Massacre (3 page)

Thwarted, Thiers withdrew his forces from Paris to Versailles, where he planned to regroup and eventually retake the city. Thousands of wealthy Parisians joined him there. In Paris, meanwhile, left-wing militants proclaimed a ‘Commune’ of progressive self-government that brought
freedom to Parisians, many of whom believed themselves ‘masters of their own lives’ for the first time. Working-class families from proletarian neighbourhoods proudly strolled into the
beaux quartiers
of the capital, imagining a more just society, and prepared to take steps to make that a reality. Their progressive Commune would last a mere ten weeks before it was annihilated during the last bloody week of May.

The birth and destruction of the Paris Commune, one of the most tragic, defining events of the nineteenth century, still resonates today. In the streets of Paris, Thiers’s army gunned down thousands of ordinary men, women and, occasionally, children. Soldiers executed many for their participation in the defence of the Commune; others died because their workers’ attire, remnants of a Parisian National Guard uniform, or simply their occupation or manner of speaking marked them for death. The massacres carried out by French troops against their own countrymen anticipated the demons of the century to follow. You could be gunned down because of who you were, because you wanted to be free. This may have been the ultimate significance of Bloody Week, 21–28 May 1871, the biggest massacre in Europe of the nineteenth century. The life and death of the Paris Commune still resonates today.

Paris was a surging city of great social contrasts and contradictions during Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–1870). On one hand, the capital led a rapidly growing French economy. Industry continued to be dominated by artisans in small workshops who produced the
articles de Paris
, high-quality gloves and other luxury goods that came to symbolise French manufacturing. Imperial financial institutions helped boost industrial production in and around Paris, bringing unparalleled prosperity to people of means. They attended lavish imperial social events and theatrical performances, traversing the city and the Bois-de-Boulogne in carriages while ordinary people walked to work. Powerful trains, their engines spewing steam, carried wealthy passengers from the burgeoning capital to Deauville and other increasingly elegant towns on the Norman coast.

The economic boom and the incredible wealth it brought to Paris diverted attention from widespread poverty and divisions in the city. Napoleon III and Baron Georges Haussmann ploughed spacious boulevards through the tangle of medieval Paris. Fancy restaurants and cafés welcomed those who could afford them. In the dilapidated and overcrowded districts of eastern and northern Paris, working people living in miserable tiny apartments or rooming houses struggled to get by. For them, hard times never seemed to go away.

By the late 1860s, Napoleon III faced mounting political opposition, so much so that many Parisians anticipated a disastrous end to his reign. France already had a lengthy history of class strife. Three revolutions had chased monarchs from the throne of France in the past sixty years. So far, none had brought to France the stability one could find across the English Channel in Great Britain.

Napoleon III, however, was confident that he, unlike his immediate predecessors, was destined to hold onto power. Born in 1808, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the son of Napoleon’s brother and had been raised in a chateau in Switzerland amid artefacts of his uncle’s rule. He was certain that his future role would be to build upon his famous family’s dynastic heritage. Identifying his family with the fate of France, to his ambition he added a shrewd sense of political opportunism which he combined with notoriously bad judgement. The July Monarchy of King Louis Philippe of the Orléans family (a junior wing of the Bourbons, the French royal family) maintained its policy of forcing the family of Napoleon Bonaparte to remain in exile. He had attempted to invade France with a handful of followers in 1836, when he marched into a Strasbourg garrison and was arrested, and again four years later, when he landed on the coast near Boulogne-sur-Mer, with the same embarrassing result. In 1840, he was imprisoned in northern France, from which he escaped in 1846 dressed as a worker. These fiascos helped lend Napoleon’s nephew the reputation of being something of a buffoon who surrounded himself with sleazy, inept cronies. Short and increasingly corpulent, he resembled his uncle – with whom his enemies compared him, calling him ‘the [Napoleonic] hat without the head’, and poking fun at his ‘fish eyes’.

Yet for all his early failures, Louis Napoleon was surprisingly optimistic and believed that economic progress under his rule could benefit all Parisians, wealthy and poor alike. With his usual modesty he wrote from prison ‘I believe that there are certain men who are born to serve as a means for the march of the human race … I consider myself to be one of these.’
¹

The February Revolution in 1848, one of the many revolutions that swept Europe that year, brought an end to the Orléans monarchy, and Louis Napoleon quickly returned to Paris. He was elected president of the Second French Republic in December 1848, nine months after King Louis-Philippe was overthrown. After orchestrating the repression of the left, the ‘prince president’ ended the Second French Republic with a coup d’état on 2 December 1851 because his term as president would have come to an end the following year. Parisians awoke to martial law, with
democratic-socialist members of the National Assembly, whose members were elected from the
départements
, under arrest.

But some Parisians were not willing to submit to another empire without a fight. Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état sparked an ill-fated uprising in working-class neighbourhoods in central and eastern Paris. More than 125,000 people, the majority of them
paysans
, took up arms to defend the Republic, particularly in the south, where secret societies had built networks of underground support. But the insurgents had no chance against columns of professional soldiers and were soon fleeing for their lives. In a precursor to the aftermath of the Commune in 1871, almost 27,000 people – whether they had participated in the revolt or not – were brought before courts-martial, or ‘Mixed Commissions’, consisting of senior military officers and judicial and administrative officials. Thousands of people were convicted, receiving sentences ranging from deportation to Algeria or even Cayenne, to imprisonment in France or exile from the region where they lived. The following year Napoleon III declared the Second Empire.
²

The Emperor found his Bonapartist following among wealthy men who had supported Louis-Philippe in the name of social ‘order’ during the Orléanist July Monarchy that ruled between 1830 and 1848.
³
The financial system under Napoleon III was also set up to enrich those already in power. Napoleon III’s family received a million francs (roughly £1.8 million) from the treasury each year. Random relatives also received large sums from the state for simply existing. Moreover, millions of francs in special funds went into the Emperor’s large pockets; an English mistress received a hefty sum as well. But not everyone was pleased with the new Emperor. As the rich became even richer, many people in Paris and in the provinces continued to struggle and had contempt for ‘
Napoléon le petit
’, as Victor Hugo dubbed him. Workers had no legal recourse against their employers, who were backed by gendarmes and troops.

In fact, an increasing number of Parisians fell into the latter camp and benefitted not at all from Napoleon III’s regime. The population of Paris almost doubled during the 1850s and 1860s, rising from a little more than 1 million in 1851 to almost 2 million people by 1870. Each year during the Second Empire tens of thousands of immigrants poured into the capital from the Parisian basin, the north, Picardie, Normandy, Champagne and Lorraine, among other regions, mostly male labourers even poorer than the Parisians already there, attracted by the possibility of construction work. These new residents, many of whom had left precarious economic situations in the rural world, accounted for virtually all of this rapid urban growth. Many were under-employed, if not unemployed, and crowded
into
garnis
– rooming houses – on the narrow, grey streets in the central districts or in virtual shacks in the emerging industrial suburbs. The central
arrondissements
, always densely packed, reached an astonishing 15,000 people per square kilometre in the Fourth Arrondissement in Le Marais, where population density was three times today’s. Tens of thousands were indigent, dependent at least to some extent on charity. Some simply slept wherever they could. In 1870, almost half a million Parisians – one quarter of the population – could be found classified as indigent.
⁴

As the deterioration of the old medieval centre of Paris became more pronounced, elites became more frantic about ‘the urban crisis’. On Ile-de-la-Cité, most artisans had moved away, leaving about 15,000 men, most day-labourers, crammed into the island’s rooming houses. Notre Dame towered over these small, jam-packed buildings. A police report had noted the presence of ‘an enormous number of down-and-out people, men and women, who survive only through plunder and who find refuge only in the bars and brothels that pollute the
quartier
’. On the Right Bank, much of the First Arrondissement, centring on the great market of Les Halles, Le Marais, including the Third and Fourth Arrondissements, and, to the north, the Eleventh and Twelfth Arrondissements reflected the grim texture of urban life. A good part of the Fifth Arrondissement on the Left Bank, with its many scrap metal and cloth sellers, was also very poor. The miserable, disease-ridden faubourg Saint-Marceau, one of the poorest parts of Paris, reached into the Thirteenth Arrondissement, where rag-pickers plied their trade and tanners tossed animal remains into the Bièvre River.
⁵

Central and eastern Paris formed, according to one observer, ‘a gothic city, black, gloomy, excrement- and fever-ridden, a place of darkness, disorder, violence, black, misery, and blood’. Horrible smells emanated from ‘appalling alleys, houses the colour of mud’ and from stagnant, putrid waters. Paris, like other large cities, was an unhealthy place where every year more people died than were born. Only about a fifth of the buildings had running water. Keeping out freezing winters was a perpetual challenge. People of relative ease living in the
beaux quartiers
of western Paris felt they resided uncomfortably in a sordid capital of immorality and vice, its dark, dank
quartiers
the preserve of the ‘dangerous and labouring classes’, even if most people of means had never actually seen these neighbourhoods. Popular literature helped firmly place this image in the upper-class imagination, depicting poor neighbourhoods of Paris as the haunts of ‘the dregs of society’.
⁶

To accommodate the exponential growth in Paris’s population and limit the deterioration of the city centre, in 1853 Napoleon III summoned
Baron Georges Haussmann, prefect of the
département
of the Seine, to plan the rebuilding of Paris. Of Alsatian origins, Haussmann had been born in the capital. After completing law school he moved into the bureaucracy, serving as a sub-prefect and then prefect in several provincial
départements
, where, during the Second Republic, he lent his administrative skills to political repression. An energetic man with a talent for organisation, Haussmann seemed the perfect Parisian bureaucrat, and was eager to use the emerging field of statistics to his advantage in launching his great project. But the elegantly dressed Haussmann was also an arrogant, vain and aggressive bully willing to do anything in his power to ensure that France would never again be a republic.
⁷

In many ways, then, Haussmann was the ideal man to realise Napoleon’s dream of rebuilding the French capital into an imperial city. The Emperor and the prefect of the Seine had three goals. The first was to bring more light and air into a city ravaged by cholera in 1832 and 1849 (and again in 1853–54, after Haussmann’s grand projects had begun), while building more sewers to improve the city’s sanitation. Second, they wanted to free the flow of capital and goods. The first French department stores – Bon Marché, Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, Le Printemps, Le Louvre and La Samaritaine – would stand on Haussmann’s wide boulevards, along with glittering
brasseries
and cafés, which became the face of modern Paris, although small shops remained essential to the urban economy.
⁸

Third, the Emperor and his prefect wanted to limit the possibilities of insurgency in traditional revolutionary neighbourhoods. The boulevards themselves would become an obstacle to the construction of barricades by virtue of their width. On eight occasions since 1827 disgruntled Parisians had built barricades in the city, most recently during the February Revolution and then during June Days of 1848, when workers rose up to protest against the closing of National Workshops that had provided some employment in a time of economic distress. Barricades went up again in Paris following Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Then, protestors managed to block the advance of professional armies of the state by hurriedly constructing barricades on the narrow streets of central and eastern Paris, using wood, cobblestones, and just about anything else that could be found. Napoleon III had no intention of letting that happen again.
⁹

Haussmann’s boulevards reflected the determination of the leaders of the Second Empire to impose their version of social order on Paris. The prefect of the Seine did not mince words: ‘Bringing order to this Queen City is one of the first conditions of general security.’ Some of the boulevards indeed tore right through the insurgent
quartiers
of the June Days.
The boulevard Prince Eugène provided troops with relatively easy access into ‘the habitual centre … of riots’.
¹⁰

The new boulevards of Paris thus embodied the ‘imperialism of the straight line’, intended not only to quash uprisings but also to display the modernity and might of the empire. They provided power alleys down which troops could march in showy processions, as had been the case in earlier examples of classical urban planning from Philip II’s Madrid to Peter the Great’s St Petersburg and Frederick the Great’s Berlin. The rue de Rivoli, completed in 1855, led visitors to the international exposition on the Champs-Élysées, which featured 5,000 exhibits, many celebrating the city’s technological innovations. The ‘capital of the world’ had emerged as a spectacular ‘permanent exposition’, or what novelist Théophile Gautier called ‘A Babel of industry … A Babylon of the future’.
¹¹