The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (55 page)

The following day the Commune met again. This time it managed to agree to the formation of ten Commissions to carry out its various affairs. At the top of the list was the Executive Commission, consisting of Eudes, Tridon, Vaillant, Lefrançais, Pyat, Duval, and Bergeret. But despite its name, and although it was supposed to implement the decrees passed by the other Commissions, in effect it had no executive powers, as every measure had to be referred back to the Commune Council itself. Where the actual power of the Commune resided was by no means clear; and meanwhile, much as the original Commune of ’93 had harassed the Convention, so the Comité Central continued to exist and to interfere with the working of the Commune’s Executive Commission. Next in immediate importance came the Military Commission, whose best-known members were Eudes, Bergeret, Duval, and Flourens. (The more impressive Brunel appears to have been dropped for having shown too conciliatory an attitude towards the Mayors and their peace initiatives.) To the key posts in the
Sûreté Générale
went the sinister pair, Ferré and Raoul Rigault. Perhaps the Commission to achieve most under the Commune was that of Labour, Industry, and Exchange, operated by a heavy majority of Internationalists, including Malon, Frankel, Theisz, and Avrial. Another of great significance was the Finance Commission, comprising Clément, Varlin, Jourde, Beslay, and Régère.

For the most part, the delegates of the various Commissions assumed their functions with positively unrevolutionary diffidence. Theisz, appointed Postmaster-General, presented himself at the Post Office and ‘invited’ Rampont, the inaugurator of the balloon services during the Siege, to hand over his duties. Rampont replied that he would not, that he would only acquiesce to violence; in which case he and all the Post Office employees would decamp to Versailles. Theisz retired for further instructions. There was an even more comic situation when old Beslay—himself a failed banker—nervously arrived to ‘take over’ the Bank of France. Rouland, the Governor, had already fled to Versailles, leaving this mighty institution in the hands of the Marquis de Plœuc, who confronted poor Beslay with his four
hundred employees drawn up outside, armed with sticks. There was a conversation, during which de Plœuc appealed to Beslay’s patriotism, reminding him that ‘the fortune of France’ was in his hands. Obviously overawed, Beslay reported back to the Hôtel de Ville that if the Commune laid hands on the Bank there would be ‘no more industry, no more commerce; if you violate it all promissory notes will become worthless’. In the meantime, Varlin and Jourde had assured the finances of the Commune temporarily by borrowing 500,000 francs from Rothschilds, and securing an advance of another million from the Bank. The National Guard could be paid, and immediate commitments met; thus removing any temptation to seize the Bank. This oversight was rated by both Marx and later Lenin as comprising one of the two cardinal errors committed by the Commune; for in the Bank’s vaults lay over two milliards-worth of assets which could have provided the Commune with its most powerful weapon and hostage. Had it laid its hands on these assets, said Marx, ‘the whole of the French bourgeoisie would have brought pressure to bear on the Versailles Government in favour of peace with the Commune’. Instead, Beslay amiably allowed himself to be installed in a small office next to de Plœuc’s, completely under the latter’s wing, while the astute Marquis doled out the advance to the Commune as slowly as possible, all the time smuggling out to Versailles the plates for printing banknotes and what money he could.

From March 29th onwards a flood of decrees began to pour out from the Commune, representing in their miscellany the extraordinary confusion over priorities that prevailed in the Hôtel de Ville. Great satisfaction greeted the repeal of the detested rent act, thereby exempting tenants from payment of rent for the previous nine months, as well as a decree suspending the sale of objects pawned at the notorious
‘Monts-de-piété’
.
¹
Gambling was banned; and on April 2nd the Church was disestablished. The Commune somehow found time to issue an
ordonnance
concerning the Ham Market, one of whose eighteen articles specified that Parisians should not relieve themselves ‘elsewhere than in the public urinals’. There were edicts forbidding the public display of any announcements from Versailles, and threatening looters with the death penalty. Conscription to the regular Army was declared abolished; on the other hand all able-bodied citizens were to enroll for service with the National Guard.
About the only other military measure taken at this time was the reoccupation of the southern forts which the regulars had abandoned; while it was sought to forestall any Versailles attack on the city by the following order sent to the officer guarding the western sector of the
Ceinture
railway; ‘Place an energetic man at this post night and day. This man should mount guard equipped with a sleeper. On the arrival of each train he must derail the train if it does not stop.’

