The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (64 page)

The Archbishop’s prospects were not improved by the behaviour of his fellow hostage, Abbé Lagarde, the Vicar-General. The Abbé had been released by the Communards in order to carry further negotiatory correspondence to Thiers, on condition that, his mission completed, he would then return. But, once reaching the sanctuary
of Versailles, he found one pretext or another for not delivering himself up again into Rigault’s clutches. According to Hoffman, the Archbishop referred to this desertion in a ‘sad and resigned, but not bitter tone’. On Friday, May 19th, Washburne visited the Archbishop again; this time to bring him the bad news that it had, after all, proved impossible to effect his exchange for Blanqui. ‘I am sorry to say’, Washburne reported to Fish, ‘I found him very feeble. He has been confined to his pallet for the last week with a kind of pleurisy; is without appetite, and very much reduced in strength. He is yet cheerful, and apparently resigned for any fate that may await him.’ Washburne shook hands with him and bade him what proved to be a final adieu’.

That same day Rigault began the work of the summary Juries of Accusation. He had divided the hostages into two categories; first, the major figures who included the Archbishop and the other priests, Chaudey, Jules Ferry’s deputy accused of being responsible for the ‘massacre’ outside the Hôtel de Ville on January 22nd, and a Second Empire banker called Jecker; and second the small fry, mostly police agents and gendarmes. The second category were tried first. The hearing of the fourteen before Rigault himself (who asked them such superbly pertinent questions as ‘What would you have done in December 1851?) lasted little more than three hours, and twelve of them were sentenced to return to prison to await their fate as hostages. A hearing for the Archbishop and the first category was to be fixed for the following week; but events overtook it. Rigault’s trials had cost the Commune the support of one of its powerful, albeit unpredictable, allies. Rochefort (earlier he had tried to obtain the release of one of the arrested priests) attacked in his
Mot d’Ordre
the principle of executing hostages, and the following morning, while still abed, he was visited by a young man from the Prefecture, come to warn him that he would probably be arrested that day. Like Rossel, he decided it was time to go. Accompanied by his secretary, with his beard shaven and his give-away bushy hair cut, Rochefort got out of Paris without much difficulty. Heading eastwards, he reached Meaux Station before being recognized and arrested by a Government agent. The prisoners were then escorted to Versailles, where it seemed as if the whole town had turned out to witness the arrival of the fettered rabble-rouser. Women crowded round, shaking their fists and screaming ‘Kill them! Kill them! Kill them on the spot!’ Instead of being taken at once to the cells, Rochefort claimed that they were driven through the town ‘for more than an hour to feast the eyes of the population’, and it seems he was lucky to escape lynching. Indicative of the prevailing mood at Versailles, the treatment of Rochefort was

mild compared with what other prisoners of the lawful regime would shortly experience.

As tension increased in Paris, manifestations of phenomena familiar during the first Siege also recurred. The passion for crazy inventions was one. A Dr. Parisel, head of the ‘Scientific Delegation’, bombarded the Commune with ideas of ‘armoured sharp-shooters’, of explosive-carrying balloons that would wipe out not only Versailles and the Prussians, but for good measure the wicked English as well—because they were ‘coveting Suez’. There was talk about mining the sewers of Paris, and more about that perennial fancy, Greek fire. Zealously abetted by Rigault, spy-mania had once more become a norm of life. The Rev. Gibson witnessed six people seized in the Avenue d’Eylau ‘because they were looking towards Mont-Valérien, and their gestures made some National Guards believe they were making signals to the Fort!’ Arrested by a drunk National Guard, Colonel Stanley was escorted to prison and flung into a hole ‘two paces long and one broad… thickly coated with slippery filth’. There he was later joined by a drunk who promptly relieved himself; ‘I gave him a small tap on the head… and I warned what would happen if he touched an Englishman, not a cowardly Frenchman as he fancied he had to do with.’ Stanley was eventually released, through the intervention of the British Embassy, but while in prison he also met ‘two poor
sergents de ville
, they both had families and expected to be shot’, and ‘two more supposed spies’.

