The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (48 page)

Now, as the Assembly’s session at Bordeaux neared its end, it hastened through a veritable flurry of legislation unpalatable to a wide variety of factions in the capital. In a deplorable
ex post facto
ruling, Blanqui, Flourens, and two other agitators were sentenced to death,
par contumace
, for their parts in the October 31st uprising; and six left-wing journals, including Pyat’s
Le Vengeur
and the scurrilous but popular
Père Duchesne
, were suspended. But no act of the new Assembly caused more justifiable, and widespread, resentment than the Law of Maturities. This ordained that all debts, on which a moratorium had been declared during the war, were to be paid within forty-eight hours; while a similar law decreed that landlords could now also demand payment of all accumulated rents. The two bills were as cruel as they were stupid, and they dealt a staggering blow to hundreds of thousands of Parisians. With industry and commerce at a standstill for four months, and still virtually paralysed, only the wealthy minority had the funds with which to pay. At the same time, as yet another measure designed to diminish the National Guard’s potential, the Assembly voted to end the pay of 150 francs a day, which for so many had provided a form of dole during the Siege. Thus with these three unenlightened strokes a vast cross-section of Parisian society—the
petite bourgeoisie
of clerks and shopkeepers, artisans and minor officials, few of whom owned their own dwellings—now found themselves thrust into the same camp asthe under privileged proletariat, whom they had hitherto despised and distrusted. Their mood was rebellious, typified by Louis Péguret when he wrote to his sister: ‘the landlords have no reclaim against those whose only fortune is in their daily work…. We shall pay when we can, and there will be many who will never pay.’

The last act at Bordeaux of this ‘Assembly of country bumpkins’, as Gaston Crémieux described it, was to adjourn itself on March 10th and decide (by 427 votes to 154) to reconvene in Versailles on the 20th. Mindful of the humiliation Trochu and Favre had been subjected to on October 31st, and of the shootings of January 22nd, the Assembly certainly had reason to consider that somewhere outside of inflamed, disordered, atheistic Red Paris would be more conducive to good government. Reporting to Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, at the beginning of March, the British Ambassador, Lord Lyons, used some ominous words: ‘The majority of the Assembly, which is decidedly anti-Republican, hardly expects to establish a Government to its taste, without some actual fighting with the Reds in Paris and other large towns. It therefore does not at all like the idea of moving the Assembly to Paris…. I cannot help thinking that the sooner the Government settles in the Capital, and has its fight (if fight there really must be) with the Mob over, the better.’ The possible motives behind this latest slight were also apparent to the Parisians, but the choice of Versailles was taken as a sign not only of distrust, but—more dangerously—of weakness.

* * *

At the same time as the Assembly, in its heavy-handed insensitivity, was heaping injury upon injury from Bordeaux on to wounded Paris, the city itself had been subjected to the worst humiliation that any proud capital can know. France’s part of the bargain by which Thiers had saved Belfort was to allow the Germans to make a triumphal march through Paris and occupy the city for two days. Unfeelingly Labouchere wrote, ‘I am fully convinced that this vain, silly population would rather that King William should double the indemnity which he demands from France than march with his troops down the Rue de Rivoli’, and indeed few Parisians felt that the fate of this distant provincial town merited submitting Paris—after all she had suffered—to such depths of shame. Indignation was universal and violent; and with it went an additional sense of betrayal, in that the Government had proclaimed on February 4th: ‘The enemy shall not enter into Paris’. It recalled all too painfully Trochu’s promise ‘The Governor of Paris will not capitulate’—or Favre’s ‘not an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses’. Louis Péguret wrote to his sister, Octavie: ‘What shame, what dishonour, these Royalists have brought upon their country!… The whole population has rage in its heart, and if the Prussians should give the least suspicion of mockery it would not be at all surprising if some patriot,
for whom the shame was too much, fired a random shot.’ The veteran Socialist, Louis Blanc, told Juliette Lambert that what was being said in the Clubs ‘terrified’ him, and that he ‘feared some folly’ if the Prussians should march through Paris. The Lyon brothers, who had just entered Paris, found that when the news became known, ‘angry crowds of armed men were going about vowing vengeance on the Prussians’, and added ominously that ‘The National Guards had taken forcible possession of their arms and ammunition and were very excited’.

