Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (11 page)

As for Paris, the Prussian forces had encircled the city since September 19, razing the villages in a several-mile radius. The next line of defense for the Parisians would be the forts.

Nadar, the famous aeronaut, constructed hot air balloons to sail over the slate rooftops, carrying correspondence to the French troops out in the hinterlands. On October 7, Léon Gambetta, the Marseilles representative in the Assembly, attempted to flee to Tours in exactly this kind of craft to create an outpost for the French government while Paris was under siege. In fur cap and fur coat, Gambetta climbed into the basket with his aide, Eugène Spuller. He seemed, according to one eyewitness, in remarkably good humor, as if on a pleasure trip. His journey included high jinks that could have been written into a Jules Verne novel of the day, such as finding himself hanging upside down from a tree.

On the journey, Gambetta found seeing life from so high to be disappointing. “Alluding in after days to his experiences on this journey, the great man said that the earth, as seen by him from the car of the balloon, looked like a huge carpet woven chance-wise with different coloured wools. It did not impress him at all, he added, as it was really nothing but ‘
une vilaine chinoiserie
[a vulgar chinoiserie]
.
’”

Two days after his departure, Gambetta arrived in Tours and took over the post of minister of war as well as that of minister of the interior. Waiting in Tours was Giuseppe Garibaldi, the legendary and charismatic Italian general who had liberated Italy from Austria, Sicily from the Neapolitans, and Rome from papal forces. Garibaldi cut an instantly recognizable figure. He still dressed in the garb for which he had become famous when galloping across Italy—red shirt, scarlet neckerchief, gray cape with red lining, and black felt fedora.

Garibaldi tended to offer his military services to any grandiose cause. When the American Civil War broke out, he had offered himself to Lincoln, who jumped at the chance to have him as a military leader. When Garibaldi insisted on being made head of the U.S. Army and that Lincoln declare that the cause of the Civil War was to end slavery, not just to prevent secession, Lincoln demurred.

Garibaldi had been offering his services to the French since early September, but received no reply at first. The hot-blooded mercenary had never been adamantly pro-French; in fact, he had congratulated the Prussians for beating Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and had fought against the French during the siege of Rome. Garibaldi was adamantly anti-pope, which did not endear him very much to the general populace of Catholic France, but he appreciated the 250 French volunteers who had journeyed to Sicily to assist him in helping the peasants rise up. He also realized that if France fell, the balance of power in Europe would be lost. The French, for their part, realized they had sorely underestimated Prussian strength. By October they were ready to accept whatever assistance they could get.

Bartholdi, meanwhile, essentially had been trapped in Colmar with nothing to do under Prussian occupation; therefore he decided to leave. Not many enemy soldiers were left behind to guard Colmar, so it was not hard to escape. Ostensibly he traveled to Tours as a civilian with no military interest. Or at least that is what he told his mother. “It is maybe not good to allow myself to be led by my vagabond tastes,” he wrote to her from the road, “but it will do me good. In four or five days I think I will return, unless I yield again to the attraction of curiosity.”

In reality, he had gone to Tours to rendezvous with Gambetta and to become Garibaldi’s aide-de-camp.

Bartholdi’s knowledge of the region was useful to Garibaldi, and Bartholdi already admired the man, having remarked in one of his letters to his mother years earlier, as he passed the island of Caprera, where Garibaldi claimed to have retired, “I regret, here as in Paris, we find too little sympathy for this great gentleman.” Bartholdi must have been pleased at the thought that he could link himself to the legend and possibly redeem the loss of his hometown.

In the 1860s, Garibaldi had been worshipped like a saint, admired by dark Sicilian girls with flashing eyes, while rumors abounded that angels sheltered him with their wings. Now, at sixty-four, Garibaldi suffered from rheumatism and could barely walk. A northern European winter offered unexpected challenges.

At first it seemed the French, while welcoming him to the front, might want him not to fight at all, but to merely lend his prestige to their military efforts; however, that dispute was resolved. With Bartholdi trailing, Garibaldi went off to Dôle to collect soldiers for his future Army of the Vosges, the rural area in the east spliced by the mountain range of the same name, and birthplace of such fiery sorts as Joan of Arc.

