The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (11 page)

After Spicheren and Wœrth, the French never again left the defensive. So brilliant and often irresistible in the attack when that spirit of
furia francese
is uppermost, they have never been good at the kind of fighting withdrawal at which the British soldier so excels. After Wœrth and Spicheren the long, disheartening retreat began. On August 12th, the Emperor handed over the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine. Disastrously, order and counter-order from panic-stricken Paris caused the forces under the two marshals to divide, with MacMahon falling back on Châlons-sur-Marne, the Aldershot of France, and Bazaine on Metz. There was a brief pause while the outside world formed a reappraisal of the Prussians; discovering the Royal Guard, the
Illustrated London News
wrote glowingly that ‘a finer or more martial looking set of fellows can be found in no European Army’. Also in England, the Amberleys who had been so shocked by Second Empire morals typified Liberal reactions when they wrote ‘we are in great delight at their two defeats and hope the Prussians may push on now to Paris and so end the war soon’.

Bazaine, upset by another extemporized attack on his rear, decided to pass through Metz and fall back on the ancient fortress of Verdun, eventually to join up with MacMahon’s forces. But after all the French vacillations and changes of plan, time was running out. On August 15th, the vanguard of Bazaine’s retreating column found the only road to Verdun cut by Uhlans of Moltke’s fast-moving Second Army, between the villages of Rezonville and Mars-la-Tour in the middle of the Woëvre Plain. The following day a desperate encounter took place, degenerating rapidly into a ‘soldier’s battle’, with the Germans distinctly outnumbered and, for once, their staff-work falling down. By 2 p.m. every foot soldier and every gun had been thrown
into the battle, but the Germans were saved by cautious Bazaine’s fear of his left flank being turned. Losses were heavy, 17,000 for the French and 16,000 for the Germans, with a son of Bismarck shot in the thigh. That night the battle was broken off, each side claiming a victory. But it was Moltke’s men who held the field, astride Bazaine’s escape route.

Meanwhile, Moltke was bringing up the whole strength of his First and Second Armies, and Bazaine had withdrawn to a position of what he considered to be ‘exceptional strength’, at Gravelotte, a few miles back on the road to Metz, where just twenty years earlier a small triumphal arch had been built to celebrate Louis-Napoleon’s visit to Alsace-Lorraine. Behind the enemy guns, the tired French could see from their positions the blue outline of the Meuse hills surrounding Verdun in the distance; to them, as much as to the Germans of forty-six years later, it represented the never-to-be-attained Promised Land. On August 18th, 188,332 Germans supported by 732 guns moved in to attack 112,800 Frenchmen with only 520 guns. For the first time the bulk of both Armies were involved, and among the spectators General Sheridan, late of the American Civil War, had arrived to watch (from the German side) what would be perhaps the most decisive day of the war.

Wounded during the retreat through Metz, Bazaine, a promoted ranker, galloped from one threatened battalion to another, comporting himself all that day like a valiant brigadier, but never once like an Army commander. His attention was distracted by the costly efforts of the uncontrollable Steinmetz against his left flank; though, in fact, resting on a ravine, it was the strongest part of his line. But his right hung in the air at St.-Privat in the open Woëvre, which Canrobert had done little to fortify because—typically—the Army’s entrenching tools had been left behind in Châlons. As dusk was gathering, the Prussians (for whom the day so far had gone far from brilliantly) swung round to attack at St.-Privat, led by the Guards. It was the end. Through the night Bazaine’s Army flooded back in disorder into the sanctuary of Metz. The 20,000 casualties they had inflicted (the highest of the war) to their own 13,000 attested, nevertheless, to the heroism with which the French—though disillusioned and exhausted, outnumbered, out-generalled, and out-gunned—had fought that day. The Prussians, who had committed a number of almost catastrophic errors, had been severely shaken, with the Guards losing nearly all their officers, but, once again, the balance had been tipped largely by sheer offensive spirit.

