The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  In a fury, Rossel personally punished a number of National Guards who had deserted their posts, by cutting off their right sleeves, ‘commencing with the officers. They were all sobbing, and the guard which surrounded them was, perhaps, more affected than it would have been for a capital execution.’ His action was bitterly resented, and may well have played some part in the reneguing, the next day, of a number of battalion commanders who had promised to furnish troops for Rossel’s offensive (they included the unfortunate Bergeret, now returned to duty after a spell in the cells). This was the last straw for Rossel. After writing out a final fiery order to the effect that ‘deserters and those hanging back at the rear will be sabred by the cavalry; if numerous, they will be cannonaded’, on May 8th he dictated his resignation as Minister of War:

  Citizen members of the Commune, I feel myself incapable of continuing to bear the responsibility of a command which everyone discusses and no one obeys…. The Commune discusses, and has resolved nothing…. The Comité Central discusses and has not yet been able to act. During this delay the enemy was surrounding Fort Issy by adventurous and imprudent attacks for which I should punish him had I the least military force at my disposal…. The nullity of the Artillery Committee prevented the organization of the artillery; the hesitations of the Central Committee hinder the administration; the petty preoccupations of the Battalion Commanders paralyse the mobilization of troops. My predecessor made the mistake of striving against this absurd situation.… I am withdrawing, and I have the honour to request from you a cell in the Mazas.

  That same day, from Versailles, Thiers issued a proclamation to the Parisians warning them of the opening of the general attack on the city: ‘The moment has now come when, to shorten your sufferings, [the Versailles Army] must attack the fortifications themselves. It will not’, he added in an aside hardly designed to impress the residents of the Passy or Étoile districts, ‘bombard Paris’. Commenting on the proclamation, Colonel Stanley wrote, ‘I am sick of the useless slaughter, poor misguided wretches, and by tonight’s paper, Versailles seems to be really in earnest….’ That this was so was at once proved by a vast intensification of shellfire all the way from Meudon to Issy, put up by over eighty heavy guns.

  For Fort Issy, which had by now suffered somewhere over 500 dead and wounded, this was the death-knell. Thiers had at last achieved something which Moltke had failed to do—the capture of one of the great Paris fortresses. At the Hôtel de Ville, Rigault was being subjected to cross-fire about police excesses when Delescluze interrupted with the gravest news the Commune had yet received. ‘You argue’, he cried, ‘while it has just been announced that the tricolore now floats over Fort Issy! Treachery threatens us at every hand…. Today the National Guard no longer wants to fight, and you discuss matters of procedure. We shall still save the country, though possibly now only behind barricades;’ but, he begged, ‘put away your mutual hatreds’. Deeply moved, the Commune applauded loud and long Delescluze’s impassioned speech; it was, said Lissagaray, the chronicler, ‘subjugated by this severe man, who was duty personified’. It was also shaken by Rossel’s bitter letter of resignation, and the session which continued late into the evening degenerated once more into wrangling and recrimination. Pyat attacked Rossel in his absence, declaring, ‘I warned you, citizens, that he was a traitor but you would not believe me. You are young, unlike our Masters of the Convention you were incapable of being wary of military authority.’ The more extreme members of the Jacobin ‘Majority’ clamoured for the arrest of Rossel and the entire ‘Minority’ faction, while Malon of the International counter-attacked Pyat with the apt accusation, ‘You are the evil genius of the Revolution! Shut up! Cease spreading your venomous suspicions and stirring up discord. It is your influence that is destroying the Commune!’