On the train, with the legend right there on the banquette before him, Bartholdi must have thrilled to converse about big ideas. They talked about “religion in general, horror of priests, he believes in God, immortality of the soul, Christian sentiments . . . admires Voltaire.”

In Dôle, Garibaldi distributed a red pocket-sized handbook for the “Guerrillas” that was characteristically theatrical. Among his instructions for the Volunteers, Mercenaries, and Mobile Army of the Vosges was the motto “I count on you, you can count on me.”

The
New York Times
reported: “The journals say there is a general rising in the Vosges. There are no regular troops there, but all the men are aroused.
Francs-Tireurs
are in all the passes, and give no quarter to the enemy, whom they harass night and day, stopping their convoys and cutting their communications and roads.” Garibaldi’s men, aided by Bartholdi, were on the move, and included, it was said, ten thousand Italian volunteers.

Throughout his whole experience assisting Garibaldi’s military efforts, Bartholdi never stopped sketching. He crafted his drawings for his own record of events and, for the amusement of the troops, he drew big-headed caricatures of their commanders. He crafted a drawing of Garibaldi on October 15, on the train between two conferences, and it was a remarkably frank depiction of the reality of war. The bearded general slumped, wrapped in a blanket with a rucksack or pillow behind him, his brimmed hat still perched on his head. He appeared almost in slumber, or perhaps desolate.

A few days after Léon Gambetta declared the new republic, Victor Hugo, now white-haired, shorn of his long locks, but still vibrant, arrived at the Paris train station from the self-imposed exile that Napoléon III had heartily endorsed. He had been physically far from his comrades, but never truly distant. In 1869 his sons had started a newspaper in Paris,
Le Rappel,
which allowed the poet to communicate to his countrymen. Now, finally reunited with his people, he boomed to the mob of supporters: “Citizens! I have come back from an exile of twenty years simultaneously with the Republic!”

He characterized the Prussian invasion as an assault against civilization, saying it had brought forth new hatreds and resentments. Paris would have to be victorious to preserve universal love.

Pointing to an American flag hoisted in the crowd, he thundered, “That banner of stars speaks to-day to Paris and to France, proclaiming the miracles of power which are easy to a great people” in fighting for a great principle: “liberty of every race, fraternity of all.”

The crowd cheered wildly, and Hugo nearly missed being able to put his feet down on Parisian ground, as he was carried to his carriage on the people’s shoulders.

Now, as the siege of Paris wore on, he served as an informal international reporter on the conditions, writing what he saw accurately but still trying to buoy up morale. Citizens were eating horse meat, as well as antelope, bear, and stag from the Jardin des Plantes. They made a rat pâté, “said to be quite good.”

Back at the front, the troops Garibaldi had assembled in the Vosges fared well, winning a small battle at Châtillon-sur-Seine. The larger skirmishes that followed trailed on without resolution. Expressing French xenophobia, the National Guard and Gardes Mobiles at Besançon refused to fight under Garibaldi’s command. The towns of Dijon and Autun changed hands between the French and the Prussians, then back again.

The snowfall seemed never-ending that bitter winter. Soldiers endured sleepless nights and bouts of smallpox. One soldier marching with Garibaldi’s men remembered coming to a château and finding the carbonized cadaver of a Garibaldi soldier allegedly thrown into the hearth, perhaps burned alive.

Garibaldi himself was plagued by attacks of rheumatism. Even the admiring Bartholdi had begun to lose heart. “There is a lack of nerve in the army,” Bartholdi complained in a private note, “little organization, lack of order, precision. . . . Garibaldi is perhaps a little old!”

At one point in December, Bartholdi traveled to Bordeaux to retrieve ammunition and supplies from an American ship. Charlotte still thought he was on his pleasure trip around France, and she wrote to him urging that he find a nice Protestant girl there.

