The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (27 page)

But even the exploits of Sergeant Hoff could not suffice to distract Parisians from the uglier facts of life that were now becoming apparent for the first time. In his entry for November 12th, Washburne added: ‘During the last few days the suffering has greatly increased.’ It was true; about the same time Tommy Bowles recorded an ominously symptomatic observation. He had been watching fishermen haul in a seine net from a lake at the Bois de Boulogne. Not a fish was in it. The following day he was reporting that milk had run out, and on the 16th Washburne wrote: ‘Fresh meat is getting almost out of the question…. They have begun on dogs, cats, and rats…. The gas is also giving out.’ One of the first to try the new fare was Labouchere, who rated his introductory
salmi de rat
as ‘excellent—something between frog and rabbit’. But it was still a novelty. Yet another grim aspect of siege life—the threat of epidemics—began to intrude itself upon the scene; already during one week of November smallpox had claimed five hundred victims.
¹

All this, coming so soon after October 31st’s revelation of public discontent, made even Trochu realize that something had to be done swiftly and dramatically. The time had come for a major military effort. But where, and how?

For some time the wags of Paris had been talking about ‘
le plan Trochu
’. It was a word he was extremely fond of; even when he sat down to a game of piquet (according to Labouchere) he would warn his opponents, ‘‘
f’ai mon plan
’, and if he lost he would leave the table grumbling, ‘nevertheless, my plan was a good one’. A little ditty was beginning to make the rounds:

Je sais le plan de Trochu,

Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan!

Mon Dieu! Quel beau plan!

Je sais le plan de Trochu:

Grâce à lui rien n’est perdu.
¹

Later, a story was also put around by Trochu’s enemies that he had confided his mysterious ‘plan’ into the hands of his lawyer, but in fact the documents when examined proved to be a blank! Trochu in his memoirs hotly denies this slander; admitting, with perfect truth, that he had never had any plan at all.

Indeed, in so far as there was any military plan, it was Ducrot’s. There was no one in 1870 more representative of the best tradition of French generals than Ducrot; ardent, courageous to a fault, enterprising, but seldom rewarded by success. In 1914 he would have been and out-and-out supporter of Foch; in Algeria of the 1950’s, of General Massu and perhaps even of the O.A.S. He was a true disciple of
l’attaque à outrance
. Before the war Ducrot had warned Louis-Napoleon that the Army was not ready to fight Prussia, but that if war were inevitable the only way to win would be with a
Blitzkrieg
through the southern states of Germany. Captured with the Emperor at Sedan, the humiliation had driven him to escape, in circumstances which Bismarck claimed constituted a breach of parole. He was, in Trochu’s words, ‘
un véritable homme de guerre
’, and ever since the setback at Châtillon he had been champing at the bit to lead a major action. In the earliest days of the Siege, Trochu and Ducrot had both agreed (erroneously) that the forces in the provinces would never amount to much, and that, therefore, if the Prussian ring round Paris were to be burst, this would have to be done from the inside. There were three points which seemed to offer the best prospects of a breakthrough: between the Marne and the Seine to the south-east of Paris; on the Plain of St.-Denis to the north; and across the peninsula formed by the meanderings of the Seine at Gennevilliers to the north-west, one of the favourite painting grounds of the Impressionists. Of these, Ducrot considered the last alone combined both tactical and strategical advantages. The investing enemy forces in the Gennevilliers peninsula were less securely organized, and once their lines there had been pierced Ducrot’s men would find themselves in unoccupied, friendly territory, which would not be the case in other
directions. Moving north-westwards along the Basse-Seine via Rouen, Ducrot would then reach out for Le Havre, gaining a port through which Paris could be revictualled, linked with the French Armies of the provinces, and perhaps even supplied with fresh arms from overseas.

Such was Ducrot’s ‘plan’. He had, he says, just completed his studies of it when he heard, on October 7th, of Gambetta’s flight out of Paris. Immediately he presented the plan to Trochu. The pessimistic Trochu was by now thoroughly convinced that no attempt at breakthrough would succeed, but for want of any better suggestion both he and his Chief of Staff, General Schmitz, accepted Ducrot’s plan in principle, which henceforth became ‘
le plan Trochu
’. Ducrot was allowed to go ahead with preparations, to the extent of carrying out a limited operation at Malmaison on October 21st that aimed at securing the left flank of the breakthrough. It was tentatively planned that the attempt should be made between November 15th and 20th, by which time Ducrot (whose chief concern still lay in the quality of his troops) hoped to have a corps of fifty to sixty thousand well-trained men available. Meanwhile Trochu—until October 31st—remained sceptical towards the plan’s probability of success and phlegmatic in his efforts to push it, even hesitating to comply with Ducrot’s requests that Gambetta be kept fully informed about the operation. The ‘Red’ uprising, however, was enough to alarm Trochu into backing
Le Plan
with new zest.

