Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  While the German besiegers, too, would suffer from hunger and sickness during the bitter winter to come, inside the city Trochu faced problems unknown to Moltke, and these would have direct consequences in the events of March – May 1871. From the beginning, Parisian political factions used the leverage of their National Guard alliances to insist upon sorties that usually had no discernible military goal. These lunges outside the ramparts by the regular troops of Generals Vinoy and Ducrot were uniformly unsuccessful once they got beyond the 3-mile range of the city’s heavy guns, but their failure inflamed the Parisian radicals, who openly insulted the soldiers as cowards. Throughout the siege, hopes were periodically raised and then dashed by reports of various advances and retreats by the armies of the Loire and the North, but no breakout to link hands with a relief force was ever feasible. In December, food and fuel ran desperately short, and the civilian death rate from hunger, cold and sickness rose inexorably. On 5 January 1871, while Parisians haggled over the price of horses’ hooves and dogs’ heads, the Germans extended their shelling from the forts to the city itself.

  On 18 January, Bismarck delivered an exquisite insult when, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he proclaimed King Wilhelm I of Prussia the Kaiser of the new German Reich. In a spasm of fury another sortie was hurled out, which cost 3,000 French casualties (probably 400 of them shot in the back by confused National Guardsmen). On 19 January, General Faidherbe’s Army of the North was beaten at St Quentin; on the 20th came news of the final defeat of Chanzy’s Army of the Loire at Le Mans, and soon afterwards reports of Bourbaki’s fiasco outside Belfort. On the 22nd, ‘Red’ National Guards exchanged volleys with Mobiles defending the Hôtel de Ville (the city hall). The following day, Foreign Minister Jules Favre requested a meeting with Bismarck, and an armistice was signed on 26 January.

  ELECTIONS WERE HELD for a new government to conclude a final peace, and the National Assembly returned at Bordeaux on 8 February was dominated by provincial conservatives. They appointed as prime minister the 73-year-old Adolphe Thiers, who, on 26 February, signed preliminary terms of capitulation: France would give up the border provinces of Alsace and northern Lorraine and pay a huge war indemnity. The Assembly ratified these terms, by an 80 per cent majority, on 1 March – the day that 30,000 German troops paraded down the Champs-Élysées. On 3 March they left the city, but continued to surround the eastern half of the ramparts north of the Seine (from Saint Denis, at roughly ‘12 o’clock’, to Charenton at ‘5 o’clock’). By then, however, Paris was already on the verge of insurrection against the Assembly.

  Relief at the raising of the siege was quickly forgotten in the Parisians’ rage over what they saw as a treacherous surrender; Army officers were attacked in the streets and policemen were lynched. The National Guard formed a representative Federation, and these Fédérés swore to resist any attempt to disarm them. The Federals accused the provincial deputies of wishing to restore a monarchy, and they persuaded many soldiers of the garrison to their viewpoint. Guard units from well-to-do districts dissolved as the nervous middle classes fled the city, and a Red element – represented by a self-created Central Committee – grew stronger. Parades on 26 February had brought some 300,000 men on to the streets, at a time when General Vinoy’s garrison had been reduced by the armistice terms to at most 15,000 distinctly shaky regulars. That day, Guardsmen seized some 200 cannon from artillery parks and dragged many of them off to working-class strongholds on the hills of Montmartre and Buttes-Chaumont.

  Prime Minister Thiers entered the capital on 15 March; he and his Republican ministers were well to the Left of the Assembly, but as negotiations with Bismarck continued under the threat of German cannon, they knew it was essential to establish the new government’s authority. Thiers ordered Vinoy to carry out a coordinated occupation of strategic points on 18 March, to recover the artillery and arrest dissident ringleaders, but this attempted coup de main failed. Huge, hostile crowds gathered, and Army officers, lacking any realistic rules of engagement for dispersing them, were helpless to prevent their confused and nervous men from standing aside, or even fraternizing openly. In Montmartre the 88th Marching Regiment fell to pieces; two generals were seized in the street, and that afternoon – despite the protests of the young district mayor, Dr Georges Clemenceau – both were murdered and mutilated by a drunken rabble of men and women. The prime minister’s reaction was immediate, but surprising: by nightfall on 18 March, Thiers’ government and Vinoy’s troops were leaving Paris for Versailles, 7 miles to the south-west. The psychological distance this placed between the Army and the Parisians was as significant as their physical separation.8