In Paris the optimism engendered by the first fleeting triumphs had been replaced by a much darker mood. On August 7th, Edwin Child wrote in his diary (it was his first mention of the war): ‘In consequence
of disastrous news from the seat of war Paris was in a state bordering upon madness. I myself saw 3 or 4 Germans nearly punched to death, but for the interference of the police they would have been, in the evening. Excited mobs
partout parlant la politique
, in many cases even destructive. Several of the largest cafés being forced to close’. The next day he started packing up his employer’s jewellery for dispatch to London or Geneva, which he thought ‘a most ridiculous precaution as business happened to be rather brisk’. But everywhere people seemed to be expecting the arrival of the Prussians before the gates of Paris at any minute. On the 14th, four days even before Gravelotte, Child discovered that the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne had already been blocked by fortifications. Edmond de Goncourt, who managed to enter the Bois, experienced great emotion at the sight of the beautiful trees being felled. These days, he commented, had given the population of Paris ‘the look of an invalid; one sees on these faces, yellow, strained and drawn, all the heights and depths of hope through which the nerves of Paris have passed since August 6th’.

Meanwhile, news of the first defeats had caused the fall of Ollivier in favour of General de Montauban, Comte de Palikao (he had acquired his title after a triumph over Chinese peasants in 1860), who was to be both President of the Council and Minister of War. The Left, now abandoning all vestiges of pacifism, relentlessly assailed the Government for its martial shortcomings, with Jules Favre demanding that the faubourgs of Paris be armed, preparatory to a
levée en masse
. Although at the time few shared Prosper Mérimée’s pessimism that this measure would only provide ‘a new Prussian Army around our necks’, no one would later regret Favre’s proposal more than Favre himself. On August 16th there was a brief glimpse of what might be expected. Mounting disorder, provoked by the extreme Republicans, culminated in a serious insurrection in the working-class quarter of La Villette. A fire station was attacked in an attempt to acquire arms, and several wretched firemen were killed. One of the instigators, a man called Eudes, was sentenced to death but saved by subsequent events to play an important role during the Commune. On the day of the La Villette affair, Mérimée prophesied to Panizzi ‘We are heading inevitably towards a Republic, and what a Republic!’

It was also on August 16th that the Emperor arrived at Châlons, in a third-class railway carriage. There he found all the signs of a beaten army. Exhausted soldiers lay about, ‘vegetating rather than living’ as one staff officer described them, ‘scarcely moving even if you kicked them, grumbling at being disturbed in their weary sleep’. Generals crept through the camp in dirty uniforms, afraid to show themselves to their men. Drunks reeled everywhere, and discipline
hardly existed any more. Among the worst were the eighteen battalions of
Gardes Mobiles
from Paris, whose officers proved quite impotent to prevent them shouting, in response to the exhortation of ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’, ‘
Un-deux-trois! Merde!
’ Eventually they had to be dug out of the brothels and drinking-dens of Châlons and sent back to the capital. Out of the remaining debris MacMahon was feverishly trying to constitute a new army.

On the day after his arrival, Louis-Napoleon called a momentous conference at which the fate of the Empire was to be decided. It was attended by his cousin, the unattractive but astute Prince Napoleon (known as ‘Plon-Plon’), MacMahon, and a new personality, General Louis Jules Trochu, commanding the recently formed XII Corps. Aged fifty-five, Trochu had behind him (certainly by Second Empire standards) so distinguished a military career that one might well wonder why he was still a mere corps commander, and a freshly promoted one at that. As a young captain under Louis-Philippe he had been specially selected by the great Marshal Bugeáud to be his aide in Algeria, and he had remained with him until his death. In the Crimea, Trochu had commanded a brigade with great flair, and had been badly wounded during the storming of Malakoff. At Magenta and Solferino he had been unique among the French divisional commanders in manoeuvring his units with an almost peacetime precision, and his coolness under fire was quite outstanding. Then for the next ten years his career seemed to languish. As the Franco-Prussian War opened, he was to be found humbly offering to take a division to the front, but instead had been sent to command an inactive corps in the Pyrenees. The reason why Trochu’s promotion had lagged was partly that he was politically distrusted, regarded as an Orleanist—or worse—and both hated and feared by the Empress. In 1867 he had increased his disfavour in imperial eyes by publishing a tract called
L’Armée Française
in which he had placed his finger all too accurately on most of the things that were wrong with the French Army, not sparing the Government.

But this was not the only reason for the blighting of Trochu’s career. He was, so it seemed, something remarkably rare in a French general—unambitious. His dislike of the regime could not entirely explain, first, his desire, on the death of his patron, Bugeaud, ‘to re-enter into the most complete obscurity’; nor, subsequently, a series of refusals of important jobs. These had included the command of the Chinese expedition (Palikao got it instead) which would probably have carried with it a marshal’s baton, and which Trochu had declined on the grounds of his father’s illness. Was there something lacking in the man? Nevertheless the correctness of his warnings about the state of the French Army had now made him a Cassandra. This—coupled
to his known political orientations—had acquired him so sudden and great a popularity in Paris that on August 7th a hundred deputies of both Right and Centre had put his name forward as a successor to Ollivier. But Trochu had once again lost himself the job; this time by demanding as a condition that he be allowed to mount the tribune to reveal all the errors of the Government since 1866. Clearly this was not the time for such an inquest, and instead—to get him out of Paris—Palikao gave him the job of forming the XII Corps in Châlons.

