The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (56 page)

Goncourt’s entry was a fair summary of the day’s skirmishing. Thiers had backed up Gallifet’s reconnaissance with a strong attack on Courbevoie where the Communards, reinforced after the alert of the 30th, were entrenched at the Rond Point. The action was clearly visible from Paris. Washburne, disappointed at having seen none of the fighting during the Siege, found it ‘a singular sight to my family on that Sunday morning to watch from the upper windows of my residence the progress of a regular battle under the walls of Paris, and to hear the roar of artillery, the rattling of musketry and the peculiar sound of the mitrailleuses’. But it was difficult to tell for some time who was winning. Indeed, at Courbevoie itself there was doubt to begin with. The Versailles regulars were repulsed, and one battalion of the line broke with ominous cries of ‘
Vive la Commune!
’ On the other hand, the Zouaves were said to have attacked vigorously, shouting, ‘
Vive le Roi!
’ Suddenly, it was the story of Buzenval all over again. Under pressure, the rebel National Guard, still no better trained or disciplined than in January, some drunk and all doped with over-confidence, panicked and abandoned their positions. Across
the bridge and up the Avenue de Neuilly they fled, offering to all who would listen the excuses heard so often during the Siege; above all, the dismal plaint, ‘
Nous sommes trahis!
’ Ex-Guardsman Child, on his way home from Palm Sunday service, met some of them and remarked acidly ‘suppose they wanted what was most needful, “pluck”.’ It was, he added, a ‘dull day. Quite suitable to the
événements
.’

Almost without opposition Gallifet’s men seized the vital bridge at Neuilly. The success, small though it was, gave a boost of tremendous importance to the shaky morale of Thiers’s forces. Casualties had been low on both sides, but among the victims had been the unfortunate inmates of a girls’ school in Neuilly, hit by Government shells as they were departing on a Palm Sunday outing. It was a prelude to what lay ahead for the civil population of this part of Paris, but there was also that day a casualty which was to set off an even more tragic chain-reaction. With the Versailles troops had been Surgeon-Major Pasquier of the Gendarmerie, the principal doctor attached to Vinoy and apparently a much-beloved figure. According to the Government version, Pasquier had volunteered to go towards the Pont de Neuilly, under a flag of truce, to negotiate with the insurgents; according to the Communards, they simply saw a figure whose sleeves were covered in gold stripes, assumed he was a general, and shot him down. Wherever the truth lay, the killing caused great indignation among the Versailles troops, and Thiers—condemning it as an atrocity on a par with the murder of Thomas and Lecomte—made maximum capital out of it.

Thoroughly shaken out of its tranquil euphoria by the news of the Versailles attack, all Paris was trembling; some of it with rage. Larded with references to ‘Chouans, Vendéens, and Bretons of Trochu’ which betrayed the historical fixations of its Jacobin members, the Commune emitted a hysterial proclamation, announcing:

The royalist conspirators have ATTACKED.

Despite the moderation of our attitude, they have ATTACKED….

Those who still regarded the Commune as nothing more than a legally elected municipal council were profoundly and genuinely shocked. The boulevards ‘were terribly agitated’, reported Edwin Child, ‘at every turning almost were to be met battalions marching, their drums and clarions creating a most awful discord. On arriving Rue Royale, met them all united together and marching, so they said, straight to Versailles, but doubt if they will ever get there.’ At the Hôtel de Ville there was the usual disunity. The ‘generals’ of the
Commune, Eudes, Duval, and Bergeret, demanded an immediate counter-attack; Pyat, who for the past three days had been clamouring for action in
Le Vengeur
in much the same tone as he had employed against Trochu during the Siege, now backed down, to the fury of Duval. Finally a plan was arrived at, under which massed units of the National Guard would march upon Versailles the following day, April 3rd, in three columns. On the right, Bergeret, and Flourens, heading on either side of Mont-Valérien towards the village of Rueil; in the centre, Eudes, advancing via Meudon and Chaville; with Duval securing the left flank by an attack on the same Châtillon heights that had so embarrassed Ducrot during the Siege. The plan itself was unexceptionable; but it relied too much on the striking-power of the National Guard, and ignored the fact that—through the disgraced Lullier’s oversight—Mont-Valérien was now held by enemy gunners.

