The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (52 page)

On the 21st, the Comité informed Clemenceau that it was repudiating the agreement, as far as handing over the Hôtel de Ville was
concerned. But it would still adhere to the postponement of the elections. This in itself was no small victory for Thiers, though not for the cause of peace. Clemenceau was both annoyed and disappointed; from now on the Mayors were largely discredited by both parties, suspected by Versailles as being too extremist, and by the insurgents as being too moderate. Their suspicions of Thiers’s motives were enhanced by a Government proclamation that day forbidding any civil or military functionary to have relations with the Comité. The next day, the 22nd, another Thiers proclamation declared in uncompromising language: ‘The greatest crime with a free people, a revolt against national sovereignty, adds fresh disasters to the troubles of the country. Senseless criminals, on the morrow following a great misfortune, when the foreigner had scarcely evacuated our ravaged fields, have not blushed to carry disorder, ruin, and dishonour into Paris, which they pretended to honour and defend. They have stained the city with blood, which raises the public against them….’ Hardly the language of conciliation, but there was worse to come that day.

While with his left hand Thiers appeared to be offering conciliation, with his right he was testing the potential strength of his support within Paris. On the 19th he had appointed yet another officer to command the National Guard, in succession to the unpopular d’Aurelle. This was sixty-year-old Admiral Saisset, who had emerged with rare distinction from the Siege, in which he had also lost his son. He was promptly dispatched to Paris by Thiers, with the risky task of rallying round himself the ‘loyal’ units of the National Guard. How impossibly weak his position was, and what little likelihood there was of his mission succeeding, soon became apparent to him. As a factor to be reckoned with, the bourgeois National Guard had virtually disintegrated and no longer responded to any centripetal force its leaders could exert. Yet after the first paralysing shock had passed, a mild reaction had begun to build up in Paris. A motley of anti-revolutionary and ‘moderate’ elements, retired colonels, respectable shopkeepers, elderly gentlemen, and
petits crevés
, as well as the remnants of the bourgeois National Guard, gravitated around the Opéra and the Bourse, and especially Tirard’s Mairie in the focal 2nd
Arrondissement
. Another rallying-point appears to have been the premises of a tailor in the Boulevard des Capucines, a M. Bonne, formerly a captain in the National Guard. In his window, Bonne displayed the following poster: ‘Time presses for the formation of a dyke against the Revolution. Let all good citizens come to lend me their support.’ It was signed ‘Reunion of the Friends of Order’, and the name stuck.

On the 21st, the ‘Friends of Order’ demonstrated, peacefully enough, outside the National Guard headquarters in the Place Vendôme. They were dispersed by the local commander, Bergeret, with the aid of two companies; but he, fearful lest the ‘Friends’ might be contemplating a serious coup to seize the H.Q., and would return in greater strength, called for reinforcements to seal off the Place. Sure enough, his fears seemed to be justified when a far larger force of the ‘Friends’ appeared the next morning. Now led by the intrepid old Admiral himself, they had assembled in the Place de l’Opéra with the aim of marching into the Rue de Rivoli, and thence to demonstrate in front of the Hôtel de Ville, collecting supporters as they went along. They deliberately came unarmed—with the exception of a few sword-sticks and pistols secreted about the persons of some of the more nervous. They bore banners inscribed
‘Pour la Paix’
, and proclaimed in alternate breaths as they marched,
‘Vive l’Assemblée!’
and
‘Vive la République!’
As they turned into the short Rue de la Paix, they collided with Bergeret’s National Guards, ready and somewhat trigger-happy, who were drawn up across the entrance to the Place Vendôme. Insults were exchanged and tempers rose; according to the Comité, Bergeret ten times read the
sommation
ordering the demonstrators to disperse. But his voice was drowned by the noise, and all the time pressure from the rear was thrusting the leading ‘Friends of Order’ closer and closer on to the line of the National Guards. Then it happened, and as so often under these circumstances, no one ever knew which side fired first.

Just before the arrival of the ‘Friends’, Washburne’s friend, the young and beautiful Lillie Moulton, reached the Place Vendôme on her way to visit the salon of Worth the English couturier. Picking her way through the barricades, she had entered his premises on the Rue de la Paix unmolested, and then heard the noise of the approaching cavalcade. Absent during the Siege, it was the first time she had seen anything like this in Paris. She rushed to an upstairs window, and fixed her eye upon a ‘handsome young fellow’ in the crowd, whom she recognized: Henri de Pène, a director of
Paris-Journal
, who seemed to be one of the leaders of the demonstration.

