The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Probably few had a luckier escape than Auguste Renoir. Oblivious of the world around, he was painting a sketch of the Seine which attracted the attention of some National Guards. They became convinced that he was a spy sketching plans of the river defences for Versailles. Renoir was arrested; a crowd gathered, and an amiable old lady proposed that the ‘spy’ should immediately be thrown into the river. ‘You drown kittens’, she said, ‘and they don’t do nearly as much harm.’ Eventually, however, Renoir was dragged to the nearest Mairie, where (according to his son and biographer, Jean Renoir) ‘there was a firing-squad on permanent duty’. Fortunately for Renoir, and posterity, Rigault also happened to be there and he now rendered his one great contribution to civilization by recognizing Renoir as the artist who had given him sanctuary at Fontainebleau some years previously, when he had been on the run from Louis-Napoleon’s police. Rigault embraced the ‘spy’ touchingly, and promptly had him turned loose.

  But in his zeal it was apparent that Rigault had been arresting the wrong spies and hostages. As Lissagaray observed, by far the best hostage held by the Commune was the Bank of France; ‘Through it they held the genital organs of Versailles; they could laugh at its professional experience, at its guns. Without expending a man, the Commune had only to say to it: “Come to terms or die”’. Meanwhile, under the myopic eyes of complaisant old Beslay, the Marquis de Plæuc had continued to pass out of the back door of the Bank vast funds that materially helped Thiers finance the expansion of his forces. But apart from the issue of the Bank, there was also no doubt that Paris was riddled with real spies who slipped through Rigault’s net. Numerous attempts were made by Thiers to ‘buy’ leading Communards, and several of the conspiracies and rifts within the Commune seem to have been caused by the work of his agents provocateurs. Dombrowski (like Cluseret before him) was approached by an agent with an offer of a million francs if he would ‘open’ one of the gates under his command. Dombrowski promptly informed the Commune. A short time later a ‘peasant’ forced his way into Dombrowki’s H.Q., purporting to bring news from the front, then produced a dagger from underneath his smock, but was bayonetted first by Dombrowski’s bodyguard. At least such endeavours succeeded in so far as they increased the nervous tension, suspicion, and mistrust within the Commune, and by May 14th the Commune had decided to issue identity cards.

  In his fifth-column work Thiers was immeasurably aided by the fact that, compared with the first Siege, Paris was only partially invested. Over half the perimeter was still occupied by the Prussians, supposedly neutral but in fact, for reasons of self-interest, increasingly well-disposed towards Versailles. Thus, despite the battle raging in the west and south-west, it was not all that difficult to leave or enter Paris via St.-Denis or some other Prussian-held centre. As has already been seen, Washburne travelled regularly between Paris and Versailles, Louise Michel had entered Versailles in disguise and returned safely, and in the latter part of April Edwin Child decided to make the trip, purely for diversion. At first he thought of taking with him a lady friend, Mlle Lassalle, but wisely changed his mind. He took a bus to the Jardin des Plantes, walked from there to the Porte d’Italie and thence to Sceaux on the road to Orléans, ‘where I met the first post of the Versailles troops, showed my passport, and got as far as Plessis where I had to traverse a camp of soliders to arrive at the Quartier-Général to obtain a laissez-passer to Versailles, here I was detained upwards of three hours for what reason except being a stranger I cannot say’. Having walked about sixteen miles and been arrested five times, he reached Versailles at 9 p.m. and ‘after about 3 hours search all over the town found a bed, without a room, that is to say in the room was 4 bedsteads, one occupied by a woman, but I was too tired to search further’. The following day he returned by a long circuit around the north of Paris.

