The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (41 page)

But at Versailles there was in the offing another event, one of the most momentous in modern European history, to distract Prussian minds from the shortcomings of the bombardment. In a solemn ceremony within that glittering hall where only so few years ago Queen Victoria had danced with Louis-Napoleon amid all the splendours of the Second Empire, King Wilhelm I of Prussia had himself proclaimed Kaiser of the Germans. At last Bismarck had had his way. W. H. Russell described the scene in the Hall of Mirrors:

It is 12 o’clock. The boom of a gun far away rolls above the voices in the Court hailing the Emperor King. Then there is a hush of expectation, and then rich and sonorous rise the massive strains of the chorale chanted by the men of regimental bands assembled in a choir, as the King, bearing his helmet in his hand, and dressed in full uniform as a German General stalked slowly up the long gallery, and bowing to the clergy in front of the temporary altar opposite him, halted and dressed himself right and front, and then twirling his heavy moustache with his disengaged hand, surveyed the scene at each side of him.

Russell’s comment on this extraordinary event taking place beneath a painting of Frenchmen chastising Germans within the great palace which bears the inscription ‘
à toutes les Gloires de la France
’ was—‘What a humorous jade Fortune is!’ But the humour was barely apparent to a Frenchman like Goncourt who mourned prophetically: ‘That really marks the end of the greatness of France’. Not only had something of the old order of Europe died; to the injury of the bombardment of Paris an appalling insult had been added, and the combination of the two would jointly inject a special bitterness into Franco-German relations for the next three-quarters of a century.

On the eleventh day of the Prussian shelling, Markheim, the ‘Oxford Graduate’ remarked, ‘the prospect of possible starvation is fraught with such unknown terror that it renders us quite callous to the dangers of bombardment’. These ‘unknown terrors’ of starvation
were not very far distant for a great many Parisians, and now January brought with it a new form of suffering, one that malnutrition greatly exacerbated. The cold! Fuel was now running desperately short, causing, as O’Shea noted, ‘the greatest privation’. Already by November 20th coal-gas, urgently required for the balloon service, had been stringently rationed and largely replaced by oil; five days later oil was requisitioned, and the streets of the
ville lumière
plunged into darkness. And it seemed as if even the elements had deserted the Parisian cause; first there had been the abnormal autumn rainfalls, producing the Marne floods that had helped wreck Ducrot’s Great Sortie; and now—since the onset of the savage freeze-up in mid-December—Paris was gripped by the bitterest winter in living memory. Wrote O’Shea, ‘We might be able to rattle a four-in-hand across the Seine… that is, if we had not eaten the team in advance’; and Wickham Hoffman of the American Legation, not normally given to exaggeration, related how hungry rats had apparently broken into the kitchen of a compatriot, eaten the grease off some unwashed plates, then later died of cold in his bedroom. With coal gone, wood was rapidly running out, and there were no horses to transport what little remained. To keep warm in her house, Juliette Lambert noted that she needed 100 kilogrames of wood per day, while in fact she was entitled to only 75 kilograms
a week
; ‘What is one to do?’ As in every privation, it was worse for the poor. Markheim, who visited Belleville with his mother shortly after Christmas, was shocked to see that

scarcely a vestige remained of the young saplings that peopled this outer line of boulevards, except here and there a stump with the bars of the iron fence that protected the tree lying wrenched and twisted on the soil. Further on, huge trunks lay prostrate, around which swarmed an eager crowd of women and children, hacking with their puny hatchets at the twigs and bark…. All Belleville had turned out into the streets, and swarmed in ant-like procession,
divina vis populi
, each one bearing away his portion of the spoil, branch, log, faggot, sweepings of small twigs shovelled into aprons and pinafores—a desperate struggle for existence. Hard by was the cemetery of Père la Chaise…. We paused awhile to look into a long wide trench which the diggers were carrying through the eastern slope of the hill…. Sorrowing relatives gazed tearfully at the closely packed
fosse commune
, crushing its dead in such tight embrace. ‘Never mind’, quoth a grave-digger, who recked not of the agonies of the tomb, ‘there’s room enough for all of ’em….’

Soon, when their own neighbourhood had been denuded, the frantic fuel-scavengers began to descend on the more fashionable parts of Paris. ‘I hear’, wrote Washburne on December 27th, ‘that several yards were broken into last night. The high board fences
enclosing the vacant lots on the Rue de Chaillot, near the legation, were all torn down and carried off last night.’ That same day, on the Avenue de I’Impératrice (today the Avenue Foch) Goncourt had run into

a menacing crowd, surrounded by terrible female faces, hooded by a Madras, and giving the impression of Furies, among the rabble…. The explanation is a depot of wood for making charcoal which they have begun to pillage. The cold, the freeze-up, the lack of fuel to heat their minute rations of meat, has thrown this female populace into a fury and they hurl themselves upon trellis-works, plank barricades, ripping up everything that comes to their enraged hands. In their work of destruction, these women are assisted by appalling urchins, who place step-ladders up against the trees in the Avenue de l’Impératrice, breaking off anything they can reach, each dragging behind him his small faggot, tied by a string, held by a hand plunged in pocket.

Three weeks later, it was the turn of the Champs-Élysées themselves. There Goncourt watched ‘a cloud of children, armed with hatchets, knives, anything that would cut, slashing off pieces of bark with which they filled their hands, their pockets, their pinafores, while in the hole left by the felled tree, one could see the heads of old women, engaged in digging up with picks all that remained of the roots.’ Meanwhile, in a contrast so typical of the Siege, at a nearby café there were ‘seven or eight young Mobile officers, parading and coquetting around a
lorette
, deciding on a menu of fantasy and intellectual imagination for dinner’.

Protection against the cold was in no way assisted by the dilapidated state of clothing. The fuel shortage had closed down most of the laundries, and men took to wearing their shirts inside out: ‘Imagine’, Louis Péguret boasted to his sister, ‘I have worn a shirt for 39 days!’ Even women of the upper classes, recorded Tommy Bowles, ‘are now dressed, without exception, in sombre and modest attire which makes them look like refined upper-housemaids’, though Felix Whitehurst qualified this by declaring; ‘It is not that there are no fine garments, but to go out decently dressed would now expose you to risk of arrest as a Prussian spy, or that which is worse, to be recognized as an Englishman.’ Again, want was most acute among the poor, many of whom had been forced to pawn their meagre garments in order to buy food. At the end of December the Government had made allocations of flannel, and, in one of their many acts of charity during the Siege, the Rothschilds supplied the poor with clothes for some 48,000 children and a similar number of adults. But still none of this was sufficient, even though augmented by a new suggestion of the Laputan inventors of Paris: shirts made of newspaper (euphemistically
christened
flanelle de Santé
), which the newspapers themselves boasted could ‘be worn a consecutive month without ceasing to be comfortable!’

Hand in hand with malnutrition and the cold came that inevitable concomitant, disease. Smallpox cases mounted rapidly, as did typhoid, now that the Siege forced Paris to draw most of her drinking water unfiltered from the foul Seine. Outbreaks were worst among the overcrowded and insanitary slums, but under the circumstances it was perhaps little short of miraculous that no major epidemic occurred during the Siege. Still, January brought an alarming increase in the number of deaths; Labouchere complained from his hotel sanctuary, ‘they nail up the coffins in the room just over mine every night’. As may be deduced from the table below, it was pneumonia caused by the cold that particularly helped to augment the mortality figures:

What these statistics do not reveal is that the highest mortality rate lay among infants, deprived of milk and warmth, then among the women, followed by the old and unemployed. As the Russians themselves were to discover during the Siege of Leningrad, anyone who was occupied—even the National Guardsman warming himself in the
bistro
while his wife queued for food—had a better chance of survival.

By mid-January the Government felt forced to take a step which stripped the last illusion about the state of Paris’s food supplies. Bread, the staff of life, was rationed to just over half a pound per adult per day, and half this amount for children under five; though its quality was bad enough to cause more infant deaths from enteritis. ‘Black, heavy, miserable stuff, made of flour, oat-meal, peas, beans and rice,’ commented Washburne. ‘The cook put a loaf of it in my hands and I thought it was a pig of Galena lead….’ The ration of meat (when there was any to be had) had now also been reduced to roughly a quarter of a pound a week for adults. ‘Personally I am pretty well’, Edward Blount could continue to write, ‘I still have one horse
and some cow, biscuits and
confiture
, but the misery around me is frightful.’ It was no exaggeration. Those foreigners who could yet afford to dine out were regularly shocked by the pinched and wan faces of children begging at the doors of the restaurants. Labouchere records visiting the house of an absent friend to find ‘three families installed in it—one family, consisting of a father, a mother, and three children, were boiling a piece of horse meat about four inches square, in a bucket full of water. This exceedingly thin soup was to last them for three days. The day before they had each had a carrot.’ On January 7th, Goncourt with his usual aptness summed up the outlook of a dying city; ‘The sufferings of Paris during the siege? A joke for two months. In the third month the joke went sour. Now nobody finds it funny any more, and we are moving fast towards starvation….’

