The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Delescluze at the Ministry of War heard the news grimly, but with calm, and ordered Assi, the incompetent first Chairman of the Commune, off on reconnaissance of the threatened area. The haggard old Jacobin then dictated a street-by-street defence of the city, placing Brunel, who—once again in disfavour—had only been released from a spell in prison the previous night, in command of the key position around the Place de la Concorde. He completed his night’s work with the issue of a rousing proclamation to the Citizens of Paris:

  Enough of militarism! No more General Staffs with badges of rank and gold braid at every seam! Make way for the people, for the fighters with bare arms! The hour of revolutionary warfare has struck!

  It was a call to the barricades, and the old appeal for the spontaneous, unorganized, torrential levée en masse heard so often from Delescluze and the Reds during the first Siege. But although for some days past 1,500 women had been set to work sewing sandbag sacks in the disused National Assembly building, at 8 centimes a sack, none of the second line of barricades recommended by Rossel had yet been completed. And now there would be no coherent plan of defence either. The barricades as prescribed by Delescluze were tactically more suited for guarding districts than for any integrated defence of the whole city. Rossel with his engineer’s eye understood precisely the military significance of the obliquely intersecting streets of Haussmann’s Paris, but his frequent warnings of how easy Haussmann had made it for regular troops to ‘turn’ a barricade went unheeded by the Jacobins with their memories of ’48. At 5 a.m., leaving all his papers undestroyed, Delescluze abandoned his office for the barricades.

  Outside the turbulent chambers of the Commune, Paris had spent the rest of that sparkling May Sunday in joyous oblivion. The city, thought the Rev. Gibson, ‘seemed to be en fête. There have never been such crowds all around the Place de la Concorde except on some extraordinary occasion, such as the fete of the 15th of August under Imperialist rule, and everybody appeared to be in holiday dress.’ In his diary, Edwin Child entered this account of his day:

  Up at 8. Church at 11. At 1 o’clock met Madame Clerc (rendezvous) at the Madeleine, breakfasted au Café du Helder… afterwards strolled to Champs Elysées. There rested best part of afternoon. About 5 p.m. saw her home (Avenue Friedland), walked to my room, had tea, and then took bus to Johnson’s, where I passed the evening. Lovely day.

  As darkness fell, life continued. At the Gymnase there was a gala première of Les Femmes Terribles and the theatres had never been fuller. Pompeii on the night before its extinction can hardly have been gayer. At his ‘usual place of observation’, Goncourt, who had evacuated his house in the hazardous neighbourhood of Auteuil to lodge temporarily in the centre of Paris, saw a man arrested for shouting that the Versaillais had entered.

  I wandered around for a long time in search of information…. Nothing, nothing at all…. Another rumour. Finally I returned home. I went to bed in despair. I could not sleep. Through my hermetically closed curtains I seemed to be able to hear a confused murmur in the distance. In a street some way off there was the usual noise of one company relieving another, as happened every night. I told myself I had been imagining things and went back to bed… but this time there was no mistaking the sound of drum and bugle! I rushed back to the window. The call to arms was sounding all over Paris, and soon, drowning the noise of the drums and the bugles and the shouting and the cries of ‘To Arms!’ came the great, tragic, booming notes of the tocsin being rung in all the churches—a sinister sound which filled me with joy and sounded the death-knell of the odious tyranny oppressing Paris.

  It was not till the next morning that most Parisians learned of the Versailles entry. Edwin Child recorded:

  Was startled about ½ past 8 by Barbe knocking and calling out that the troops had taken the town by assault. Immediately dressed, locked all up and with him and Balfield proceeded by the Rue Lafayette, they intending to try and leave Paris, but I made for Johnson’s, leaving them at the Faubourg St. Denis; crossed the Boulevard Strasbourg by Rue St. Martin and Temple arriving safely R. de Braque, but not without having assisted several times making barricades, that is to say, carrying my ‘pavé’ to each, took my quarters up here, Johnson being very kind, Madame also making me welcome….

  Paul Verlaine, who had been employing his literary talents in the Commune Press Office and had spent the previous day at a Club meeting in the Church of St.-Denis-du-St.-Sacrément, was awakened by the voice of his wife dreaming aloud that the Versaillais had entered Paris. A few moments later her pretty maid came in to tell her that what she had dreamed was no fantasy. Mme Verlaine at once packed to take refuge with her parents, leaving her husband contemplating means of seducing the maid.

  The Versailles entry at Auteuil had caught Dombrowski’s forces completely by surprise. There had been a desperate but brief defence on the line of the Ceinture railway; then panic. A major come from the lost ramparts assured Dombrowski that he had beaten his fleeing troops ‘with the flat of his sword till his arm ached; but he could not stay the panic. Without losing his head, Dombrowski dispatched an urgent request to Delescluze for reinforcements. But MacMahon’s troops, advancing through the friendly territory of Passy, had already made remarkably rapid initial progress. At about 11 o’clock on Sunday night, Assi reached the Trocadéro on his reconnaissance mission, but turning into the darkened Rue Beethoven his horse slipped in a large pool of blood and refused to budge. Along the walls Assi noticed what appeared to be the figures of sleeping National Guards. Suddenly out of the shadows regular troops rushed at Assi and seized him; the first of the Commune leaders to be taken. Themselves fearing a trap (it was rumoured that the Communards had mined and were intending to blow up the whole area), the Versailles forces, with their habitual caution, paused before taking the dominating heights of the Trocadéro. But by 3 a.m. it was theirs, and through five gaping breaches in the walls between the Porte de Passy and the Porte St.-Cloud MacMahon had already poured 70,000 troops; some 1,500 National Guards had surrendered. While in the centre Douay and Vinoy headed straight for the É toile, on the right a column under General Cissey passed through Auteuil to infiltrate across the Pont de Grenelle, thereby opening up the Left Bank approaches too. Working left-wards along the inside of the walls, Clinchant and Ladmirault moved to take from the rear the Communard positions at Neuilly, then wheeled right to advance on the great fortress of Montmartre. By dawn the whole of Auteuil and Passy in the 16th Arrondissement had been ‘liberated’, as well as most of the 15th on the other side of the Seine. For residents like the Rafinesque family, almost overcome with joy and gratitude towards the Versailles Army, the ordeal of the past weeks appeared to be over; it seemed almost an augury that from an egg laid by one of the Rafinesques’s pet birds a live chick should be hatched just as the fighting passed beyond Passy.

  With the morning of Monday, May 22nd, a frenzy of desperate energy seized the Commune. Barricades that should have been constructed weeks earlier were being rushed up everywhere, and passing citizens—like Edwin Child—forced at bayonet point to assist by each contributing his pavé, prized out of the road. Dr. Powell, trying in vain to reach his place of work, the Beaujon Hospital some 500 yards down the Avenue Friedland from the Étoile, was several times deflected from his goal to build barricades, which he described as follows:

  If possible two or three trolleys, cabs or carts would form the foundation; all the apertures being filled with sand, the cubic paving stones from the road, sandbags, bricks or anything else… in such wide streets as the Rue Royale, the barricade was made by engineers, and were small fortresses with place for cannon, and very strong.

  A vast new barricade, several metres high, was thrown up across the Rue de Rivoli, just in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Colonel Stanley awoke from a night out at the theatre to discover, from his hotel in the Rue de la Paix, that a barricade ‘of water carts is across the Boulevard by the New Opéra, at the end of this street’. A quarter of a mile closer to the advancing Ve
rsaillais, Dr. Alan Herbert was disturbed to see, on looking out of his window just behind the Madeleine, ‘several National Guards and dirty-looking fellows taking counsel together whether they should raise a barricade opposite my windows;

  MAP 2. Paris: south-west

  and they were actually beginning it’. He was consoled, however, by the recollection that when he had been visited a few months previously by the up-and-coming young M.P. for Chelsea, Sir Charles Dilke, who already possessed a shrewd eye for a tactical situation, Dilke had suggested that the proper place for any effective barricade covering the Place de la Madeleine would be three doors further down. Sure enough, a senior officer (whom Herbert took to be Dombrowski himself) arrived and promptly ordered the barricade to be shifted to the point Dilke had indicated!

  Herbert, like many another sensible Parisian, stayed quietly at home to await developments. Safely ensconced with his friends the Johnsons in the as yet unthreatened eastern part of Paris, Child did the same; ‘Playing cards best part of day. We could hear the cannon now and then, but altogether it seemed quiet enough.’ To many of the ‘neutral’ British and Americans, immured in their dwellings as the fighting of the next few days flowed and ebbed around them, was to be granted a view—terrifying in its proximity and historically all but unique—of warfare in a great western city; and warfare of a particularly atrocious kind. Of the French eyewitnesses, there were vast numbers like Louis Péguret who had ardently backed the Commune in the earliest days, but who also now unostentatiously went to ground, to avoid building barricades and to escape impressment by the Commune in its hour of need. Thus did its marginal supporters fade away when the crunch came.

  Goncourt, however, his curiosity as ever gaining the upper hand, ‘could not stay indoors today, I simply had to see and know.’ Near the Madeleine he had found excited groups ‘already plucking up the courage to boo the mounted orderlies’. Near the Opéra he saw ‘a National Guard being carried along with his thigh broken. In the square, in a few scattered groups, they were saying that the Versailles troops had reached the Palais de l’Industrie. The National Guards, coming back in small bands, and looking tired and shamefaced, were obviously demoralized and discouraged.’ Goncourt next went to call on Burty, the art critic, who lived just behind the Bibliothèque Nationale in the 2nd Arrondissement. There Goncourt found himself a prisoner in his apartment ‘for I do not know how long. It was not safe to go out….’ As the hours passed by, ‘Burty started copying out extracts of the Correspondence found at the Tuileries, while I buried myself in his Delacroix to the sound of exploding shells coming gradually nearer.’ Curiosity had also induced Benjamin Wilson—‘awakened strange to say by an unaccustomed still wave in the neighbourhood’—to poke his head outside, where he promptly met two National Guards, ‘looking gloomy and crestfallen. In reply to my query whether there was anything new: “Mon Dieu, Monsieur”, one of them said, “the tricolor is waving from the Arc de Triomphe, and we are completely betrayed as ever we were.” A feeling of pity for those whose cause was lost and whose lives were possibly not worth a day’s purchase prevented me from showing any satisfaction, though my heart was leaping for joy at the news’.

  It was indeed true that Douay’s men had occupied the Étoile; even though the Arc de Triomphe, heavily sandbagged, with a field-piece hoisted on to its top and provisions for a forntight, had been converted into a minor fortress. Before the morning was over the Versailles troops could sweep all the way down the once-more deserted Champs-Élysées with their cannon. So far they had encountered practically no opposition. Their confidence was high; perhaps too high. Marching along the Quai they now headed towards the silent Place de la Concorde which, little more than twelve hours earlier, had been pullulating with gay, festive crowds. But all of a sudden concentrated volleys of fire flashed out from the terrace of the Tuileries Gardens. Struck at point-blank range and thoroughly caught off balance, the leading Versaillais suffered heavy losses; the survivors fled back as far as the Palais de l’Industrie. The advance had received its first check, administered by the tough and competent Brunel, and for the rest of the day Douay’s force consolidated around the Étoile. The American Legation, now in Government-held territory, found itself once again under shellfire; this time from Commune guns positioned in Mont-matre. The Minister (of whom Wickham Hoffman had once remarked, ‘If we heard of any part of Paris where shells were likely to burst and bullets to whistle, Washburne was sure to have important business in that direction’) was of course there. That afternoon he imperturbably mounted a horse to ride out to examine the state of his Residence near the Porte Dauphine. ‘Besides the breaking of considerable glass, there was no material damage’, Washburne reported with relief, and the house had not been looted. Along the line of the ramparts he saw many corpses in National Guard uniform, while all the time fresh regulars were pouring in from Versailles; ‘It is estimated that from eighty to one hundred thousand troops of the line will be in the city before tomorrow morning. In all our part of the city they have been received with unbounded joy by the few people remaining.’

  Later that same day Washburne rode over to see Marshal Mac-Mahon, who had now already established himself in Passy, ‘to advise him of what I knew in relation to Archbishop Darboy, and to express the hope that the government troops might yet be enabled to save him. The interview was anything but reassuring to me, and I left the headquarters of the Marshal feeling that the fate of the Archbishop was sealed.’

