The Debacle: (1870-71)

by Emile Zola

  Since the failure at Champigny there had been only one more unfortunate attempt, in the direction of Le Bourget, and on the evening when the plateau of Avron had to be evacuated under heavy artillery fire directed at the forts, Maurice shared the growing and violent irritation that possessed the whole city. The tide of unpopularity threatening to bring down Trochu and the Government of National Defence reached such a height that they were forced to make one supreme but unavailing effort. Why were they refusing to lead into the holocaust the three hundred thousand National Guards who were continually offering themselves and clamouring for their share in the danger? This was to be the torrential sortie everybody had been demanding since the first day, Paris bursting its dams and drowning the Prussians in the colossal flood of its people. The authorities were obliged to yield to this need for bravado, although a fresh defeat was inevitable, but in effect, to keep the massacre within limits, they only used the fifty-nine battalions of the National Guard already mobilized in addition to the regular army. The day before 19 January was like a public

  holiday: a vast crowd on the boulevards and in the Champs Elysées watched the regiments go by, led by bands and singing patriotic songs. Women and children marched along with them, men stood on seats and shouted emotional good wishes for victory. And then on the next day the whole population made for the Arc de Triomphe and was filled with wild hopes when the news of the occupation of Montretout came in during the morning. Epic stories were bandied about concerning the irresistible impetus of the National Guard, the Prussians were hurled back, Versailles would be taken before nightfall. And so what utter despair when evening came and the inevitable failure was known! While the left wing was occupying Montretout, the centre, which had got past the wall of Buzenval park, broke against a second inner wall. The thaw had set in and a persistent drizzle had turned the roads into slush and the guns, those guns cast with the help of public subscriptions, into which Paris had put its very soul, could not be moved up. On the right General Ducrot’s column began moving too late and

  remained too far in the rear. That was the end of the effort, and General Trochu had to give the order for a general retreat. Montretout was abandoned, Saint-Cloud was abandoned and the Prussians set fire to it. By the time it was dark the horizon of Paris was a sheet of flame.

  This time Maurice himself felt it was the end. For four hours he had stayed in the Buzenval park with some National Guards under the withering fire from the Prussian positions, and for days after, when he got back, he praised their valour. The National Guard had indeed behaved splendidly, which meant, didn’t it, that the defeat must be due to the imbecility and treachery of their leaders? In the rue de Rivoli he ran into groups shouting ‘Trochu out! Up with the Commune!’ It was a re-awakening of revolutionary passion and a new upsurge of public opinion so disturbing that the Government of National Defence, as an act of self-preservation, felt it had to force General Trochu to resign and replaced him by General Vinoy. That same day Maurice went into a public meeting at Belleville and heard yet another clamour for a mass attack. The idea was crazy and he knew it, yet his heart beat faster in the face of this determination to win. When all is over can’t one still attempt a miracle? All through that night he dreamed of wonders. Eight more long days dragged on. Paris was in its death-throes, but never complained. Shops no longer opened, and the few people walking about never saw a vehicle in the deserted streets. Forty thousand horses had been eaten, and now dogs, cats and rats were becoming expensive. Since corn had vanished, the bread, made of rice and oats, was black, clammy and most indigestible, and to get the ration of three hundred grammes the interminable queues in front of bakers’ shops were becoming killing. What a painful business these waits were in the siege, when poor women shivered in pouring rain, with their feet in freezing mud! It was the heroic misery of a great city that refused to give in. The death rate had tripled, and theatres had been turned into hospitals. By nightfall the formerly fashionable neighbourhoods fell into a gloomy silence and pitch darkness, like quarters of an accursed city ravaged by plague. In the silence and darkness the only thing to be heard was the ceaseless din of the bombardment, and the only thing to be seen the flashes of guns lighting up the winter sky.

  On the 28th Paris suddenly heard that Jules Favre had been negotiating

  with Bismarck for two days with a view to an armistice, and at the same time that there was only enough bread left for ten days, scarcely time to restock the city with food. A surrender was being brutally forced on them. Paris, grief-stricken and stunned by the truth she had been told at last, just let things run their course. On that same day, at midnight, the last gun was fired. Then on the 29th, when the Germans had occupied the forts, Maurice went back into camp with the 115th near Montrouge, within the fortifications. Then there set in for him an unsettled existence, full of both idleness and feverish activity. Discipline had become very lax, soldiers ran wild and wandered about, waiting to be sent home. But he remained disturbed, nervy and touchy, full of anxiety which turned into exasperation at the slightest mishap. He greedily read the revolutionary papers, and this three-week armistice, concluded for the sole purpose of allowing France to elect an Assembly to settle peace terms, looked to him like a trap, a final act of treachery.