On August 10th, Trochu had addressed an important letter to the Emperor’s War Council. In it he spoke already of a ‘Siege of Paris’, adding:

… the essential conditions for all sieges, imperatively necessary for this one, is that the struggle should be supported by a relieving army… to act by repeated attacks against the Prussian Army, which would as a consequence be incapable of a complete investment, and to protect the railways and major roads from the south by which the city would be provisioned….

The force to provide this ‘relieving army’ he thought could only be Bazaine’s, then assembled before Metz, which should at once retreat on Paris. Accurately he predicted that

at the present time you still have three routes with which to effect this retreat. In four days you will have only two. Within eight days you will have only one; that of Verdun. That day the Army will be lost.

As it turned out, August 17th, the day the Châlons conference opened, was in fact the day of Gravelotte, but news neither of this battle nor of Rezonville was yet known, so it was still assumed that Bazaine was retreating towards Châlons. At the conference, Prince Napoleon at once vigorously supported Trochu’s proposal. The Emperor was listless and silent, and seemed to have no will-power left; at their first encounter he had shocked Trochu by asking him hopelessly ‘Where is the King of Prussia?’, and throughout the conference it was clear to Trochu that the Prince was now ‘the only Napoleon who counted’. Feebly the Emperor suggested he should consult Eugénie, but he was brushed aside, and eventually Trochu’s proposals were agreed to. Trochu himself was to return as Governor of Paris, charged with its defence. Thus the strategy was laid for something not unlike that which was executed by Joffre and Galliéni on the Marne in 1914, though the relative strength of the forces available for it were more closely those of Weygand in June 1940. Still, there might have been a chance….

But on the afternoon of the 17th the dread news arrived that
Bazaine’s retreat had been cut off at Rezonville. Once again Louis-Napoleon wavered, and telegrams from Palikao and Eugénie began to arrive from Paris. On no account must he return to Paris with his forces, bearing the stigma of defeat. If he did, the dynasty would surely topple. A strong diversion against the Prussians was called for.
‘Louis, fais bien ton devoir’
, the words could not be forgotten. Then came fragmentary news that Bazaine had lost at Gravelotte and was now penned in at Metz. MacMahon was ordered to set forth with his ‘Army of Châlons’ to Reims, instead of Paris, and meanwhile in Paris Palikao was devising a staggering flanking operation that would simultaneously cut in two Moltke’s armies, and save Bazaine. After more disastrous vacillation, MacMahon received orders to march towards Montmédy on the Belgian frontier. With him went the Emperor, no longer in military command and a political ruler in name only, carried along like an unwanted parcel in the baggage train of his army, a phantom racked with pain, forbidden to return to his capital, and with no other option but to chase after his Nemesis. The march to the culminating tragedy at Sedan is vividly described by Émile Zola in
La Débâcle
. Old crones on the route jeered at the dispirited, bedraggled soldiery: ‘Cowards, cowards!’ The hundreds of stragglers brought the Army into further disrepute with the locals; French farmers barred their doors and threatened to fire on the starving troops begging for food. The Army disappeared into the forest wilderness of the Argonne, out of sight of the world. For several days Prussian Intelligence puzzled as to what MacMahon’s intentions could be. Then, on August 23rd,
The Times
reported ‘… the imminence of some great movement… Marshal MacMahon is executing strategical movements, which Marshal Bazaine will support at the proper moment’. These revelations reached Moltke on the night of the 24th, but still Moltke pondered; could anyone commit such a folly as to leave Paris uncovered and move across the front of superior enemy forces? But by the following night the pattern was clear. At once the ever-vigilant Uhlans were on the track; now like a pack of wolves, waiting for the stragglers; now like beaters, driving the frightened coveys towards where the guns lie in wait. On those torrid last days of August MacMahon’s men, harried incessantly by the Prussian cavalry, must have shared the emotions of their great-grandsons under the torrent of the Stukas, wondering where their own Air Force was.