The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  By April 30th, after only four weeks of office, Cluseret was exhausted—worn out by the intrigues and the wrangling. Yet on hearing Mégy’s report he summoned up a rare burst of energy, and marched out himself at the head of less than two hundred men, in pouring rain, to see what could be retrieved from the situation at Issy. Arriving at the fort, he found to his considerable surprise that it was still as Mégy had left it, unoccupied1—with the exception of ‘an urchin of sixteen or seventeen, weeping quietly upon a barrel of gunpowder, placed on a wheelbarrow under the entrance. He had a match with which to ignite the barrel and was thus intending to blow up the fort and himself when the enemy entered. I flew to him and embraced him, weeping myself.’ Clad in civilian clothes and the kind of slouch hat Ulysses Grant might have worn before Richmond, unmoved by the shots that whistled through the riddled fort, Cluseret at once ordered its reoccupation. The guns (which had only been ineptly spiked in the first instance) were unspiked, and fresh reinforcements hastened up. By a miracle he had saved Fort Issy; but the miracle was not enough to save Cluseret. In his absence, rumours of the fall of Issy had reached Paris and there had been manifestations outside the Hôtel de Ville alarmingly familiar to the Commune leaders inside who had themselves taken part in the events of October 31st and January 22nd. Returning to the Hôtel de Ville, to report his success Cluseret fell into what he described as ‘an ambush’. At the door of the Commune Council Chamber, he was met by a sad-faced Pindy and a picket of the Commune’s special guard. ‘Mon cher ami, I have a very melancholy mission to perform’, said Pindy, ‘I am forced to arrest you.’

  Nuns interrogated by Communards

  22. The Return of the Jacobins

  THE news of Cluseret’s arrest was revealed in a public announcement the following day, Monday, May 1st. It provoked—according to Washburne—a great deal of excitement. The official reason was ‘incapacity’, but rumours swiftly buzzed through Paris that Cluseret had been apprehended plotting to overthrow the Commune; that he had sold himself to Versailles; or that, more specifically, he was an Orleanist agent. It was a measure of the new nervousness within the city.

  To replace Cluseret, his former Chief of Staff, Louis Rossel, was designated ‘provisional’ Delegate of War. Completely apolitical, Rossel was one of the more unusual adherents to the Commune, and his attachment testified to how the bitterness felt by so many loyal Frenchmen at the shameful capitulation of the Government of National Defence had led up to the March insurrection and gained it such powerful initial support. At this distance in time, he, Varlin, and Delescluze strike one as being—in their different ways—the Commune’s three most appealing figures; but Rossel was also by far its most efficient soldier. Had he been in charge in March, subsequent history might well have been different; had he survived, it seems almost certain that he would have left a mark of genius somewhere. Rossel was born in Brittany of a French father with military and Huguenot antecedents, and a Scottish mother. He had made a career as an engineer in the regular Army, graduating second in his class at the Polytechnique. At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war Rossel held the rank of captain in Bazaine’s Army, and from the first was disgusted at the ineptitude of the French High Command. Walled up in Metz, he seems early on in the siege to have toyed with the idea of ‘deposing’ Bazaine. He tried once to escape from the city, but was caught and led back by Prussian sentries; just as the capitulation was being arranged, he did succeed in getting away, disguised as a peasant, which would almost certainly have resulted in his being shot by the Prussians had he been discovered. He eventually reached Gambetta’s forces, whose slovenliness shocked him, and when asked by Freycinet what job he wanted replied unhesitatingly: ‘if all the places were to be distributed, I should choose the sole direction of operations’. Gambetta, at once recognizing genius in this strange, fierce young man with a straggly black moustache and penetrating eyes, promoted him colonel and sent him off to be Chief Engineer at Nevers. Rossel was then just twenty-six.

  When news of the armistice reached him in Nevers, Rossel was appalled. In his Posthumous Papers he wrote: ‘We are wanting in patience; we conclude peace as rashly as we went to war’, adding with biting irony: ‘as a general rule, a defence until death can never do harm to a people’. On March 19th, the day after the insurrection in Paris, he wrote to General Le Flô, the Minister of War:

  Mon Général,

  I have the honour to inform you that I am about to proceed to Paris, to place myself at the disposal of the Government forces which are being organized there. Having learnt by a Versailles despatch, published this day, that two parties are struggling for mastery in the country, I do not hesitate to join the side which has not concluded peace, and which does not include in its ranks generals guilty of capitulation….

