The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (19 page)

Old hands like Blanqui, Delescluze, and Pyat could recall all too vividly how in those previous revolutions the bourgeois had usurped the workers’ birthright, and they had fears that it was going to happen all over again. Every utterance from the moderate camp claiming that the ‘Reds’ constituted as grave a menace as the Prussians was seized upon as a warning of what to expect. Sooner or later the treacherous bourgeois would do a deal with the reactionary Prussians, and conjointly they would then set about stamping once more on the
true
Republicans of Paris. Favre’s interview with Bismarck was itself regarded with gravest mistrust, as revealed by Blanqui writing in
La Patrie en Danger
of September 22nd: ‘Since the Fourth of September the Government of the so-called National Defence has had only one thought: peace. Not a victorious peace, not even an honourable peace, but peace at any price… it does not believe in resistance….’ Every fresh military setback, every sign of flaccidity (of which there was to be no shortage) on the part of Trochu and his colleagues, henceforth came to be interpreted as evidence of ill faith, of collusion; worse, of treachery.

From all sides they bombarded the Government with suggestions on how to conduct the war more vigorously, while at the same time
seizing the opportunity of pushing through whatever municipal reforms they could in areas of Paris under their control. As early as September 15th a body describing itself as the ‘Central Committee of the Twenty
Arrondissements
’ published a manifesto demanding ‘Municipal elections, the control of the police and the election and responsibilities of all magistrates to be placed in the hands of these municipalities, absolute rights of the Press, the right to hold meetings and to form affiliations, the expropriation of all essential foodstuffs….’ A week later the Central Committee issued another manifesto, declaring ‘Point One: The Republic may not negotiate with an enemy occupying its territory. Point Two: Paris is resolved to let itself be buried under its own ruins rather than surrender….’ This then went on to demand the suppression of the Prefecture of Police and the election of an all-powerful
Commune
of Paris. At Belleville a meeting of 3,000 ‘citizens’ unanimously ‘deposed’ the mayor of the 19th
arrondissement
, ordaining his ‘immediate arrest by the citizens’. The innate anticlericalism of the extreme Republicans was not long in bursting to the surface; on October 9th, a letter published by a Citizen Berthydre outraged bourgeois opinion by suggesting that churches should be used to house the ‘brave National Guard’ as well as cattle and sheep, and not long afterwards
La Patrie en Danger
was dictating that ‘all the hospitals must be purged of priests who are to be arrested, armed and placed before the patriots in the most dangerous places’. Meanwhile, fresh grist was added to the ‘Red’ mill when, at the end of September, the Government feebly adjourned the holding of municipal elections from one day to another, finally announcing on October 8th that they would postpone them altogether until the Siege was raised.

And now a source of power potential such as the Paris extremists had never known before was there to lend immense amplification to their voices. The
Garde Nationale
had rapidly established itself as
the
storm-centre of the Left. From the Government’s point of view it was turning out, in more ways than just one, worse even than the most sceptical regular soldiers, like Trochu, had predicted. Originally, in the minds of such rosy-spectacled liberals as Ernest Picard (and, indeed, Gambetta too), the creation of the
Garde
would fulfil three functions: it would quickly produce a mass of trained soldiers; it would provide relief for the poor of Paris, now confronted with widespread unemployment; and it would keep the ‘Reds’ quiet by giving them an outlet for their bellicosity. But in only the second respect had the Government hopes shown any likelihood of vindication. For their services, National Guardsmen received the handsome emolument of 1·50 francs a day, and their wives half-pay (Pyat had promptly
demanded that ‘unmarried wives’ should be accorded the same benefits).
¹
Undoubtedly it was to save a great many of the poorer Parisians from starvation during the Siege, but even these benefits had their built-in dangers, as the shrewd eye of young Tommy Bowles quickly noted: ‘These thirty sous will constitute a formidable difficulty when the war is over, for the recipients have already come to consider they have a right to State pay and will strongly resist its withdrawal…’