Strategically, the situation confronting Trochu at this time was aptly likened by one of the Britons in Paris to that of ‘a king left alone on the board, with enough room for a certain number of moves until the final mate’. As in the chess parallel, only a miracle could now save Paris and the pious Trochu’s first move after the Prussian bombardment began was to pray for one. Informed by a historically-minded chaplain that it was the anniversary of the repulse of the Huns from the gates of Paris, fourteen centuries earlier, by Ste. Geneviéve, Trochu promptly framed another of those renownedly verbose proclamations announcing how he had invoked the intercession of the city’s patron saint. When the Cabinet was informed, the effect upon its more anticlerical members—as Trochu himself admitted—was more explosive than any Prussian shell, with Jules Ferry leaping out of his chair as if one had just gone off underneath him. The proclamation was quashed, accompanied by the brutal advice from Victor Hugo to ‘Throw your prayer-book to the dying, General, and let’s have a breakthrough in a hurry’. Instead, Trochu was permitted to declare on January 6th, even more rashly, ‘The Governor of Paris will not capitulate’. Thus, with miracles barred by the Republican
laïcs
, the Government was forced to consider a more pragmatic approach to the city’s last moves. The leaders were now seriously divided. Ducrot had long since lost any hope of military success; all he could suggest was that the Paris forces be split into penny-packets and infiltrated through the Prussian lines to join up with Gambetta, and for himself he requested—typically—that, as there was nothing left for him to achieve in Paris, he be allowed to balloon out also to fight with Gambetta. Trochu and a majority felt that the city should hold out as long as the food lasted, and make one last major attempt at a sortie. In this desperate counsel they were swayed, as so often in the past, by yet another exaggerated dispatch
from Gambetta, revealing Bourbaki’s march, which in one grand sweep would sever the enemy’s lines of communication. But not even the most hardened optimist on Trochu’s staff now gave a sortie any prospect of success.

It was not, however, until a Government session on January 15th that the possibility of surrender was actually mentioned. Then, as on the eve of the Great Sortie at the end of November, not military considerations—nor even the problem of food—precipitated a fateful decision. As Ducrot was to remark on the Siege in retrospect, ‘virtually the whole defence revolved around a single thing!
fear of a rebellion
…. One was constantly obliged to face two enemies: one which, night and day, tightened his ring of fire and steel, the other which at every instant was awaiting the moment to hurl itself upon the Hôtel de Ville….’ Upon the first suggestion that the city should now surrender, one doubt immediately presented itself to all minds: would the Reds permit a surrender? Although Flourens and their other leaders gaoled after October 31st still languished in the Mazas, neither the Red newspapers nor the Clubs had in any way reduced the violence of their attacks upon the Government. It was a source of amazement to Washburne, as it was to most foreigners in Paris, that the Government had taken no further action. Now, with matters growing more desperate, the angry voices reached a new pitch. There were proposals from the Belleville Clubs that the Government should march out through the Prussian lines, preceded by choirs of virgins; there were outcries of ‘you are 400,000 strong, and you let them shell us!’; but above all, and louder than ever before, came the demands for a
sortie torrentielle
of the citizenry of Paris, of the National Guard. These were backed up by red-dyed posters that surreptitiously appeared all over Paris on January 6th. Drafted by Delescluze and signed by ‘The Delegates of the Twenty
Arrondissements
’, these called for the Government to be instantly replaced by the mystical Commune, and—once again—for the immediate employment in battle of the National Guard. That the working population of Paris after all its suffering should still be so ardent for battle was astonishing, but it was also unmistakable. As Corporal Louis Péguret of the National Guard, who sympathized with the Reds, wrote at the beginning of January, ‘The majority, the mass of inhabitants have redoubled their energy to resist, and desire whole-heartedly to march on the Prussians to crush them.’ (On the other hand, among the bourgeoisie, the slogan ‘Rather Bismarck than Blanqui’ was beginning to be heard with increasing regularity.) Word of emotions prevailing in Paris had even reached Versailles; on January 16, Blumenthal recorded, ‘It looks as though in Paris a catastrophe were about to happen to the present
rulers there. According to the Parisian newspapers, red-hot speeches are being made in the working mens’ clubs of the Belleville quarter, and they are calling for a Commune—i.e. a Reign of Terror.’