  There were more people who wanted to get out and stay out. On April 21st, Goncourt expostulated in his Journal that he had heard the Commune was about to pass a decree under which ‘every man, married or unmarried, between the ages of 19 and 55 will be conscripted and condemned to march against the Versaillais. Here I am, threatened by this law! Here I am, obliged within a matter of days to hide myself as at the time of the Terror!’ When the Conscription Law was passed, and the Commune showed it meant business by actually entering houses to impress into the National Guard, according to Washburne, ‘all who cannot prove that they are foreigners’, thousands more Parisians went into hiding or took to flight. Every kind of ingenuity was practised; Dr. Powell smuggled two friends out on his English passport and a third ‘escaped like Falstaff in a basket of dirty linen’; Alphonse Daudet described watching a petit crevé viscount depart disguised as a waggon-driver, piloting a team of horses through Vincennes. Fleeing himself from impressment, Daudet recalled with some contempt the fellow escaper who, having passed through the Commune posts in utter silence, ‘became progressively more insolent, provocative, a real terror to the Communards the farther he got from the fortifications; he had threatened to put the lot of them to the bayonet’. After his narrow escape, Renoir too used his influence with Rigault to obtain a safe conduct to Louveciennes; Zola got out on a Prussian passport; while twelve-year-old Seurat fled with his parents to Fontainebleau. Several hundred thousand more Parisians had left since the Commune began,1 and by mid-May Paris had begun to look like a city of the dead. Gulielma Rafinesque noted ‘all the shops shut or half shut—a very few weary looking people shabbily dressed….’ What shops remained open had no customers, and even the Hôtel Meurice had closed down. In London, Karl Marx rubbed his hands: ‘Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire. No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards.’

  In at least one fundamental respect, the mass departures from Paris were a blessing in disguise for the Commune. As early as mid-April, the Rev. Gibson wrote in his diary:

  Although the city is not really invested, the question of supplies is beginning to be a serious one. Country people don’t care to bring their provisions into a city bristling with cannon and abounding in barricades. Naturally prudent, they prefer to sell their provisions to the Prussians…. Hence the price of provisions is rising rapidly. Veal, which sold at 1·40 frs., now sells at 2 frs. the pound…. Our butcher said that in a week’s time there would be no more beef to be had.

  By the end of the month, Thiers had organized an effective blockade of food entering Paris, with the Prussians consenting to co-operate on their side of the city. Once again Edwin Child began laying in an emergency hoard of biscuits and concentrated milk; Colonel Stanley wrote an un-Guardsmanlike admission to his mother, ‘I chiefly quarrel at having been asked to pay 75 centimes for washing an unstarched silk shirt. I revenge myself by wearing them three days.’ Rising prices and food shortages reawakened grim memories of the first Siege, persuading further thousands to make their way out of Paris; but this in turn helped postpone a serious food crisis, so that as May entered its fateful third week Paris was experiencing nothing like the privations of the previous winter.

  There were a variety of lesser ways in which, as the second Siege approached its climax, life in Paris continued to surprise the British and Americans still living there by its normality. The experiences of the first Siege, especially perhaps the Prussian bombardment, had conditioned many a Parisian to an unnatural phlegmatism out of which neither the Versailles bombardment nor the neo-Jacobin Terror of the Commune could really stir them. Returning to Paris from Versailles during the first battles of April 3rd, Benjamin Wilson had been astonished to see ‘labourers peacefully at work on plots of ground white with blossoms, as if ignorant of all that was going on around them’. Nothing during the first Siege had managed to distract the Seine fishermen from their sport, and even when the shelling of Neuilly was at its peak they were still to be seen standing quiet and motionless,
rods held in unshaking hands, as the cannon-balls whistled and rattled overhead. Towards the middle of April, the Rev. Gibson found delight in the spectacle, just outside the Madeleine, of ‘A man in the middle of the broad asphalted pavement, with a crowd around him, performing feats with heavy weights, lifting them and throwing them over his head; a sight such as you might see on the green of a provincial village on a fête day.’ More than a month later, he was commenting how Paris ‘has never appeared to be cleaner and healthier than now’; there was a great improvement in the habitually ‘sour smell’ of Paris, which he attributed (rather than to any acts of the Commune) to the mass departure of its citizenry!

