The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (47 page)

But Louis-Napoleon’s intervention—a rather pathetic echo of his uncle’s bold sortie from Elba—hardly assisted Bonapartist prospects. When the votes were counted, they revealed that only a score of his supporters had been returned, and most of these by faithful Corsicans. The elections resulted in an astonishing and overwhelming victory
for the ‘list of peace’. Out of 768 seats (though because of duplication and other causes in fact only 675 could be filled immediatly), the vast majority had been won by deputies with conservative, Catholic, and rural sympathies. Over 400 of them were monarchists, though they were divided in their loyalties between the Legitimists who backed the exiled Comte de Chambord, and the Orleanists (the larger faction) who rallied behind Louis-Philippe’s son, the Duc d’Aumale. No more than 150 genuine Republicans had been returned, and these too were divided between the ‘respectable’ moderates of the ilk of Jules Favre and the extremists to the left of Rochefort; of whom there were approximately 20, mostly Deputies of Paris. Within a space of less than six months, the Government of France had veered from Bonapartist imperialism to a liberal Republic, and now back again to an ultra-conservative majority with royalist leanings. The swing was bound to be unsettling, on top of everything else, but was not perhaps as startlingly illogical as it seemed. The Empire was blamed for having started the war, the Republic with having prolonged it and lost it. Both factions were discredited, so now the provinces turned back with nostalgic hope to what at the moment seemed like the Golden Age of the last monarchy, of Louis-Philippe. There was also no doubt that the provincial conservatives were further urged along their path by what they had heard about the Reds’ behaviour in Paris during the Siege, and how feebly the Republican Government had dealt with them, and they deeply feared the pranks which these Reds—if given another chance—might play with property, religion, and all else that was dear to them. That the ‘brutal rurals’ (as the Parisian proletariat stigmatized them) should have won so complete a victory over Paris was in itself not altogether surprising or unfair, for in 1871 more than 80 per cent of the country was still employed on the land.

Yet even allowing for this fact, neither the Electoral Law, which allocated Paris
¹
only 43 seats out of 768, nor the results took into account the real or imagined pre-eminence of Paris in France. It was her tradition to look upon the provinces with superior contempt. Under the Bourbons, for a noble to be exiled from Paris to his country estates was a fate worse than death. Before the war, France had reminded the historian, Taine—as he remarked to the Goncourts—‘of Alexandria in its heyday. Below Alexandria there dangled the valley of the Nile, but it was a dead valley.’ Now, more than ever before, the four months of isolation had given Paris a sense of apartness from the rest of the country; more than ever it seemed to lend force to Danton’s famous piece of arrogance, ‘
Paris, c’est la France
’. With the deeds and sufferings of Gambetta’s levies concealed from
their view, Parisians naturally concluded that they themselves had borne the principal weight of the war. Their attitude was typified by Corporal Pégeurt of the National Guard writing to his sister on December 19th; ‘we realize that France is coming to the aid of France, that is to say the provinces knowing very well that at this moment their destiny is being played out within the walls of Paris’. Not for the first time, Paris by the end of the Siege had inflated herself into that dangerous state of blind pride which the Greeks called
hubris
and which almost invariably preceded a calamitous fall. ‘O city, you will make History kneel down before you’, Victor Hugo had declaimed. But would the rest of France now also genuflect? In assuming that she should, Paris in her neurotic state was building herself up for a bitter disillusion.

News of the elections hit Republican Paris like a thunderbolt, The extremists had suffered particularly, for her 43 seats had been allocated to the city as a whole, and not by
arrondissements
, so that only a handful of their leaders—including Delescluze, Pyat, and Millière, with such assorted allies as Gambetta, Garibaldi,
¹
Rochefort, Clemenceau, and Victor Hugo—had been elected. To the left wing, therefore, the elections represented a defeat only less terrible in kind than the capitulation, and henceforth the peace-seeking, conservative country squires would become paired with the Prussian conquerors. For during the Siege the Parisian proletariat and its ideologues had felt that, as well as fighting the enemy outside, they were also fighting for the ideal Republic; above all for their birthrights, promised by the Great Revolution, of which they had been successively defrauded by the bourgeoisie and the provincials. After those few glittering moments of September the Republican dream had never seemed closer to fulfilment, but now it looked as if the fraud was going to be repeated all over again. A chasm had been opened between the provinces and aggrieved Paris which every fresh act of the new Assembly was to widen.