Probably few had a luckier escape than Auguste Renoir. Oblivious of the world around, he was painting a sketch of the Seine which attracted the attention of some National Guards. They became convinced that he was a spy sketching plans of the river defences for Versailles. Renoir was arrested; a crowd gathered, and an amiable old lady proposed that the ‘spy’ should immediately be thrown into the river. ‘You drown kittens’, she said, ‘and they don’t do nearly as much harm.’ Eventually, however, Renoir was dragged to the nearest
Mairie
, where (according to his son and biographer, Jean Renoir) ‘there was a firing-squad on permanent duty’. Fortunately for Renoir, and posterity, Rigault also happened to be there and he now rendered his one great contribution to civilization by recognizing Renoir as the artist who had given him sanctuary at Fontainebleau some years previously, when he had been on the run from Louis-Napoleon’s police. Rigault embraced the ‘spy’ touchingly, and promptly had him turned loose.

But in his zeal it was apparent that Rigault had been arresting the wrong spies and hostages. As Lissagaray observed, by far the best hostage held by the Commune was the Bank of France; ‘Through it
they held the genital organs of Versailles; they could laugh at its professional experience, at its guns. Without expending a man, the Commune had only to say to it: “Come to terms or die”’. Meanwhile, under the myopic eyes of complaisant old Beslay, the Marquis de Plæuc had continued to pass out of the back door of the Bank vast funds that materially helped Thiers finance the expansion of his forces. But apart from the issue of the Bank, there was also no doubt that Paris was riddled with real spies who slipped through Rigault’s net. Numerous attempts were made by Thiers to ‘buy’ leading Communards, and several of the conspiracies and rifts within the Commune seem to have been caused by the work of his
agents provocateurs
. Dombrowski (like Cluseret before him) was approached by an agent with an offer of a million francs if he would ‘open’ one of the gates under his command. Dombrowski promptly informed the Commune. A short time later a ‘peasant’ forced his way into Dombrowki’s H.Q., purporting to bring news from the front, then produced a dagger from underneath his smock, but was bayonetted first by Dombrowski’s bodyguard. At least such endeavours succeeded in so far as they increased the nervous tension, suspicion, and mistrust within the Commune, and by May 14th the Commune had decided to issue identity cards.

In his fifth-column work Thiers was immeasurably aided by the fact that, compared with the first Siege, Paris was only partially invested. Over half the perimeter was still occupied by the Prussians, supposedly neutral but in fact, for reasons of self-interest, increasingly well-disposed towards Versailles. Thus, despite the battle raging in the west and south-west, it was not all that difficult to leave or enter Paris via St.-Denis or some other Prussian-held centre. As has already been seen, Washburne travelled regularly between Paris and Versailles, Louise Michel had entered Versailles in disguise and returned safely, and in the latter part of April Edwin Child decided to make the trip, purely for diversion. At first he thought of taking with him a lady friend, Mlle Lassalle, but wisely changed his mind. He took a bus to the Jardin des Plantes, walked from there to the Porte d’Italie and thence to Sceaux on the road to Orléans, ‘where I met the first post of the Versailles troops, showed my passport, and got as far as Plessis where I had to traverse a camp of soliders to arrive at the
Quartier-Général
to obtain a
laissez-passer
to Versailles, here I was detained upwards of three hours for what reason except being a stranger I cannot say’. Having walked about sixteen miles and been arrested five times, he reached Versailles at 9 p.m. and ‘after about 3 hours search all over the town found a bed, without a room, that is to say in the room was 4 bedsteads, one occupied by a woman, but I was too
tired to search further’. The following day he returned by a long circuit around the north of Paris.

There were more people who wanted to get out and stay out. On April 21st, Goncourt expostulated in his
Journal
that he had heard the Commune was about to pass a decree under which ‘every man, married or unmarried, between the ages of 19 and 55 will be conscripted and condemned to march against the
Versaillais
. Here I am, threatened by this law! Here I am, obliged within a matter of days to hide myself as at the time of the Terror!’ When the Conscription Law was passed, and the Commune showed it meant business by actually entering houses to impress into the National Guard, according to Washburne, ‘all who cannot prove that they are foreigners’, thousands more Parisians went into hiding or took to flight. Every kind of ingenuity was practised; Dr. Powell smuggled two friends out on his English passport and a third ‘escaped like Falstaff in a basket of dirty linen’; Alphonse Daudet described watching a
petit crevé
viscount depart disguised as a waggon-driver, piloting a team of horses through Vincennes. Fleeing himself from impressment, Daudet recalled with some contempt the fellow escaper who, having passed through the Commune posts in utter silence, ‘became progressively more insolent, provocative, a real terror to the Communards the farther he got from the fortifications; he had threatened to put the lot of them to the bayonet’. After his narrow escape, Renoir too used his influence with Rigault to obtain a safe conduct to Louveciennes; Zola got out on a Prussian passport; while twelve-year-old Seurat fled with his parents to Fontainebleau. Several hundred thousand more Parisians had left since the Commune began,
¹
and by mid-May Paris had begun to look like a city of the dead. Gulielma Rafinesque noted ‘all the shops shut or half shut—a very few weary looking people shabbily dressed….’ What shops remained open had no customers, and even the Hôtel Meurice had closed down. In London, Karl Marx rubbed his hands: ‘Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire. No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards.’