  At the Ministry of War Rossel had been receiving various deputations throughout the day. In the evening, just as he was about to leave to dine with Dombrowski, five delegates from the Comité Central which had come so severely under Rossel’s flail arrived to tell him of their Comité’s decision to appoint him a military dictator, which it considered was the last chance of saving Paris and the revolution. But better than anyone else Rossel knew that the fall of Fort Issy was the beginning of the end, that it was only a matter of time now before MacMahon broke into the city itself; and Rossel had had enough of Pyat and the Commune’s hopeless wrangling, the counter-orders and the impotence of his own position. He refused the Comité’s proposition, pointing out that he had already sent in his resignation, which was irrevocable. On returning from dinner, Rossel found Delescluze and Avrial awaiting him with a warrant for his arrest—on the grounds of having posted up the news of the fall of Issy before consulting the Commune. After some discussion, Delescluze declared that he could not arrest Rossel without his first being heard before a plenary session of the Commune. An appointment was fixed for the next day, the 10th, but when the matter was brought up before the Commune Pyat and his allies refused to countenance a confrontation with so impressive a figure as Rossel, and demanded that instead he be tried by court martial, presided over by an officer named Collet. One of Rossel’s friends slipped out to warn him what was afoot. ‘I could not bear’, Rossel wrote later, ‘the idea of appearing as an accused before that Collet, whom I had seen cowering before the shells at Issy, and it was then that I determined to evade the justice of the Commune.’ The insurgents’ brightest, and last, military star now leaped into a carriage and disappeared, not to be seen again during the life of the Commune.

  The Destruction of the Vendôme Column

  23. ‘Floreal 79’

  THE Commune Assembly was listening half-heartedly to the ravings of Jules Allix, arrested for committing some bizarre outrage in his district, when a highly excited Avrial—who had been detailed to ‘guard’ Rossel—interrupted to tell of his flight. Rosse’s fall struck the rest of Paris like a thunderclap; ‘He was regarded by all’, wrote the Rev. Gibson, ‘as a man of talent and capacity, and his retirement is a great loss to the Commune… the Commune is said to be dead, but it dies hard.’

  Doomed though it might be, the Commune was far from dead, and it now handed authority to the one man who could inspire it in its last agonies; the one man who could rise above the Pyats and their petty factionalism. Delescluze! The sixty-one-year-old Jacobin who had led the attempted insurrection against Trochu on October 31st was himself slowly dying of consumption contracted through long years on Devil’s Island; yet from the embers there still flickered a fire emitted by no other Communard. ‘He no longer spoke, he hardly breathed; he was an ambulating corpse’, said Rossel. But when he did speak, even Pyat listened. The son of a ’92 revolutionary, by the time he was an adolescent Delescluze had already done his apprenticeship at the barricades, and the sum of his years in prison was exceeded only by Blanqui’s record. To Washburne’s secretary, McKean, who went to see him in May, he represented ‘a most perfect type of the Jacobin and revolutionist of 1793. He affected to dress à la mode Marat, and had a coarse scarf about his neck; his hands were dirty and there was a large amount of “free soil” under his nails. He was an old man, with long hair, unclean, unshaven, and dressed in a shabby coat.’ To another contemporary, Philibert Andebrand, Delescluze was ‘small in stature, rather badly put together, and had none of the characteristics that Sallust exacted of those desiring to lead the multitude. The forehead had nothing noble about it; the eye observed fixedly, but without having the power to fascinate… his face was eroded into deep wrinkles and strange zigzags denoting what Balzac described as the defeats of private life. A mouth devoid of nobility or smiles was concealed by a beard once upon a time red, but now more white than grey. From it came a tremulous voice, always tempestuous, and which occasionally brought to mind the grating of a prison gate. He had the yellow complexion of a Brutus….’

  Neither description was particularly flattering; yet in some of his portraits there is a touch of Lincoln in the ravaged face. There was something s
trangely noble about the dying Delescluze. He was as incorruptible as Robespierre—when Cluseret reported that Versailles had offered him one million francs to betray the Commune, Delescluze commented coldly, ‘So much the worse for you, Monsieur Thiers would never make a similar proposition to Citizen Delescluze’–and every Communard knew that he would go on to the bitter end. Because of his age and the state of his health, Delescluze had not wanted to take any office under the Commune, but now, with the disappearance of Rossel, he could not escape taking over as Civil Delegate to the Ministry of War. At the same time he was appointed to a reconstituted Committee of Public Safety, from which Pyat had at last been purged. On the eve of disaster, the Commune now had something approaching control vested in one pair of hands; those of its most outstanding personality. It was the last chance of reuniting the Communards, but at the same time the coming to power of Delescluze completely changed its character. For Delescluze was the king Jacobin, and to the now ascendant Jacobins ideology and social reform were of secondary importance to living—and dying—in the heroic tradition of ’93. The Jacobins were, in their own way, quite as conservative and reactionary as any restored Bourbon. To proclaim the spirit that moved them, the Committee of Public Safety began to date its proclamations with the Convention’s old revolutionary calendar, starting on the ‘15th Floreal, year 79’. On May 15th the Committee of Public Safety announced that the Commune had abdicated all power in its favour. Thus of its two opposing conceptions, the Dictatorial Commune had triumphed over the Democratic Commune. Delescluze was its most powerful man; but close behind him, in the shadows, was Rigault, the exponent of that inseparable concomitant of Jacobinism—Terror.