  And beneath all the apprehension, the suffering, and the uncertainty, there still bubbled that irrepressible Parisian gaiety. Already by early April the Commune had reopened eight theatres, and the Rev. Gibson could not help exclaiming at the news ‘that the museums are shortly to be opened to the public, and the usual annual exhibition of modern paintings is to be held!’ On May 6th, as Fort Issy was tottering, the Commune threw open the Tuileries Palace for the first of a series of concerts to collect funds for the wounded. A great crowd of curious Parisians surged through the palace, pausing to goggle with particular fascination at the ex-Emperor’s sumptuous private bathroom. Into the stately Salle des Maréchaux, where the belles of the Second Empire had once waltzed and where the fourteen life-sized portraits of the first Bonaparte’s marshals were now discreetly covered over, they crammed to hear Mlle Agar recite the inevitable Châtiments of Hugo and to roar applause at Mme Bordas as she sang the current hit, which ended:

  C’est la canaille,

  Eh! bien, j’en suis!1

  The members of this essentially proletarian audience, for whose delectation tables groaning with brioches and beer had been laid out in the former banqueting hall, were ‘not very orderly in their behaviour’, the Illustrated London News complained; while Colonel Stanley sniffed fastidiously that ‘the stink became so bad I could not stay it out’. But for the organizers the distraction was a huge success, and it was repeated on the 14th and the 18th.

  With the Tuilerie concerts, an extraordinary kind of exaltation, almost of valedictory gaiety, seemed to seize the supporters of the Commune as the final catastrophe became more obviously imminent. Once again the boulevards filled; this time with strangers from the darker parts of Paris. It almost seemed as if they had come out to enjoy for the last time the opulence and grandeur of those foreign parts of the city which they loved with such possessive, destructive pride. Spring was at its splendid peak, and on the Concorde Communards replaced the withered laurels garlanding the statue of Strasbourg with offerings of flowers. To many it seemed as if there had never been quite so many flowers as that spring. ‘In the young verdure and the bloom of vernal shrubs’, Goncourt lyrically observed some National Guards ‘lying alongside their arms which glistened in the sunshine, with a blonde cantinière pouring out a drink for a soldier with her Parisian grace.’ But he could not avert his eyes from the unpleasant reminders of war inseparably mingled with this idyllic scene; ‘a corpse being hoisted on to a cart, of which a man holds in his two hands the brain ready to escape from its open skull’. On Sunday, May 14th, Goncourt’s raptures were less marred; ‘All that still remains of the Paris population is at the bottom of the Champs-Élysées, under the first trees, where the gaily clamorous laughter of children seated in front of the Punch and Judy shows occasionally rises above the voice of the distant cannonade.’ That same day Dr. Powell observed that the

  Parisians were out in their Sunday best, usually morning attire, watching with interest the erection of formidable earth works at the top of the Rue de Rivoli and Rue Royale, the guns of which were to sweep the Place de la Concorde of the entry of the troops; the fountains were playing as usual, the water hoses being plied, whilst at the barricades a roaring trade was being driven in sirop de vanille, in the horrid periodical Le Père Duchesne, and in coarse illustrated skits on Napoleon, Eugénie, Thiers… and away towards the ramparts again might be seen a kite high in the air….

  The next Sunday evening, May 21st, the Commune threw its most ambitious entertainment yet in the form of a vast open-air concert in the Tuileries Gardens, at which fifteen hundred musicians took part. ‘Mozart, Meyerbeer’, claimed Lissagaray, ‘and the great classics chased out the musical obscenities of the Empire’. Again it was a huge success. At the end, amidst heavy applause, a Communard staff officer mounted the conductor’s stand with a brief announcement: ‘Citizens, Monsieur Thiers promised to enter Paris yesterday. Monsieur Thiers did not enter; he will not enter. Therefore I invite you here next Sunday, here at this same place….’

  But at that identical moment the troops of Monsieur Thiers were beginning to pour into the city.

  Versailles Troops Enter Paris

  24. ‘La Semaine Sanglante’—I

  UP to the very last minute, Clemenceau, his fellow Mayors, the Deputies of Paris (jointly united as the ‘League of Republican Union for the Rights of Paris’), and various other bodies had still been seeking anxiously to achieve a negotiated compromise between Paris and Versailles, before the disastrous final confrontation took place. At the end of April the Freemasons of Paris had massed together, and, in top hats, bearing their Masonic orders and banners, bravely mounted the ramparts to demand a parley with the Versaillais. A deputation had been received, but to them—as to all others—Thiers replied with his unwavering formula: ‘Do you come in the name of the Commune? If so, I shall not listen to you; I do not recognize belligerents…. I have no conditions to accept, nor commitments to offer. The supremacy of the law will be re-established absolutely…. Paris will be submitted to the authority of the State just like any hamlet of a hundred inhabitants.’ He did not intend, and never had intended, that there should be any compromise with the rebellious city. Now that he had the power he proposed to crush the Commune mercilessly. But when, following the fall of Fort Issy, he began what he described as the ‘orthodox and classic methods of siege’, sapping his way forward across the Bois de Boulogne, his slow and methodical preparations received a nasty holt. Bismarck, growing as impatient as he had with Moltke during the first Siege, threatened Thiers that if he did not hurry up, the Prussian Army would itself enter Paris.