  The letter must have been a delight to its recipient. Rossel now set forth for Paris, in the apparently genuine belief that—with the guns available in Paris and a revolutionary and fighting party in power it would be possible somehow ‘to snatch back victory’ from the Prussians. Socialism, Proudhon, Blanqui, and Marx meant nothing to him; ‘I did not know who the insurgents were, but I knew against whom they were rebelling and that was sufficient.’ During a kind of ideological selection board to which he was submitted on taking up his new post, he admitted: ‘I shall not tell you that I have profoundly studied social reforms, but I have a horror of this society which has just sold France with such cowardice….’ What he saw of the Commune soon shocked him even more than had Gambetta’s levies, and he was about to quit Paris when Cluseret begged him, on April 3rd, to become his Chief of Staff; although, to the end, he maintained that ‘the Parisian revolutionary party was, in my eyes, the lesser evil’.

  Rossel had a self-confident manner, a deliberate and thoughtful way of speaking that reminded a Daily News interviewer more of an American or an Englishman, and—like Cluseret—he would have wished to introduce some Yankee efficiency into the National Guard. With an energy Cluseret never revealed, Rossel—well aware that time was now hopelessly against him—set to work to reorganize the Paris defences. On the very day of his appointment in succession to Cluseret he ordered the immediate construction of a ring of barricades behind the ramparts, as a second line of defence in the event of MacMahon breaking through the perimeter. There was much his engineering expertise could achieve here; on April 27th, Colonel Stanley noted critically, ‘The embrasure in the barricade at the end of the Rue de Rivoli is so stupidly made, that it does not command half the Place de la Concorde’. Further within the city, three last-ditch ‘citadels’ were to be erected at the Trocadéro, Montmartre, and the Panthéon on the Left Bank. The whole of this southern side of Paris Rossel entrusted to another courageous and competent Pole, thirty-four-year-old Walery Wroblewski, while Dombrowksi was placed in direct control of the Right Bank. Eudes was sent, reluctantly, to Fort Issy, from which hot-spot he spent most of his time finding a pretext to return. For the first time, Rossel attempted to concentrate and centralize the Commune’s powerful artillery; there were some 1,100 pieces which had hitherto been scattered uselessly about, many rusting in the compounds, their breech-blocks stored elsewhere, while the beleaguered gunners on the ramparts had for the most part only light 7- and 12-pounders with which to reply to Versailles’s heavy naval guns.

  Strategically, Rossel also appreciated that a purely passive defence would be powerless to prevent the eventual fall of the fortifications’ and with this in mind he drew up a plan to create ‘combat groups’, each of five battalions, commanded by a colonel and supported by 40 guns, with the aim of seizing the initiative wherever possible before Paris. But his scheme was confronted with a serious, and growing, shortage of numbers; the 200 battalions parading in such triumph on March 28th had soon melted.1 Levied on a parochial basis, the National Guardsmen showed a curious reluctance to serve in quarters other than where their own homes lay, as well as being fundamentally part-time militiamen; so that by the time of his take-over, Rossel could probably co
unt on little more than 30,000 regularly available fighting troops, as against the 130,000 that Thiers and MacMahon had now mustered.

