The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (60 page)

Throughout April and on into May, while on the one hand fighting for survival, the Commune had persisted in its zealous aims of reforming the world. From the Hôtel de Ville there poured out a mass of legislation—a mixture of incredibly irrelevant trivia and genuine attempts to right social injustices. On April 2nd a decree was passed limiting the salaries of all Government officials to 6,000 francs a year, roughly equivalent to a workman’s wages; a step later praised by Lenin as making ‘the break from a bourgeois democracy to a proletarian democracy’. On the 16th an edict ordained the ‘nationalization’ of all workshops abandoned by their bourgeois owners (but it was never carried out). On the 27th, the Commune abolished the system
of fines imposed upon workers. On the 28th, it decreed an end to nightbaking, which had long been a grievance among the bakery workers (Frankel, who was responsible for it, considered the law the Commune’s one big achievement, while many like Madame Rafinesque of Passy grumbled that it only meant ‘all Paris is reduced to stale bread’). A serious effort was made to combat prostitution, but there were certain self-cancelling local discrepancies; as Colonel Stanley noted, ‘It is very funny that the 1st Arrondissement forbid women in the houses and the second Arrondissement in the streets…. So I suppose the women will sleep in one quarter, and perambulate in the other.’ The Commune proclaimed that it would ‘adopt’ all the wives and children of men who died ‘in defending the rights of Paris’; the wives—‘married or not’, the Rev. Gibson was shocked to discover—were to receive pensions of 600 francs a year.

Nor was the Commune backward in cultural affairs; legislation was busily being prepared to laicize schools (‘What’, snorted one Communard, Gaston da Costa, ‘should one think of this pedagogic Commission occupying itself at such a moment with educational reform…. This grandeur, this tranquillity, this blindness in an assembly of men already menaced by 100,000
chassepots
, is one of the most stupefying facts ever given to a historian to record’), while on April 12th Courbet had been charged with the task of reopening the museums of Paris ‘with the least possible delay’, and of re-establishing the annual Salon.

On April 19th the Commune issued what was probably its most imposing and important politico-social proclamation, which was to become, in essence, its testament; at any rate its closest approach to formulating any coherent programme. In immense placards posted throughout Paris it declared the aims for which it was fighting:

… the recognition and consolidation of the Republic… the absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of France…. The inherent rights of each Commune are:

The control of the Communal budget, receipts and expenditures; the fixing and re-division of taxes; the direction of local services; the organization of the magistrature, of the police and of education….

The absolute guarantee of individual liberty, of the freedom of conscience and the freedom of labour….

Paris herself reserved the rights to make

administrative and economic reforms demanded by her population… to universalize power and property according to the necessities of the moment, the wish of those interested, and the rules furnished by experience….

Rising to a powerful, grandiloquent climax, the proclamation continued:

The Communal Revolution, begun by the popular initiative of March 18th, inaugurates a new political era, experimental, positive, scientific.

It is the end of the old governmental and clerical world, of militarism, of monopolism, of privileges to which the proletariat owes its servitude, the Nation its miseries and disasters.

But nothing the Commune said or did faced up to the issue over which so many patriotic Parisians had originally sided with it—the humiliation at Prussian hands and the crushing peace terms. Nor, patently, had it ever had the military potential for any such action. With the Prussians ringed around the eastern perimeter of Paris, the Commune lived in constant fear that they might intervene to help Versailles crush the insurrection, and therefore went out of its way to avoid any incident that might upset the former enemy. And, if it lost adherents through its display of impotence towards the Prussians, as well as its military ineptitude in the fighting with Versailles, the Commune also lost many of its moderates when, in both word and deed, it revealed ambitions far beyond the scope of a mere municipal council.

By early April, through the resignation of such moderates, deaths, and other forms of erosion, the Commune Assembly found it had thirty-one vacancies, and on the 16th—with the fighting at Neuilly at its peak—chose to hold by-elections. Among the newcomers elected was the noisy and drunken old Courbet; Marx’s future son-in-law, Longuet, the editor of the
Journal Officiel
, and his liaison officer, Serrailler; Johannard, a handsome heart-breaker and largely renowned for being the Commune’s top billiards-player; and a contumacious hunchback called Vésinier. Its new blood did little to improve matters within the Commune. As the pressure from Versailles mounted, so the arguments and rifts grew; with each act of legislation the Commune threatened to divide into its various heterogeneous components.
¹
Usually Félix Pyat, as ever the irresponsible polemicist, was to be found somewhere near the eye of the storm. Attacked by Vermorel for inconsistency between what he said at the Hôtel de Ville and what he printed in his paper, Pyat would retire to
Le Vengeur
to retaliate with a savage leader accusing Vermorel of
being a police spy. There were few who were not at some time the target for Pyat’s poisoned spleen, including Rossel, who he knew despised him.