The force which set out from Paris early on the morning of the 3rd was more of a mob than an army; it proximated closely to the
sortie torrentielle
for which its leaders had pleaded throughout the first Siege. But in the haste and the disorganization the National Guard omitted to take along its most powerful military card—the two hundred cannon, the original
casus belli
, which still remained in the artillery park at Montmartre. What it lacked in equipment and training, though, was more than compensated for by the National Guard’s confidence in itself, despite the reverse of the previous day. All felt that one ‘whiff of grapeshot’ would suffice to disperse the demoralized ‘royalists’. No one was more confident than the commanders. Bergeret, a former bookseller’s clerk, who arrived at dawn at the assembly area in a phaeton, caparisoned in sashes and great knee-boots that reminded one somehow of a Dumas musketeer, declared in a first dispatch: ‘Bergeret
himself
is at Neuilly. Soldiers of the Line are all arriving and declaring that, except for the senior officers, no one wants to fight.’ Flourens, too, was there, magnificent as ever in his Cretan uniform—blue pantaloons, immense scimitar, and Turkish belt crammed with pistols. In his turn, he telegraphed back to the Hôtel de Ville: ‘We shall be the victors… there cannot ever be a doubt of that.’ Still the festive mood of those halcyon March days prevailed, and one Communard chronicler, Edmond Lepelletier, was reminded of ‘a horde of turbulent picnickers, setting out gaily and uncertainly for the country, rather than an attacking column directing itself towards a formidable position’. In ragged but dense ranks, without any scouts, the Bergeret-Flourens column sauntered across the Seine, keeping to the centre of the road. Up on to the Bergères plateau they strolled, close to the scene of Trochu’s final disaster.

Then one of the powerful guns spoke from the fortress of Mont-Valérien, towering above the expedition. The aim was not particular distinguished, but one shell fell amid the packed masses of Bergeret’s column, followed by another. An officer was cut in two. It was enough. No one—least of all Bergeret—seems to have expected this, and like the detonation that ignites a powder magazine, panic flashed back along the whole straggling column. It split in two, the rear fragment scattering at top speed back across the Seine. On the far side of the river a
Times
correspondent came across ‘two officers hiding in a house, and the men were begging the villagers to lend them clothes in order that they might not be caught in uniform by the troops’. Demoralization could hardly have been more complete. But, isolated at the head of the column, the ever-audacious Flourens and a now rather less confident Bergeret still decided to press on towards Versailles with the remnants of the vanguard, some 3,000 men, that still remained to them.

The Communards had fallen into a trap. As soon as Bergeret’s troops deployed on to the plain, the Versailles cavalry swept down on them. He too fell back across the Seine. Flourens was now left alone with a handful of his faithful
Chasseurs
and Cipriani, his comrade from Cretan days. Displaying an almost suicidal courage, and ignoring Cipriani’s exhortations to beat a retreat back to Paris, he continued sadly on to Rueil. At an inn in the village, he took off his famous belt, scimitar, and pistols, and flopped down, exhausted. During the night Rueil was surrounded by troops commanded by one Colonel Boulanger, who had fought with conspicuous gallantry at Ducrot’s Great Sortie and would, at the end of the next decade, give his name to a bizarre episode in French politics, the Boulangist movement. According to one account, Cipriani and Flourens were denounced by the villagers; Cipriani was struck down at once, and Flourens led out unarmed. A mounted gendarmerie captain, apparently recognizing him, cleft his head in two with one savage sabre blow.

