The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  With the Versailles forces pressing towards it on two sides, the Communard position at the Madeleine became a key bulwark to the Rue Royale and Brunel’s stronghold. ‘The sentries watched all night just opposite my house’, said Alan Herbert,

  and at early dawn the firing recommenced on both sides, and lasted all the morning, but less violent than the day before. Nothing whatever was known of passing events; we only knew just what we saw through the bars of my window. The monotony and the suspense was very great, and we felt that the barricades ought to be taken, as the force defending them was evidently small. I began to think that the capture of these barricades would be much like the rest of the war, and last ten times longer than anyone anticipated.

  Towards evening, however, the firing became harder and harder, and after an hour and a half watching we saw the insurgents retreat from the different barricades and cross the Place. The troops then came in. A few scenes of horrid massacre and bloodshed, and then the streets were occupied by the regular troops…. I fear there is a very revengeful disposition amongst the regular troops, which is much to be regretted….

  While Douay’s troops were closing in on the Madeleine, Dr. Powell, still working at his temporary first-aid post nearby on the Rue St.-Honoré, was sought out by some ‘high officers of the Commune’ who said they wanted to use his ambulance as a ‘point of retreat’ when the Madeleine barricades fell. He remonstrated with them, pointing out that they would all be put to death for violating the Geneva Conventions. ‘The answer given to me was “well citizen, in that case we shall all go to hell together….” ’ The Communard officers were evidently persuaded, however. Suddenly the cannonade ceased, and Powell peered out of the window to see men in red trousers taking position at the captured barricades. Some of the women with him ‘fainted with joy’. Emerging into the open, he noticed all the columns of the Madeleine had been chipped and splintered, ‘the figures in the Tympanum being sadly mutilated and railings twisted about and the street lamps also, into fantastic figures’.

  Moving up the Boulevard Haussmann to join hands with Clinchant’s right wheel, Douay also captured a barricade opposite the famous Printemps stores and with a few rounds of cannon dislodged the National Guards from the Trinité. Haussmann’s still unfinished Opéra was soon hemmed in on three sides. Marine sharp-shooters mounted themselves in the top storey of the surrounding buildings, and directed a deadly fire down on to the Communards exposed behind their barricades; but here they fought back with desperate courage. At 6 p.m., after both sides had suffered substantial losses, the Opéra was carried; and a soldier climbed up on to the statue of Apollo at its entrance and ripped down the red flag. One of the Daily News correspondents was there to witness the event, and about the same time he watched another regular, ‘a little grig of a fellow’, run to take up position behind a tree, whence he began firing down the Boulevard Haussmann:

  He fired with an air; he loaded with an air; he fired again with a flourish, and was greeted with cheering and clapping of hands. Then he beckoned dramatically for he meditated firing up the Rue Lafayette, but changed his mind, and blazed away again up Haussmann. Then he turned and waved on his fellows as if he were on the boards of a theatre, the Federal bullets cutting the bark and leaves all around him.

  A few seconds later the British journalist saw the ‘little grig struck down with a bullet through his head’.

  Clinchant’s flanking right wheel was soon traversing the recently renamed Rue du 4 Septembre. The sound of the approaching rifle-fire brought hopes of early redemption to both Goncourt, still incarcerated with Burty behind the Bibliothèque Nationale, and an anxious Marquis de Plœuc in the Bank of France. Around Goncourt the signs of retreat began to multiply. First horse-drawn ambulances came past; then a bus filled with National Guards, followed by staff officers arriving at the gallop to warn the Communards stationed near Burty’s house not to let themselves be cut off. Next came the artillery, followed by the stretcher-bearers. Some men began half-heartedly to start a barricade outside, but gave it up and sloped away. Shortly before 6 p.m., a mass of retreating National Guards came into sight, bearing with them ‘a dead man with his head covered in blood, whom four men were carrying by his arms and legs like a bundle of dirty washing, taking him from door to door—none of which opened’. Soon Versaillais bullets were flying around Burty’s house. Goncourt’s curiosity was still unquenchable and, down on his knees in the dining-room, he peeped out through a corner of the curtain:

  On the other side of the boulevard there was a man stretched out on the ground of whom I could see only the soles of his boots and a bit of gold braid. There were two men standing by the corpse, a National Guard and a lieutenant. The bullets were making the leaves rain down on them from a little tree spreading its branches over their heads. A dramatic detail I was about to forget; behind them, in front of the closed doors of a closed porte-cochère, a woman was lying flat on the ground, holding a peaked cap in one hand.