There were those in the German camp too, including the Prussian Crown Prince, who had their doubts about the wisdom of the triumphal entry, but on the appointed day the sheer splendour of the occasion swept all misgivings aside. At 8 a.m. on March 1st, a young lieutenant and six troopers of the 14th Prussian Hussars rode up to the Étoile, jumped their horses over the chains and other obstructions Parisians had placed around the Arc de Triomphe, and continued insouciantly through the sacred edifice. Edward Blount, who was watching, was ‘astonished by the Prussians’ bravery’, and the populace too seems to have been taken by surprise. The march had begun.

Out at Longchamp, where less than four years ago another march past had been held in honour of the King of Prussia, but under rather different circumstances, the 30,000 troops picked for the triumphal entry were passing in review before him: 30,000 of the troops who had elevated him from a king to an emperor in those four years. Standing in the fallen Louis-Napoleon’s pavilion, the Crown Prince noted that ‘all the woodwork is burnt, and only the iron framework holds the walls precariously together. Obscene insults in word and picture scrawled on the bare walls revile the banished ruler’. As the men who had fought at Wœrth and Gravelotte, Orléans, and Dijon, and from Sedan to Paris, goose-stepped past, a sense of history overwhelmed Archibald Forbes who was attempting to record the event for the
Daily News
: ‘Out rings the clarion of the trumpets, clash goes the silver music of the kettledrums, tempered by the sweet notes of the ophicleide. The horses, ever lovers of sweet sounds, arch their necks, champ the bits, and toss flecks of foam on the polished leathers of the riders. They are as proud as if they realised the meaning and the glory of the day.’ As the procession formed up to move off, Forbes noted a touching encounter that seemed to epitomize the strength and solidarity of this new nation; ‘The Kaiser turned his horse and met his son face to face. Hand went out to hand, and the grip was given of love and mutual appreciation.’ Behind followed what looked to Forbes like ‘half the Almanack de Gotha’.

On the way to Paris, there was an unplanned touch of the absurd when some of the Uhlans lost their way in the Bois de Boulogne and had to be redirected by French bystanders. But as the columns debouched into the Champs-Élysées, even Parisians—never able to resist a parade, nor stifle their curiosity—could hardly withhold grudging envy of the conquerors. ‘A company of Uhlans, with their spears stuck in their saddles, and ornamented by the little flags of blue and white, headed the advancing column’, Washburne reported to his Secretary of State; ‘They were followed by the Saxons, with their light blue coats, who were succeeded by the Bavarian riflemen, with their heavy uniform and martial tread. Afterward followed more of the Uhlans, and occasionally a squad of the Bismarck cuirassiers, with their white jackets, square hats and waving plumes, recalling to mind, perhaps, among the more intelligent French observers, the celebrated cuirassiers of Nansouty and Latour-Maubourg in the wars of the First Napoleon. Now come the artillery, with its pieces of six, which must have extorted the admiration of all military men by its splendid appearance and wonderful precision of movement….’ ‘What a solid and stately array’, gasped O’Shea, homeward bound for England; ‘The spectacle was one of the most thrilling I had ever witnessed.’

When the German troops were dismissed, they crowned themselves with laurels in the Tuileries, and strode proudly about the city in small groups. Some were followed by groups of urchins, hooting and whistling, while other elements booed from a safe distance. But, despite all the omens, no attacks were made on the Germans; in fact one of the British correspondents claimed ‘there was a gala look about the place, which was revolting under the circumstances’, and another noted how Parisian women ‘openly expressed their admiration of the fine manly proportions, the martial look and gallant bearing, of the invaders’. There was an ugly moment when Bismarck found himself surrounded by a glaring crowd on the Place de la Concorde, but with superb aplomb he took out a cigar and asked the most hostile-looking spectator for a light. Writing from what they called ‘Passy-Prusse’ during those ‘two sad days’, the Rafinesque family reported that Belleville had ‘barricaded itself, armed with cannons and machine-guns and swore that the Germans would never put a foot on its territory’. Fortunately, however, the Prussians were prudent enough not to enter this hornets’ nest. Most of the shops in Prussian-occupied Paris remained firmly closed, their windows draped with black, and bistro-owners accused of having served the enemy had their windows smashed and premises sacked. Savage retribution was also meted out to civilians appearing to be too friendly to the conqueror, and a number of women had their clothes torn off them on the slimmest of
pretexts. Forbes himself, observed doffing his hat to the Crown Prince of Saxony, was seized after the troops had passed by, beaten up, and narrowly escaped being thrown in the Seine.