De Pène, seeing people on Worth’s balcony, beckoned to them to join him; Mr. Worth wisely withdrew inside and shaking his Anglo-Saxon head said ‘Not I’… This mass of humanity walked down the Rue de la Paix, filling the whole breadth of it. One can’t imagine the horror we felt when we heard the roar of a cannon,
¹
and looking down saw the street filled with smoke, and frightened screams and terrified groans reached our ears. Someone dragged me inside the window, and
shut it to drown the horrible noises outside. De Pène was the first who was killed. The street was filled with dead and wounded. Mr. Hottinguer (the banker) was shot in the arm. The living members of
Les Amis
scampered off as fast as their legs would carry them, while the wounded were left to the care of the shopkeepers, and dead were abandoned where they fell until further aid should come. It was all too horrible!

Worth smuggled Mrs. Moulton out of a back exit. She returned home safely, was given a sedative of camomile tea, and put to bed after her harrowing experience.

Among those who had marched with the ‘Friends of Order’ was Gaston Rafinesque, a young medical student and son of the Passy doctor. After the first volley, fired by the National Guard, he claimed, ‘then the shooters started to march continuing to fire, which was why some of them were wounded by their comrades who were left behind….’ When the firing died down, Gaston and another medical student helped pick up the dead and wounded; the first corpse they collected was that of an elderly gentleman wearing the Legion d’Honneur. Later Gaston recalled ‘the whole scene lit up by the brilliant hot sun, unfeeling as it has been since eternity at the spectacle of human misery….’ It so disgusted him that he felt urged at once to take arms against the rebels, and his father, Jules Rafinesque, wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law in London, Louis Hack; ‘Sometimes I wonder if it would not be wise to go and practise medicine in Switzerland.’ The ‘Massacre in the Rue de la Paix’, as it came to be known, resulted in a dozen dead among the ‘Friends of Order’ and many more wounded, while Bergeret’s National Guards lost one killed and two or three wounded. Each side accused the other of having fired first, and the true blame has never been apportioned; though it seems as if it were most likely to rest with Bergeret’s men. But at the time this hardly mattered. What did matter was that, for the first time since the shooting outside the Hôtel de Ville on January 22nd, blood had been spilt. As Daudet wrote, ‘the farce was turning towards the tragic, and on the boulevard people no longer laughed’. The rift between Paris and Versailles had now gone beyond conciliation.

The Comité had meanwhile invested the military command of the National Guard, pending the arrival of Garibaldi, to whom they had offered it,
¹
in Brunel, Eudes, and Duval—all now raised to the rank of ‘general’—in place of the bibulous Lullier who had been arrested for incompetence. The new commanders at once set about winkling out Thiers’s remaining footholds in Paris. Tirard’s Mairie in the 2nd
Arrondissement
was occupied, as was that of Clemenceau in Montmartre; Clemenceau himself was incarcerated briefly by his insubordinate deputy, Ferré. As mediators, the Mayors had reached the end of the line. At Versailles, the talk was now all of ‘suppression’. On the 25th, Thiers instructed Tirard: ‘Do not continue a useless resistance; I am in the process of reorganizing the army. I hope that before two to three weeks we shall have a force sufficient to liberate Paris.’ But when Tirard had asked Thiers for two regiments of gendarmes, he had been told, ‘I have not got four men and a child to give you’; while Admiral Saisset, quitting Paris on foot and in disguise to report back to Thiers on the failure of his mission, gloomily pronounced that it would require 300,000 men to crush the insurgents. Not one of the facts seemed to support Thiers’s optimism. Certainly nothing Washburne found at Versailles (he had decided to move his official residence there on the 24th, through still keeping a foothold in Paris) impressed him. Chaos and disorganization reigned. In the overcrowded conditions, some sixty of the Deputies were sleeping in the Council Chamber, sometimes appearing in their night-shirts in the midst of a debate; it was, thought Washburne, ‘worse than a Western steamboat in emigration times’. They booed the Paris Mayors for their attempts at conciliation, but when Washburne visited the Assembly he found ‘that august body fiddling while Paris burned’. Sitting between Washburn and Wickham Hoffman in the gallery of the theatre where Marie-Antoinette had spent her last evening at Versailles, Lillie Moulton heard Thiers declaim in his squeaky voice (with thorough hypocrisy) against the use of force; Favre then orated about the glorious ‘destiny of France’, remarks which were received with tremendous applause and much waving of feminine handkerchiefs. But Hoffman on one side of her growled ‘How typical!’, and Washburne on the other, ‘What rubbish!’