  The National Guardsman, talking at the top of his voice, with violent and base gestures indicated to his fellows that he wanted to remove the corpse. Bullets continued to bring the leaves raining down on the two men. Then, the National Guardsman, whose face I could perceive was red with rage, flung his rifle on to his shoulder, butt upwards, and stepped out into the fusillade, an insult on his lips. Suddenly I saw him halt, put his hand to his forehead, lean for a second with his hand and his head against a small tree, then turn about and fall on his back, spreadeagled.

  The lieutenant had remained motionless beside the first corpse, as tranquil as a man meditating in a garden. A bullet that had knocked down a small branch on to him, which he brushed away with a flick, did not draw him out of his immobility. For an instant, he contemplated his killed comrade. Then, without any hurry, he threw off his sword behind him, as if with scornful deliberation, bent down and tried to lift the dead man. The body was large and heavy, and, like any inert object, evaded his efforts and rolled about in his arms from left to right. At last he raised it; and clutching it across his chest, he was carrying it away when a bullet, smashing his thigh, made the dead and the living spin in a hideous pirouette, collapsing one upon the other. I think it is given to few people to to be witnesses of such a heroic and such a simple contempt of death. They told me that evening that the woman lying on the ground was the wife of one of the three men.

  For all his loathing of the Communards, Goncourt could not withhold admiration for the courage and comradeship—senseless, perhaps—demonstrated in this small incident, nor could he stifle his compassion for the suffering of their wounded. As the Versaillais approached, ‘I retained in my ear for a long time the rending cries of a wounded soldier1 who had dragged himself to our door and whom the concierge, through a cowardly fear of compromising herself, refused to let in.’ By nightfall the street was in the hands of the Versailles troops. ‘We took the risk of looking at them from our balcony, when a bullet struck just above our heads. It was that imbecile of a lodger who had decided to light up a pipe at his window.’

  Even British correspondents accompanying the Versailles troops were struck by the joy with which this part of Paris greeted its ‘liberators’. People sang and danced in the exhilaration of the moment. Bottles of wine and money were pressed upon the soldiers; women embraced them. Yet still Douay’s forces could not frontally break Brunel’s resistance in the Concorde and the Rue Royale; and, well after the capture of the Opéra and after Clinchant had swung round across the Rue du 4 Septembre, Colonel Stanley continued to find himself isolated in a pocket of Communard resistance in the Place Vendôme, the former H.Q. of the National Guard. At 3 p.m. he had jotted down for his mother’s eyes:

  It is a glorious day, but I am feeling low. We are surrounded. The Versailles people have not advanced as much as I expected, but they are gaining ground; after all there is a good deal of ground to get over. We have a battery of guns of the Reds at the end of Rue de la Paix, in the Boulevard 300 yards from the hotel which make
s the windows rattle. The musketry has been very continuous and very heavy. Many of the National Guards are slipping away… I fear no letters will get out today.

  (5 p.m.) For the last three quarters of an hour there has been an awful fire. The Reds have run past the Rue de la Paix in quantities with the greatest trouble…. It is a very grand sight, but the firing is of course a most pitiful one and also the cowardice of the people. We shall soon have the red legs in the streets, and they I shall not dare to bully as I do the Reds.

  (5.30 p.m.) The barricade at the end of the street, which twenty minutes ago had been vacated by the Reds, has been taken by the Line and they have occupied a house and are firing down the street, making a most fearful noise. They are returning the fire near the Vendôme….

  Beyond the Place Vendôme, Stanley spotted National Guards ‘flying across the Rue de Rivoli and St. Honoré, and their grand battery in Rue Castiglione is taken in reverse and is of course useless and empty’. Then, at 8 p.m., the Colonel recorded:

  After forty minutes firing the Reds left the Place Vendôme. A quarter of an hour afterwards six men came back and have been firing ever since. The noise on both sides is awful, for those six men (it sounds like a joke), with their tabatière rifles, made as much noise as if they fired 6 pounders. I only observed two men wounded. It is getting dark… and the aim of course gets worse….

