by Emile Zola
‘What, it’s you, Jean?… My sister wrote to me. And to think that this morning I meant to go and inquire about you at the War Ministry!’
Jean’s eyes were filling with tears of joy.
‘Oh my dear boy, how wonderful to see you again! I’ve been looking for you, too, but where could I ever get hold of you in this bloody great city?’
The crowd was still threatening, and Maurice turned round to them.
‘Citizens, let me talk to them! They are good chaps and I can answer for them!’
He took both his friend’s hands and lowered his voice:
‘You will stay with us, won’t you?’
An expression of intense surprise came over Jean’s face.
‘With you, what do you mean?’
For a few minutes he listened while Maurice worked himself up against the government and against the army, recalling all that the people had gone through, explaining that at last they were going to be the masters, punish the incompetent and the cowards and save the Republic. As he strove to follow all this Jean’s calm face, the face of an unlettered peasant, darkened with growing distress.
‘Oh no, my dear friend, I’m not staying with you if it’s for that kind of job! My captain has told me to go to Vaugirard with my men and I’m going. If the wrath of God were there I should go all the same. It’s natural, surely you realize that.’
He began to laugh in his open-hearted way, and added:
‘No, it’s you who are going to come with us.’
Maurice let go of his hands in a gesture of furious revolt. And there the two of them stood facing each other for several seconds, one worked up by the fit of madness that was infecting the whole of Paris, a malady of long standing with its roots in the evil ferment of the previous reign, the other strong in his common sense and ignorance, still healthy from having grown up far away from all this, in the land of hard work and thrift. And yet they were brothers, linked by a strong attachment, and it was a terrible wrench when a sudden surge of the crowd separated them.
‘Be seeing you, Maurice!’
‘Be seeing you, Jean!’
It was a regiment, the 79th, emerging in a solid mass from a side street, which had thrown the crowd back on to the pavement. There was more shouting, but they didn’t dare bar the roadway against the soldiers who were being marched along by the officers. And so the little squad of the 124th was free to follow on without any further hold-up.
‘Be seeing you, Jean!’
‘Be seeing you, Maurice!’
They went on waving to each other, yielding to the brutal fatality of this separation, but each with his heart full of the other.
During the days which followed it was at first crowded out of Maurice’s mind because of the extraordinary events happening one after another. On the 19th Paris had woken up without a government, more surprised than frightened to hear about the sudden panic that during the night had swept away the army, public services and government ministers to Versailles, and as the weather was superb on this lovely March Sunday, Paris calmly came down into the streets to have a look at the barricades. A big white poster put up by the Central Committee summoning people for communal elections sounded very sensible, though it was a little surprising that it was signed by such utterly unknown names. In this first fine flush of the Commune Paris was hostile to Versailles because of the resentment it felt for what it had suffered and its haunting suspicions. In any case there was absolute anarchy, a struggle between the local mayors and the Central Committee, the former making fruitless efforts at conciliation while the latter, still unsure of having all the federal National Guards on its side, was still modestly campaigning only for municipal liberty. The shots fired against the peaceful demonstration in the Place Vendôme and the handful of victims whose blood stained the roadway sent the first shudder of horror through the city. While the insurrection was triumphantly and definitely taking over all the ministries and public administration, anger and fear were mounting at Versailles and the government was hastening to assemble sufficient military strength to repulse an attack it felt must be imminent. The best troops from the armies of the north and the Loire were hurriedly brought in and ten days sufficed for concentrating nearly eighty thousand men. Confidence was so rapidly restored that by 2 April two divisions opened hostilities and recaptured Puteaux and Courbevoie from the Federals. It was not until the next day that Maurice, off with his battalion to conquer Versailles, once again saw rising out of the jumble of his memories the sad face of Jean saying good-bye. The attack by the Versailles forces had stunned and enraged the National Guard. Three columns of them, some fifty thousand men, had stormed out early in the morning via Bougival and Meudon to seize the monarchist Assembly and the murderer Thiers. This was the all-conquering sortie that had been so fiercely demanded during the siege, and Maurice wondered where he would ever see Jean again unless it were out there among the dead on the battlefield. But the rout came too quickly – his battalion had hardly reached the Plateau des Bergères, on the road to Rueil, when suddenly shells from the Mont-Valérien fort fell into their ranks. There was a moment of stupor, for some thought that the fort was occupied by their comrades and others said that the commanding officer had solemnly sworn not to fire. A mad terror seized the men, battalions went to pieces and rushed wildly back into Paris, while the head of the column, caught by a turning movement effected by General Vinoy, went on and was massacred at Rueil.
