The Fall of Paris
Page 58
The cession of Alsace-Lorraine, it is war to perpetuity under the mask of peace!
For a nation like France could not possibly accept an ‘inferior position’ in Europe; nor, in the long run, would it prove acceptable to Europe.
* * *
Together and separately, each in its different way, the Siege and the Commune had left the structure of the old world fundamentally altered. Nothing would ever be quite the same. The Franco-Prussian War, of which the Siege of Paris was both its central and climactic feature, upset the whole balance of power as it had existed in Europe since the downfall of the first Napoleon. Englishmen, basking in the late noon sunlight of Victorian splendour and introvertively preoccupied with liberal experiments, and Americans, still recovering from their own Civil War and about to plunge into the era of Big Business, little reckoned that one day they would both be called in—twice—to redress the balance which Louis-Napoleon and Bismarck had upturned. Because of the chronic and endemic weakness of post-1871 France in relation to her former enemy, the new resurgent Germany was bound sooner or later to be enticed on to further ideas of grandeur; which would ineluctably bring her into conflict with the world’s greatest remaining force, British sea-power. On the other hand, France clearly would never herself have the capacity to restore the balance until the powerful industrial areas of Alsace and Lorraine were once more back in her hands; and she could never regain them without calling upon the help of others.
Materially, France herself would recover from the after-effects of war and civil war with astonishing speed. Even the amputation of Alsace-Lorraine might not prove mortal; perhaps, who could tell, there might even come a day when the lost territories would be restored by negotiation? But far more serious for so proud a nation were the unseen wounds; the shame, the outrageous reversal of fortune, the slur on her virility. The deep insult of the German Emperor being crowned in the palace dedicated ‘à toutes les gloires de la France’ while Paris was in her death throes was something no people could forget. Soon a new generation would grow up in France; a generation to whom defeat would be unthinkable, and who in the unspeakable mire of Verdun would turn Gambetta’s slogan ‘résistance à outrance’ into a terrible reality. With uncanny accuracy, the Illustrated London News had predicted in December 1870, ‘… it may be that young officers who are now watching the strife will come to the front and renew the race of Marshals’. There was Ferdinand Foch who would always remember as a teenager the spectacle of Louis-Napoleon dragging himself sick and defeated through Metz; Pétain, then a schoolboy, already dedicating himself to a military career; and Joffre, an apprentice gunner on the fortifications of Paris… all would be brought up with but one idea; to expunge the shame, to repurchase the lost glory—whatever the cost. ‘Everything was rotten in France.’ Thiers had told officers during the war, ‘only the army remained clean and honourable’ [quoted Horne, The French Army and Politics, op cit, p. 14]. Hence what better starting point for a spiritual spring-cleaning than the army? Hand in hand with a wave of piety in the nation, a new mood of dedication ran through the whole army; there followed far-reaching reforms, a new code of discipline—modelled on German success—and new plans to meet the menace of a fresh war against those triumphant Germans. Foch, Pétain and Joffre, they would be old men before the shame was purged, inside that same Hall of Mirrors where the German nobility had huzzahed their Emperor; and the price paid, not just for France but for the whole world, would have been well-nigh unbearable.
The echoes set up by the Commune were of a different kind, and, in terms of historical significance, they have resounded more powerfully even than the long-range effects of the first Siege and of France’s defeat at Prussian hands. The social achievements of the Commune during its two brief, turbulent months of existence were minimal; one of its leading reformers, Frankel, rated the ending of night-work in the Paris bakeries as the Commune’s single most important contribution. Yet for all the ephemeral, and so often foolish, content of its acts, the image of the Commune would linger long, and potently.
There was one person above all others who was determined that the image of the Commune should not fade. When it first broke out, Karl Marx had had misgivings—in that, as a revolution, it was unlikely to succeed—and these were misgivings to which he returned later in life. But he had swiftly perceived that the real importance of the Commune lay elsewhere; as early as April 17th, when Thiers had just begun to hammer on the doors of Paris, he prophesied to his friend Kugelmann:
The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.
Out of the fabric of the Commune Marx was to weave social and revolutionary myths of immense portent. Within a matter of days, he had written The Civil War in France. Next to the Communist Manifesto, it was probably the most powerful tract Marx ever wrote, as well as being a remarkable tour de force of up-to-the-minute journalism. From his listening-post on Haverstock Hill, he got most of the events of the Commune right—plus the reasons for its failure—then distorted the facts for his dialectic purposes. ‘After Whit Sunday, 1871’, concluded Marx,
… there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce… the battle must break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions…. And the French working class is only the advance guard of the modern proletariat.