  An hour later the Versaillais, ‘sick of the nonsense’, brought up some guns, and fired five rapid rounds into the gathering dusk. The effect, continued Stanley, was wonderful, instant silence. The poor street is awfully cut up, glass and lamps have fallen all along;… I have chased away the maid who, like a little fool, would look out.

  By 10 p.m. Stanley could hear people beginning to move about down in the street; ‘Poor Street of Peace. I imagine it is in an awful state’. An hour later he made his last entry for the 23rd:

  Well, this eventful day is closing quietly. The spent balls whistle through the still air, and can be heard at a great distance…. I have been looking at my English flag which sticks out of my window. It has several bullet holes in it.

  Away in the distance he saw the red glow of a great fire, which he thought might possibly be the Tuileries Palace burning.

  * * *

  All through that day Brunel and his men had continued to hold out with the utmost tenacity at the barricades in the Rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde, and at the immensely strong one at the bottom of the Rue St.-Florentin which guarded the Rue de Rivoli, the street pointing so straight at the Hôtel de Ville and the very heart of the Commune. Douay had brought no less than sixty guns to bear on Brunel’s position, against a meagre twelve. Their concentrated fire reduced the barricades to a shambles, killing scores of the defenders, whose flank all the time was becoming increasingly threatened by the turning movements from the direction of the Opéra. After the vital bulwark in the Place de la Madeleine fell, a new menace—that which had dispersed the Communards outside the Opéra—threatened them; deadly rifle-fire from sharp-shooters ensconced in the tops of the high buildings along the Rue Royale, which plunged down upon the defenders exposed behind their barricades. But Brunel was a soldier ruthless and resourceful enough to meet this kind of threat. Already during the first Siege he had acquired the nickname ‘Brunel the Burner’ on destroying a house that obstructed his field of fire, and now he swiftly ordered the firing of any houses capable of jeopardizing his defence. With alarming speed the flames spread up the famous street, consuming expensive bijouteries and elegant cafés alike.

  The burning of Paris had begun; it was to become as integral a part of the legend of the Commune as the rats and balloons of the first Siege. For Brunel, however, the conflagration could only postpone the inevitable. His men (as Colonel Stanley spotted from his hotel) began to take flight in small packets down the Rue de Rivoli, and on the fall of the Place Vendôme his position became hopeless. An American friend of Wickham Hoffman, with an apartment overlooking the Concorde, witnessed what must have been the last minutes of ‘the Burner’s’ stand there. At the great, sixteen-foot-high St.-Florentin barricade, in a scene that might have been painted by Delacroix, he saw

  a young and apparently good-looking woman spring upon the barricade, a red flag in her hand, and wave it defiantly at the troops. She was instantly shot dead….

  When the barricade, stretching across what is now one of the busiest thoroughfares in Paris, was finally carried, Hoffman’s friend watched while ‘an old woman was led out to be shot. She was placed with her back to the wall of the Tuileries Gardens, and, as the firing party levelled their pieces, she put her fingers to her nose and worked them after the manner of the defiant in all ages….’ Some forty or fifty dead Communards were collected at the barricade, and thrown into the deep ditch from which the materials for its construction had been excavated. Quicklime was added and the ditch filled in, so that Douay’s troops could without delay push their guns forward over it.

  Up the vital Rue de Rivoli Brunel and his survivors now fell back towards the Hôtel de Ville in desperate haste. As they passed the Rue Castiglione they were caught in enfilading fire by regulars advancing from the Place Vendôme, who nearly succeeded in cutting off their line of retreat. Brunel escaped, although he and his men were silhouetted by an immense fire that had burst out behind them, the fire that Colonel Stanley had noted. Jules Bergeret, the Commune’s earliest military commander, now released from prison and to some extent rehabilitated, had carried out a desperate action, actuated, apparently, more by vengeful motives than by tactical necessity; an action that might easily have led to perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole civil war—the burning-down of the Louvre. Inside the Salle des Maréchaux of the Tuileries Palace, where only so recently the last of the famous concerts had taken place, Bergeret had piled barrel after barrel of gunpowder. The resplendent hangings in the great halls that had witnessed so many of the triumphs of the Second Empire in its hours of pride he smeared indiscriminately with tar and petroleum, and then withdrew. Shortly after 10 p.m. flames burst out all along the length of the palace. With a tremendous roar the central dome housing the Salle des Maréchaux disappeared. While Douay’s men looked on impotently, fascination mingled with horror at this display of pyrotechnics dwarfing anything mounted by the former Emperor to divert his royal guests at the Great Exhibition, Bergeret scribbled a brief note to the Committee of Public Safety:

  ‘The last relics of Royalty have just vanished.’

  Even if this had so far eluded its grasp, the Commune was now certainly beginning to leave a permanent mark on the face of France. But at the Hôtel de Ville late on Tuesday night the signs of imminent defeat were multiplying. How remote seemed that halcyon day when the Commune had been proclaimed outside this same Hôtel de Ville; when it had seemed to so many of the oppressed and dissatisfied of Paris that Utopia was at last within their grasp! Could that day of splendour and sublime confidence really have been a bare two months ago? Now the flames rising high above the Tuileries cast a diabolic glow on the Hôtel de Ville’s medieval façade, at the same time as it imparted an unnatural colour to the frightened faces of National Guards scurrying in and out of the building. The sounds of musketry were coming appreciably closer. Inside, the corridors were cluttered with wounded, groaning for water; the walls flecked with their blood. In men’s eyes a real fear was betrayed, something beyond the transient panics of the past. The realization that, despite the slowing-down in the rate of the Versaillais advance, the 23rd had been—militarily—the decisive day was not restricted to the leaders of the Commune. That night most who visited the Hôtel de Ville became aware of being faced with a choice of death or flight. Some, like the vanished Pyat, had already chosen. So had Dombrowski, now lying in state in a blue satin bed in the Hôtel de Ville. Even in the Commune’s last hours the irrelevant, as always, was to be found jostling the immediate; alongside Dombrowski a National Guard was occupied sketching the dead general’s features.

  Outside Delescluze�
��s temporary office, a vigilant guard kept at bay the hordes of would-be suppliants. Within, a curiously unusual calm and quietness prevailed. According to Lissagaray’s description, ‘Delescluze is signing orders, pale, mute like a spectre. The agonies of the past days have drained what remained of his life. His voice is nothing but a croak. His gaze and his heart alone still live.’ Again according to the usually reliable Lissagaray, at about 3 o’clock that same night a staff officer presented himself to the Committee of Public Safety, having come post-haste from Notre-Dame Cathedral. There, he reported, he had found a detachment of National Guards busily engaged in buidling up a large ‘brasier’ out of chairs and pews; but, the staff officer warned, there were some eight hundred Communard sick and wounded in the adjacent Hôtel Dieu hospital, to which the flames would almost certainly spread if the cathedral were incendiarized. The Committee hastily dispatched him with orders for Notre-Dame to be evacuated and left strictly alone. By so slender a margin was one of the world’s most famous monuments preserved.

  But there was no one to check Raoul Rigault, then about to commit an atrocity he had long been planning. Without any authority and without consulting his colleagues, Rigault arrived at the Ste.-Pélagie Prison claiming to have orders for the immediate execution of Gustave Chaudey, one of the hostages who, as Jules Ferry’s deputy, had ordered the Mobiles to fire on the mob demonstrating outside the Hôtel de Ville on January 22nd. Rigault informed Chaudey, ‘You killed my friend Sapia; you have five minutes to live.’ Chaudey pointed out that he had been merely carrying out his duty; that, in the absence of any authenticated orders, Rigault would be responsible for murder and not an execution. Rigault brushed all this aside and, to a final objurgation by Chaudey that he had a wife and child, he replied icily: ‘The Commune will take better care of them than you.’ A reluctant firing-squad was hastily formed, of which Rigault personally took charge, but on its first volley only succeeded in wounding Chaudey in one arm. Displaying admirable courage, Chaudey stood there waving the other arm and crying ‘Vive la République!’ until prison warders finished off the job with their revolvers.