  BARRICADES WERE THROWN UP in the streets and the red flag was hoisted. In the absence of any coherent organization, the Central Committee of the National Guard seized the reins, and on 22 March Guardsmen fired on an unarmed rally by conservatives in the Rue de la Paix. The demands of ideology had already forced the Central Committee publicly to defend the lynchings of Generals Lecomte and Thomas, which caused widespread disgust; now these dozen more killings strengthened Thiers’ position. A parallel mental entrenchment appeared in Paris; after hasty elections, on 28 March a new Red-dominated municipal council installed itself in the Hôtel de Ville under the name of the Commune of Paris.

  The word Commune, which has a long history in France, had nothing to do with ‘Communism’; it simply meant a municipality enjoying a degree of self-government. However, once the Commune had been proclaimed, the many competing groups that gathered beneath its flag each clamoured to define it in their own preferred terms. Heated disputes raged between the leaders of various factions; during April and May rival commissions and subcommittees sprang up almost daily, and mutual denunciations led to arrests at gunpoint. From the first, the baying of bloodthirsty Jacobins could be heard amidst the babble, growing louder as the weeks passed. The Reds were contemptuous of the dithering uncertainties of the moderates, and some genuine sociopaths were to elbow their way to prominence as events careered out of control. In the protective shadow of Charles Delescluze, the ineffectual old Jacobin figurehead, younger men – notably, the security commissars Raoul Rigault and Théophile Ferré – would seize their opportunity to enjoy life-and-death power. Nothing approaching a coherent plan of action was ever achieved; but the Paris poor believed (wrongly) that they had nothing to lose, and collective memories of both cathartic mob violence and brutal repression in 1830 and 1848 opened their ears to extremist rhetoric. And all the time, out at Versailles, Thiers was recovering his nerve.

  The Thiers government spoke for the provincial constituencies of the National Assembly. Over the past 80 years ‘deep France’ had grown sick of having ready-made regimes imposed on them by conspirators in Paris, and they now wanted peace on almost any terms. The provinces had elected men whose instincts they trusted, and for once parliament had a genuine mandate from the country at large. Frightened by violent disorder and threats to property rights, the rural, Catholic population heard in the title ‘Commune’ an echo of the Terror of 1793 – 4, which had unleashed widespread horrors on the western provinces. The middle-class tendency to interpret the worst excesses of any Communards as revealing the essential character of the Commune itself was entirely predictable – as was the government’s exploitation of those fears, to justify the military confrontation for which it was now trying to equip itself. Whether that attempt could succeed remained questionable, however; the immediate fear was of a National Guard assault on Versailles in overwhelming numbers, and there was real doubt that Thiers’ 55,000-odd soldiers, militia and gendarmes could – or would – even defend the new government.9

  On 27 March 1871 the Foreign Regiment were ordered from Besancon to Versailles by rail, and when they arrived on 1 April they had 66 officers but only 1,003 rankers on strength.10 How many of them could strictly be described by now as ‘légionnaires’ is unclear; we might guess at a total of perhaps 350 men from the original I/ and II/RE from Algeria still in the ranks
among the Bretons and French odds and ends. It was normal to equalize battalion and company strengths as far as practical, and – with a critical shortage of seasoned sergeants – to spread experienced corporals and privates-first-class among the youngsters as stiffeners. If that was the case here, then the RE’s 1st, 2nd and 5th Battalions would have had only about 330 men each, divided into 6 field companies of some 55 men, of whom perhaps 1 in every 3 was a veteran. The high ratio of officers noted on 1 April did not last; by 26 May the colonel was concerned about being able to provide each company with even 2 officers, so many of the original 66 must have been transferred to fill critical vacancies in other regiments. Close personal supervision of the troops was vital at a time when the loyalty of many units was dubious.