In an attempt to bring some kind of order to the Commune’s affairs, Delescluze proposed that the semi-impotent Executive Commission be replaced by a kind of War Cabinet formed from the Delegates of the other nine Commissions, and on April 21st this reorganization had been effected. But in practice it made little difference. Day after day the bickering continued. ‘What gnawed the heart of the Commune’, declared Rochefort with reason, ‘was distrust. The Hôtel de Ville distrusted the Ministry of War, the Ministry of War distrusted the Ministry of the Marine, Vanves Fort distrusted Montrouge, which distrusted Issy. Raoul Rigault distrusted Colonel Rossel, and Félix Pyat distrusted me.’ Delescluze was disgusted by it all, and in a fiery speech magnificent for one so sick and worn out he thundered to the Commune assembly:

You complain that our decrees are not carried out. Well, citizens, are you not yourselves somewhat accessory to this fault?… When a decree appears in the
Journal Officiel
with 13 negative votes and only 18 in the affirmative, and does not meet with the respect that this assembly deserves, can you be astonished?…

‘You should have replaced us sooner’, he went on. But until then

… there are members who have remained at their posts, and will remain until the end despite the insults with which we are covered, and, if we do not triumph, we will not be the last to die, whether on the ramparts or elsewhere.

These were eloquently prophetic words.

On April 28th, an old Jacobin of the 1848 Revolution with a massive white beard, Jules Miot, proposed the creation of a Committee of Public Safety to take over the Commune’s executive functions. For three stormy days the discussions continued over this proposal, so redolent with associations of Robespierre and the Terror. The Socialists, and above all the members of the International, were strongly opposed; Longuet scornfully described it as a talisman, while another with a long memory cried out; ‘Under the Empire we stood for liberty, and in power we shall not abjure it.’ Finally the Commune Assembly voted, 45 to 23, in favour of Miot’s proposal. Next it went on to vote for five men to form the all-powerful Committee of Public Safety; with the exception of the inevitable Pyat, all unknown ciphers—although Washburn somewhat exaggeratedly described them as ‘the most desperate and dangerous men in the Commune’. This time the Minority of 23 (including Beslay, Courbet,
Longuet, Malon, Serrailler, and Varlin) abstained from voting. The most fundamental split in the Commune so far had taken place, and henceforth its Assembly would consist of a Majority and Minority faction; the one, controlled by the Jacobins, wanting to exercise dictatorship and terror—the methods of ’93—and blaming the failures of the Commune upon the sentimentality of the Socialists; the other desiring to govern by reasonably democratic methods, to observe moderation in order to leave, as Rochefort put it, ‘the door at least half open to conciliation’. In the light of twentieth-century history, it seems perhaps ironical that the exponents of democracy and moderation should have been chiefly the Internationalists, the forefathers of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

Although at first the Committee of Public Safety proved as ineffectual as anything that it was designed to replace, it was a milestone in the Commune’s passage towards grimmer territory. For in the background personalities and trends had already emerged that would in the end for ever stigmatize the name ‘Commune’ in respectable eyes. Of all the leaders of the Commune, none was more responsible for shaping its final image than Raoul Rigault, its Police Chief, and later
Procureur
of the Revolutionary Tribunal introduced by the Committee of Public Safety. In at least one facet of his character Rigault typified the professional Bohemian and perpetual student still to be found today lurking purposelessly around the cheaper estaminets of St.-Germain-des-Prés—atheistic, amoral, left-wing, anti-Establishment, and lightly washed. A friend of Verlaine’s, among others, Rigault before the war frequented the Café Madrid or any of the Left Bank haunts patronized by Rochefort, Pyat, and other vociferous enemies of the Second Empire. Though of steady middle-class origins, Rigault supported Blanqui as passionately as he hated the Church. But by instinct he was more of a Jacobin than a Socialist, spending most of his leisure time plunged into books about the Great Revolution, and especially the Terror. Not yet twenty-five at the outbreak of the war, he had already shown promise as a true disciple of
l’Enfermé
by receiving three separate sentences of imprisonment for political agitation, during one of which he attempted to stir up a prison revolt with blood-curdling shouts of
‘Vive la Guillotine!’

