The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (31 page)

At 3.15 that afternoon, so the Prussian Crown Prince’s Chief of Staff, General von Blumenthal, noted in his journal, he received a telegram which ‘informed me that the enemy appears to be in retreat on Joinville….’ After dinner I played whist for the first time, and during the game had the unspeakable joy of receiving a message from
Viebahn, telling of a brilliant victory won by the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg.’

But in Paris the populace for a day or two still lived in the illusion that the break-out might yet take place, as the official communiqués were less than enlightening. On the disastrous day of December 3rd, a M. Patte was writing happily to a lady friend in London that ‘just now the guns make the most dreadful noise, but we hear it, I can say with pleasure, as it is the cannon which announces to us the deliverance…’. Not until the 5th was Ducrot’s admission of defeat manifest. It was a bright, cold, bracing morning. Not a drum was to be heard anywhere. Goncourt spoke for all Parisians when miserably he entered in his journal: ‘the heights and depths of hope; this is what kills you. One believes oneself saved. Then one realizes one is lost…. Today the recrossing of the Marne by Ducrot has thrown us back into the darkness of failure and despair.’

The ebullient Ducrot himself was no further from despair. By the night of November 30th, he had already concluded that Paris herself was lost. After the battle there had been some bitter recriminations in the high command; General Blanchard, one of his corps commanders, had actually tried to provoke Ducrot to a duel by declaring (it was an allusion to the famous ‘dead or victorious’ proclamation) ‘I wish to know if your sword is as long as your tongue’. Ducrot had replied by offering his resignation, and requesting to revert to the ranks. The request was refused. Then, in the midst of all this misery and acrimony, on December 5th yet another deadly blow descended. It was a letter from Moltke, addressed to Trochu, studiously polite, but informing him of the crushing defeat that Frederick-Charles and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg had between them inflicted upon Gambetta’s divided forces, resulting in the recapture of Orléans.

In three days the Great Sortie had cost 12,000 officers and men; it had failed, and at the same time the relieving army from Tours had been stopped in its tracks. The plight of Paris now seemed hopeless. But still the fear of Red revolution, combined with the revealed harshness of Prussian peace terms, purged any idea of capitulation from the minds of the Government. The Siege would go on, though since the supreme military effort had failed it would henceforth be merely a matter of survival and attrition.

If the Government of National Defence could derive any consolation at all from the results of the Great Sortie, it was that it had at last managed to lay hands on the illusive firebrand, Flourens. In hiding since October 31st, he had heard that his
Tirailleurs
had been in action and had lost three men killed (presumably in the rout that Tommy Bowles had witnessed); impatiently he went off to join
them at Maisons-Alfort, and was promptly arrested on his return to Paris by order of General Thomas. But the seizure of Flourens was of itself a petty enough success.

Could
Le Plan
ever have succeeded? Could anything have lifted the Siege by November? Military history frowns upon ‘ifs’, but it does seem that
if
Tours and Paris could have co-operated in Ducrot’s original plan, and it had taken place, as projected, within the first fortnight of November (i.e. before the arrival of Frederick-Charles), the break through to Le Havre might well have succeeded. Even once the plan had been switched Gambetta’s forces might, if properly handled, also have reached Fontainebleau in time to help Ducrot; but whether Ducrot could ever have got that far remains open to doubt. The strategy of the second plan was fundamentally at fault; breaking out across the Marne, Ducrot would have had his flanks open to German attacks on both sides all the way to Fontainebleau, and would probably have been destroyed between the Marne and Seine. Bismarck, who had seen this, remarked calmly on hearing of the sortie on November 30th ‘Where could they go?…. They would put their heads in a sack. Such an attempt would be the best thing that could happen for us.’

Despite Bismarck’s confidence, however, the French attempt had succeeded in throwing the Prussian military leaders into considerable alarm for a short time, aware as they were of the tenuousness of their siege ring about Paris. At Versailles, there had been serious talk of crisis measures to be taken in the contingency of a break-out, and, though light in comparison to French casualty figures, the fresh losses suffered so long after the war had seemed over at Sedan made an unpleasant mark in German minds. For weariness over the prolongation of the war had set in both at home and at the front, and perhaps for this reason alone there existed some purpose in the Paris forces keeping up an aggressive attitude for as long as they were able.

The American Ambulance at Work on the Battlefield

11. The Outsiders Within

As the war dragged on, and Prussia showed herself apparently incapable of bringing it to a speedy conclusion, there was an additional fear never very far from Bismarck’s mind. Might others among the great powers be tempted to intervene, and thus rob the Germans of the completeness of victory?

The Austro-Hungarians, still mindful of their chastisement at Sadowa, had made it clear they would only enter the war on the condition (unfulfilled) of early French victories; thus it was the ever-unpredictable British on whom Bismarck kept an eye, with the other squinting over his shoulder at the Russians behind him. At the beginning of the war, there had been widespread sympathy in Britain for the Germans—from the top down. Queen Victoria acclaimed her son-in-law Fritz’s first victory over MacMahon at Frœschviller as ‘wonderful news’, while Lady Russell in a letter to Kate Amberley
¹
commenting on Sedan exclaimed, ‘Thank God that punishment has
fallen on the right hand!’ But since Sedan there had been a distressing reversal of British public opinion, perhaps summarized in a letter Lady Amberley received from an English radical towards the end of the Siege: ‘Abt the war I think the Prussians were right at 1st but in its present phase my sympathies are intensely & most painfully French.’ Sir Charles Dilke, M.P., who had visited the August battlefields under Prussian auspices, declared, ‘I began to wish to desert when we saw how overbearing success had made the Prussians and how determined they were to push their successes to a point at which France would have been made impotent in Europe….’ By November both the prolonged resistance of suffering Paris and Gambetta’s courageous efforts in the provinces had begun to play strongly upon traditional British compassion for the underdog. In London there were manifestations in favour of British assistance to France, and the iconoclastic Bradlaugh had found several excuses to hit out at the Queen’s Germanic ties. Even
The Times
had been provoked into protesting against German brutality, and such ardent francophobes as Thomas Carlyle were finding themselves increasingly isolated.

More and more the thoughtful in Britain suffered from concern at the true scope of Prussian ambitions, as revealed by the bombastic utterances of her leaders, and at the kind of Europe that would emerge from the war. In December the
Illustrated London News
wrote:

The war may or not be over when Paris shall have capitulated…. But it will not have ended in another sense, when the peace shall have been signed…. It may be neither next year nor the year after that the lessons of the last two months will bear fruit, but that they will bear it we have no doubt at all….

In an even more remarkable prophecy, Karl Marx predicted from Highgate as early as September that any German victory which led to the dismemberment of France would inevitably end ‘by forcing France into the arms of Russia’, followed by a new war of revenge; ‘and’, he added in a letter of the same month, ‘a war No. 2 of this kind will act as the midwife to the inevitable social revolution in Russia’.

Dilke, a radical supporter of the Gladstone Liberal Government, held that ‘if Gladstone had been a great man’ and had threatened to intervene with the Royal Navy against whichever side attacked the other, the Franco-Prussian War would never have broken out. (One might well speculate as to whether, had Dilke’s advice been taken, 1914 too would not then have been averted—or at least postponed.) But in July Gladstone had determined upon neutrality, and as the war progressed—whatever the pressures of public opinion at home—nothing would deflect him from his steadfast course. To one of Jules
Favre’s emissaries, Frédéric Reitlinger, who reached England at the time of the Great Sortie, the Grand Old Man had sermonized (according to Reitlinger): ‘War is a terrible disaster for humanity. Are there any circumstances which may justify a Government throwing a country into war?…’ His Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, had added: ‘we have neither the right nor the power to interfere in an affair which does not concern us’; and ‘France has given an exhibition of military courage which has aroused the admiration of the world, but there is also a
civil courage
which a great people must not neglect, and which is even greater and more admirable than military courage.’ Such was the tenor of British policy in those days, and even the subsequent sinking by
German
action of five British colliers in the lower Seine, which aroused widespread anger in Britain, was not sufficient to alter it.
¹