Maurice escaped from the slaughter, and, all elated at having been in the fighting, had nothing but hatred left for this so-called government of law and order which, crushed at every encounter with the Prussians, only recovered courage to conquer the Parisians. And the German armies were still there, from Saint-Denis to Charenton, watching the edifying spectacle of the collapse of a people! So in the evil fever of destruction that took hold of him Maurice approved of the first violent measures, the throwing up of barricades across streets and squares, the taking of hostages, the archbishop, priests and former officials. On both sides atrocities were already being committed: Versailles shot prisoners, Paris decreed that for every one of its fighters killed the heads of three of its hostages would fall, and what common sense Maurice had left after so much shock and ruin was blown away by the wind of fury
coming from all directions. The Commune now seemed to him to be the avenger of the shameful things they had endured, a kind of liberator bringing the knife to amputate and the fire to purify. None of this was very clear in his mind, and the educated man within him simply called up classical memories of free triumphant city-states or federations of rich provinces imposing their will on the world. If Paris won he visualized it in glory, reconstituting a France of justice and liberty, reorganizing a new society after sweeping away the rotten debris of the old. True, after the elections he had been somewhat surprised by the names of the members of the Commune, with its extraordinary jumble of moderates, militant revolutionaries and socialists of all colours, to whom the great task was entrusted. He knew some of these men personally, and thought they were a very mediocre lot. Were not the best of them going to clash and destroy each other in the confusion of ideas they represented? But on the day when the Commune was solemnly constituted in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, while the cannon roared and
trophies of red flags flapped in the wind, he had made the effort to forget everything, and once again was borne away by boundless hopes. And so illusion began again in the crisis atmosphere of a disease at its climax, made up of the lies of some and the starry-eyed faith of others. All through the month of April Maurice was fighting near Neuilly. An early spring brought out the lilacs, and the fighting went on amid the fresh green of the gardens, and National Guards came home at night with bunches of flowers on the ends of their rifles. By now the troops assembled at Versailles were so numerous that they had been formed into two armies, a front line one under the orders of Marshal MacMahon, and a reserve army, commanded by General Vinoy. The Commune on its side had nearly a hundred
thousand active National Guards and almost as many militiamen, but only fifty thousand at the most were really fighters. And each day the Versailles tactics became clearer: after Neuilly they had occupied the château of Bécon, then Asnières, simply to close up their line of investment, for they planned to enter by the Point-du-Jour as soon as they could force the rampart by means of convergent fire from the forts of the Mont-Valérien and Issy. The Mont-Valérien was in their hands, and their whole effort was directed at capturing the fort of Issy, which they attacked by utilizing the breastworks made by the Prussians. From mid April the rifle-fire and bombardment were continuous. At Levallois and Neuilly there was non-stop fighting, with snipers firing every minute, day and night. Heavy guns on armoured trucks moved along the Ceinture railway and fired over Levallois at Asnières. But the bombardment was fiercest at Vanves and Issy, and every window in Paris shook, as they had during the worst days of the siege. On 9 May when, after an earlier alarm, the fort of Issy definitely fell into the hands of the Versailles army the defeat of the Commune was inevitable and a panic set in which prompted the wildest excesses.