First, there was the election of a man to be head executive of the new Government. The choice fell naturally enough upon Thiers, who, as head of the ‘list for peace’, had been elected by no less than twenty-six different constituencies; compared to Gambetta (whom Thiers derided as a
fou furieux
) with only ten. A powerful majority of the new Assembly now appointed Thiers to the post of supreme power in France, and he promptly set about forming a Government composed
of like-minded men. A small, white-haired, gnome-like figure, with a bespectacled and owlish face of sallow tint, Thiers was already seventy-three but had lost none of his ruthless vigour. He was a consummate politician with almost half a century of experience in the tortuousness of French government, and his knowledge of French history was equally profound. From the very first he gripped the reins with a firmness that neither Trochu nor Favre could have achieved, dominating both the Assembly and the Government. In Thiers’s long career, his first mentor had been Talleyrand; he had helped Louis-Philippe to the throne, under whom he had three times been
Président du Conseil
and there was no reason to suspect that he had relinquished his Orleanist leanings. He had steadily opposed Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, and had refused to take office under the Republic proclaimed on September 4th, although he was willing to play along with it. Thiers once claimed: ‘By birth I belong to the people; my family were humble merchants in Marseilles; they had a small trade in the Levant in cloth, which was ruined by the Revolution. By education I am a Bonapartist; I was born when Napoleon was at the summit of his glory. By tastes and habits and associations I am an aristocrat. I have no sympathy with the bourgeoisie or with any system under which they are to rule.’ On the other hand, by instinct he was considerably less sympathetic towards poverty, or any of its manifestations. In 1834, when a serious revolt had broken out in Lyons and threatened to spread to Paris, Thiers—then Minister of the Interior—cunningly put the word about that the Lyons revolutionaries were winning the day, thus drawing the dissident Parisian leaders into the open and provoking a revolt which was harshly crushed. For the ensuing ‘massacre in the Rue Transnonain’, immortalized by Daumier, the left wing would always hold Thiers responsible, and it knew that it could now expect little but hostility from the new Assembly.
¹
Thiers, a supreme realist, was also dedicated to concluding ‘peace at almost any price’ with Germany, and the choice of words was perhaps ominous when one of the
Daily News
correspondents, referring to the peace terms, remarked that ‘If France is ruined, she is at least sure to get from M. Thiers
un enterrement de première classe
’.
²
In the course of Thiers’s latest mandate, thousands of Parisians would require interment, but it would be far from ‘first-class’.

Because Gambetta and his Delegation had evacuated themselves there on December 10th, after being driven out of Tours, it was at Bordeaux that the new Assembly first met. By its second meeting in Bordeaux’s eighteenth-century Grand Théâtre, on February 13th, the Assembly witnessed a scene which graphically revealed its mood. Garibaldi, attempting painfully to rise to speak, was booed and finally silenced by shouts of ‘No Garibaldi!’, ‘No Italian!’, and ‘Let him hold his tongue!’ A spectator with a long black beard was heard to shout from a box, ‘You rural majority, listen to the voice of the towns’, and then the President cleared the galleries. Garibaldi also left and was loudly applauded outside; he declared that he had come to France to fight for the Republic and that he felt his mission was now over. That night, clad in his familiar red shirt and broad-brimmed hat, he departed for Caprera, never again to return to an ungrateful France. He was, as Hugo truthfully remarked, ‘the only French general never to be defeated in the war’; but, more than this, in the eyes of the left wing he was
the
hero of the Republican cause and the insult cut deep.