  This would have been a political disaster of the first magnitude, and, as Thiers admitted, ‘it was why we had now also thought of purchasing the entry of one of the gates to Paris’. Several attempts to open a way into the city by ‘Fifth Column’ work had failed, but one plan proposed by ‘a very brave man who entered and left Paris every day’ seemed to promise success. On the night of May 13th no less than 80,000 men stood by, concealed in the Bois de Boulogne, waiting for this modern Ulysses to lead them through the city gates. Thiers himself was there. But by 4 a.m. nothing had happened and the Army withdrew, disappointed. From now on Thiers spent every day at the front, full of Micawberish hopes. Still there was no sign of a breach in the walls, or the opening of a gate, so resignedly Thiers convened a Council of War at Mont-Valérien on Sunday, May 21st, to fix a date for the postponed general assault on the walls of Paris. He had reached the entrance to the fortress, when an excited staff officer galloped up to inform him that General Douay could not now attend the conference as he was occupied in entering Paris. Thiers hastened inside, where he found Marshal MacMahon studying the movements of Douay’s troops through a spyglass. At first it looked as if they had been repelled, then—after about a quarter of an hour—Thiers saw ‘two long black serpents, winding through folds in the ground, head towards the Point-du-Jour Gate, by which they entered’.

  It had happened as follows. At Montretout, one of the objectives of Trochu’s final sortie in January, the Versaillais had established what Wickham Hoffman (with memories of fighting at the Siege of Vicksburg under Ulysses Grant) described as ‘probably the most powerful battery ever erected in the world’. This may have been a slight exaggeration; nevertheless, for several days it had pounded the Po
int-du-Jour area to such an extent that the ramparts had been partly demolished and the defenders had withdrawn some distance from the devastated area. On Sunday, May 21st, a civil engineer named Ducatel, an overseer in the Department of Roads and Bridges who felt no love for the Commune, happened to stroll near the battlements on his afternoon walk. He was astonished to perceive that near the Point-du-Jour there was not a defender in sight. After a brief reconnaissance, he discovered that no one was holding the gate there. (Why MacMahon’s troops had not become aware of this, Colonel Hoffman claimed, could ‘only be accounted for by the general inefficiency into which the French Army had fallen’.) Ducatel now mounted the ramparts, waving a white flag. A Versailles major came forward; Ducatel told his story; this was verified; and Douay’s troops began to pour into Paris through the undefended gate. After all that had passed since the previous September, it was—as Hoffman remarked—‘rather an anti-climax’.

  Thiers now returned to Versailles to dine ‘with my family and a few friends who shared my joy’.

  At the Hôtel de Ville, the Commune had been busy formulating its last legislation. Apart from an order sending some staff officers, who had been caught philandering with cocottes, to the front with picks and shovels (the girls to a sandbag factory), in the four previous days there had been a Decree of Legitimacy, a new decision on the Secularization of Education, and a Decree on the theatres. Now the Assembly was in the midst of trying Cluseret for dereliction of duty. Suddenly, at about 7 o’clock that Sunday evening, Billioray, one of the members of the Committee of Public Safety, burst in shouting. ‘Stop! Stop!’, he cried, ‘I have a communication of the utmost importance, for which I demand a secret session.’ The doors were closed and Billioray read out a dispatch from Dombrowski reporting the Versailles entry. There was, according to Lissagaray, ‘a stupefied silence’, then uproar. Rigault, supported by Ferré, his successor as police chief, recommended that the Commune forces should blow up the Seine bridges and withdraw into the old Cité area for a last-ditch defence, burning all behind them. He also proposed that the hostages should be brought along too, ‘and they will perish there with us’. Cluseret was released, and an hour later the Commune adjourned; the last time that it would ever hold a plenary session at the Hôtel de Ville.