Maurice approved of the setting up of a Committee of Public Safety. He recalled pages of history – had not the time come for energetic measures if their country was to be saved? Only one of the many acts of violence had really given him a secret pang of sorrow, and that was the overthrowing of the Vendôme column, and he reproached himself for that as though it were a childish weakness, for he still had ringing in his ears his grandfather’s
stories of Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram and Borodino, and these epic tales thrilled him still. But that the murderer Thiers’s house should be razed to the ground, that they should keep hostages as a safeguard and threat, wasn’t that fair reprisal for the increasing fury of Versailles in its shelling of Paris, where shells were smashing in roofs and killing women? The black lust of destruction was mounting in him as the awakening from his dream drew near. If the ideal of justice and vengeance were to be crushed in bloodshed, well, let the earth open and be transformed in one of those cosmic upheavals by which life has been renewed! Let Paris collapse and burn like a huge sacrificial fire rather than be given back to its vices, miseries and the old social system corrupted with abominable injustice! And he indulged in another bleak dream, the gigantic city in ashes, nothing left on both sides of the river but smoking embers, the wound cauterized by fire, an unspeakable, unparalleled catastrophe out of which a new people would emerge. So the tales going round excited him more and more: whole neighbourhoods mined, the catacombs filled with gunpowder, all the great public buildings ready to be blown up, electric wires connecting the blast-holes so that one single spark could detonate them all together, large stocks of inflammable material, especially oil, enough to turn streets and squares into torrents and seas of flame. The Commune had sworn it would be so if the Versailles forces entered; not one would get past the barricades blocking the main crossings, for the roadways themselves would open up and buildings crumble into dust, and Paris would go up in flames and swallow a whole world.
When Maurice threw himself into this mad dream he was really doing so out of a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction with the Commune itself. He was losing all faith in mankind, and he felt that the Commune was impotent, being torn asunder by too many contradictory elements, getting more frenzied, incoherent and stupid as it was increasingly threatened. It had not been able to carry out a single one of all the social reforms it had promised, and it was already certain that it would leave no lasting achievement behind. But its great weakness came especially from the rivalries that tore it apart, and the corrosive suspicion in which every one of its members lived. Already many of them, the moderate and those who were worried, were absenting themselves from meetings. Others acted under the lash of events, trembled at the prospect of a possible dictatorship and were reaching the stage at which groups in revolutionary assemblies exterminate each other to save the country. After Cluseret and Dombrowski, Rossel was going to be suspected. Delescluze, nominated civil delegate to the fighting forces, could do nothing on his own in spite of his great authority. The great social effort that had been envisaged was being frittered away and coming to nought in the isolation, increasing hour by hour, of these men, paralysed and reduced to desperate measures.
Inside Paris the terror was mounting. Paris, at first angry with Versailles and resenting the sufferings of the siege, was now turning against the Commune itself. Compulsory enrolment, the decree calling up all men under forty, had annoyed peaceloving people and provoked a mass exodus – they got away via Saint-Denis in disguise or with forged Alsatian papers, they let themselves down with ropes and ladders into the moat beyond the fortifications on dark nights. Well-to-do bourgeois had gone long ago. No factory or works had reopened its doors. No commerce, no work, and the idle existence went on in anxious expectation of the inevitable dénouement. People still had nothing to live on beyond their pay as National Guards, the one-franc-fifty now being paid out of the millions confiscated from the Bank of France, the one-franc-fifty for which alone many were now fighting, in fact one of the basic causes and the raison d’être of the insurrection. Whole neighbourhoods were empty, shops were shut, houses dead. In the beautiful sunshine of this wonderful month of May nothing could now be seen in the deserted streets but funerals of Federals killed in action, processions with no priest, coffins covered with red flags followed by crowds holding bunches of everlasting flowers. Closed churches were being turned every evening into clubrooms. Only revolutionary newspapers appeared – all the others had been banned. In fact Paris was destroyed, that great, unhappy Paris that retained the feeling of revulsion of a traditionally republican capital for the Assembly, but in which the Communist terror was now growing, a terror it was impatient to be free of amidst all the terrible stories going round of daily arrests of hostages and of barrels of explosive lowered into the sewers where, it was said, men were always ready with torches, waiting for the signal.
