The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (2 page)

And so, after a blessed pause of thirty-five years, the whole obscene business had started up again in the murderous July Days of 1830, with some hundreds of victims later commemorated by name on the July Column. In order to avoid further bloodshed, Charles X had left Saint-Cloud for Rambouillet and had made his leisurely way to the coast, embarking for England. At the same time, the incurably silly, posturing Lafayette had made a second appearance, indeed a Second Coming, on
the balcony of the old Hôtel-de-Ville, where he was able to persuade the usurper, Louis-Philippe, to drape himself in the tricolor flag, a gesture that did the trick, at least for the time being.

But, so it was said, the July Monarchy had turned out, almost from the start, to be unglamorous and therefore
boring
, the greatest crime that any modern French regime could commit. The King of the French himself, it was alleged, was a crashing bore, who talked too much, especially to gathered firemen, and who carried a green umbrella. Guizot, too, his sensible minister, had gone on too long (only eight years in fact), so he too had had to go, along with
Le Roi Bourgeois
. Of Lamartine it had been said at the time: ‘
M. de Lamartine était de ceux qui étaient devenus révolutionnaires pour se désennuyer
.’ And there had been many more like him at the time (as, indeed, there still are). This had brought a new round of killing in February 1848. Louis-Philippe, like his predecessor Charles X, had had the decency to go off quietly, landing at Newhaven, and heading first of all for Eastbourne before settling in Surrey.

The elections of that year had given an enormous majority to moderate provincial royalists; they had also been seen, as they were meant to have been seen, as a massive vote against Paris. The June Days had followed, accompanied by much of the usual silliness:
Marchons sur Varsovie
(a very long march indeed) and exploding in a new topography of barricades in the east central districts of the city. The fighting between the insurgents on the one side, and the Army and the National Guards, who had been brought in from the western districts or from the provinces, had been savage; there had been atrocities on both sides, hostages had been summarily despatched, including the Archbishop of Paris. The repression that had followed had been ferocious; many insurgents had been shot, many others had been deported to Algeria; and there had thus been created a new generation of Parisian avengers, especially among the widows or the female companions of the victims.

Haussmanisation had, if anything, made matters rather worse, by accentuating the class contrasts between one quarter and another, and by thus creating artisan ghettoes in the east and the north-east of Paris. The Butte des Moulins had been levelled, displacing an unruly population eastwards and rendering the Palais-Royal harmless from then on. But it had also made the wealthy western districts wealthier, the exclusive domain of middle-class families and their numerous servants, and the area had been further extended westwards by the taking in within the city’s boundaries of Neuilly, Chaillot, Passy and Boulogne.

So the principal theme of Alistair Horne’s remarkable book, and one eloquently proclaimed by its title,
The Fall of Paris
, is the decisive crushing of the place, as it would be, once and for all. So it might be seen as a hopeful theme, albeit one realised at extraordinary bitter human cost:
many, many more victims than those of the Terror of 1793–4. Adolphe Thiers, the man who, more than any other, had decided to settle accounts with the violent and dangerous city, with its strident claims to revolutionary universalism, has suffered much at the hands of historians, at least until the recent reassessment by Patrick Bury and Robert Tombs in their well-documented biography. It is clear from the present book that in suddenly removing his Government to Versailles, and in thus handing over the city to the bewildered, directionless Commune, he not only acted with decision, but that there could not have been an alternative line of action open to him. He (and his ministers) had got out, had succeeded where the unfortunate Louis XVI had failed. At different times, by a variety of advisers, none of whom had taken the trouble to study the ground or to take a look at maps, Louis had been counselled to head for Rouen or for Bourges. Thiers had at least managed to get his hastily packed Government, as well as a clutter of Generals, to the relative safety of Versailles. The surprised leaders of the Commune had done the rest, by failing to pursue him there at a time when they still had the advantage of numbers. So it could be said, in view of what finally happened, at the cost of an appalling bloodbath on a scale unequalled in the nineteenth century, that the little man had saved France from its capital. And for this he deserves considerable credit. Of course, the conflict was not just one between the Provisional Government on the one side, and the quarrelsome leaders of the Commune, supported by the inhabitants of the eastern and north-eastern districts on the other. There were the Prussians to be considered as well. The author is rightly concerned at all times to keep them in the picture throughout. As it turned out, their presence somewhat facilitated the task of the Thiers Government by sealing off most of the northern exits from the Capital.