‘Working-men’s Paris, with its Commune’, he predicted, ‘will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.’
The Civil War in France attracted immediate attention. ‘It is making the devil of a noise’, Marx wrote to Kugelmann on June 18th, ‘and I have the honour to be the best calumniated man in London. That really does one good after a tedious twenty years’ idyll in my den.’ Marx’s whole-hearted support for the Commune split the International movement down the centre. On one side the split led indirectly to the birth of the moderate British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats; on the other, to Lenin’s extremist Bolshevik party. Overnight Marx ceased to be a still somewhat obscure German-Jewish professor, and achieved universal notoriety as the ‘Red Terrorist Doctor’. But he had succeeded in creating a heroic, Socialist legend. He was right about the Commune’s ‘martyrs’. Still to this day, the Mur des Fédérés where the 147 Communard survivors were shot down at Père-Lachaise is a Mecca for mass left-wing pilgrimages every May 28th. Despite the rift caused in the International by Marx’s pamphlet, the numbers of its branches began to multiply, its strength to grow.
In France, although the defeat of the Commune meant the death also of the ‘sacred cause’, the independence of Paris, the struggle had achieved one result; there would now be no question of France taking the risk of replacing the Republic by any kind of monarchist restoration. With some justification, the surviving Communards could claim to have ‘saved’ the Republic. With equal justification, Thiers could say that he had saved France from anarchy. He also claimed, ‘we have got rid of Socialism’. He was, of course, totally wrong: history was to prove that the death of the Commune, with all the mythology it left behind, fanned by Marx, was far more important than its life. A deep trench had been dug between the French bourgeoisie and the masses, between the professional army and the Left, so much more profound than that left by the conflict of 1848, and which would stretch on into the far distance, suddenly yawning open to bedevil France at various critical moments in the years ahead.1 Although the process of social reform and of emancipating the workers was seriously slowed down over the next twenty years (certainly in comparison to developments in Britain and Germany), in fact the crushing of the Commune only postponed the ‘arrival’ of Socialism in France. When it did arrive, it was to assume a more virulent form than in perhaps any other Western country. For ‘Bloody Week’ and its marty
rs whose memory Marx would not permit to fade injected into French politics rifts not yet bridged today, accompanied by bitterness never paralleled in Britain or the U.S.A. As Colonel Stanley remarked on his last day in Paris, May 25th, 1871: ‘What provokes me is that there seems no middle opinion ever expressed.’ Nearly a hundred years later, it is still hard to find a ‘middle opinion’ about the Commune in France. From the ‘secession’ of the proletariat after May 1871 stemmed the receptiveness, later, of many a French Socialist to conversion to Marxist Communism. From the bitter hostilities engendered in 1871 was to spring the Front Populaire, the Socialist—Communist alliance of the 1930’s, which so devitalized France; leaving her once again an easy prey to a new German menace—this time in 1940.
But it was through the medium of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, one year old at the time of the Commune and later known as Lenin, that the Commune and Marx’s interpretation of it was to have the most cosmic effect. All through his life Lenin studied the Commune; worshipped its herosim, analysed its successes, criticized its faults, and compared its failures with the failure of the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. In his mind, two mistakes committed by the Commune stood out above all others; as he declared in an often quoted article written on the anniversary of March 18th, in 1908:
The proletariat stopped half-way; instead of proceeding with the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’, it was carried away by dreams of establishing supreme justice in the country… institutions such as the Bank were not seized…. The second error was the unnecessary magnanimity of the proletariat; instead of annihilating its enemies, it endeavoured to exercise moral influence on them; it did not attach the right value to the importance of purely military activity in civil war, and instead of crowning its victory in Paris by a determined advance on Versailles, it hesitated and gave time to the Versailles government to gather its dark forces….