Thiers’s most immediate task on his accession to power was to conclude a peace treaty with the conquerors. Time was running out. The armistice was due to expire on the 19th, but he managed to gain an extension; first to the 24th, and then again to the 26th. On February 21st he arrived at Versailles, and for six days the talks dragged on. Thiers at once proved a tougher negotiator than Favre. On the 26th, Bismarck, still unwell, testily refused any further extension of the armistice and declared that if a treaty were still not concluded, the German forces would resume hostilities against ‘whatever they could find to fight’; to which Thiers replied, by warning the Iron Chancellor that such an action would incur the odium of all Europe. Finally, that night, the treaty was signed. On his way back to Paris, Thiers broke down and wept in his coach. France was to lose all Alsace, and most of Lorraine, two of her fairest and most valuable provinces, including the bastion cities of Metz and Strasbourg. By hard negotiating and appealing to the greed for glory of the Prussian military, Thiers had managed to save the city of Belfort (which, despite a long siege, had never capitulated) in return for subjecting Paris to the shame of a triumphal march by the conqueror. The Germans had demanded the payment of an unprecedented war indemnity of six milliard francs, or £240 million; but they acceded to strong British representations that France could never pay this amount, and it had accordingly been reduced to five milliards—still an astronomical sum.
¹
Until it was paid off, France was to submit to partial occupation. ‘The peace
terms seem to me so ponderous, so crushing, so mortal for France’, groaned Goncourt when he heard of them, ‘that I am terrified the war will only break out again, before we are ready for it’. Even beyond the frontiers of France, there were many Europeans who agreed with him.

On February 28th Thiers presented the Treaty to an appalled Assembly for ratification. Edgar Quinet declared prophetically that ‘the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war to perpetuity under the mask of peace’, which was approximately what Thiers had warned Bismarck. Victor Hugo made a speech (as a contemporary British chronicler described it) of ‘unexampled silliness’, but predicted that ‘the hour will sound—I can feel already the coming of that immense revenge’. The France of 1792 would ‘stand upright again! Oh! then she will be a power to reckon with. We shall see her, at a single stroke, resume possession of Alsace, resume possession of Lorraine! Is that all? No, we shall see her, at a single stroke, resume possession—mark well my words—of Tréves, Mayence, Cologne, Coblence… of all the left bank of the Rhine as well.’ Having said this, he addressed himself to the Germans, amiably recommending to them the benefits of a Republic; ‘You got rid of my Emperor, I shall come to get rid of yours!’ However, the Assembly ratified the Peace Treaty by 546 votes to 107, with 23 abstentions. Paris fumed in impotent rage and disgust; Gambetta and the deputies from Alsace-Lorraine resigned in a body, as did six of the extreme Left from Paris—including Rochefort and Pyat. They were followed on March 8th by Victor Hugo, after a debate in which he had vigorously opposed a motion to pronounce Garibald’s election null and void. A rural
vicomte
had shouted at him, ‘The Assembly refuses to listen to M. Victor Hugo, on the ground that he does not speak French.’ No doubt the Assembly regarded the departure of the old demagogue with some relief, but his resignation came as yet another outrage to raw Parisian feelings.

The new Assembly could not, would not, comprehend the state of mind of the city which had for so long dictated to the provinces. ‘We provincials were unable to come to an understanding with the Parisians’, admitted the Vicomte de Meaux, a newly elected deputy and the son-in-law of the Catholic leader, Montalembert; ‘It seemed as if we did not even speak the same language, and that they were prey to a kind of sickness.’ What the nature of this ‘sickness’ was, most of the deputies did not inquire too deeply; preferring to accept, simply, Viollet-le-Duc’s view that ‘Paris is a monstrous agglomeration that must be liquidated for the peace of France and of all Europe….’ When the Parisian Deputies arrived at Bordeaux, ‘still vibrating with patriotism, their eyes hollow but glowing with Republican faith’,
wrote a left-wing chronicler savagely, ‘they found themselves confronted by forty years of greedy hatreds, provincial notables, obtuse
châtelains
, grainless musketeers, clerical dandies… a completely unsuspected world of towns ranged in battle against Paris; the atheistic, the revolutionary city which had created three Republics and shattered so many idols’.

There seemed to be no end to the extent to which the Assembly could rub salt into the wounds of Paris. Next, it was announced that General d’Aurelle de Paladines was to succeed Clément Thomas as commander of the Paris National Guard. It was not a happy choice. D’Aurelle was by repute a reactionary, a former Bonapartist and violently anti-Parisian; and moreover he was regarded now, not as the victor of Coulmiers, but as the man who had
failed
to come to the aid of Paris. It was also clear that by his appointment Thiers intended to curb the power of the National Guard.