: ‘I am sorry to say that it is the old story, out of 40 cases operated on hardly one recovers. Drink, drink, drink; there is always the smell of drink, when they lie panting on the wooden trestles, where they are put when their wounds are examined. When they require all the calm and vitality they have to resist the shock they offer nothing but a feverish exhausted state of blood.’

  At the overtaxed, makeshift hospitals that received the Communard wounded in the centre of Paris there were spectacles no less distressing. Goncourt, visiting one where ‘the picturesque of war was blended with the disorder of a student’s room’, was shocked by the callous gaiety with which the internees spoke of the appalling mutilations they witnessed. One man, they told him, had had his jaw shot away; ‘a real antique mask… and—imagine—the orderly persisted in asking his name!’ They pointed out to him a busy man in a black skull-cap whose job was to undress the dead, at forty sous a time: ‘It’s his real passion… you should see with what an amorous eye he looks around, spying out those who are going to kick the bucket…’ Working at the Beaujon Hospital, Dr. Powell noted the critical shortage of trained nurses, many of whom had left Paris. Hygienic conditions were appalling: ‘out of fifteen patients who had the leg amputated all died of pyæmia or gangrene…. There was no proper supervision and visitors came and went as they liked, also no priests permitted to visit the wounded or the dying.’ The hospital became forced to add carbolic acid to bottles of alcohol, because it ‘disappeared at one time so rapidly’ down the throats of the attendants.

  It was not only the combatants who suffered. The prosperous village of Neuilly, largely spared during the Prussian bombardment, was being progressively destroyed and many of its inhabitants had been trapped in the ruins. Colonel Stanley wrote in the last week of April:

  every single tree is cut in pieces, and the ground is covered with grape, canister, shot and broken shells and flattened bullets. I entered what had been beautiful houses, with floors wobbling and held up only by a side, utterly wrecked, billiard tables, looking-glasses, sofas, and costly furniture all smashed to pieces, guns placed in lovely gardens, the walls broken through to enable them to pass from one garden to another. Bedding and furniture all piled up into barricades…. In many houses we found the dead laid out, where they had been placed some days ago… and the people had lived as they could in the cellars all this long time on bread and nothing else….

  What life under these circumstances was like for the inhabitants is revealed in an account written to his mother on April 20th by Charles Skelly, a type-compositor working on a Parisian English-language periodical. Skelly lived in the Avenue de Roule at Neuilly; he had two young children and his wife was imminently expecting a third. From his back window he had watched the shells from Mont-Valérien plunge down upon the advancing Communards, and the resultant débâcle. Three days later, on April 5th, Theresa Skelly gave birth, and the following morning (Thursday) her husband set forth as usual to his work in Paris:

  … but in the evening when wanting to return I found that the insurgents had placed their guns in position on the ramparts at the Ternes and were sweeping our avenue; I slept in Paris that night. Next morning (Good Friday), at an early hour, I was fortunately permitted to pass through, after a close inspection of my passport. I sought my home with a heavy heart but, thank God, I found my wife and children safe. Theresa was too ill to be removed, but a neighbour dressed the children, and I succeeded by keeping close in by the side of the wall in bringing them safely into Paris, the shells bursting above and around us on our perilous way. Since that morning I have never been home, the gates have been closed, and it has been an eternal rain of shot and shell. Night and morning I visited the Ternes, from where I could see indistinctly our house enveloped in smoke… powerless to save them….

  On the morning of April 11th, Skelly managed to enter Neuilly, under fire from both sides, and reached

  … within some yards of the house. I had but to bound across the Avenue du Roule and I could enter my home; but no that was impossible; it would have been certain death to expose myself to view within that deadly avenue; I should have passed under the very mouths of their guns. I
saw the guards at the end of the Rue Victor Noir firing upon the soldiers of the rond point of the Avenue Inkermann opposite our door….

