The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (63 page)

Henri de Rochefort, who, although he had declined to commit himself to the Commune, was still capable of inspiring the Paris mob to madness, now wrote in his paper:

M. Thiers possesses a wonderful mansion in the Place St.-Georges, full of works of art of all descriptions… what would these property-owning statesmen say if the people of Paris replied to their ravages by using the pickaxe, and, if for every house at Courbevoie touched by the shells, a piece of the wall were knocked out of the palace in the Place St.-Georges?… I am convinced that on the first news that even the door-knockers had been damaged, M. Thiers would order a cease-fire…

The article was to earn Rochefort a sentence of transportation for life to the South Pacific; for his suggestion was taken up with greater enthusiasm than he could possibly have foreseen. On May 11th the newly reconstituted Committee of Public Safety decreed that Thiers’s house should be ‘razed to the ground’ and his belongings confiscated. Without delay twenty carts began clearing the house, distributing its various treasures among the city’s libraries and museums, and the linen to the hospitals. On the 15th, Rigault’s twenty-one-year-old aide, Gaston da Costa, ‘gave an example’ by climbing on to the roof and ripping off the first tiles; the next day Thiers wrote bitterly to a friend: ‘My house is demolished. I have neither hearth nor home, and this dwelling where I received and entertained you all over the past forty years has been destroyed down to the foundations.’ To Edwin Child, who watched the work of demolition, it was ‘as striking an instance of futile spite, as perhaps any revolution can or has to furnish’.

Next, the backward-looking Jacobins—knowing they were about to perish and determined not to go without leaving their mark on Paris—embarked on one of the Commune’s most memorable, as well as pointless, acts. The Vendôme Column had been erected by Napoleon I on the site where, in 1792, the mob had destroyed an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. In close emulation of Trajan’s prototype in Rome, bronze bas-reliefs (cast from melted-down enemy cannon) celebrated Napoleon’s campaign of 1805, winding for 840 feet round the column from the pedestal to the lantern. At the top had originally stood a massive effigy of the Emperor, clad in a toga. With the fall of the First Empire this had been removed, and an unsuccessful attempt made to demolish the huge shaft. Under Louis-Philippe the Column was crowned with a statue of Napoleon in the uniform he had worn at Austerlitz, but on the advent of Louis-Napoleon it too was changed, once again for his uncle, this time wearing his imperial robes. This restoration did much to revive old hatreds of the monument, which, in the eyes of even the moderate left wing of the Second Empire, had long represented all it most detested about militarism and imperialism. As early as September
1870 Courbet (who claimed an additional motive in so far as the Column offended his aesthetic senses)
¹
had been urging Trochu to have the Column demolished, and finally the Commune had acceded to his pressure by passing the necessary decree on April 12th. But, apart from the erection of a scaffolding around its base, nothing much had happened. There were, if nothing else, considerable technical difficulties involving in bringing down this massive shaft, 155 feet high and immensely thick.

With the Jacobins in control, the Commune began to press for more active endeavours, threatening the contractors who had applied for the job with a 500-franc fine for every day’s delay. According to a story later uncovered by Goncourt, an engineer who possessed a demanding mistress, and had been racking his brain for ways of making money, came up with the idea of applying a bevel-cut at the base of the column, to fell it like some gigantic tree. He was paid 6,000 francs for his brainwave (which he promptly passed on to his
amourette
), and workmen began laboriously to hew their way through bronze and stone. After more postponements the demolition was fixed for May 16th, the 26th Floreal. It was to be the biggest festivity since the proclamation of the Commune on March 28th, and no doubt there were hopes that the spectacle would distract minds from the grim realities drawing ever closer outside the city gates. Special ‘invitation’ cards stamped with a Phrygian cap were issued to permit entry into the Place Vendôme (now renamed Place Internationale). Three bands and several battalions of the National Guard were packed into the Place, transformed into a dense mass of red scarves and gold braid, with Félix Pyat swaggering about somewhere in the centre, enveloped in his conspiratorial black cloak with twin pistols at his belt. Paper strips had been stuck to the windows as a protection against shock, while, for fear that the falling column might penetrate straight through the
pavé
into the sewer, tons of manure, straw, and bracken had been spread to reduce the impact.