At the harbor of Bordeaux, Bartholdi overheard the officers of the ship bringing the ammunition talking about demonstrations going on in the United States that clamored for America to support Germany in the war. One of the officers explained that the new German immigrants were responsible for the cheerleading, but that not everyone felt similarly aligned. Those who had been in the United States longer would not wish ill toward the French, he said. After all, it was the French who had helped America win the freedom and prosperity that these new immigrants were enjoying.

That conversation stuck with Bartholdi. In this war, France had not exactly appeared noble in international opinion. Napoléon III had declared war, then followed that aggression with tactical blunders. Some felt that France’s surrender could have saved lives. Bartholdi now wanted to get to know the United States better. Perhaps it appealed to him to think that even if France’s present seemed pitiable, the United States still remembered its heroic past. Perhaps Laboulaye had been right that this was a gratitude that could not be shaken.

On December 11, newspapers reported Garibaldi had officially resigned from the Army of the Vosges owing to the hostility of French troops who refused to fight a losing war. He eventually took back his post and fought on, even without French help. Through it all, Bartholdi never seemed to abandon a core affection for the general he served, fondly citing one example of the leader’s tremendous courage. At Dijon on January 21, when the Germans fired their first shots, Garibaldi’s troops had bolted for safety. Garibaldi, horrified by his men’s cowardice, stumbled down from his carriage. His aides pleaded for him to return to the shelter, but he began waving his hat about, singing the Marseillaise in his tremendous voice, trying to urge the men on. Two days later, the Garibaldi troops that remained behind to fight emerged victorious.

The siege of Paris ended on January 28, 1871, with capitulation. France had lost the war. The Peace of Frankfurt was signed on May 10, stipulating that the French would have to pay Prussia five billion francs in five years, or else the last soldiers would not leave. The countries could reestablish trade. Most poignantly and painfully, France would have to give away Lorraine and Alsace to the Prussians.

Residents of those regions were given until October 1872 to decide if they preferred to stay in their home territory and become German, or leave and remain French. More than one hundred thousand Alsatians left right away. The ones who remained were not allowed to use their mother tongue or travel freely.

Garibaldi earned a seat in the Assembly, elected by Algiers, but when he rose to speak in February, he was shouted down. He had wanted to express his support for a republic—“the only Government which can prevent France from being convulsed by a revolution within six months”—and his belief that the expenses of the war ought to be paid by the “millions who voted for the war, especially by the imperialists and the priests who urged them to vote.” That last remark must have been a reference to the idea that endorsing Napoléon III’s declaration of himself as emperor was akin to declaring war.

The Assembly intimidated him into silence, and he left the hall in disgust. Bartholdi watched the whole sad scene from the Assembly’s staircase. He bid Garibaldi good-bye at the port of Bordeaux on February 15. “Emotional farewell. Garibaldi embraces us,” Bartholdi wrote; “he thanked me for all I did for him, has no other reward to offer us. The ship slides out and we still see Garibaldi alone with [his secretary], sending us a farewell and loud cheers.”

Victor Hugo, who also then held a seat in the Assembly, did not approve of Garibaldi’s bad treatment. Three weeks later, he begged the Assembly to give Garibaldi another chance. “Garibaldi was the only general who fought for France and was not conquered.”

The Assembly shouted him down, furious that he would put a foreigner’s heroics over that of their own military leaders. Hugo resigned on the spot. “Three weeks since,” he said, “you refused to listen to Garibaldi; to-day you refuse me the right of speech. I retire. But I shall yet be heard by France.”

For the nation, giants of a past age were now merely men.

5
Paris in Rubble

Back in Colmar, Bartholdi glumly surveyed his options. He could either remain in his birthplace and become a German citizen, or exile himself and remain French. Paris was no place to retreat.

While on military service, Bartholdi had kept in the back of his diary a list of powerful people, eminent men from across France: military officers, statesmen, owners of hotels. It ran on for several pages. One can’t say whether he was merely noting the people he had met, or perhaps ruminating about the people he might pursue for commissions once the war was over. His finances were very much on his mind. At the end of the war journal, he totaled up what money he could hope to gather: 600 francs from soldier pay, 1,000 from mama, and almost 800 from other sources.