  Having got so close, Skelly was forced reluctantly to return once more to Paris, ‘amidst the awful howl and crash of shells as they travelled from the battery at Courbevoie to the Porte de Ternes and being answered from the ramparts’. After another week of misery in Paris, he applied to the British Embassy for assistance, but they were unhelpful. Then, like so many needy Britons during the Siege, he directed his footsteps towards Richard Wallace, who unhesitatingly gave him a letter to the American Ambulance, asking them to evacuate Theresa and child, at Wallace’s own expense. But Skelly found the American Ambulance ‘closed’, and as a last report appealed to the chief of one of the French ambulances, who agreed to intervene:

  … what was my joy when the next morning at five o’clock she entered my room in company with a National Guard…. As it was almost certain death to be exposed in the streets, they passed through holes previously cut in the walls, through gardens, and through houses, until they arrived at the end of Sallonville…. Our poor dear baby was quite black with dirt on the face…. I cannot tell you of all the horrors she has seen and heard of. A poor man who had bought them some sugar was retracing his steps, when he was shot dead in front of our house: two guards attempted to pick him up and one of them fell dead also….

  Gradually, as the guns and ammunition became available to the Versailles forces, the bombardment experienced by Neuilly spread to other suburbs on the western approaches to Paris. On the morning of Saturday, April 15th, Goncourt was working in the garden of his house at Auteuil, near the Bois de Boulogne, when there was a ‘whistling of several shells’. Several burst very close and there were shouts of ‘Everybody down in the cellars’. For nearly two hours the bombardment continued; there was one ‘terrible explosion’ so powerful that it shook the whole house above and knocked over his faithful housekeeper, Pélagie. Goncourt began to suffer from ‘a sense of cowardice such as I never felt during the time of the Prussians. Physically one has reached bottom. I chose to have a mattress placed on the ground and, lying on it, I remained in a state of sleepy torpor, only vaguely perceiving the cannonade and death….’ Towards 3 p.m. the bombardment lifted and began to fall ahead on the ramparts where the Communards had installed some guns. When Goncourt emerged from his cellar, he found that three houses immediately behind his had been hit.

  One of the ironies of the civil war was that, as the bombardment spread, it was the most staunchly anti-Communard parts of Paris that bore the brunt of Government gunfire. In an endeavour to strike back at Mont-Valérien, Cluseret had sited a battery of his biggest naval guns at the Trocadéro, and this in turn drew fire down on the smart residential area of Passy. Writing to his brother-in-law in London, Dr. Jules Rafinesque compared their situation there to travellers seized by bandits: ‘When the gendarmes arrive the wretched travellers are exposed to blows from two sides. Siege by the Prussians was nothing by comparison….’ He described the ‘bandits’ occupying Passy as ‘a veritable army of unpaid mercenaries, a dirty, lewd, sordid, vicious, indisciplined rabble, but well-armed and well able to resist behind walls and in the streets….’ To reach the few of his patients that still remained in Passy, the doctor frequently had to run a gauntlet of shellfire; he claimed the Communards had boasted of having positioned their guns at the Trocadéro (which evidently proved incapable of covering the 6,000 yards to Mont-Valérien) solely ‘to draw cannon-balls down’ on this detested bourgeois quarter.

  Soon the shells from Mont-Valérien were reaching out still further into the centre of the city, as haphazardly and ruthlessly as at any time during the Prussian bombardment. On April 12th, Washburne recorded shell splinters striking the U.S. Legation near the Étoile ‘within twenty feet of where I was writing’. Two days later he counted twenty-seven separate hits on the Arc de Triomphe itself, and Colonel Stanley passing by picked up an elbow that had been knocked off one of its bas-reliefs. Occasionally the shelling in the area grew so intense that no one was allowed farther up the Champs-Élysées than the Rond-Point. The great avenue was almost deserted. Anxious Americans living in the neighbourhood thronged the U.S. Legation morning and night applying for passports or ‘protection papers’, while at the British Embassya Second Secretary thoughtfully repeated a notice Lord Lyons had issued before decamping the previous September, warning that ‘British subjects who continue to remain in Paris now do so at their own risk and peril….’ By April 25th, Washburne decided it would be prudent to evacuate his family to the country, and the Rev. Gibson did the same. Militarily as ineffective as the Prussian endeavours of January, Thiers’s promiscuous bombardment served chiefly to exasperate and depress his natural allies in Paris. Writing to his father on April 11th, Edwin Child, who had just witnessed a shell carry off both legs of a seventy-year-old lady outside his church, declared that ‘at one time I was almost French in sentiment, but I now scorn them almost as much as I do the Germans’. On the 27th, noting the usual ‘wastage of munitions’, he wished ‘the whole affair was finished one way or other. It is becoming absolutely sickening, during the siege at least people knew why they were suffering and for what end, but now it would be difficult to say which is the most preferable, the Commune or the Government. Both give such proofs of their incapacity.’ A few days later Child remarked that the indiscriminate bombardment was ‘deciding many hitherto neutral to join “the insurgents” although not in any way sympathising with the Commune’. An experienced soldier like Colonel Stanley was as contemptuous as ex-Guardsman Child about the procrastination of ‘that too stupid little Thiers’, while Goncourt, thoroughly unnerved and despondent, complained that ‘at the end of all this terrible noise, nothing happens and one goes away saying to oneself: ‘never mind, it will happen tomorrow!’ And that tomorrow never comes….’