In at least one fundamental respect, the mass departures from Paris were a blessing in disguise for the Commune. As early as mid-April, the Rev. Gibson wrote in his diary:

Although the city is not really invested, the question of supplies is beginning to be a serious one. Country people don’t care to bring their provisions into a city bristling with cannon and abounding in barricades. Naturally prudent, they prefer to sell their provisions to the Prussians…. Hence the price of provisions is rising rapidly. Veal, which sold at 1·40 frs., now sells at 2 frs. the pound…. Our butcher said that in a week’s time there would be no more beef to be had.

By the end of the month, Thiers had organized an effective blockade of food entering Paris, with the Prussians consenting to co-operate on their side of the city. Once again Edwin Child began laying in an emergency hoard of biscuits and concentrated milk; Colonel Stanley wrote an un-Guardsmanlike admission to his mother, ‘I chiefly quarrel at having been asked to pay 75 centimes for washing an unstarched silk shirt. I revenge myself by wearing them three days.’ Rising prices and food shortages reawakened grim memories of the first Siege, persuading further thousands to make their way out of Paris; but this in turn helped postpone a serious food crisis, so that as May entered its fateful third week Paris was experiencing nothing like the privations of the previous winter.

There were a variety of lesser ways in which, as the second Siege approached its climax, life in Paris continued to surprise the British and Americans still living there by its normality. The experiences of the first Siege, especially perhaps the Prussian bombardment, had conditioned many a Parisian to an unnatural phlegmatism out of which neither the Versailles bombardment nor the neo-Jacobin Terror of the Commune could really stir them. Returning to Paris from Versailles during the first battles of April 3rd, Benjamin Wilson had been astonished to see ‘labourers peacefully at work on plots of ground white with blossoms, as if ignorant of all that was going on around them’. Nothing during the first Siege had managed to distract the Seine fishermen from their sport, and even when the shelling of Neuilly was at its peak they were still to be seen standing quiet and motionless, rods held in unshaking hands, as the cannon-balls whistled and rattled overhead. Towards the middle of April, the Rev. Gibson found delight in the spectacle, just outside the Madeleine, of ‘A man in the middle of the broad asphalted pavement, with a crowd around him, performing feats with heavy weights, lifting them and throwing them over his head; a sight such as you might see on the green of a provincial village on a fête day.’ More than a month later, he was commenting how Paris ‘has never appeared to be cleaner and healthier than now’; there was a great improvement in the habitually ‘sour smell’ of Paris, which he attributed (rather than to any acts of the Commune) to the mass departure of its citizenry!

And beneath all the apprehension, the suffering, and the uncertainty, there still bubbled that irrepressible Parisian gaiety. Already
by early April the Commune had reopened eight theatres, and the Rev. Gibson could not help exclaiming at the news ‘that the museums are shortly to be opened to the public, and the usual annual exhibition of modern paintings is to be held!’ On May 6th, as Fort Issy was tottering, the Commune threw open the Tuileries Palace for the first of a series of concerts to collect funds for the wounded. A great crowd of curious Parisians surged through the palace, pausing to goggle with particular fascination at the ex-Emperor’s sumptuous private bathroom. Into the stately
Salle des Maréchaux
, where the belles of the Second Empire had once waltzed and where the fourteen life-sized portraits of the first Bonaparte’s marshals were now discreetly covered over, they crammed to hear Mlle Agar recite the inevitable
Châtiments
of Hugo and to roar applause at Mme Bordas as she sang the current hit, which ended: