Massacre (6 page)

In an attempt to bolster support for his empire, in May 1870 Napoleon III resorted to that old Bonapartist – and, later, Gaullist – tactic of organising a plebiscite with sneaky wording to attempt to reassert his authority. It asked French men if they approved of the liberal changes undertaken by the empire. A
non
could thus indicate opposition either to the Emperor or to liberal reforms, such as the relaxation of censorship. Nationwide, 7.4 million men voted
oui
, and 1.5 million
non
, but in Paris the no vote carried by 184,000 to 128,000. Thus, in Paris the plebiscite fell far short of achieving its intended effect. The announcement of the results led to bloody demonstrations and pitched battles with the police, bringing several deaths.
⁴³
The Second Empire and its opponents in Paris seemed on a collision course.

CHAPTER
1

War and the Collapse of the Empire

I
N
1870, N
APOLEON
III
FOOLISHLY PUSHED
F
RANCE INTO WAR WITH
Prussia and its south German allies, a war that would undermine his power, strengthen anti-government sentiment, and lead to the collapse of the Second Empire. At issue was the candidacy of Prince Leopold – a member of the Prussian royal Hohenzollern family – for the vacant throne of Spain. If a Prussian became king of Spain, France risked being surrounded by Hohenzollerns, rivals for European continental supremacy, leaving potential enemies on the other side of the Pyrenees as well as across the Rhine.

But the French Emperor had other reasons for wanting a war. His empire had been further weakened by the growing strength of republicans and socialists in France and was still reeling from a foreign policy fiasco in Mexico in 1867, where French forces were defeated and Maximilian, Napoleon III’s protégé and Mexico’s would-be emperor, was executed. He may have assumed that war with Prussia would bring a relatively easy victory, thereby enhancing his prestige. It was not the first time he had done so; Napoleon had used French victories in the Crimean War of 1853–56 and against Austria in 1859 to remind his people and the rest of Europe of the strength of his empire. When dining with army officers in Châlons-sur-Marne in 1868, he provocatively hoisted a glass of German Rhineland Reisling wine and announced, ‘Gentlemen, I hope that you yourselves will shortly be harvesting this wine,’ as he nodded towards the east.
¹

In 1866, Napoleon III had badly underestimated the strength of the Prussian army, having assumed that Habsburg Austria would emerge victorious in a short war that year for political supremacy in central Europe. He would make the same mistake four years later. The creation of the North
German Federation, dominated by Prussia following Austria’s defeat, shifted the balance of power. Even after Prussia’s victory, however, the French Emperor had made forceful demands for territorial compensation, in response to the increased might of a rival for power perched across the Rhine from Alsace. Specifically, he insisted on Prussian acquiescence to the possible annexation by France of Belgium and Luxembourg, which Britain and the other powers successfully opposed. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck rejected written French demands.

In July 1870, under great French pressure, Prince Leopold withdrew his candidacy for the Spanish throne. Napoleon III demanded that King William I of Prussia formally apologise to France and promise that a member of the Hohenzollern royal family would never again be a candidate for the throne of Spain. The French ambassador to Prussia, Count Vincent Bénédetti, aggressively and rudely put forward this insistence to the Prussian king in the spa town of Bad Ems. Bismarck responded with a telegram, later released to the press, that became known as the Ems Dispatch, forcefully embellishing what had occurred. Bismarck, whose father was a Prussian noble (
Junker
), had entered the Prussian bureaucracy after completing law school, where he had been more prominent for duelling scars than for academic success. As prime minister of Prussia, he mastered domestic and international politics with his brand of ‘
Realpolitik
’, the pursuit of national self-interest based on a shrewd assessment of all possibilities. The use of the Ems Dispatch was a calculated manoeuvre to prime his country for war. Bismarck rejected the French demand. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ of Prussia was now confident that a victorious war against France would lead to the unification of the German states under Prussian leadership.
²

The story quickly spread in Prussia and other German states that the French ambassador had arrogantly insulted the king. In both Prussia and France, the mood was bellicose. Many ordinary Parisians, too, seemed to want war, including some republicans. Crowds sang the
Marseillaise
, which had been forbidden in imperial France because it was identified with republicanism and the French Revolution. The popular mood and the expectation of victory were reflected by one publisher’s decision to produce a
French–German Dictionary for the Use of the French in Berlin
.
³
Egged on by the Foreign Minister, the Duc de Gramont and the Empress Eugénie, as well as a segment of the public, Napoleon III declared war on 19 July 1870.

The German states of Wurttemberg, Hesse, Baden and Bavaria joined the Prussian side. France went to war without allies. Bismarck revealed to the British the document in which Napoleon III had demanded the
annexation of Belgium and Luxembourg, an attempted power grab that Bismarck knew would anger the British and ensure their neutrality. Newly unified – at least in principle – Italy had not forgiven France for the absorption of Nice in 1860 following a plebiscite and was unwilling to come to their aid now. Gramont foolishly assumed that Austria would join France against its former enemy once French armies had moved into the Prussian Rhineland and Palatinate in south-western Germany, but Austria stayed out of the fray.

Although it would face the Prussians alone, the French army seemed confident of victory. In addition to their victories in the Crimean War and in the war against Austria in 1859, French troops had expanded imperial interests in South-East Asia, giving the officer corps more experience in battle. The debacle in Mexico three years earlier, the army hoped, could be conveniently forgotten.

But military complacency had set in and traditional routines took over. The officer corps was ridden by cliques, intensified by tensions between aristocratic officers and men of ordinary social origins and expectations – lower-middle-class, workers and
paysans
. Experience garnered in one-sided military campaigns in north Africa and South-East Asia could not be easily applied in European warfare.
⁴

To make matters worse, French mobilisation for war was nothing short of chaotic. Regiments stationed all over France were carried by trains to often distant mobilisation points, a disorganised, inefficient, and painfully slow process. Reservists had to be summoned from their homes and transported to regimental depots. The army of Alsace was notably short of supplies and funds, and some troops openly hostile to their officers. Even proper topographical maps were unavailable or hard to locate. Commanders had only two-thirds of the number of soldiers anticipated and lacked the massive reserves available to Prussia and its allies.

Prussian mobilisation plans, on the other hand, were well in place. Prussia’s railways, public and private, had been placed under military control and modernised with particular attention to wartime needs. In contrast, the French high command had given little consideration to the crucial role of railways so necessary for the rapid and efficient mobilisation of troops. French troop trains moved on a single track, and thus could only be used for transport in one direction at a time. Fifty Prussian trains each day pushed along double tracks towards the front each day on five main lines, as opposed to twelve trains for the French.

Yet the French army had a new breech-loading rifle, the
chassepot
, which was superior to Prussian rifles because soldiers could carry many
more of its smaller-calibre bullets. French troops also had an early version of the machine gun (
mitrailleuse
), rather like the Gatling gun in the US Civil War. It had thirty-seven barrels or ‘gun tubes’ fired in rapid succession by a soldier quickly turning a hand crank. It soon picked up the nickname of the ‘coffee grinder’.

French commanders had little idea of the cohesive and organised Prussian general staff relentlessly overseen since 1857 by Helmuth von Moltke. In sharp contrast, incredibly, France had no head of the general staff. In principle the Emperor commanded the army; he assumed that the fact that he was Napoleon’s nephew was enough. Napoleon III, unlike von Moltke, appears to have had no specific plan for waging the war against Prussia.

Within eighteen days of the declaration of war, Prussia and its south German allies had nearly 1.2 million troops at or near the border. One French general reported in panic by telegraph: ‘Have arrived at Belfort. Can’t find my brigade. Can’t find the divisional commander. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are.’ Demoralised French troops, many of whom were unwilling conscripts ill at ease among professional soldiers who had seen it all, seemed apathetic, playing cards and drinking heavily to bolster their spirits amid food shortages. Commanders were notoriously uninterested in the conditions of their soldiers. Recently recalled reservists lacked sufficient training, and sometimes commitment.
⁵

Prussian tactics, developed in the war against Austria four years earlier, emphasised the quick and coordinated movement of units towards enemy positions, thus extending the field of battle. French commanders believed that sturdy lines, armed with
chassepots
and machine guns, supported by artillery fire, would carry the day over the Prussian ‘needle-gun’ with inferior range. They seemed to have been oblivious to the fact that the sturdy steel Prussian cannons, produced by the Krupp factories, were more powerful and accurate than the older French artillery pieces of bronze and could be fired more rapidly. Moreover, Von Moltke had made his batteries more mobile and thus responsive to changes in the enemy’s positions. He had also gone to great lengths to modernise the cavalry, purging incompetent officers, despite their credentials as Prussian nobles. In contrast, aristocrats retained their privileged place in the French officer corps, no matter their incompetence.
⁶

The Emperor left Paris for Metz on 28 July, appointing Empress Eugénie to serve as regent in his absence. On 31 July, the French Army of the Rhine moved forward in a pre-emptive strike. French troops crossed the border and captured Saarbrücken, which was virtually undefended because
Prussian armies commanded by von Moltke had bigger fish to fry. This was the last French victory of any consequence. Two Prussian armies then moved into northern Lorraine and a third into northern Alsace. Prussian forces won hard-fought victories at Wissembourg on 4 August, and at Spicheren near the Vosges mountains the following day, while Marshal Achille Bazaine’s regiments were camped but nine miles away, and then at Woerth the following day.

The French defeats were not overwhelming and their enemy suffered many casualties, but nonetheless forced the armies of France back. Prussian cannons thundered shell after shell upon the French, with Prussian soldiers well out of range of French machine-guns. Marshal Patrice de MacMahon retreated to Châlons-sur-Marne and Bazaine, now named commander-in-chief, to the fortress of Metz. Chaotic and sometimes ill-informed French orders flew back and forth. Bazaine moved his army in the direction of Verdun, but found the route cut off by von Moltke.
⁷

On 18 August, the Prussian army, 188,000 strong, moved against French forces two-thirds their size under the command of Bazaine. In the Battle of Gravelotte, fought just west of Metz, the Prussians inflicted 20,000 casualties (against 12,000 on the German side). Demoralisation and acrimony followed the French armies after such defeats. In Saverne, tipsy soldiers insulted officers whom they found sitting comfortably in a café. Yet another loss made matters worse. Bazaine’s army retreated to Metz and the Prussian army besieged the city, defeating the army commanded by MacMahon, who was trying to relieve Bazaine. There, some senior officers had become so disenchanted with Bazaine that they planned, without the marshal’s approval, to organise an attempt to break out from Metz and engage the Prussians in battle. But the French commander got word of the plan and it collapsed. For republicans, the incident took on a political tone because Bazaine, as other French commanders, had reached high military office through blatant imperial patronage.

As a Prussian siege of Paris now seemed inevitable, General Louis Trochu had suggested to Napoleon III’s war council that Bazaine’s army should be withdrawn to the outskirts of Paris, beyond its fortifications, to hold off the Prussians. Six days later, the Emperor arrived in Châlons-sur-Marne to preside over a military meeting to determine whether to follow Trochu’s plan. There he found confirmation of just how dire the army’s situation had become: seemingly beaten soldiers lounged about, ‘vegetating rather than living’, as one of their officers put it, ‘scarcely moving even if you kicked them, grumbling at being disturbed in their sleep’.
⁸
Napoleon III’s army seemed resigned to defeat.

In Paris, anxiety about a looming Prussian siege mixed with anger at the French military’s miserable defeats, an atmosphere that presented an opportunity to the political left. On 14 August, a group of ‘Blanquists’ stood ready for revolution. Now, led by a young student, Émile Eudes, a group of Blanquists forced their way into a fire station at La Villette in northern Paris. Their attempt to spark an insurrection came to nothing when the firemen held on to their weapons and workers did not step forward to assist them. The insurgents rapidly retreated to their peripheral bastion of Belleville.
⁹