  The rift within the Commune did not heal automatically with the advent of Delescluze. On the contrary; on May 15th the Minority, composed largely of the Internationalists, openly issued a manifesto (which twenty-two of its members signed) declaring its opposition to the dictatorship the Committee of Public Safety had just established. The manifesto revealed to the public for the first time the existence of this fundamental split within the Commune. Nor was Delescluze to be granted any respite in his capacity as Minister of War. After the fall of Issy, morale had again slumped rapidly in the National Guard, with absenteeism and open desertion rising inversely. On his appointment, Delescluze issued a rousing Order of the Day to the National Guard:

  You know that the situation is grave…. To your ranks, therefore, Citizens, and stand firm before the enemy! Our walls are as stout as your arms, and as your hearts. Do not forget, too, that you are fighting for your freedom and for social equality, this promise which has so long escaped you; if your breasts are exposed to the shot and shells of Versailles, the prize assured you is the liberation of France, the security of your homes, the lives of your women and children….

  But although Delescluze could, where professional soldiers like Rossel and Cluseret had failed, inspire by appealing to the revolutionary, civilian instincts of the National Guard, he was hopelessly at sea on military technicalities. He had brought to his post, as Lissagaray put it, ‘nothing but his devotion’. His own paper, La Justice, might comment acidly that ‘The Commune had revived and aggravated all the faults committed during the Prussian siege by the Government of the 4th of September’, and speak of ‘Trochu’s plan without Trochu’, but it was now far too late to set these faults right—even if Delescluze had been one of history’s great captains.

  On May 13th Fort Vanves fell to MacMahon’s troops. Visiting it the previous day, Colonel Stanley described a scene of chaos: ‘… The confusion was awful. National Guards struggling to get into Paris, officers carrying despatches violently arrested, and accused of being cowards, scores of women trying to find their husbands… the rappel was beaten under our horses’ noses, which made them unmanageable.’ On the 15th, the village of Issy, where for five days Brunel had been conducting one of the Commune’s most stubborn defensive actions, surrendered while Brunel was absent at a council of war. A big breach had been made in the outer defences covering the Achilles’ heel of Paris. The city itself was now directly menaced. At the same time, just north of the Point-du-Jour salient on which Thiers had his eye fixed, General Clinchant had crossed the Seine to establish himself at Longchamp and was now digging parallels across the Bois de Boulogne almost up to the Porte de la Muette. Further to the north, Ladmirault was still bogged down amid the ruins of Neuilly, held by a hard-pressed Dombrowski. According to Lissagaray, at Dombrowski’s headquarters in the Château de la Muette ‘shells have opened to the skies every room…. It has been worked out that his aides de camp lived on an average eight days…. He received no reinforcements, despite his dispatches to the Ministry of War…’ He had apparently resigned himself to Slav fatalism, knowing the war to be lost.

  For the civilians in the threatened district within the walls, life was becoming still more intolerable. ‘I am writing to you above the shells which are whistling over our heads’, said Jules Rafinesque in a letter from Passy, dated May 15th:

  One fell five minutes ago in a garden next to ours, but it did not explode—which undoubtedly saved Guli and Blanche, who were working among the osiers, from being hit by splinters…. For the moment I watch the number of the sick diminish without regrets; for the streets of Passy are not safe, and I am the only doctor left.

  Continuing the letter the following day, he noted that his family was now forced by the bombardment to seek refuge elsewhere during the day, returning to their home only at night:

  The situation is extremely serious, although at this moment I can hear Blanche playing the piano. Really I marvel at the courage of her and her mother…. This morning the guns established at the Trocadéro, endeavouring to hit the Bois de Boulogne, succeeded in landing their projectiles on the houses at the corner of Rue de la Pompe and La Tour.1… Bravo, bravo, they drink well, the Communard gunners, but aim badly!