Engineers had installed capstans with ropes running from them to the top of the column, so that, as it had already been partially cut through, all that now remained was to winch the capstans and pull it over. Shortly after 3 p.m., the bands struck up the Marseillaise. On his own balcony in the Place, Colonel Stanley of the Grenadiers and two compatriots had a grandstand view of the proceedings:

The streets are densely crowded, about 10,000 people. The National Guards have driven back the mob halfway down the Rue de la Paix, it is a wonderful sight to see the buzzing mob, we are all expectation… the single officer watering the streets is a sight worth seeing alone…. It is a blackguard Vandalism but as it was to fall I would not have missed it for a great deal… The first attempt commenced at 3.15. The rope, a double piece attached to a windlass anchored in the ground, began to be tightened at that moment. At 3.36 the snatch-block gave way and some two or three men were wounded, not anything very serious….

There were cries of ‘Treason’, followed by a long pause during which the bands diverted the impatient crowd with patriotic airs. Meanwhile, at the base of the Column

workmen drove in extra wedges on the Rue St. Honoré side where it had been sawn. The other side had been largely cut out, wedge-like with picks, and extra rope was put round the top of the Column, and manned by 50 men on either side standing in the Rue de la Paix, and they, and not the windlass, caused it to lean over at 6.

Part of the great crowd in the Place began to stampede in terror, and then the Column

fell over on the heap of sand faggots prepared for it, with a mighty crash. There was no concussion on the ground, the Column broke up almost before it reached its bed, and lay on the ground, a huge mass of ruin. An immense dust and smoke from the stones and crumpled clay rose up and an instant after a crowd of men, National Guards, Commune, and sightseeing English flew upon it, and commenced to get bits of it as remembrance, but the excitement was so intense that people moved about as in a dream.

A tremendous clamour broke out. Amid roars of ‘
Vive la Commune!
’ Communard leaders attempted to make the customary speeches which nobody could hear from the stump of the column. National Guardsmen busied themselves in breaking up the bronze fragments with the butt ends of their muskets; one old lady purchased a piece of ‘
La Gloire
’ for 500 francs from a sailor who afterwards denounced her to the Commune for another 500 francs. Other members of the crowd rushed up to spit on the remains of the great Emperor, which broken and fallen in the dust reminded the Rev. Gibson of when he had once stood, ‘in the midst of the shapeless ruins of Memphis, besides the one great prostrate statue, probably that of the great Rameses’. To the amorous engineer, as an additional reward, was given the little statue of Liberty on a globe held in Napoleon’s hand. The echoes of the fall of the Column were heard afar; its disappearance was even apparent from Mont-Valérien; while in Brussels, Victor Hugo rebuked the Commune for its vandalism.

Moderate Parisians now began to dread increasingly where the Commune’s next excesses would lead. The guillotine had been publicly burned at the foot of Voltaire’s statue; the demolition of the Chapelle Expiatoire, erected in atonement for the execution of Louis XVI, had already been decreed and was to be saved only at the eleventh hour by the collapse of the Commune itself. The two arms of the cross surmounting the Panthéon had been cut off, replaced by a red flag, and the church—as in 1793—dedicated once again ‘
aux grands hommes
’. On May 4th Goncourt had been horrified by Verlaine’s revelation ‘that he had had to combat a proposition calling for the destruction of Notre-Dame’; and he was extremely relieved to hear that the Venus de Milo had been hidden from Courbet’s possible attention under a pile of dossiers at the Préfecture de Police.

Shortly before 6 p.m. on the day after the fiesta in the Place Vendôme, Edwin Child, chatting to a friend, was suddenly shaken by ‘a terrific shock that made the house tremble, which we thought to be a terrible broadside from Montmarte’. In Passy, Dr. Rafinesque, who was almost knocked over by the force of the explosion, saw a huge column of smoke rising just across the Seine, and rushed home to discover the chandelier on the floor and his wife and daughter taking cover. An hour and a half later his son Gaston returned clutching a handful of blackened bullets; all that remained of an immense arsenal on the Avenue Rapp, a brief distance from the site of the Great Exhibition on the Champ-de-Mars. Visiting the scene of the explosion, Child ‘could hardly believe my ears and eyes. Roofs torn off, not a window to be seen, sunblinds hanging by a broken hinge, fronts of shops smashed in and 4 houses of 5 stories thrown to the ground. The cafés even had the glasses and decanters splintered to pieces by the shock, and many serious accidents occurred to the wounded in the military hospital of the Gros Caillou.’ Colonel Stanley’s friend Lewis Wingfield, assistant surgeon to the American Ambulance during the first Siege, reported: ‘the number of human bodies is about 200, and he saw half a man thrown down from the roof of a neighbouring house, where it had been blown…. Poor women were crying and searching for the remains of their daughters.’