  This was by no means Rossel’s only headache. To raise the effectiveness of what troops he did have, he, like Cluseret, wanted to apply the disciplinary measures of a regular army. He wanted to bring those who had defaulted in the face of the enemy before a court martial, but the Executive Commission complained of his excessive severity: while Karl Marx’s future son-in-law, Charles Longuet, accused Rossel of not showing the right ‘political spirit’. When the sentence of death on one battalion commander found guilty of refusing to march on the enemy was commuted to imprisonment for the duration of the war, Rossel was driven to despair and fury. Just like Cluseret he too discovered his hands bound by the rival Communard bodies; Maxime Vuillaume, one of the Commune chroniclers, recalls a visit to the Ministry of War, when Rossel ‘went to the window, pointed to a group of the Comité’s officers gesticulating and arguing loudly below, and, turning to us, cold-eyed; muttered between his teeth: “If I were to have them shot, now, down there in the yard….” ’ With the departure of Cluseret, the Comité Central had redoubled its efforts to gain control over military operations. Friction with the Commune Executive Commission grew worse, and when Rossel pleaded against any such transfer of responsibility, the Blanquists spread suspicion that he was scheming to set himself up as a military dictator. And, one day after his appointment, yet another new headache arrived in the form of the creation of a Committee of Public Safety; which, despite its dread connotations of absolutism, in fact—initially—only meant still further dissipations of the Commune’s executive power, and graver rifts within it.

  Throughout April and on into May, while on the one hand fighting for survival, the Commune had persisted in its zealous aims of reforming the world. From the Hôtel de Ville there poured out a mass of legislation—a mixture of incredibly irrelevant trivia and genuine attempts to right social injustices. On April 2nd a decree was passed limiting the salaries of all Government officials to 6,000 francs a year, roughly equivalent to a workman’s wages; a step later praised by Lenin as making ‘the break from a bourgeois democracy to a proletarian democracy’. On the 16th an edict ordained the ‘nationalization’ of all workshops abandoned by their bourgeois owners (but it was never carried out). On the 27th, the Commune abolished the system of fines imposed upon workers. On the 28th, it decreed an end to nightbaking, which had long been a grievance among the bakery workers (Frankel, who was responsible for it, considered the law the Commune’s one big achievement, while many like Madame Rafinesque of Passy grumbled that it only meant ‘all Paris is reduced to stale bread’). A serious effort was made to combat prostitution, but there were certain self-cancelling local discrepancies; as Colonel Stanley noted, ‘It is very funny that the 1st Arrondissement forbid women in the houses and the second Arrondissement in the streets…. So I suppose the women will sleep in one quarter, and perambulate in the other.’ The Commune proclaimed that it would ‘adopt’ all the wives and children of men who died ‘in defending the rights of Paris’; the wives—‘married or not’, the Rev. Gibson was shocked to discover—were to receive pensions of 600 francs a year.

  Nor was the Commune backward in cultural affairs; legislation was busily being prepared to laicize schools (‘What’, snorted one Communard, Gaston da Costa, ‘should one think of this pedagogic Commission occupying itself at such a moment with educational reform…. This grandeur, this tranquillity, this blindness in an assembly of men already menaced by 100,000 chassepots, is one of the most stupefying facts ever given to a historian to record’), while on April 12th Courbet had been charged with the task of reopening the museums of Paris ‘with the least possible delay’, and of re-establishing the annual Salon.

  On April 19th the Commune issued what was probably its most imposing and important politico-social proclamation, which was to become, in essence, its testament; at any rate its closest approach to formulating any coherent programme. In immense placards posted throughout Paris it declared the aims for which it was fighting:

  … the recognition and consolidation of the Republic… the absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of France…. The inherent rights of each Commune are:

  The control of the Communal budget, receipts and expenditures; the fixing and re-division of taxes; the direction of local services; the organization of the magistrature, of the police and of education….

  The absolute guarantee of individual liberty, of the freedom of conscience and the freedom of labour….

  Paris herself reserved the rights to make

  administrative and economic reforms demanded by her population… to universalize power and property according to the necessities of the moment, the wish of those interested, and the rules furnished by experience….

  Rising to a powerful, grandiloquent climax, the proclamation continued:

  The Communal Revolution, begun by the popular initiative of March 18th, inaugurates a new political era, experimental, positive, scientific.

  It is the end of the old governmental and clerical world, of militarism, of monopolism, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude, the Nation its miseries and disasters.

  But nothing the Commune said or did faced up to the issue over which so many patriotic Parisians had originally sided with it—the humiliation at Prussian hands and the crushing peace terms. Nor, patently, had it ever had the military potential for any such action. With the Prussians ringed around the eastern perimeter of Paris, the Commune lived in constant fear that they might intervene to help Versailles crush the insurrection, and therefore went out of its way to avoid any incident that might upset the former enemy. And, if it lost adherents through its display of impotence towards the Prussians, as well as its military ineptitude in the fighting with Versailles, the Commune also lost many of its moderates when, in both word and deed, it revealed ambitions far beyond the scope of a mere municipal council.