  IT IS NOT A FIGURE OF SPEECH to say that the Imperial army, made up of long-term conscripts and volunteers, had been almost destroyed during the summer of 1870, since only ten of 100 Line regiments had survived. Otherwise the infantry of the National Defence armies of September 1870 to January 1871 were so-called régiments de marche, bearing the number of a regular Line unit but actually assembled from its depot companies and those of two other regiments, bulked out with new conscripts and ‘reservists’ 11 The depot personnel were the essential staff of pen-pushers, storemen and other old sweats necessary to process new recruits; although many were unfit, most at least knew their job by rote, and a few other ex-regulars had also volunteered to return to the colours. However, the great majority of the rank and file were baffled young peasant conscripts, and the ‘reservists’ bore no resemblance to the genuinely trained Landwehr of Bismarck’s armies. At this date French reservists were not veterans who had been discharged after years of service, but the products of that pre-war system that Napoleon III had tried in vain to reform. Even conscripts who drew ‘bad numbers’ in the lottery had been divided into ‘first and second portions’; for lack of funds to equip, train and embody them the latter had been sent home again, to report for a brief spell of instruction each year. The training these ‘second portion’ men had behind them when they were mobilized was (at the very best) three months, at least a year previously.12

  These ‘marching regiments’ were led by an equally diverse officer corps. Some had been dug out from behind desks, others had volunteered or been recalled from retirement. About two-thirds of pre-war captains and lieutenants had been commissioned ex-NCOs, and many in the National Defence armies were very newly promoted from the ranks, serving beside military school cadets with perhaps a year’s theoretical instruction, and young volunteers from the educated classes with even less.13 While some of the ex-sergeants were battle-wise, the need for literacy meant that such men were disproportionately drawn from the administrative NCOs. Whatever their backgrounds, all were products of a tradition that demanded unquestioning obedience to superior rank and to the textbook, and actively discouraged initiative. The haste with which their improvised regiments had been assembled meant that few officers had known their superiors or their subordinates for more than a few weeks, and the introduction of a new manual of infantry tactics in 1869 added to the confusion. In a period when the company officer’s tasks on the day of battle were to turn his colonel’s broadly expressed orders into reality on the ground, and to control and encourage his men by persuasion and example, these were serious handicaps.

  In 1870 an infantry battalion still moved and fought en masse, wielded by its commander as a single weapon. The first steps in infantry training were therefore reasonably straightforward: men had to learn how to move together on command; to handle and care for their weapons and bivouac kit; and to shoot reasonably straight when ordered to deliver volleys. This last was not an easy skill to acquire even if (as was seldom the case) there was plenty of time and ammunition for range practice. The large-calibre, single-shot rifles of those days had a robust kick and spewed out a blinding cloud of powder-smoke, and to many returned veterans and reservists the new Chassepot introduced in 1867 – the French soldiers’ only edge over the Prussians – was as much of a mystery as it was to new conscripts. (Since old soldiers always delight in making recruits’ blood run cold, they probably exaggerated the grisly stories about the tendency of the long firing-pin to break and jam in the forward position, so that chambering the next round too smartly could cause a premature discharge that would blow the bolt straight back into the firer’s face, taking his thumb with it.)14

  In any case, no training could prepare raw recruits for the shocking and confusing reality of battle. To obey orders under fire (especially artillery fire, which was a new experience even for most veterans) demanded habits of mind that could only be learned through patient example and encouragement by familiar and trusted NCOs and lieutenants, and these were in short supply. Some of their officers were intelligent and humane, some of the NCOs fatherly and resourceful, some of the veterans comradely and encouraging, but taken as a whole the ‘marching regiments’ of the National Defence armies were of uncertain quality when they went into action in autumn 1870. The inevitable breakdowns of the system under campaign conditions had left many of them cold, famished, ragged and rudderless, and by March and April 1871, when they began arriving around Versailles to reinforce the compromised Paris garrison troops, many had been tested to the brink of collapse.