  Although the repeated rumours that the Government forces were about to force a re-entry into Paris continued to end in disappointment for the beleaguered bourgeoisie, as April moved to its close Thiers and MacMahon had in fact decided upon a formula under which to deploy the full weight of the troops they had been husbanding. Possibly better than any soldier, Thiers knew the strength—and weaknesses—of the Paris defences; it was he who had been the Minister responsible for their construction during the reign of Louis-Philippe. He had long been aware that the potential Achilles’ heel of the system lay at the Point-du-Jour, the extreme south-western pinnacle of the city, close to where the Seine flows out towards Sèvres. It was here that his army would try to break in. But first they would have to capture Fort Issy, the imposing fortress controlling the approaches just across the river.

  On April 25th, Thiers acceded to the Commune request for an armistice at Neuilly, in order to allow the evacuation of the wretched, half-starved inhabitants. There was by now hardly a house standing in the village, and many of its residents almost lacked the strength to leave their cellars. Under cover of the twelve-hour truce, Thiers now disengaged the weight of his artillery from the Neuilly sector and transferred it to that facing Issy-les-Moulineaux. No less than 53 batteries of guns, supported by powerful infantry contingents, were mustered there under the command of General Cissey. The next day Thiers announced the opening of ‘active operations’, and after a particularly intense bombardment captured the village of Les Moulineaux that evening. On the 27th, Cissey’s troops succeeded in pushing a parallel to within 300 yards of Fort Issy, which was all the time being deluged with heavy fire. According to Lissagaray, the Commune chronicler, Issy—already badly battered by Moltke’s artillery in January—was soon ‘no longer a fort, hardly even a fortified position; a litter of shell-lashed earth and rubble. Through the smashed-in casements the countryside could be seen, and the powder magazines were exposed; half of Bastion No. 3 lay in the moat; one could have driven a carriage through the breach….’ The fort’s commandant, a workman called Mégy who had killed a policeman come to arrest him the previous year, sent pl
eas to Cluseret for heavy reinforcements, but none came. By the 30th Cissey’s men had sapped forward to the very foot of the fort glacis, and Mégy could no longer restrain the panic that had broken out among the garrison. Ordering the guns to be spiked, he now evacuated the fort.

  It was the worst military blow yet to befall the Commune. At the Ministry of War, Cluseret at once realized the significance of the evacuation of Fort Issy, both to the defence of Paris, and to himself. Although there had been no major shocks since April 4th and his reforms had begun to return some dividend, his star had been steadily waning. Anger at the drowning of a large number of National Guardsmen when a bridge of boats had broken—apparently by mismanagement—on April 17th, had been directed against Cluseret, and his undisguised contempt for the National Guards’ military attributes had caused growing resentment in Commune circles. Tact was not his strongest point, and the Executive Commission found itself constantly having to water down some of his more searing pronouncements; there was, for instance, one in which he had condemned the profligate expenditure of ammunition as a ‘stupid and entirely Monarchist practice’. These were words that cut to the quick, and Cluseret came under constant fire at the Hôtel de Ville. In a heated session on April 20th, Vermorel had declared that ‘for the past month we have been sleeping, we have had no organization’, to which Delescluze responded with the lukewarm defence, ‘We took Cluseret because we could find no other soldier’. Bitter rivalry had sprung up between the Comité Central and the Commune for control over the National Guard; the former was disinclined to subordinate its earlier powers. Thus every effort for reform made by Cluseret, never the most energetic of men, had been attacked by one side or the other, and much of his time had been wasted in playing one off against the other. A leader worth his salt would have seen the necessity to limit strictly the Comité’s powers of interference in the conduct of war; but Cluseret, the eternal conspirator, could not help but exacerbate divisions between the two rival bodies.