Otherwise the Prussian occupation came to an end unchecked. On the morning of March 3rd, Goncourt was awoken ‘by music,
their
music. A magnificent morning, with that fine sunshine indifferent to human catastrophes, whether they be called the Victory of Austerlitz, or the Capture of Paris. Marvellous weather, but with a sky filled with the cawing of crows, which one never hears here at this time of year, and which they bear in their train like black outriders of their armies. They are going! They are leaving us at last!’ A
Times
correspondent who watched the departing German officers call for a cheer as they rode out through the Arc de Triomphe admitted: ‘No matter, at that moment, upon which side one’s sympathies might be, it was impossible not to catch the infection of the enthusiasm, not to feel one’s heart beating and one’s cheek flushing in harmony with the palpitating mass of men which went roaring and rolling past like some mighty torrent….’ On March 6th Bismarck and his entourage left for the Fatherland; it was, so the faithful Busch terminated his account, ‘a beautifully fine morning. Thrushes and finches warble the signal for our departure’.

As soon as the last German had withdrawn from the city, Parisians set to scrubbing the streets the enemy feet had trodden with Condy’s Fluid, and ‘purifying’ the tainted
pavé
by the fire of many bonfires. But an atrocious stain had been left behind which nothing would quite erase. To any Latin race, there are some insults that can only be wiped clean with blood. It would be another half century before France was strong enough to exact vengeance upon the Germans; in the meantime, the blood that was to flow would belong to her own people.

Seizure of the National Guard Guns

17. The Guns of Montmartre

‘W
HEN
you know Paris’, wrote Trochu’s one-time aide, Captain d’Hérisson, about the city under siege, ‘she is not a town, she is an animated being, a natural person, who has her moments of fury, madness, stupidity, enthusiasm.’ That she was on the verge of or embarking upon one of her ‘moments of fury’ was sensed by some outside the city walls, including Lord Lyons, and on March 4th the Prussian Crown Prince entered in his diary: ‘We must be prepared to see a fight in Paris between the Moderates and the Reds…. How sad is the fate of this unhappy people.’

But within Paris herself the city’s true mood tended to be obscured by the thoroughly deceptive appearance she was beginning to give, superficially, of back-to-normal calm. After the harsh winter, spring now seemed to be just around the corner, and health was returning rapidly. By the week ending March 11th, the death rate had dropped by over a third compared with the first week of February. Business was reviving, and both traffic and gas lighting were seen once more on the streets. The Rev. W. Gibson, an English Methodist clergyman who had spent ten years before the war trying to ‘convert’ the Parisians,
noted on first returning after the Siege how once-hefty coalmen shrank from carrying loads up to third and fourth storeys—but by March 9th it was the city ‘assuming its former brilliant appearance at night’ that occupied his attention.

To the casual spectator, keeping to the relit boulevards, people seemed more cheerful. Threads of life, broken by the Siege, were being picked up again. For Goncourt, February 24th was a red-letter day, for it was then he discovered his taste for literature had returned. Yet three days later he was brooding over some indefinable malaise: ‘something sombre and unquiet… upon the physiognomy of Paris…’; and again the following day: ‘impossible to describe the ambient sadness which surrounds you; Paris is under the most terrible of apprehensions, apprehension of the unknown.’ If the perceptive Goncourt could not exactly diagnose what lay beneath the surface, it equally eluded even a shrewd, experienced observer like Washburne. William Brown, about to leave Paris for good, wrote lyrically to his wife: ‘it is all over now I feel sure, thank God, and what with the prospect of peace and business, the abundance of every kind of food, the beautiful Spring weather, and last but not least the prospect of soon, I hope, seeing all your dear faces, I feel supremely happy.’ Meanwhile, on March 5th, Jules Ferry was confidently telegraphing from Paris to his colleague, Jules Simon, in Bordeaux: ‘The city is entirely calm. The danger has passed….’