Thus, as March drew to a close, the revolutionary masters of Paris had lost by their indecision thirteen priceless days since Thiers abandoned the city to them; days which Thiers himself had not wasted. By not taking advantage of their initial superiority to launch an offensive against Versailles, here, in the eyes of Lenin, lay the second of the Commune’s fatal errors. As Marx had written about the Revolution of 1848, ‘the defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies’. The Commune was about to suffer the consequences of its error, one which Marx’s pupil, Lenin—about to celebrate his first birthday far away at Simbirsk on the Volga—would not repeat when his turn came.

The Commune marches on Versailles, April 3rd, 1871

20. Monsieur Thiers Declares War

I
T
astonished Dr. Powell, an English physician recently arrived in Paris, to learn that—except for the English Ambulance run by Dr. Cormack—all the others in operation during the Siege had closed down. Explained Dr. Powell; ‘Strange to say, it was not imagined then that any more fighting would take place.’ Once the excitements, alarms, and revolutionary zeal of the first days had calmed down, the bourgeois and uncommitted elements were agreeably surprised at how normal life in Paris still seemed to be. Although some of the extreme-Left Press, such as the reincarnated
Père Duchesne
, ranted and threatened as alarmingly as had any during the Siege, there were still few actual incursions into civic liberties. As yet there had been no expropriation of private property; two right-wing and extremely hostile newspapers,
Le Figaro
and
Le Gaulois
, had been seized, otherwise the rest continued unmolested. In the first flush, the revolutionaries—urged on by the new Police Chief, Raoul Rigault—had arrested over four hundred people between March 18th and 28th, but most
of these (like Clemenccau) had been released again. Questing after a ‘strayed’ American subject, Washburne’s private secretary, McKean, obtained a glimpse of a court martial which struck him as a chilling echo of 1793, and in his dispatch to Secretary of State Fish of March 25th, Washburne himself had singled out a curious report filed by the ‘general’ commanding Montmartre, Gamier, a former dealer in cooking utensils:

He says in the first place, that there is ‘nothing new; night calm and and without incident’. He then goes on to say that at five minutes after ten o’clock two
sergeants de ville
were brought in by the franc-tireurs and immediately shot. He continues, ‘At twenty minutes after midnight, a guardian of the peace, accused of having fired a revolver, is shot’. He closes his report of that calm night ‘without incident’ by saying that a gendarme, brought in by the guards of the twenty-eighth battalion, at seven o’clock, is shot.

But, despite these early excesses, there was no suggestion so far that a new Terror had been imposed upon Paris; anti-Communards did not yet go to sleep in constant fear of the knock on the door in the early morning.

Indeed, although the dispensation of law had all but come to a standstill with the ‘disappearance’ of most of the Parisian judges as well as the police (who were hardly encouraged to venture out on patrol by the kind of treatment recorded above), order was astonishingly well maintained. ‘Robberies, assaults, and other crimes became’, as Dr. Powell claimed with corroboration from many others, ‘a very rare occurrence as far as I can remember.’ The streets seemed unusually empty, and people went about calling each other
‘citoyen’
; Rampont of the Post Office having carried out his threat and decamped with all his officials, both mails and telegraph services were temporarily halted (something which had never happened throughout the Siege); and Washburne noted occasionally meeting wedding parties on their way to the Mairie, the ‘distracted’ groom wondering whether he would find there a mayor who could marry him, or whether it had been turned into a Communard ‘guard-house’ instead. But people still got married, and everyday existence went on much as before. In fact, the Rev. Gibson reckoned that he had ‘never seen the streets so well swept since the Siege’. Eight theatres were reopened on the Commune’s orders, and, as the sunny spring weather settled in, so too did the euphoria of the simple supporters of the Commune. To the underprivileged, the oppressed, the frustrated of Paris, these last few days must have possessed an unimaginable magic, must have been golden with promise. There is something about these days that reminds one
a little of the tragic optimism of the Hungarian freedom fighters during the brief period of revolutionary liberty in 1956, while Khrushchev was marshalling his tank divisions in the east; or of the heady euphoria of Polish ‘solidarity’ in 1980.