  Even if Paris was forced to capitulate, he was with Gambetta for the continuation of the war on the Loire and in the north. The disaster of the army of the east, which had been forgotten and forced to cross into Switzerland, made him indignant. The elections put the finishing touch to his fury – it was exactly what he had foreseen, the cowardly provinces, annoyed at the resistance of Paris and wanting peace on any terms with the monarchy restored while Prussian guns were still trained on them. After the first sittings of the Assembly at Bordeaux, Thiers, returned by twenty-six departments and acclaimed as head of the executive, became in his eyes the arch-monster, the man of every lie and every crime. Nothing could calm his anger, for this peace concluded by a monarchist Assembly struck him as the very depth of shame, and the very idea of the harsh conditions and the five milliard indemnity made him rave, with Metz handed over, Alsace abandoned, the gold and blood of France running away through this ever-open wound in her side.

  It was then, in late February, that Maurice made up his mind to desert. A clause in the treaty stipulated that soldiers in camp in Paris should be disarmed and sent home. He did not wait, for he felt that his heart would be torn out of him if he left the streets of this glorious Paris, which hunger alone had succeeded in subjugating. So he disappeared, rented a tiny furnished room in a six-storey house in the rue des Orties, right at the top of the Butte des Moulins. It was a sort of turret from which you could see the endless sea of roofs from the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old friend from his law-school days had lent him a hundred francs. And in any case, as soon as he was settled in he signed on in a battalion of the National Guard, and the one-franc-fifty pay would be enough for his needs. The thought of a comfortable, selfish existence in the country filled him with horror. Even the letters from his sister Henriette, to whom he had written immediately after the armistice, irritated him with their supplications and desperate longing to see him come home and rest at Remilly. He refused; he would go later when there weren’t any Prussians left there. So Maurice’s life became rootless and idle, but also increasingly feverish. Hunger was no longer a problem, and he had devoured the first white bread with delight. Paris, in which wines and spirits had never been short, was in an alcoholic daze, and now living riotously in a continuous state of drunkenness. But it was still a prison, the gates were guarded by Germans and complicated formalities prevented anyone from getting out. No social life had been resumed and so far there was no work or business functioning, a whole population was waiting, doing nothing, growing more and more hysterical in the warm sunny weather of early spring. During the siege military service had at least tired out people’s limbs and occupied their minds, but now the populace had slumped straight into total idleness in its continual
isolation from the rest of the world. Maurice, like everybody else, just strolled about from morning till night, breathing the air that was infected with all the germs of madness that the mob had been exhaling for months. The unlimited freedom enjoyed by all finally destroyed everything. He read the papers and went to public meetings, sometimes shrugging his shoulders when the idiocies were too ridiculous, but nevertheless went home haunted by thoughts of violence and ready for desperate acts in defence of what he took to be truth and justice. And up in his little room overlooking the whole city, he still entertained dreams of victory and told himself that France and the Republic could still be saved so long as peace was not actually signed.

  The Prussians were to make their entry into Paris on 1 March, and a cry of execration and rage rose from every heart. At every public meeting he went to Maurice heard the accusations against the Assembly, Thiers and the men of 4 September for this crowning

  shame that they had not tried to spare the great, heroic city. One evening he was so worked up that he even spoke himself, shouting that the whole of Paris should go and die on the ramparts rather than let a single Prussian get in. In this manner the insurrection sprang up quite naturally and organized itself in broad daylight among people thrown off balance by months of anguish and famine, fallen into a hag-ridden idleness and haunted by suspicions of their own making. It was one of those crises of morale observed after all great sieges, when unsurpassable patriotism has been cheated and, after inspiring people’s souls to no purpose, changes into a blind lust for vengeance and destruction. The Central Committee, elected by delegates from the National Guard, had protested against any attempt at disarmament. There was a great demonstration on the Place de la Bastille, with red flags, fiery speeches, a huge crowd and the murder of one unfortunate policeman, tied to a plank, thrown into the canal and finished off with stones. Two days later, during the night of 26 February, Maurice was awakened by the call to arms and alarm bells, and watched bands of men and women going along the Boulevard des Batignolles dragging guns; and he