Then Maurice, who had never been a drinker, found himself drawn into the general outbreak of drunkenness and lost in it. Now, when he was on duty at some advanced position or spending the night in the guard-room, he would accept a tot of brandy. If he had a second one he would get worked up in the alcoholic mists whirling round him. It was a growing epidemic, chronic befuddlement, a legacy from the first siege aggravated by the second; a population without bread but with spirits and wine in barrelfuls had steeped itself in drink and now went crazy on the smallest drop. On 21 May, a Sunday, for the first time in his life Maurice went home drunk in the evening to the rue des Orties where he still sometimes slept. He had once again spent the day at Neuilly, fighting and drinking with the comrades in the hope of overcoming his immense, overwhelming fatigue. Then, with his head in a whirl and quite exhausted, he had come back and flung himself on to the bed in his little room, having got there by instinct, for he could never remember how he reached it. It was not until the next day, when the sun was well up, that the sound of bells, drums and bugles woke him. On the previous day the Versailles forces had found a gate unguarded at the Point-du-Jour and had entered Paris unopposed.
As soon as he went down into the street after dressing at full speed and slinging his rifle over his shoulder, a group of agitated comrades he met at the local town hall told him the events of the previous evening and night, but in such a muddled way that it was hard to grasp at first. For ten days the fort at Issy and the heavy battery at Montretout, supplemented by the Mont-Valérien, had been hammering away at the fortifications, and the Saint-Cloud gate had become untenable; the assault was to take place on the following day when, at about five o’clock, a passer-by, noticing that nobody was left guarding the gate, had simply beckoned to the sentries posted at the Versailles army trenches not fifty metres away. Without any delay two companies of the 37th infantry had come in, and behind them the whole 4th corps, commanded by General Douay. All through the night the troops had flowed in like a steady stre
am. By seven the Vergé division was making its way down to the Pont de Grenelle and pushing on as far as the Trocadéro. By nine General Clinchant took Passy and La Muette. By three in the morning the 1st corps was encamped in the Bois de Boulogne and at about the same time the Bruat division was crossing the Seine to capture the Sèvres gate and facilitate the entry of the 2nd corps, commanded by General de Cissey, which was to occupy the whole Grenelle district an hour later. Thus by the morning of the 22nd the Versailles troops were masters of the Trocadéro and La Muette on the right bank and of Grenelle on the left bank, to the astonishment, fury and dismay of the Commune, already crying treason and desperate at the realization of inevitable defeat. This was Maurice’s first thought when he understood – the end had come and there was nothing left but to fight to the death. But alarm bells were ringing and drums beating ever louder, women and even children were working on the barricades, the streets were filling with excited battalions hastily got together and rushing to their combat positions. By noon hope was again springing up in the breasts of the fanatical soldiers of the Commune, who were resolved to go in and win when they realized that the Versailles forces had scarcely moved. This army that they had feared to see in the Tuileries within two hours was now operating with extraordinary prudence, having learned from its defeats and now overdoing the tactics it had learned from the Prussians at such a bitter cost. At the Hôtel de Ville the Committee of Public Safety and Delescluze, the war delegate, were organizing and directing the defence. It was said that they had turned down with scorn a final conciliatory move. This put fire into people’s hearts, once again the triumph of Paris became certain, and everywhere the resistance was to be as fierce as the attack was to be implacable, owing to the hatred, fed on lies and atrocities, which burned in the hearts of both armies. That day Maurice spent in the neighbourhood of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, slowly falling back from street to street, firing all the time. He had not been able to find his own battalion and was fighting with unknown comrades and, without even noticing, had been taken by them over to the left bank. At about four they defended a barricade shutting off the rue de l’Université where it comes out on to the Esplanade, and they only abandoned it at dusk when they knew that the Bruat division, by moving along the embankment, had taken the Legislative Assembly. They had nearly been captured themselves, and only gained the rue de Lille with difficulty by dint of taking a wide detour via the rue Saint-Dominique and rue de Bellechasse. By nightfall the Versailles army was occupying a line from the Vanves gate through the Legislative Assembly, the Elysée Palace, the church of Saint-Augustin, the Gare Saint-Lazare to the Asnières gate.