By the first days of April, Thiers, having scraped the bottom of the barrel, having brought in
Mobiles
from all over the provinces and mobilized the gendarmes and ‘Friends of Order’ National Guards escaped from Paris, had managed to muster over 60,000 troops at Versailles. This already exceeded by some 50 per cent the total permitted by the Peace Treaty with the Germans, and they were a mixed lot. No plan to reconquer Paris had yet been formulated, but in anticipation of this, on March 30th, two squadrons of cavalry carried out a reconnaissance in the Courbevoie area, just across the Seine from the suburb of Neuilly. It was apparently conducted on the sole initiative of the Marquis de Gallifet, the dashing general who had led the desperately heroic last cavalry charge at Sedan, now returned from a German prisoner-of-war camp. Later a close friend of the future Edward VII, Gallifet, the elegant, witty, and savagely sarcastic courtier, whose wife had been one of the Empire’s most famous beauties, renowned for the extravagance of her costumes at Louis-Napoleon’s masked balls, was to fill a prominent and dread role in the final chapter of the Commune. Though he seemed the very essence of the
panache-et-gloire
generals of the Second Empire, Gallifet had had experience which was perhaps peculiarly appropriate to the kind of warfare now facing the French regular Army. The influential Marquise had obtained him a command in Louis-Napoleon’s Mexican campaign (no doubt to give herself greater freedom of action in Paris); a war against the irregulars of Juarez in which the French troops became accustomed to taking few prisoners. Gallifet had acquired there a reputation for being both fearless and ferocious, as contemptuous of his own suffering as he was of that of others. At a dinner party he had shocked young Mrs. Moulton with details of his Mexican experiences: ‘He had been shot in the intestines and left for dead on the field of battle. He managed by creeping and crawling,
“toujours tenant mes entrailles das mon képi”,
to reach a peasant’s house, where the good people took care of him….’ Now, so the impressionable lady was assured, he wore a silver plate with his name engraved on it ‘to keep the above mentioned
entrailles
in their proper place.’

Light as it was, Gallifet’s reconnaissance of March 30th succeeded in dislodging a small outpost held by the Commune National Guard; thus the report reaching Thiers cannot have given any impressive account of the state of the Paris defences. Two days later, an
encouraged Thiers held a council, the proceedings of which were kept strictly secret, but to the Assembly he announced that same day:

The organization of one of the finest armies possessed by France has been completed at Versailles; good citizens can thus reassure themselves and hope for the end of a struggle which will have been painful, but short.

This was nothing less than a declaration of war; painful the struggle would certainly be, but not short.

In Paris, Thiers’s announcement finally confronted Commune leaders, then involved in arguments over the disestablishment of the Church, with reality. Amid much disagreement and confusion, it was agreed that the Paris forces should march upon Versailles in five days’ time; meanwhile, Bergeret would carry out a strong reconnaissance towards Courbevoie. But Thiers acted first. It was April 2nd, Palm Sunday. Goncourt, one of the ‘good citizens’ addressed by Thiers, began his diary for that day: ‘A cannonade at about ten, o’clock, in the direction of Courbevoie. Thank God! Civil war has begun.’ As the day went on, Goncourt noted that ‘the cannonade died away. ‘Is Versailles beaten? Alas, if Versailles suffers the least reverse, Versailles is lost!’ There were indeed ugly rumours as the ever-inquisitive Goncourt hastened into the centre of Paris. But there, as usual studying ‘people’s faces, which are like barometers of events during revolutions, I discerned a concealed satisfaction, a sly joy. At last a paper told me that the Bellevillites had been beaten!…’