When the moment came for the revolution for which his whole life had been a preparation, Lenin would not repeat the Commune’s ‘half-measures’ and ‘unnecessary magnanimity’. There could be no question of accepting, as the Commune had demonstrated, ‘the available ready machinery of the State’, and adapting it; everything had to be smashed and re-created in a new, proletarian image. To Lenin and his followers, the supreme lesson of the Commune was that the only way to succeed was by total ruthlessness.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin declared (on November 1st, 1914), ‘The transformation of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only effective slogan of the proletariat, indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune….’ This was his objective throughout the war. When on the eve of success he was forced to flee briefly to Finland, Marx’s The Civil War in France was one of the two books he took with him on his final exile. When he returned, it was to impose Communism upon Russia by means of a revolution that never would have succeeded had it not been for the ‘dummy run’ attempted by Delescluze and his martyrs; and to impose it by resorting to ruthlessness with a flavour that also had its origins in those savage days. Lenin appears to have been constantly obsessed with fears that the October Revolution would go the way of the Comune; each day that it outlived the Commune, he is said to have counted ‘Commune plus one’. To ensure that the revolution would not be frittered away by the paralysing squabbles such as had arisen within so feebly democratic a body as the Commune, Lenin split with his more moderate allies, the Mcnsheviks; then proceeded remorselessly to crush the left-wing Constituent Assembly, until the extreme Bolshevik dictatorship was complete. ‘The Commune was lost,’ explained Lenin, ‘because it compromised and reconciled.’ His Red Army commissar, Trotsky, criticized the Commune for not meeting the ‘white terror of the bourgeoisie with the red terror of the proletariat’, and when civil war broke out in Russia neither Trotsky nor Lenin was backward in the dispensation of terror. How much of the ferocious brutality with which the Russian Reds fought for survival was attributable to the ever-present memory of May 1871, may be judged by the comment in retrospect of an old Bolshevik:
In those grave moments we said; ‘Look, workers, at the example of the Paris Communards and know that if we are defeated, our bourgeoisie will treat us a hundred times worse.’ The example of the Paris Commune inspired us and we were victorious.
When Lenin died, his body was appropriately shrouded in a Communard flag, and his mantle passed to Stalin. Stalin once described the Commune as ‘an incomplete and fragile dictatorship’, a charge which he made sure would never be levelled against his tenancy of the Kremlin. If the course run by the Commune could perhaps be held responsible for contributing to the oppressively monolithic character assumed by the Bolshevist regime in Russia, well might one also speculate as to how much Stalin, when deciding on the wholesale liquidation of those Communists whose views in any way diverged from his own, had at the back of his mind the lessons of the destructive discord created by Pyat and the wranglers at the Hôtel de Ville.
In perhaps the most eloquent epitaph on the Communards ever uttered by a non-Marxist, Auguste Renoir (who so narrowly escaped with his life in those days) said of them:
They were madmen; but they had in them that little flame which never dies.
The memory of Louis-Napoleon’s glittering masked balls at the vanished Tuileries has been swallowed up by the mists of the past; little enough is still recalled about Trochu’s spiritless defence of Paris; and in France even the humiliation at Bismarck’s hands is largely forgotten. But the ‘little flame’ of the Communards continues to be kept alight. The link between the brave balloonists of Paris and the spacemen of ninety-five years later may seem a tenuous one. But the course of history often flows down strange and unexpected channels. In 1964, when the first three-man team of Soviet cosmonauts went up in the Voskhod, they took with them into space three sacred relics; a picture of Marx, a picture of Lenin—and a ribbon off a Communard flag.
Louis-Napoleon, on his return from Germany, 1871
General Trochu
General Ducrot
Léon Gambetta
Cattle and the sheep in the Bois de Boulogne just before the Siege
The Crown Prince of Prussia views Paris from the heights of Châtillon
‘How one could have used the balloons to surprise the enemy.’—From a drawing by Cham
‘My passport? Here it is!’—From Souvenirs du Siège de Paris
Felix Pyat
Victor Hugo
Gustave Flourens
Henri de Rochefort
‘Garde nationale sédentaire—Partisan of peace to the bitter end.’—From L’Éclipse
‘National Guard officer and cantinière—explaining the plan of attack.’—From L’Éclipse
‘No news!’—From a drawing flown out with Fonvielle on the L’Égalité, Nov. 24th
‘The queue for rat meat.’—From a drawing by Cham
Alan Herbert’s hen, ‘Una’, who survived the Siege
Edwin Child in National Guard uniform
Child’s ‘identity card’ issued by the Commune
Child’s bread ration card issued during the last days of the Siege
The lynching of Vincenzoni, February 1871
The revictualling of Paris: distribution of the English food
Elihu Wasburne
Adolphe Thiers
Edmond de Goncourt
Raoul Rigault
Charles Delescluze
Louis Rossel
Théophile Ferré
Louise Michel
Communard proclamation announcing the Versaillais entry into Paris
Place Blanche defended by the Communard Women’s Battalion May 23rd.—The capture of Montmartre
The Follies of the Commune by Cham
‘Aren’t they stupid! They hate us provincials, yet it’s their city they burn!’
‘Watch me, you poor amateur!’
‘Execution of a trumpeter, during the Commune’—from a painting by Alfred Roll, 1871
‘In all his glory’, th
e Marquis of Gallife—from a drawing by Steinlen
The Tuileries Palace, before the war
The Tuileries Palace, June 1871
The Hôtel de Ville, June 1871
‘Appalled by her legacy.’—From a drawing by Daumier
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