As in any chronicle of events, dramatic or banal (in this case the former), there is the usual assortment of villains, sillies, the sensible, the victims and the pathetic, and the uncommitted, mere witnesses, in this case most of them American and English. The villains are readily identifiable: the apostles of hate: Rochefort, Pyat, Rigault, Ferré. There is a whole army of sillies, led, from behind, by France’s National Bore, her
Pompier National
, Victor Hugo, in full trumpeting bombast and Parisian Universalism, the City of Light. Here he is, as quoted by Mr Home, calling the peaceable cities of France to rise up in defence of their cordially (and rightly) hated capital: ‘Lyons,’ he enjoins it, familiarly, ‘take thy gun; Bordeaux, take thy carbine; Rouen, draw thy sword’ (this addressed to the most pacific and prudent of French cities), ‘and thou, Marseilles, sing thy song, and become terrible.’ One is glad to note that none responded to such declamatory appeals. There is more Hugolian bombast
later on: ‘Paris’, he announces, ‘is resolved to let itself be buried under its own ruins rather than surrender,’ (he got the ruins). Later the old fool berates us, the English, for standing aside while the Capital of Civilisation is under siege. So it is with satisfaction that we hear of an English chronicler describing one of Hugo’s speeches as ‘of unexampled silliness’. He survives the Commune, of course, goes into exile, makes himself a nuisance in Brussels, so that the Belgian authorities sensibly move him on, and he ends up for a bit in Luxembourg. There are plenty of other sillies, though none on the Hugolian scale: they include the posturing Gambetta, the intolerable Louise Michel, the trying Elizabeth Dimitrieff, and the exhibitionist Bergeret.

Of the sensible, one would give first place to the patient Jules Favre. But Gladstone and his Foreign Minister, Granville, deserve more than a mention. They both expressed sympathy at the plight of France, and resolutely refused to get involved. Some might accuse them of smugness, I think they were just showing remarkable good sense.

The victims of these terrible events are innumerable, 22,000 or more, many of them are nameless, though many could be identified through the courts-martial documents in Vincennes. Two notable victims at once come to mind: the obstinate, honourable Louis Rossel, a regular Army officer, the son of a French Protestant and of a Scotswoman, who eventually joined the Commune out of patriotism and who attempted to bring a minimum of discipline into
fédéré
ranks. The other is the Archbishop of France, Mgr Darboy.

What adds to the horror of this chronicle of war and violence is a topography that one associates with the early pictures of Sisley: the valleys of the Seine, the Marne, the rivers often in flood, the riverside villages under snow, a reassuring list of place names, many within walking distance of Paris; and which is evocative of week-ends and happy leisure: Villiers, Champigny, Joinville, Epinay-sur-Orge, Bougival, Rueil, Gennevilliers, Issy, Le Point-du-Jour. Comfortable houses in ochre-coloured stone, with green shutters, are revealed unroofed and with gaping holes in their walls, there are uneven lines of broken poplars, and war has come to a peaceful, previously banal, rather pretty countryside.

There is little place for humour in this account of war and revolution, revolt and repression. But I would single out the ‘lamb offered to one British correspondent [that] ironically turned out to be a wolf.’ And here is
La Semaine Sanglante
, with Paris burning, as seen from the fashionable
Pavilion Henri IV
, on the Terrasse de Saint-Germain, high up above the great bend of the Seine: a number of buildings appear to be alight, one of them seems to be the Louvre, ‘a large lady exclaimed: “Let’s hope he doesn’t mean the department store!”’ She seems to have got her priorities right.