Whether through the allure of the thirty sous, or genuine patriotism, in sheer numbers the recruitment of the National Guard had been an unexpected success, and the initial enthusiasm in its ranks quite enormous. Between September 5th and 13th alone, 78 new battalions (each of roughly 1,500 men) had been formed, and by the end of the month the National Guard numbered 360,000 men; twice as many as had been anticipated by the Government. Everybody seemed to be in it; Cresson, later Prefect of Police, alleged that no less than 25,000 fugitives from justice had enrolled, while an Englishman calling at Rothschilds in the city met Monsieur le Baron himself in uniform, waiting to go on duty on the fortifications. Each battalion was composed on a regional basis, and the proletarian units from Belleville and Ménilmontant presented a marked contrast to those from the richer
arrondissements
, who sometimes provided themselves with seductive young
vivandières
, got up like the regimental daughters of comic opera. Uniforms presented an extraordinary motley: some battalions were clad in chocolate brown, some in brilliant green, while others (presaging 1914–18) wore a romantic
bleu horizon
, and in the earliest days the
Garde
mounted watch on the ramparts in anything from tartan to sheepskins. But the force quickly divided itself into two components, proletarian and bourgeois, and equally quickly there sprang up grievances at the size and composition of each others’ forces. In the opinion of at least one critical British observer, Labouchere, there was absolutely no doubt in the early days as to which of the two rival sets gave the better impression (though this was an opinion he later changed): ‘I have been struck with the difference between one of these poor fellows who is prepared to die for the honour of his country… and the absurd airs, and noisy brawls, and the dapper uniforms of the young fellows one meets with in the fashionable quarters. It is the difference between reality and sham….’

To command the National Guard, Trochu had appointed General Tamisier, a regular officer of bourgeois origins who completely shared
his superior’s misgivings about ‘irregular’ forces, and whose only recommendation in the eyes of the ‘Red’ battalions was that he had spent seventeen days in prison for having helped try to suppress Louis-Napoleon’s
putsch
in 1851. Jules Favre later remarked of him: ‘Authority floated in his hands and his courage, which would have done wonders before the enemy, was impotent to vanquish the timidity of his character.’ And, more scornfully, the leader of one of the Belleville battalions, the flamboyant Flourens, regarded him as ‘a fine old man, of the stamp of a retired grocer, who must twenty years ago have had some energy’. But in the ‘Red’ battalions the real power lay in the hands of the demagogues, for they had insisted on the right to elect their own officers—to which the Government had weakly consented. The elections proceeded, regardless of any military qualifications, and it was usually the notorious soap-box orators and the red-hot revolutionaries who grabbed the top ranks. Quoting a ‘dandy’ he met one day at his club, Bowles recounts a typical situation:

‘ “What bores me is that my sergeant is my
concierge
. He drinks a good deal at the wine-shop of our quarter, and so he was known, and so,
ma foi
, they elected him. Fancy, I was obliged to ask his permission to come and dine!” ’ It was hardly surprising that discipline in the
Garde
as a whole was all but non-existent. In one of its very first engagements, troops from one of its battalions had broken into a nunnery and dressed themselves up in nuns’ clothing’. Later, a ‘curious-looking’ colonel arriving to inspect a unit of the
Garde
was exposed as a woman; the mistress, in fact, of the real colonel, who had not wished to break up his game of cards. Such episodes—added to the contrast between the noisy braggadocio of some of the battalions and their actual performance when confronted with the enemy—established the
Garde
as an object of ribaldry in Paris; which, if nothing else, at least helped maintain Parisian spirits as the Siege wore on.

‘… however the war may end, it has given the French proletariat practice in arms, and that is the best guarantee of the future.’

Too many Parisians agreed with Labouchere’s cockney coachman—‘Why, sir, giving them fellows
chassepots
is much like giving watches to naked savages’; or with Prosper Mérimée, who had predicted gloomily to his friend, Panizzi, as early as August: ‘Paris is quiet, but, if one distributes arms to the
faubourgs
as Jules Favre demands, here is a new Prussian Army that we shall have upon our necks’. Nothing would convince the military that the
Garde
could be turned into proper soldiers, and nothing could dispel from bourgeois minds Machiavelli’s warning that ‘he who commands the defence of a town will shun arming the citizens tumultously as he would shun a reef’. And indeed, if they could have read what Karl Marx would be writing to his old friend, Dr. Kugelmann, from London in a few weeks time, the Paris bourgeoisie would have felt even more cause for fear:

So no function more active than that of standing watch on the ramparts well behind the actual front, and of helping keep order in the city (although in the long run they created graver disturbances than they quelled) was entrusted to the
Garde Nationale
. Tommy Bowles watched them at work: ‘They make holes and fill them with spikes; sow their ramparts with nails, points upwards, and propose even to cover these with broken glass, as if the Prussians were so many cats.’ Edwin Child, who in October joined a kindred body, the
Garde Civique
, found himself delegated to supervising the distribution of meat at his local butcher, and in despair transferred to the
Garde Nationale
the following month. But, as will be seen later, he was to find service there even more disillusioning. Louis Péguret, a young Frenchman with left-wing sympathies who joined the 115th Battalion on September 16th, found his duties confined to drilling twice a day, and a week later his first ‘operation’ seems to have been to square the eternal triangle: ‘… arresting and conducting to the
Commissaire
a man, his wife and another woman. You can see it’s not very perilous….’, but at least he felt that out of the uniform issued him he would eventually be able to cut ‘a magnificent pair of trousers and fine waistcoat’.

To the
Gardes
the sense of their uselessness was understandably demoralizing; as they whiled away the time smoking, drinking, playing cards, and gossiping, the boredom became chronic and led to graver maladies. Paul Verlaine the poet, newly married to a sixteen-year-old bride, had joined the 160th Battalion, standing duty near Issy at the south of Paris: ‘At first, it was veritably charming, veritably, and I am in no way exaggerating. To begin with, it was that delicious month of September with its sharp, pale mornings….’ Then he describes the infiltration of ‘bad habits’—of heavy drinking, culminating in ‘the first quarrel of our youthful household… it happened after I had returned home excessively vinous (to be more precise, it was absinthe) from the ramparts. My wife burst into sobs….’ It marked the beginning of the breakdown of their marriage, and the formation of a vice that eventually ruined Verlaine and drove him into the arms of Rimbaud.

Drunkenness, the opium of the masses under Louis-Napoleon and now an inevitable by-product of the National Guard’s enforced indolence, was to become one of the worst scourges of the Siege. Even when Paris was approaching her last rat, the alcohol never ran out; you could buy a lot of cheap wine on 1.50 francs a day, and besides it kept you warm. ‘Even the
cochers de fiacre
are drunk upon their boxes, to an extent that is really astonishing’, Tommy Bowles was remarking in November. ‘It is the thirty sous pay that does it all.’ A
few years previously, General Grant had banned all alcohol in his army, but this was a measure that was beyond the courage of Trochu. So the
Garde
spent its days in the
bistros
, and it was by no means unsual to see them marching to their posts in crooked, erratic lines. Disaffection spread, and the consumption of so much fiery liquor seemed only to add further heat to the anti-Government passions of the ‘Red’
Gardes
.

Next to drink, the greatest distraction for the proletarian battalions was to spend their evenings listening to the inspired orators at one or other of the ‘Red’ Clubs. Closed during the last days of the Empire, the first of the Clubs to reopen its doors was the Folies-Bergère (not to be confused, in the
spectacles
it offered, with its modern successor), but ‘reactionary pressure’ forced it to emigrate eastwards, where it became, more suitably, the Club des Montagnards. In the dense and smoky atmosphere, the audience came to seek warmth and shelter (until the gas was extinguished at 10 p.m.) amid this mass of sulphurous humanity, as well as reassurance against the perils of the outer world; but the Clubs also acted as substitutes for ‘the theatres and
salons
of the people’. Even when the theatres slowly reopened in October, the Clubs with their wild, often nonsensical, stars combined with the brilliant interpellations of Parisian wit from the hall still presented a steady, very cheap, and extremely amusing source of entertainment. Typical of what the Clubs offered at this level was the blasphemous orator who exclaimed that he would like ‘to scale heaven, and collar the Deity…’ to which a wag in the audience rejoined: ‘Why don’t you go there in a balloon?’ The output of sheer nonsense from the Clubs was quite remarkable, and was undoubtedly what in part prompted U.S. General Burnside’s famous remark after visiting Paris under truce in October: ‘It’s a madhouse inhabited by monkeys’. At one of the Clubs, Tommy Bowles could recall ‘the original flag of Joan of Arc’ being gravely produced. There was always a strong element of anti-religious obsession, and frequent declarations in favour of free love. Above all, the Clubs pullulated with suggestions to the Government on how to win the war, and even more brilliant inventions; including
escargots sympathiques
which were to carry messages in their shells through the Prussian lines. There was remarkably little time for any serious discussion of such unmilitary topics as Socialism.