  went too, and with twenty others harnessed himself to a cannon, when he heard that the people had gone and seized these guns in the Place Wagram to prevent the Assembly from handing them over to the Prussians. There were one hundred and seventy of them, and as some of the proper gear was missing people hauled them with ropes, pushed them with their hands and got them up to the top of Montmartre with the fierce drive of a horde of barbarians rescuing their gods. On 1 March, when the Prussians had to be content with occupying the Champs-Elysées district for one day only, and even then behind fences like a herd of victors unsure of themselves, Paris did not stir from its gloom – all streets deserted and houses shut up, the whole city dead and swathed in the voluminous black crêpe of its mourning.

  Two more weeks went by. Maurice had given up trying to know how his life was carrying on under the shadow of the indefinable, monstrous thing he felt was coming. Peace was officially concluded, and the Assembly was to meet in Versailles on 20 March, and still for him nothing was yet over, and some dreadful vengeance was about to begin. On the 18th, as he was getting up, he had a letter from Henriette once again begging him to join her at Remilly, affectionately threatening to set out herself if he took too long to give her that great joy. She went on to news about Jean, how after leaving her at the end of December to join the army in the north he had been taken ill with some sort of fever in a Belgian hospital, and only the previous week he had written that although he still felt very weak he was off to Paris where he was determined to re-enlist. Henriette ended by asking her brother to tell her everything about Jean as soon as he saw him. With the letter open in front of him Maurice fell into a sentimental daydream. Henriette and Jean, his beloved sister and his brother in suffering and compassion, how far removed those dear souls had been from his everyday thoughts since the tempest had dwelt within him! But as his sister told him she had not been able to give Jean the rue des Orties address, he promised himself that he would run him to earth that very day by inquiring at the army offices. But scarcely had he gone down and was crossing the rue Saint-Honoré, when two comrades from his battalion told him of the events of the night and morning in Montmartre. And all three dashed off in a frenzy.

  What a day that 18 March was, and how it lifted his heart into a fateful elation! He could never remember later exactly what he had said and done. First he recalled that he had rushed off in a furious rage at the surprise action the military had attempted before daylight, to disarm Paris by getting the guns away again from Montmartre. It was obvious that Thiers, who had returned from Bordeaux, had been planning this coup so that the Assembly could safely proclaim a monarchy at Versailles. His next recollection was that he was in Montmartre himself at about nine in the morning, inflamed by the tales of victory he was told – the furtive arrival of the troops, the fortunate hold-up in the arrival of the drag-ropes which had given time for the National Guards to get their arms, and the soldiers not daring to shoot women and children, but holding their rifles upside down and fraternizing with the people. Then he saw himself hurrying through Paris, realizing by midday that Paris belonged to the Commune without there having been a fight, that Thiers and his cabinet were in flight from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where they had been assembled, in fact that the whole government was running away to Versailles and the thirty thousand soldiers were being hastily withdrawn, leaving over five thousand of their number lying in the streets. Then again, at half past five, he saw himself at a bend in the outer boulevards in the middle of a group of hotheads, listening without any indignation to the horrible story of the murder of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas. Oh well, what are generals? He recalled them at Sedan, a comfort-loving, incompetent lot, one more or less didn’t make much difference! The rest of that day went on in the same state of frenzied excitement that distorted everything, an insurrection that the very paving-stones seemed to have willed and which, unforeseen yet inevitable, grew and at a stroke found it had the mastery, eventually handing the Hôtel de Ville over to the members of the Central Committee, who were astonished to find themselves there.

  Yet there was one memory that stayed quite clear in Maurice’s mind – his sudden meeting with Jean. The latter had been in Paris for three days, having reached there penniless and still emaciated and run down by two months of fever that had kept him in a Brussels hospital, and having found a former captain of the 106th, Captain Ravaud, he had at once joined up in the new company of the 124th under his command. He had regained his corporal’s stripes and that evening had been the last to leave the Prince Eugene barracks, with his squad, to go across to the left bank where the whole army was under orders to concentrate, when a dense crowd had brought them to a halt. There was a lot of shouting and talk of disarming the soldiers. He was quite coolly telling them to bugger off, and all this was nothing to do with him – he was just carrying out orders and doing no harm to anybody – when he uttered a cry of amazement, for Maurice rushed up and threw his arms round him in an affectionate embrace.