  By early April, through the resignation of such moderates, deaths, and other forms of erosion, the Commune Assembly found it had thirty-one vacancies, and on the 16th—with the fighting at Neuilly at its peak—chose to hold by-elections. Among the newcomers elected was the noisy and drunken old Courbet; Marx’s future son-in-law, Longuet, the editor of the Journal Officiel, and his liaison officer, Serrailler; Johannard, a handsome heart-breaker and largely renowned for being the Commune’s top billiards-player; and a contumacious hunchback called Vésinier. Its new blood did little to improve matters within the Commune. As the pressure from Versailles mounted, so the arguments and rifts grew; with each act of legislation the Commune threatened to divide into its various heterogeneous components.1 Usually Félix Pyat, as ever the irresponsible polemicist, was to be found somewhere near the eye of the storm. Attacked by Vermorel for inconsistency between what he said at the Hôtel de Ville and what he printed in his paper, Pyat would retire to Le Vengeur to retaliate with a savage leader accusing Vermorel of being a police spy. There were few who were not at some time the target for Pyat’s poisoned spleen, including Rossel, who he knew despised him.

  In an attempt to bring some kind of order to the Commune’s affairs, Delescluze proposed that the semi-impotent Executive Commission be replaced by a kind of War Cabinet formed from the Delegates of the other nine Commissions, and on April 21st this reorganization had been effected. But in practice it made little difference. Day after day the bickering continued. ‘What gnawed the heart of the Commune’, declared Rochefort with reason, ‘was distrust. The Hôtel de Ville distrusted the Ministry of War, the Ministry of War distrusted the Ministry of the Marine, Vanves Fort distrusted Montrouge, which distrusted Issy. Raoul Rigault distrusted Colonel Rossel, and Félix Pyat distrusted me.’ Delescluze was disgusted by it all, and in a fiery speech magnificent for one so sick and worn out he thundered to the Commune assembly:

  You complain that our decrees are not carried out. Well, citizens, are you not yourselves s
omewhat accessory to this fault?… When a decree appears in the Journal Officiel with 13 negative votes and only 18 in the affirmative, and does not meet with the respect that this assembly deserves, can you be astonished?…

  ‘You should have replaced us sooner’, he went on. But until then

  … there are members who have remained at their posts, and will remain until the end despite the insults with which we are covered, and, if we do not triumph, we will not be the last to die, whether on the ramparts or elsewhere.

  These were eloquently prophetic words.

  On April 28th, an old Jacobin of the 1848 Revolution with a massive white beard, Jules Miot, proposed the creation of a Committee of Public Safety to take over the Commune’s executive functions. For three stormy days the discussions continued over this proposal, so redolent with associations of Robespierre and the Terror. The Socialists, and above all the members of the International, were strongly opposed; Longuet scornfully described it as a talisman, while another with a long memory cried out; ‘Under the Empire we stood for liberty, and in power we shall not abjure it.’ Finally the Commune Assembly voted, 45 to 23, in favour of Miot’s proposal. Next it went on to vote for five men to form the all-powerful Committee of Public Safety; with the exception of the inevitable Pyat, all unknown ciphers—although Washburn somewhat exaggeratedly described them as ‘the most desperate and dangerous men in the Commune’. This time the Minority of 23 (including Beslay, Courbet, Longuet, Malon, Serrailler, and Varlin) abstained from voting. The most fundamental split in the Commune so far had taken place, and henceforth its Assembly would consist of a Majority and Minority faction; the one, controlled by the Jacobins, wanting to exercise dictatorship and terror—the methods of ’93—and blaming the failures of the Commune upon the sentimentality of the Socialists; the other desiring to govern by reasonably democratic methods, to observe moderation in order to leave, as Rochefort put it, ‘the door at least half open to conciliation’. In the light of twentieth-century history, it seems perhaps ironical that the exponents of democracy and moderation should have been chiefly the Internationalists, the forefathers of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.