From Bismarck’s point of view the gravest risk of outside intervention (and, for Britain, the most serious threat to her standard of neutrality in Europe) came at the end of October from the other end of Europe. Russia, admittedly to some extent provoked by Bismarck himself, decided to seize the opportunity of denouncing the clauses in the 1856 Treaty of Paris which neutralized the Black Sea. The two powers responsible for enforcing this legacy of the Crimean War were Britain and France; Britain’s naval position in the Eastern Mediterranean seemed threatened, and she was faced with the prospect of once more fighting Russia, but this time—with France otherwise occupied—alone. To Bismarck, anxious to keep the war—and the peace—a strictly bilateral affair, any spread of hostilities would have been most undesirable. Instead he proposed a conference, which was accepted by the powers concerned. But such a conference would also, he realized, have proved injurious to Prussian interests in so far as it must almost certainly have led to a general attempt by the European powers to settle the Franco-German dispute; which in turn might well mean a ‘soft’ peace for France, with no annexations. Bismarck wanted to deal with France by himself. Thus, with his usual diplomatic cunning, he temporized; chiefly through placing a multiplicity of obstacles in the way of any French delegate attending the London Conference until victory was in the bag.

Gladstone’s efforts to remain on good terms with both combatants resulted, as such endeavours so often do, in pleasing neither side. On the German side, there was constant annoyance at Britain’s Olympian offers of mediation; coupled as the true strength of Bismarck’s
hand became increasingly apparent, with a certain ‘
übermensch
’ contempt for Britain’s ineffectuality on the European scene. Before the war was over, Archibald Forbes, the
Daily News
correspondent attached to the German Army of the Meuse, would record a conversation with a young officer who ‘benignantly announced that the Queen Elizabeth Regiment would, before two years were over, be besieging Windsor Castle….’ Queen Victoria’s exhortatory, but unspecific, telegrams urging ‘magnanimity’ upon King Wilhelm, as well as the steady flow of advice to her daughter, the Crown Princess, provoked mounting resentment in the Berlin Press—ably fanned by Bismarck. Already at the end of October Crown Prince Frederick was noting in his journal ‘I regret to observe that the German Press, but in especial the ‘inspired’ papers in Berlin, continues its spiteful attacks on England…,’ and by mid-December he was deprecating that ‘In Berlin it is now the order of the day to vilify my wife as being mainly responsible for the postponement of the bombardment of Paris and to accuse her of acting under the direction of the Queen of England….’ German public opinion was also highly sensitive to the unfavourable trend in British sympathies; but, as Gambetta’s levies proved to be more and more troublesome, its most tangible source of resentment was the flow of British arms being sold to the French armies in the provinces.

In the earliest days of the war, French opinion too had been scandalized by the unfriendly attitude then prevailing in the British Press, but once Paris herself was threatened it was widely assumed, not only that sympathies would switch, but that Britain herself would actively enter the lists to rescue the Fount of Civilization. Leaders of all sides (with Hugo well to the fore) applied themselves to this theme; early in October, Louis Blanc, the veteran Socialist, addressed a pamphlet ‘To the English People’, among whom he had spent so many years in exile. ‘Civilization’, he declared, ‘is, for the moment, a prisoner in Paris’. After trying to bring home to Londoners just what to be besieged might mean to them, he ended with the admonition: ‘A nation which by its indifference sanctions the saturnalia of force risks, and deserves, to submit to them.’ The words summed up the feeling of most Parisians, and, when the British knight-errant showed himself totally unmoved by all appeals, great was the sense of bitterness, almost of betrayal. During the Great Sortie, M. Patte wrote caustically to his friend in London, Mrs. Macpherson, ‘The influence of Britain in Europe is down; England is now a merchant’s country as America is…’, and—later—Gulielma Rafinesque to her brother, Louis Hack; ‘I am really ashamed of England for her indifference. I suppose she is afraid of the Prussians, they seem to be very strong—
enfin!
’ It was a sentiment that grew to be echoed by many of the Britons sharing the Parisian lot; in his letters home, Edwin Child frequently deplored the pusillanimity of Gladstone in the strongest terms, while William Brown wrote his wife, ‘I cannot understand England’s neutrality, it is void of all self-respect or respect of Englishmen abroad…’ He longed ‘for a Pitt or a Palmerston in the place of a Gladstone and Granville…’.