  During these days, Edwin Child had also ‘strolled’ to the Trocadéro to observe the cannonade, where he remarked that ‘reply on the part of the “Nationals” was almost out of the question, most of their pieces being dismounted, and they altogether are becoming fast demoralised so that an end appears not far distant….’ From Bordeaux Lillie Moulton received a laconic warning sent by her friend, Prince Metternich, the Austrian Ambassador: ‘Advise you to go. Thiers is coming.’ ‘The Versailles troops are getting nearer and nearer’, wrote the Rev. Gibson on the 17th, ‘and the general impression is that they will soon be within the ramparts.’ It was an impression shared by many Parisians, but still the cautious Thiers—pushing his saps across the Bois de Boulogne according to ‘orthodox and classical siege methods’—delayed the final assault.

  Washburne, who up to the replacement of Rossel had tended to over-estimate the military strength of the Commune, now also recognized that ‘the crisis seems to be really approaching’. At the same time, as he observed to Secretary of State Fish, ‘the worse things grow, the more desperate the Commune becomes’. Threats to confiscate private property were heard with increasing regularity, while cases of pillaging (which Rigault’s police seemed either powerless or unwilling to halt) grew more common. Colonel Stanley reported that the Grand Hôtel, where Labouchere had luxuriated during the Siege, had been methodically sacked; the looters ‘took all the silver for which the hotel is famous, women’s boots, linen, everything; they took 30 francs out of the pocket of a waistcoat of a waiter, which was hanging up in his bedroom, they ate everything, and drank themselves drunk, 200 bottles of wine’. On May 5th, the Commune suppressed seven hostile newspapers, six more on May 11th, followed by another ten on the 18th. Fear and hatred mounted hand in hand, inflamed by each successive charge of atrocities at the front. There were accusations on both sides; Government troops claimed to have found at Fort Vanves one of their men ‘nailed to a stake’; Communard leaders taken in the fighting for Clamart had been shot on the spot, as Duval had been, and British correspondents in Versailles heard regular units openly raising a cry of ‘No
quarter!’ A weighty portion of the Communards’ wrath continued to be directed towards the person of Thiers. ‘Venomous toad’ and ‘serpent in glasses’, ‘evil bandit’ and ‘old criminal’, and ‘the country’s grave-digger’ were among the labels regularly attached to his name by the Red Press; and they were not terms of endearment. One cartoon portrayed him having obscenely unnatural relations with Bismarck; while with his declaration of all-out war on May 8th and the stepped-up bombardment that followed it, feelings against Thiers reached new heights.

  Henri de Rochefort, who, although he had declined to commit himself to the Commune, was still capable of inspiring the Paris mob to madness, now wrote in his paper:

  M. Thiers possesses a wonderful mansion in the Place St.-Georges, full of works of art of all descriptions… what would these property-owning statesmen say if the people of Paris replied to their ravages by using the pickaxe, and, if for every house at Courbevoie touched by the shells, a piece of the wall were knocked out of the palace in the Place St.-Georges?… I am convinced that on the first news that even the door-knockers had been damaged, M. Thiers would order a cease-fire…

  The article was to earn Rochefort a sentence of transportation for life to the South Pacific; for his suggestion was taken up with greater enthusiasm than he could possibly have foreseen. On May 11th the newly reconstituted Committee of Public Safety decreed that Thiers’s house should be ‘razed to the ground’ and his belongings confiscated. Without delay twenty carts began clearing the house, distributing its various treasures among the city’s libraries and museums, and the linen to the hospitals. On the 15th, Rigault’s twenty-one-year-old aide, Gaston da Costa, ‘gave an example’ by climbing on to the roof and ripping off the first tiles; the next day Thiers wrote bitterly to a friend: ‘My house is demolished. I have neither hearth nor home, and this dwelling where I received and entertained you all over the past forty years has been destroyed down to the foundations.’ To Edwin Child, who watched the work of demolition, it was ‘as striking an instance of futile spite, as perhaps any revolution can or has to furnish’.