But before
Le Plan
could go any further, all was upturned with a sudden, miraculous piece of news from Tours.

* * *

After his departure from Paris on October 7th, Gambetta had had an eventful flight. The balloon sailed over the Prussian lines at less than 2,000 feet, its occupants watching nervously while enemy riflemen below took pot shots at them. Hastily throwing out ballast, the pilot rose to safer altitudes before any harm could be done. After a few hours, he opened the gas valve and attempted to land on an empty space, but peasants came running up to warn the balloonists that they were in Prussian-occupied territory. They took off and later, spotting a group of men who looked like
franc-tireurs
, tried to land again. These were in fact Prussians. Fortunately their arms were stacked, and by the time they could grab them the balloon was rising rapidly once more; however, a bullet actually grazed Gambetta’s hand. After this hair-raising escape, the pilot allowed some time to elapse before trying a third landing. Eventually they came
down near Montdidier, at 3.30 p.m., and just a quarter of an hour ahead of the Uhlans. Despite his unnerving experiences, that same evening Gambetta issued a rousing proclamation, announcing his arrival, and calling the provinces to arms. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival at Tours, far exceeding the powers accorded him by Trochu, he had taken over the Ministry of War from old Crémieux while remaining Minister of the Interior, thus establishing himself as a virtual dictator. As his right-hand man he appointed Charles de Freycinet, only a little older than himself and almost equal to him in boldness and will-power. A civil engineer, Freycinet shared Gambetta’s civilian contempt for the orthodox military who had heretofore proved themselves so singularly unsuccessful in their own profession. He was a brilliant organizer, though neither this talent nor his and Gambetta’s combined spirit and drive could quite compensate for their lack of military know-how.

The situation which Gambetta and Freycinet inherited in October was hardly an encouraging one. The peasantry in unoccupied France was largely indifferent to the struggle; since the fall of the Empire, political wounds had reopened everywhere, with Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Republicans all clawing at each other. Many of the local authorities were still run by ardent, conservative supporters of Louis-Napoleon, who showed a reluctance to heed instructions emanating from the Republican Delegation at Tours. In the big cities, such as Lyons and Marseilles, there had been serious ‘Red’ disorders similar to that of October 31st in Paris. And there were also the same heated conflicts between the regular Army and those who urged the creation of Republican National Guard Forces. Gambetta, in one of his earliest reports back to Paris, wrote disgustedly: ‘The country districts are inert, the bourgeoisie in the small towns are cowardly, and the military administration either passive, or desperately slow.’ Inside the occupied areas, harsh and Teutonically thorough repressions of
franc-tireurs
and telegraph line-cutters, coupled with heavy fines levied upon the communities where they were active, had terrorized the inhabitants. Yet, in fact, this occupied territory still only amounted to a small fraction of the vast surface of France. Beyond the German lines of investment around Paris, all of the country to the south, south-west, and west remained free; as did most of the north, too, as far as Amiens and even further. It contained a reservoir of anything up to a million men of military age, which could be tapped. Moreover, the pinning-down of Moltke’s forces around Paris and Metz provided valuable time for the provinces to regain their breath, and their morale—and for Gambetta to reorganize.

Despite the failure of his predecessors, the ‘Old Men of Tours’, to
cope with the Augean problems confronting them, Gambetta’s impact was immediate. He drove his senior generals to daily despair, but between them he and Freycinet miraculously raised armies with a speed which the generals could never have achieved; certainly far beyond anything that Trochu or Ducrot had anticipated.
¹
Volunteers from all over France flowed into Tours, ‘their chests bristling with enormous daggers’, and arms began to arrive from depots all over the country—as well as from Britain and America. Above all, Gambetta, with his meridional passion, his Churchillian invective, managed to instil into his forces something that had been long lacking in France—the will to win. After General de la Motte Rouge on October 11th had lost Orléans to the Bavarian General von der Tann with only 28,000 men, Gambetta immediately sacked him, threatened him with court martial, and replaced him with General d’Aurelle de Paladines. A divisional commander in the Crimea, Aurelle had a magical touch with his troops that made him appear to be the perfect complement to Gambetta. By the beginning of November he had transformed a beaten, demoralized rabble into something resembling an Army; meanwhile, the Germans, their lines precariously extended in pursuit of what must have seemed to them little more than a colonial punitive expedition, were committing mistake after mistake unworthy of the great Moltke.

Pushed hard by Freycinet and Gambetta, Aurelle moved in with 100,000 men to strike the Bavarians in France’s first major offensive since the fall of Louis-Napoleon. On November 9th, a battle was fought at Coulmiers some ten miles west of Orléans. Von der Tann was outnumbered by more than three to one; for once the French artillery, now supplied with percussion fuses, was as effective as the enemy’s; and by nightfall von der Tann was forced to retreat, beaten, and with his personal baggage abandoned to the French. Had the French cavalry shown more persistence, defeat would probably have been turned into annihilation; but as it was Gambetta’s forces had won for France her first clear victory of the war. The next morning Orléans was reentered, and for several days the scenes of jubilation there astonished by their fervour members of the Anglo–American ambulance left behind with the German wounded.

Valid as the reasons for rejoicing were, the victory at Coulmiers was, alas, but part of a strategical error which was to pave the way to France’s final catastrophe. In his first apprecaitions, Gambetta,
vésted with absolute authority and complete freedom to communicate with the remainder of unoccupied France, saw himself now as the sole arbiter of the nation’s strategy; clearly, the supreme planning could no longer reside with Trochu and Ducrot locked up in Paris. To Gambetta, the amateur strategist, the objective was equally clear; Paris must be relieved from the outside, and by the most direct route. This meant via Orléans, a distance of less than seventy miles as the crow flies. But Gambetta committed a cardinal error in overlooking the tenuousness of his communications with Trochu. For whereas the balloon service had already provided a tested and reliable means of Paris informing and instructing the provinces, signals in the reverse direction had to depend solely upon the spasmodic, insecure, and quite unreliable pigeon post; for this reason it would obviously be a great deal easier for Tours to co-ordinate with Paris’s plans than
vice versa
.

Thus, while throughout October Paris had been pursuing Ducrot’s plan, aimed at linking up with the provinces along a north-westerly axis, Gambetta was planning to join hands with the Paris garrison from almost the opposite angle. At least part of the fault for this divergency of strategy seems to lie in Trochu’s procrastination in informing Gambetta. On his own admission, he first told his deputy, Favre, of Ducrot’s Basse-Seine project during the first fortnight of October. ‘Have you briefed Gambetta?’ asked Favre. ‘No’, replied Trochu, advancing by way of explanation his doubts about Gambetta’s ability to make a serious effort in the provinces. Favre and other members of the Government insisted that Gambetta be informed at once, but it was not until the 14th that this was actually undertaken, by means of a friend of Gambetta’s called Ranc who was intending to balloon out of Paris. In case Ranc should fall into enemy hands it was decided to give him no written orders; instead, he was summoned to the Louvre and there personally briefed by Trochu. After the war, to Trochu’s indignation, Ranc denied having received any instructions at all for Gambetta. It does seem likely that, bearing in mind Trochu’s habitual long-windedness and his early pusillanimity towards Ducrot’s plan, nothing so precise as a clear-cut order was issued for Ranc to convey. Certainly Gambetta claimed he took Ranc’s dispatch as no more than a suggestion, and one that did not happen to attract him. As follow-ups to Ranc’s mission, more definite orders to Gambetta were, however, sent on the 19th, 23rd, and 25th of October. But by this time Gambetta was thoroughly committed to his Orléans strategy. Like Nelson, he turned a blind eye to Trochu’s signals, later insisting, disingenuously, that they had never been seriously discussed at Tours as constituting anything so
definite as a plan, and at the same time failing to inform Trochu of his own project. By November 10th, Trochu—thoroughly frustrated—had still heard no word from Gambetta and now sent yet another dispatch, this time specifying that Bourbaki be sent to establish himself on the Basse-Seine. But it was too late; Aurelle’s troops were at that moment reoccupying Orléans, and Gambetta was already considering his next move