The body of the flamboyant adventurer was then thrown upon a dung-cart, and wheeled in triumph to Versailles (where, it was reported, elegant ladies prodded the corpse’s shattered cranium with the ferrules of their umbrellas). The first of the Commune’s leaders had been eliminated. Elsewhere other summary punishments were being exacted; at least five captured insurgents were put to death on Gallifet’s orders, on the grounds that they were deserters from the regular Army, but it was fairly clear that these were regarded as reprisals for the shooting-down of Surgeon-Major Pasquier the previous day. Indeed, Gallifet issued a proclamation that same day, declaring that his soldiers had been ‘assassinated’, and that ‘I proclaim
war without truce or mercy upon these assassins. This morning I had to make an example; let it be salutary.’ One woman at Courbevoie told a
Times
correspondent that many prisoners had been ‘first treated with the grossest cruelty by the Gendarmes’, and then shot. The same correspondent quoted rumours to the effect that General Vinoy himself had ordered the shooting out of hand of all surrendered National Guards, and the fate of Duval, the leader of the Communard left flank, suggests there may have been truth in these rumours. By the night of the 3rd, Duval had successfully installed himself, with some 1,500 men, on the Châtillon plateau. But the
Versaillais
counter-attacked the following morning, and Duval and his men were forced to surrender—apparently on promise of their lives. All who still wore any vestige of regular Army uniform were shot on the spot, while the remainder, including Duval, was marched off to Versailles. On the way they were intercepted by Vinoy. The general inquired if there was a leader among the Communards, and Duval stepped forward. Two others came to his side; Vinoy addressed them as ‘hideous scum’, turned to his staff and ordered the three prisoners shot.
¹
The order was duly executed, and a captain dragged off the dead Communard ‘general’’s boots as a trophy. It was an episode that was to mark the beginning of the terrible tragedy of the Commune ‘hostages’.

Everywhere the Commune drive on Versailles had collapsed in ruins. All that had been achieved was the recapture of the Pont de Neuilly. Paris was in a turmoil. In the afternoon Washburne encountered a body of several hundred exhilarated women formed up in the Place de la Concorde, ready to march upon Versailles

in poor imitation of those who marched upon the same place in the time of Louis the Sixteenth. They paraded up the Champs Elysées and through the Avenue Montaigne…. Many of them wore the
‘bonnet rouge’
, and all were singing the Marseillaise. Whenever they met an omnibus they stopped it, caused the passengers to get out, and took possession themselves. One old woman, sixty years of age, mounted on the top of an omnibus, displayed the red flag, and gave the word of command. How far they went and what became of them I do not know.

Elsewhere the Rev. Gibson found National Guardsmen wandering about in twos and threes, looking extremely dejected; ‘fatigued and worn, covered with dust; so changed in their appearance from what they were when they marched out on Sunday evening’. On the 6th,
there was a magnificent state funeral for the ‘heroes’ who had died in the two days of action. Three large hearses, containing the dead,
¹
covered in black with red flags at each corner, were drawn solemnly through Paris. Delescluze and five Communard leaders, heads bare and wearing red scarves, led the procession. Behind came several battalions of National Guards; the men, thought Gibson, ‘looking thoughtful and sad’, though Edwin Child—less charitably—considered that ‘a few hundredweights of soap would have done them good’. In the background muffled drums beat, and women sobbed as the corpses were lowered reverently into a communal grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

It hardly needed the sombre procession, so reminiscent of those of a few months earlier, to make Parisians grimly aware that they were now under siege for a second time. The gates were shut and the trains ceased running. Hearing of this, the Rev. Gibson echoed the feelings of most Parisians when he exclaimed: ‘So we are shut up as in a cage!’; his concierge admitted, ‘I never felt afraid during the Siege, but now I shiver’. Despite the closing-down of communications, people contrived to leave Paris by the thousand; Gibson heard it said that they were leaving at a rate of 50,000 a day. Many men, fearful of being conscripted into the National Guard, took to their heels or went into hiding. As the Commune authorities required that a
laissez-passer
be obtained by anyone leaving Paris, Washburne (in his capacity as
chargé d’affaires
acting for the Germans) was besieged with Alsatians wanting a passport and claiming to have become German citizens. For the fourteenth time since the previous August, Edwin Child was instructed to pack up his shop’s stock of watches and chains for the nervous M. Louppe to take them with him out of Paris. On Easter Sunday, he was surprised to notice how empty the church seemed; the boulevards had become more and more deserted; the principal shops shut because their owners had departed. Wandering into Voisin’s on the Saturday, Goncourt asked for the
plat du jour
, to be told, ‘There isn’t any; there’s no one left in Paris’. He spotted only one old lady whom he had seen there throughout the Siege. Outside, the emptiness gave him the impression ‘of a city where there’s a plague’.