‘I want sexual promiscuity. Concubinage is a social dogma,’ Rigault once declared, and, in and out of sordid Montparnasse garrets, he assiduously practised what he preached in the spare moments remaining from his other commitments. His leer terrified poor Lillie Moulton when she had to apply to him for a passport to leave Paris. By then debauchery, probably more than the cares of office, had
evidently aged him, for he ‘appeared to me a man about thirty-five or forty years old, short, thick-set, with a full round face, a bushy black beard, a sensuous mouth, and a cynical smile. He wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses; but these could not hide the wicked expression of his cunning eyes.’ In a voice loaded with insinuation, he voiced his regrets that she was leaving the city, because ‘I should think Paris would be a very attractive place for a pretty woman like yourself.’ Turning to the courteous Paschal Grousset (whose presence she felt probably saved her from something worse than just the refusal of a passport, and who later apologized to her for his colleague’s behaviour), Rigault concluded, ‘We don’t often have such luck, do we Grousset?’ Mrs. Moulton was afraid she might be about to faint.

One of the historians of the Second Empire, de la Gorce, claimed that one did not know whether ‘to rank him among the dangerous lunatics or among the corrupt’. Rigault was much more than a mere Left Bank layabout. To this aspect he added an infinitely more menacing face. About him and his faithful lieutenant, Ferré, there was a touch of cold, twentieth-century professionalism notably lacking in the rest of the Communards. More than any other, Rigault had studied his part in advance. ‘Nothing but a guttersnipe, but a policeman of genius’, was old Blanqi’s verdict on him. From his researches into the Revolution, while Marat deeply impressed him, Rigault reached the conclusion that Saint-Just was merely a feeble amateur in the art of terror. With this background knowledge, Rigault set himself to studying modern police techniques. Under constant observation himself by the Imperial police, young Rigault had turned the tables by spying on them. It was said he spent long hours with a spyglass propped up on a Seine bookseller’s stall, peering into the Prefecture of Police across the water, and that he had a team of ‘agents’ posted outside to keep track of the coming and going of informers and plain-clothes men. Rochefort tells how Rigault plotted the undoing of a particularly harsh and licentious judge, Delesvaux, who delighted in sentencing revolutionaries. Rigault set an
agente provocatrice
to pick up the judge in a café; then, once the bait had been taken, Rigault arraigned the judge with seducing his sister, and—with the aid of three toughs—broke his nose and blacked both his eyes.

On the overthrow of Louis-Napoleon, Rigault had promptly offered his services to the Prefecture ‘to dig out secret agents of the Bonapartist police, arrest them and prosecute them….’ Edmond Adam, then Prefect of Police, vaguely recalled noticing Rigault as a ‘simple employee’ busily searching for dossiers; until, on the night of October 31st, this same simple employee had presented himself at the head of
three hundred National Guards as Adam’s newly appointed successor. When the
putsch
failed, Rigault was sacked; but not, apparently, before he had been able to make off with a quantity of the secret files.

On March 20th, Rigault received the post coveted since the previous October, and with some zeal began arresting ‘enemies of the Republic’, many of whose names he had uncovered in the course of his counterespionage against the police. Rigault and his work were at once a source of contention within the Commune; Jacobins like the embittered Vésinier claimed there ‘never was a man who possessed a finer sense of justice’, while Rossel accused him of having ‘led the scandalous existence of a spendthrift rake, surrounded by useless persons, and giving up the greater part of his time to debauchery.’
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As the pressure from Versailles mounted, and with it all the familiar manifestations of siege nerves, such as spy-mania, so Rigault stepped up the rate of his arrests until by May 23rd they totalled over 3,000. Many were clapped into gaol for long periods without any kind of hearing. The Communards themselves began to share the terror that Rigault and his ‘twenty-year-old scoundrels’, as Cluseret called them, exercised over the Parisian bourgeois, and on April 24th protests against the arbitrary arrests reached such a peak that both Rigault and his lieutenant, Ferré, were forced to resign. But Rigault’s successor as Prefect of Police, Cournet, was in fact an ally of his; and three days later Rigault reappeared vested in the immensely greater authority of
Procureur
, State Prosecutor of the newly created Revolutionary Tribunal. It was yet another title with unpleasant connotations from ’93, and under it Rigault emerged possessing more real power than an other member of the Commune.