  Despite the check in the centre, MacMahon’s turning movements on either flank were thrusting ahead with considerable speed. On the Left Bank, Langourian captured the École Militaire, including over a hundred Communard cannon parked uselessly outside. To his right, Cissey swept forward up Paris’s longest street, the Rue de Vaugirard, to reach Montparnasse Station. There were only a score of National Guards defending this important position, but they fought hard until their ammunition ran out and then retreated up the Rue de Rennes, towards St.-Germain, where they took up position behind a hastily erected barricade. Their withdrawal was covered by a courageous Communard, who kept up a calm and steady fire into the station from a one-man stronghold inside a newspaper kiosk. At the other end of MacMahon’s front, Ladmirault’s and Clinchant’s advance on Montmartre had been greatly facilitated by two characteristic Communard blunders. To the great discouragement of their fighters all over the city, up till 9 o’clock that morning the massed guns up in the principal Commune fortress of Montmartre had not yet fired a single shot against the Government troops. La Cécilia, sent by Delescluze to investigate, discovered the famous guns whose seizure in March had sparked off the whole civil war in a calamitous condition: ‘Eighty-five cannon, a score of mitrailleuses, lay there, dirty and scattered about. Nobody, during these past eight weeks, had thought of getting them into action. There was plenty of 7-pounder ammunition, but no breech-blocks. At the Moulin de la Galette, three 24-pounders were the only ones equipped with gun-carriages; but there were no parapets, no side-armour, no platforms.’ When the first shots were at last fired, ‘the recoil buried the gun trails, and it took a lot of time to dig them out’

  Thus unopposed, Ladmirault moved right up to the Batignolles area at the foot of Montmartre, while to his right Clinchant was aided by the second Communard blunder. The Parc Monceau was captured when National Guards directed a murderous fire into the rear of their own front-line defenders, mistaking them for Versaillais. In the panic that ensued, Clinchant captured the park and began to sweep eastwards up the Boulevards Malesherbes and Haussmann, as well as the Faubourg St.-Honoré. The forces of law and order were now well into Paris. Before midday, the Beaujon Hospital, which Dr. Powell had tried in vain to reach earlier that morning, was in their hands. After being stopped several times to help build barricades, Powell had reach the Rue St.-Honoré, in the vicinity of the Place Vendôme, and—finding no more barricades ahead of him—still hoped to be able to attain his destination. ‘But I had not got far before several bullets whizzed past
my head… fighting was going on at the great barricade across the Rue Royale and near the Church of the Madeleine which was sadly damaged.’ Unable to progress any further, Powell stopped to give assistance at a temporary ambulance set up in the Rue Royale. There he found all the painful confusion of civilians caught up in the midst of war; ‘Many ladies and children had also come into the house for protection, and were all mixed up with the wounded, and were much alarmed as it was then known that parts of Paris were on fire…. There was little food or anything in the house for the wounded and others, and no one dared to leave the house, as the shutters (outside) were closed and often struck by spent bullets… I felt my last hours were near….’

  The Rev. Gibson had left Paris to join his wife and family at Chantilly, but M. Chastel, the librarian at his Methodist Chapel in the Rue Roquépine (close to the Place St.-Augustin and the Boulevard Malesherbes), had remained to find himself in the centre of the fighting. In a detailed letter to Gibson, he wrote:

  Since eight o’clock this morning there has been a fusillade in our street…. This morning we were surrounded by National Guards, and we heard the fusillade in the direction of the Faubourg St.-Honoré and the Champs-Élysées. After a while the fight was close to Saint-Augustin, in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and at last the soldiers reached our street. We could not even put our nose through the window without the risk of being struck by a ball. The soldiers are installed in the house next to our chapel, and are firing in the direction of the Rue Neuve des Mathurins (in a line with our Rue Roquépine on the other side of the Boulevard Malesherbes). They are at the doorway and at the windows of each storey. You can imagine the noise and confusion we hear outside. About nine o’clock we had worship in our room; all in the house were present, and we prayed earnestly to God to aid us…. I heard a poor wounded man uttering a cry, I peeped out from under our window shutters. We saw him carried off. Shortly afterwards a soldier was killed on the spot close to our library….