The catastrophe seems almost certainly to have been caused by the kind of carelessness so common during the Siege, but the Commune immediately cried treachery and arrested four unfortunate bystanders. In their hyper-nervous state, there were many Communards who automatically assumed that this was indeed the work of Thiers’s agents; no doubt in retaliation for the shattering of the Vendôme Column. News of the explosion reached the Hôtel de Ville in the midst of fresh wrangling between the Minority and the Jacobin Majority,
and it immediately provoked the latter to clamour for a stepping-up of the Terror. Urbain, a greasy, unattractive personality, rose to press for the application forthwith of the ‘Hostages Law’, which he had proposed on April 5th and on which so far no further action had been taken. Citing the recent killing of a woman ambulance attendant near Fort Vanves, he demanded that ten hostages be executed forthwith, five of them within sight of the Versailles forward posts. Urbain was promptly supported by Rigault, who jumped up with a decree already drafted to provide for the summary trial of prisoners, declaring that only those proven guilty, rather than hostages selected at random, should be executed; but he went on to qualify that, in his eyes, sympathy with Versailles or earlier complicity with the regime under the Second Empire was sufficient to constitute guilt. Protot, the Minister of Justice, contested the legality of Rigault’s interpretation of guilt, and Urbain’s savage proposal was rejected. But eventually a decree was passed constituting a ‘Jury of Accusation’ which was to render summary judgement upon anyone accused of ‘complicity’ with Versailles, and its sentences were to be carried out within twenty-four hours. Those found guilty would be retained as ‘hostages’ from whose number would be selected victims for reprisal executions under the original ‘Hostages Act’.

The life of the Archbishop of Paris and his fellow prisoners was now clearly in the gravest jeopardy. So far the Commune had only executed three men (all for various military offences) and, despite the occasional demands of the mob to submit the hostages to lynch-law, the Archbishop seemed safe—protected as long as he remained a valuable pawn to trade with Blanqui. On April 18th, the Papal Nuncio, Mgr. Chigi, had written to Washburne to ask him—as the only senior diplomat still (partially) resident in Paris—to intercede on the Archbishop’s behalf. Accordingly, Washburne sought an interview with Cluseret who, though receiving him affably enough, expressed his impotence and took him round to see Rigault. Although it was 11 a.m., Rigault was still in bed and Washburne noted an elegant breakfast for some thirty people being laid. Cluseret, however, entered Rigault’s bedroom and came back with a permit for Washburne to visit the Archbishop at the Mazas Prison. Thoughtfully taking him ‘a bottle of old Madeira and some newspapers’, Washburne found him in ‘a gloomy and naked little cell’, about six feet by ten, such as housed common felons:

I was deeply touched at the appearance of this venerable man… his slender person, his form somewhat bent, his long beard, for he has not been shaved apparently since his confinement, his face haggard with ill-health…. I was charmed by his cheerful spirit and his interesting conversation. He seemed to appreciate his critical situation, and to be prepared for the worst. He had no word of bitterness or reproach for his persecutors, but on the other hand remarked that the world judged them to be worse than they really were. He was patiently awaiting the logic of events.

On returning from the prison, Washburne strongly urged Thiers to accept Rigault’s offer to exchange the Archbishop for Blanqui, on the grounds that ‘the French Government could lose nothing in placing Blanqui at liberty, and by doing so they would probably save the life of the Archbishop. I also stated that I considered him in the most imminent danger….’ His intervention gained only Thiers’s disfavour. ‘They are very angry here with Mr. Washburn’, Lord Lyons (who had also approached Thiers, perhaps rather less forcefully) wrote to Granville on April 28th, ‘for interfering about the Archbishop, and they are still more displeased with him for being so much in Paris. In fact, although he has a room here he is much more in Paris than at Versailles.
¹
Thiers observed to me last night that my American colleague had a
conduite très singulière
. They would not stand this in a European representative’, his Lordship added in a condescending tone, ‘but they allow a great latitude to the American, partly because he and his Government have nothing to say to European politics, and partly because they cannot well help it.’ Washburne, like Lyons, found Thiers still adamant. The Communards were rebels, could expect none of the privileges of real warfare, and he could not possibly have dealings with them. Besides, if he agreed to trading Blanqui for the Archbishop, would the desperate rebels not seize additional hostages as a means of extracting new concessions from the lawful Government? So Thiers argued. There were, however, many anti-Communards who were to feel subsequently that Thiers could have made greater efforts to save the Archbishop. Washburne’s assistant, Wickham Hoffman, thought he perceived wheels within wheels; ‘The French authorities certainly were lukewarm in the matter. The Archbishop was a Gallican, a liberal Catholic, notably so. Had he been an Ultramontane, I think that the extreme Right of the Assembly—the Legitimists—would have so exerted themselves that his life would have been saved.’