The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (3 page)

Some of the episodes related in this book will hardly be palatable to Frenchmen born now, and in recording them the author exposes himself to certain obvious charges. The Battle of Verdun, hideous tragedy though it was for both sides, has justly come to be regarded as France’s ‘finest hour’, but both the Siege and the Commune lie somewhere at the other end of the scale. Edmond Goncourt, a Parisian himself, advised in the middle of the Siege that ‘posterity should not presume to relate to future generations of the heroism of the Parisians of 1870’. As the Commune crumbled in May 1871, some twenty thousand Parisians were slaughtered by their fellow-countrymen; and, for all our recent conditioning, the modern mind boggles at setting such occurrences inside what passed for the world’s most civilized city.

It is not always easy to place an episode in its right historical context. Yet it was, in fact, all not so long ago; the daughter of a young Englishman Edwin Child, who witnessed many of the events recounted in this book was still alive when I wrote
The Fall of Paris
; Pétain, whose long, sad life ended in 1951, was a schoolboy outside Paris during the
Siege and lived to play a vital part in two World Wars; Joffre, who manned the Paris ramparts as a volunteer gunner, was to lead the French Army from 1914 until Verdun ruined him; Mayor Clemenceau of Montmartre, who by a slight twist of fate might have been shot by either the Communards or the Government forces, survived to impose the Versailles Treaty on the defeated Germans of 1918. Winston Churchill was born four and a half years after the Commune was suppressed; Lenin, a few months before the Franco-Prussian War broke out; while Karl Marx was then fifty-two. There were also links with the past; among the many who defended Paris with their oratory was Victor Hugo, old enough to remember the Grand Army of the first Napoleon in which his father had been a general; and among the spectators on the Prussian side were Generals Burnside and Sheridan, veterans of the more recent American Civil War.

Karl Marx’s paper on the Commune, ‘The Civil War in France’, which he wrote while ‘Bloody Week’ was still raging in Paris (although he himself got no closer to the seat of war than the British Museum), must be rated one of the all-time classics of journalism. His facts were astonishingly accurate; but he then proceeded to distort them for his own dialectic ends. One of the other principal difficulties in writing the present book was that it was virtually impossible to find any published sources on the Commune that are not violently
parti pris
: either Marxist or bourgeois in sympathy. Similarly, French accounts of the Siege, strongly subject to contemporary emotions, have to be treated with caution. Fortunately, there exists a wealth of ‘neutral’ rapportage, not to be found in two subsequent ‘World’ Wars. Britain—as well as the U.S.A.—was a non-belligerent, and the correspondents of the leading British papers ranged far and wide with the forces of both sides during the Siege, and subsequently under the Commune. Journalism was still an honoured trade, and their accounts—reinforced by others such as the official reports of a shrewd and level-headed American Minister, Elihu Washburne—were as literate, often superbly so, as they were objective. With the advent of the telegraph (and later the balloon from Paris), and in the absence of all forms of censorship, the Franco-Prussian War received a quicker and more accurate coverage than any war before, or since.
¹

In the further pursuit of objectivity, I advertised in various American and British journals, inquiring after unpublished sources on the Siege and the Commune, and expecting to get perhaps three or four responses. Instead, to my astonishment, I received well over a hundred, many containing balloon letters actually flown out of besieged Paris. Much of the original material in this book was thanks to
the kindness, and trust, of these correspondents, to whom I am more indebted than I can say. Space does not, unfortunately, permit me to express my appreciation to all of them individually, but I feel I must single out those few to whom I owe particular gratitude: Miss E. Child, for placing at my disposal the letters, journals, and mementoes of her father, Edwin Child—a rich source of unpublished material subsequently bequested to King’s College, London; Major-General Sir E. L. Spears, Bt., for letters written to his grandfather, Edward Louis Hack;
¹
the Hon. Mrs. Mervyn Herbert, for access to the papers of Dr. Alan Herbert; Mrs. Stewart-Mackenzie of Seaforth, for the loan of the letters of her grandfather, Colonel the Hon. John Stanley; the Hon. Nancy Mitford and the Hon. Lady Mosley, for putting me on to both the Stanley papers and the writings of their grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles; Miss Clare Blount, for the loan of the letters of Sir Edward Blount; Mrs. C. H. Cole, for the papers of her great-uncle, Benjamin Wilson; Mr. Keith Brown, for the letters of his grandfather, William Brown; and, among my French correspondents, particularly to M. G. Antoine Girot, for providing access to the papers of his great-granduncle, Louis Péguret.

In addition, I must express my thanks individually to the following, here and in the United States, for various documents kindly loaned, or assistance given: Mr. R. C. Buss, Mr. E. G. Pierce, Miss Helene B. Lawrance, Miss Rosemary Meynell, Mr. H. T. Glover, Miss Patience Harbord, Mrs. Laura Strang, Mrs. M. F. Carter, Mr. Frederick J. Burnley, Mrs. W. M. Denham, Mr. Stephen Z. Starr, Mr. C. H. Gibbs Smith, Mr. Maurice Lyon, Mrs. V. Young, Mr. Francis C. Blount, the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, the Société Jersiaise, and the Wallace Collection.

I am especially grateful to Professor Michael Howard (whose excellent book,
The Franco-Prussian War
, in itself requires a separate note of indebtedness), Sir Isaiah Berlin, and Dr. A. L. Rowse for advice and suggestions made at different stages of the book. Much painstaking research and sifting of the unpublished material was carried out for me in the earlier phases by Mr. Michael Wheeler-Booth, whose help was invaluable to me. I am also profoundly indebted to Mr. Robert K. Windbiel and Mr. Robert Yeatman, for reading the manuscript with critical eyes, and particularly to Mrs. Venetia Pollock, who also performed the same service for my earlier
book, The
Price of Glory
; and lastly to Mrs. Renira Horne, both for her valuable criticisms, and support. Needless to say, any errors that remain in the text are mine alone.

Finally, I must record my thanks to Mrs. C. M. James and Mrs. A. R. Bruce for the arduous labour of transcribing my notes and typing the manuscript, and to Mrs. James additionally for preparing the bibliography as well as assisting on various points of research.

* * * * *

Over the ensuing years, I have been indebted to numerous correspondents and other authors who have provided helpful comments and new material; out of the many, I would like to mention, in particular, Mr. Frank Jellinek, Mr. W. M. McElwee MC of Sandhurst, and Mr. Michael Rosen of San Francisco. Though limited by space, in this new edition I have tried wherever possible to incorporate corrections, amendments and new material. Over the intervening years, events have taken place that modify, perhaps, previous perceptions, particularly of the Commune; Vietnam, Afghanistan, civil strife in the Lebanon and the
événements
of 1968 in Paris itself, at once spring to mind. But, for all these revised perceptions, I have personally come across few new sources that cause one radically to amend the historical record of 1870–1. Among the recent works to be found listed in the revised bibliography at the end of this book, in addition to the monumental two-volume
oeuvre
by my colleague of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Theodore Zeldin,
France 1848–1945
, and Eugene Weber’s provocative
Peasants into Frenchmen
, I would however like to draw special attention to
The War Against Paris, 1871
by Robert Tombs, for its thoughtful new perception of the role of Thiers’ ‘Versailles Army’ in the reconquest of Paris from the Communards.

Alistair Horne

Turville, March 1989

PART ONE

THE SIEGE

The Great Exhibition of Paris, 1867

1. The Greatest Show on Earth

T
HE
winter preceding the year of 1867 had been one of those, rare enough in Paris, that just never seemed to end. Spring itself was so far no more than a prolongation of the season of sleet and snow, whose gloom had served to intensify the shadows pressing in upon Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire. Pessimists and the ubiquitous critics of the regime were hastening to predict that the Great Exhibition, intended as a brilliant cameo of the reign which would distract uneasy minds, would never get off the ground. Indeed, a bare ten days before the official opening on April 1st, a sea of mud had prevented the Emperor from travelling by coach from the Tuileries to inspect progress at the Champ-de-Mars. The next day five hundred workmen were set to work clearing the roads, while an even larger task force rushed preparations on the exhibition grounds.

To the astonishment of most of Paris, the Cassandras were confounded. Unlike its predecessor in 1855, which Queen Victoria had visited and which had opened a fortnight late while exhibits were still uncrated (reminding cynical Parisians of a theatre where the curtain went up with the actors
en déshabillé
), the Great Exhibition began with faultless punctuality. True, with the signs of winter and haste not yet
erased, it gave some the heart-rending presentiment of attending ‘the baptism of a puny child that seemed born only to die’. Then as April passed, the sun suddenly came out, all at once the shadows cleared, and even Haussmann’s pampered, opulent Paris had to admit that she had given birth to the spectacle of the epoch.

The focus of the Exhibition, a few yards from where the Eiffel Tower stands today, was a vast elliptical building of glass 482 metres long, set in a filigree of ironwork, not unlike London’s own Crystal Palace. So high was the dome, marvelled Théophile Gautier, ‘that one had to use a machine to reach it, and the roof with its red arcades breached by the blue of the sky gave you a sensation of the immensity of the Coliseum’. Inside this huge pavilion all the leading countries of this new industrial era had ranged exhibits depicting the peak attained by human civilization. ‘There art elbowed industry,’ added Gautier, ‘white statues stood next to black machines, paintings hung side by side with rich fabrics from the Orient.’ The pavilion was divided into seven regions, each representing a branch of human endeavour, where the various nations of the world exhibited their most recent achievements. It was the year that Lister introduced antisepsis, and Nobel invented dynamite; in other spheres of activity, Russia annexed Turkestan, and the U.S.A. bought Alaska from Russia. Among her exhibits, America, just recovering from the Civil War, had sent a complete field service or ‘ambulance’, as it was then called, representing the peak of military medicine of the day. But the crowds passed it by, bestowing more attention upon a patent new piece of American furniture, described as a ‘rocking chair’. Britain had sent locomotives and imposing bits of heavy machinery, as well as a mass of Victoriana that attempted (with limited success, Paris thought) to combine comfort with elegance. There were displays of a new featherweight ‘wonder’ metal, ‘aluminium’—so precious in its rarity that the Emperor himself had ordered a special dinner service made of it. In the science section which, with machinery, comprised the nucleus of the Exhibition, there were also some marvellous products of a substance known as ‘petroleum’; a name which no one thought would cause a particular shudder in Paris in a few years’ time.

From Prussia had been sent, among other things, an equestrian statue of the venerable King Wilhelm I. Parisians found it slightly ridiculous, but were too polite to say so. Rather more eye-catching was an immense 50-ton gun exhibited by a Herr Krupp of Essen, who had started life as a manufacturer of railway wheels. Firing a 1,000-lb. shell which weighed as much as two small cannon, it was the biggest thing the world had ever seen, and for this it won a prize. At the Crystal Palace in 1851 Herr Krupp had also shown some of his new
steel cannon (the rest of the world was still casting them in bronze), but though women had found them ‘enchanting’, he had gained practically no orders. So this time he took the bold step of presenting the monster to his king; an extravagant but awkward gift. French military men eyed Herr Krupp’s exhibit with perhaps more attention than they would have done had that nation of comic professors and beer-swilling bombasts not astonished Europe by trouncing Austria in a staggeringly short campaign the previous year. But for the moment the world was all peace, and the menacing black gun seemed to belong as much to the past as the droll collection of cannibal arms exhibited by missionaries at a near-by stand. Paris as a whole was not unduly impressed; any more than she was by the grave Prussian officers with their mutton-chop whiskers who showed such flattering interest in the relief plans of all the great French fortresses which their hosts had obligingly placed on show. Besides, thought Paris, the Krupp gun—like its progenitors—was gross and ugly, and therefore to be regarded as of no serious account.