  THE RANK AND FILE were disheartened by their winter defeats and privations; bewildered by the political turmoil and wretchedly supplied, sheltered and fed, most of them longed only for their discharge. Except for a few regulars who had broken parole to escape from Metz, their junior officers were equally brittle; appalled by the thought of civil war, significant numbers now took ‘sick-leave’ or applied for transfers. Left without vigorous leadership, with their morale in their boots (if they had any), the troops were sullen at best, and there was a good deal of open talk about refusing to fire on fellow Frenchmen. The central factor in the remedies applied during April was the return from German captivity of many more regular officers, who were both instinctively loyal and ignorant or impatient of the complex politics of the moment.15

  On 6 April, command of the new Army of Versailles was given to Marshal MacMahon, whose previous record and wounding at Sedan insulated him from the contempt in which the troops held most Imperial generals. Under his stern but commonsense leadership, the returning professional officers filled all staff posts and unit commands, and many more junior vacancies. These regulars were much better equipped, by experience and conviction, both to discipline and to cajole their men into obedience and reasonable efficiency. They spent a great deal more time with the rankers than had been usual, awarding swift but just punishments and also real encouragement. Parisian soldiers and other suspected malcontents were identified and posted away, although the unfamiliarity of officers with their composites of detachments made this a rather hit-or-miss process. Coming at a time when reservists, volunteers and men from Alsace-Lorraine were also being demobilized, this purge cost some regiments hundreds of men. While MacMahon had about 120,000 troops by late May, some divisions and brigades went into action at less than half their establishment strength. 16

  Pay, wine rations, food, shelter and medical care were all improved. There was an attempt to keep Parisian newspapers, whores and booze-pedlars out of the camps, and pro-government papers were distributed. The men were exhorted to remember their soldierly duty, regaled with reports of Communard outrages, and told that it was this godless criminal rabble who were prolonging the war (and their own military service) needlessly.17 In a nation with a long history of centralized despotism, the countryside’s instinctive suspicions capital played some part in opening their ears, but a genuine hunger for national unity at a time of disaster was more significant. The rank and file would never be remotely enthusiastic about attacking Paris, but as the weeks passed, routine and obedience became the line of least resistance, and some of the troops’ resentments were gradually steered away from authority-figures and towards the Communards.

  While there was little mutual
respect between regular and wartime-commissioned officers, all believed that they could not put 1870 behind them and build a new France until the ugly boil of the Commune had been lanced. Prime Minister Thiers visited the camps every day; as an old journalist he understood the power of words, and even some of the most ardent republicans became true believers. Paul Déroulède, a progressive young Parisian man of letters, was so scaldingly determined on revenge against Prussia that he ‘took the képi as one takes the veil’; for such agonized patriots the path to the Prussians lay on the other side of the ‘secessionist’ Commune. Déroulède’s képi would be in the midnight-blue of the 30e Chasseurs à Pied, then brigaded with the 39e de Marche and the Régiment Étrangère.18

  NEITHER SIDE COULD GUESS the other’s intentions, and on 2 April a government probe to the western suburb of Courbevoie sparked confused skirmishing; both sides ran away, but the Versaillais Colonel Boulanger of the 114th Line had five prisoners shot. Reports of this were exaggerated, and the enraged Communard leaders ordered a major sortie for the next day: three columns totalling 30,000 men would march on the Buzenval heights, Meudon and Châtillon.19 The Central Committee had already carelessly allowed government troops to occupy the vital artillery fort of Mont Valérien, due west of Paris, and the events of 3 April would confirm their incompetence. National Guard officers were elected by their men, and many owed their epaulettes more to rhetoric, indulgent slackness and generosity with wine than to any military qualifications. Moreover, Jacobins like Delescluze were not just ignorant of, but actively hostile towards military training. In thrall to the revolutionary myth of the irresistible rush by impassioned patriots, they wrongly believed that the national levée en masse of 1793 had saved the fledgling First Republic by sheer ardour, proving that free men – sufficiently politicized – did not need the rigid ‘Prussian’ training of the brutalized ‘slave-soldiers’ of the old monarchies.