* * * * *

In this new edition of
The Fall of Paris
, the author has incorporated much of the work published since the book first came out in 1965, including the large number of books that were published in 1971 for the Centenary of the Commune. His book offers much the most comprehensive account of the War itself, the long Siege, the near-famine, the almost accidental proclamation of the Commune, in an atmosphere of holiday rejoicings and light-heartedness, and the terrible course of events that ensued. It is a brilliant account of one of the most sombre periods of modern French history. At the time of the present
Bicentenaire
of another Revolution, it is as well to be reminded that revolutions are not just about dancing in the streets,
la fête populaire
and similar light-hearted occasions for collective joy, but that they are also about lynchings and corpses in the streets.

Richard Cobb

Wolvercote, May, 1989

Preface

T
ODAY
the thought of a European war between Germans and Frenchmen seems to belong to a remote era years away. This past half century of peace—already longer than the interval between the Franco-Prussian war and 1914—remains
the
outstanding historical achievement of the much criticized and little-loved European Common Market. But the conception of this book dates back to the 1950s, when—as a young foreign correspondent in Germany—I lived among the visible legacy of that last bout of Franco-German hostility, which was then still all too tangible and too close for comfort. Yet relations between France and Germany, the root of evil in the world I grew up in, had already taken a sudden miraculous turn; and, in contemplation of this happy fact, I began thinking of a book which might trace the lethal course of these relations over the preceding century. War has a curious way of crystallizing the more peaceful trends of history, and of pointing up the developments of the intervening years; as I later found Theodore Zeldin observing in his impressive
France 1848—1945
,
^*
the French Army in particular also ‘acts as a magnifying lens revealing aspects of national problems, and of personal tensions, more clearly than they can be seen in civil society.’

Thus my projected book was to be woven around three great battles, decisive in their own war, and in wider historical contexts as well. They were to be Sedan 1870, Verdun 1916, and Sedan 1940. There were many links—tactical, strategic, historical, and psychological—connecting the battles in this blood-sodden corner of France which made the project seem a fascinating one. Then a first visit to the sinister battlefields of Verdun engendered emotions that were never to leave me alone. As I read deeper and deeper, Verdun assumed predominance in my mind; subjectively, it almost seemed
the
central event in the war which, though ended seven years before I was born, overshadowed my childhood. And, more than any other battle I had ever read of, it seemed not only to symbolize the whole war, but to have affected the destinies of nations far beyond the actual conflict. Gradually it overlaid the rest of the trilogy, and out of it came a book called
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916.
This in turn was followed, as the third leg of the trilogy, by
To Lose a Battle: France 1940.

But while writing The Price of
Glory
I found myself constantly having to refer back to 1870, and I knew that when I had finished the current project I would return there. Then once again the ground began to shift beneath my feet. Historical research is like a moving staircase; one thing is certain, that when you come to the end you will have journeyed far from your starting-point. As I set forth on the Franco-Prussian War, the brief encounter at Sedan—which sealed the fate of the Second Empire—began to be eclipsed by the long-protracted Siege of Paris as the supreme drama of the war. At Sedan the French never had a chance, the issue having already been decided, militarily, elsewhere; at Paris there was a chance, if not of actually winning the war, at least perhaps of gaining less humiliating terms in the peace that followed. And what was lost at Paris, by France, was much more than just a battle.

The greatest difficulty in writing about the Siege of Paris was to separate it from the infinitely grimmer civil war that followed on the heels of the departing Germans. In the event, the two episodes proved inseparable; once again the escalator jolted forward, and I found myself confronted by the Commune as historically the more portentous of the two.

In purely military terms, Paris fell twice in the space of six months; first to Bismarck, secondly to the French Government forces under Thiers. But she also fell in more than one sense; pride, as well as her traditional role of being the prime centre of European power, were involved (the latter never to be restored), and finally there was the grim fall of morality that accompanied the repression of the Commune.