In a dispatch to Secretary of State Fish dated March 25th, Washburne reported ‘… the appearance of things today is more discouraging than ever. The insurrectionists in Paris are gaining power and strength every hour….’ It was true. Still the seductive spring weather continued, as did the ‘terrible silence’ in Paris which had so alarmed Edwin Child. Underneath it was an acute nervousness, betrayed by ‘shopkeepers who were brave enough to keep open, guarding their shutters close at hand so as to be ready to close at an instant’s notice’. Now, on top of the realization that it was master of all Paris, deceptively good tidings from the provinces fortified the resolve of the Comité Central. There had been sympathetic uprisings, and Communes declared, in important centres as far apart as St.-Étienne and Marseilles, Le Creusot, Lyons, and Toulouse. Throwing
to the winds its earlier undertakings to the Mayors, and in total defiance of the Assembly, the Comité decided to hold forthwith the postponed municipal elections.

On March 26th Paris went to the polls. From a register of 485,569, 220,167 voted. Thiers proclaimed a victory based on the apparent number of abstentions; but the truth was, and he knew it, that a large proportion of these represented the bourgeoisie who had ‘abdicated’ by quitting Paris during the armistice, or after the first flare-up on March 18th. In fact, compared with those of the municipal elections held the previous November, the results did denote a considerable advance in support of the revolutionaries; it was proof of just how seriously Thiers and the new Assembly had alienated Paris.

Now the wild-eyed men who with Flourens had strode up and down the table a few inches from Trochu’s nose on October 31st had gained, belatedly, what they had demanded that day. Paris’s new municipal council was controlled by Reds in a proportion of four to one, and they promptly assumed the title of ‘Commune de Paris’, with all the awe-inspiring associations that conveyed.

On Tuesday, March 28th, amid immaculate spring sunshine, the Commune officially installed itself at the Hôtel de Ville. Superbly stage-managed by Brunel, for sheer spectacle it was a day of brilliance such as the city had not seen—paradoxically enough—since the braver days of the despised Louis-Napoleon. Some Parisians even found themselves thinking back to the magnificent parades of the Great Exhibition. All Paris seemed to be there, and cheering wildly. In front of the Hôtel de Ville had been erected a platform decked in scarlet cloth on which stood the members of the newly elected Commune, also wearing red scarves, taking the salute as the massed units of the National Guard marched past. Never had this semi-trained militia, which had given so poor an account of itself during the Siege, marched better. There seemed to be a new spring in its step, a new swagger in its salute. At 4 p.m. salvoes of cannon-fire pealed out from batteries mounted on the quay. Assi, who stood near a bust of the Republic that wore a beribboned Phrygian cap, attempted to make a speech, but his words were drowned out by repeated roars of ‘
Vive la Commune!
’ Abandoning his text, he shouted at the top of his voice: ‘In the name of the people, the Commune is proclaimed!’, and the crowd went mad. Thousands of National Guards stationed in the Place raised their képis on the points of their bayonets, as the massed bands thundered out the Marseillaise. All through the afternoon and late into the evening, two hundred battalions of them marched past; the officers saluting the Phrygian-capped bust of the Republic with their sabres. The sinking sun glittered fierily on the
bayonets, catching all the patches of red in the scene, from the streamers tied to the Guards’ bayonets to the statue of Henry IV, completely hidden under its scarlet draperies and clinging urchins.

‘What a day!’ exclaimed Jules Vallès, the novelist: ‘O great Paris!’ That same day in London, accompanied by unparalleled scenes of great jubilation, Queen Victoria opened the new Albert Hall. Meanwhile, in Versailles, Thiers announced that the revolts in the provincial cities had been successfully suppressed. But the news would not arrive in time to cast a shadow over the rejoicing at the Hôtel de Ville. Indeed there was little enough to cause anyone to reflect in this carefree moment that the day’s events had brought France beyond the brink of civil war. Between Paris and Versailles the bridges were down.