The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (7 page)

Having deemed it necessary to sustain his seizure of power in 1851 by instituting an authoritarian regime, Louis-Napoleon had then set to work to create internal prosperity as one way of diverting French minds from the loss of their essential liberties. In the early years of the Second Empire (admittedly cashing in on the groundwork laid by his predecessor) he had been strikingly successful, and prosperity had become an acceptable substitute for the majority of Frenchmen. In their hedonistic materialism, more than one resemblance might be found between Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire and the ‘You’ve-never-had-it-so-good’ England of the 1950’s but the big difference was that under the Second Empire economic expansion was real. In its short duration, industrial production doubled and within only ten years foreign trade did the same. Gold poured in from new mines in California and South Africa. Mighty banking concerns like the Crédit Lyonnais and the Crédit Foncier were established, the latter especially designed to stimulate the vast new building programme. In the cities there sprang up huge stores like the Bon Marché and the Louvre. The railway network increased from 3,685 kilometres to 17,924, so that all of a sudden the Riviera—formerly the haunt of only a few eccentric English at Cannes—became a Parisian resort. Telegraph lines radiated out all over the country, and shipbuilding expanded as never before. Guizot’s exhortation of ‘
enrichissez-vous
’ applied with even more force to the Second Empire. Men like Monsieur Potin the grocer became millionaires overnight; and, as Daubet’s unhappy
Nabab
discovered, scandals and vicious intrigues could reduce them to nothing again just as quickly. Speculation raged:

C’est une frénésie, une contagion,

Nul n’en est á l’abri, dans nulle région
…
¹

The contagion spread to the summit of the Establishment, with even the Duc de Morny tainted; while he was Ambassador to St. Petersburg Bismarck recalled that de Morny had used the diplomatic bag to send
trainloads of valuables back to Fiance duty-free, which were later auctioned and reputedly brought him a profit of some 800,000 roubles. Yet out of this cauldron a new wealthy bourgeoisie had arisen, installing itself solidly and comfortably in the châteaux from which its forebears had driven the aristocrats. As ostentatious as any European aristocracy and determined not to be driven out in its turn, the bourgeoisie was the chief political mainstay of the regime that was responsible for its good fortune; though it had little favourable to say of its benefactor. Never before had France as a whole been more prosperous, and in a remarkably short time she had established herself as one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Her population at the census of 1866 had grown to 37½ million, but the most remarkable feature was the immense growth of the big cities, especially Paris, as a result of this industrialization.

The Second Empire’s greatest surface achievement (in fact its one truly ineffaceable landmark) was Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris. In 1859 the old ‘Farmers-General’ wall around the city had been demolished, and seven new
arrondissements
incorporated. At one leap Paris, now with a population of two million, spread out as far as the circle of protective forts that had been constructed by Louis-Philippe. In the centre of the city 20,000 houses were demolished and 40,000 new ones were built at an enormous cost (inflated by the arts of profiteers). Great boulevards cut through the evil-smelling higgledy-piggledy alleys of old Paris, and the city essentially as it stands today was born. Haussmann was more a financier and an engineer than a man of high artistic sense, and his new Paris provoked violent controversy. The conservative Goncourts said it made them think of ‘some American Babylon of the future’, but George Sand thought it a blessing to be able to walk without ‘being forced every moment to consult the policeman on the street corner or the affable grocer’. To an innocent from abroad, like Edwin Child, Haussmann’s Paris seemed ‘about the most magnificent town, I should think, in the world; all houses being six, seven and eight storeys high and everything so different and so far superior in elegance, utility, sociability, etc., to London…’. But away from the centre there were still rural scenes beyond the Arc de Triomphe; there were fields where the Trocadero now stands, and windmills at Montmartre; Passy had the air of an isolated village, and Auteuil was regarded as ‘just about the end of the world’. In his beloved Bois de Boulogne, the Emperor himself had done much landscaping, cutting new drives and creating artificial cascades.

But for Haussmann aesthetics had been only one of several considerations. Health and crime were two others. In the course of
demolition, many of the festering abscesses of the old city had been lanced; the traditional plague-breeding spots as well as the lairs of assassins and rogues, such as the Buttes-Chaumont. In this city where riot and revolution had become almost a regular feature of life, there was one further aim all-important to the mind of the precariously installed Louis-Napoleon. The acute eye of Queen Victoria had spotted, during her visit of 1855, that he had had the streets of Paris covered with macadam, ‘to prevent the people from taking up the pavement as hitherto’. Later on, it would have been apparent to any military observer what excellent fields of fire Haussmann’s long, straight streets afforded, what opportunities to turn the flank of a barricade there were for troops debouching from their oblique intersections, and how easy the wide boulevards made it to transport riot-breakers from one end of Paris to another. They had, thought Haussmann, at last succeeded ‘in cutting through the habitual storm-centres’. But in fact, with what force will be seen later, he had to a large extent achieved the defeat of his own purpose.

In no way did Louis-Napoleon earn the title of ‘the Well-Meaning’ more than in his endeavours to improve the miserable lot of the French working man, and herein lay the source of perhaps the saddest paradox of his reign. It was the section of France for which he strove hardest, yet when the crunch came, the working class provided his most violent enemies. Louis-Napoleon’s far-reaching social reforms included the setting-up of institutions of maternal welfare, societies of mutual assistance, the establishment of workers’ cities, homes for injured workers; also projected were shorter working hours and health legislation; the loathsome prison hulks were abolished and the right to strike granted. The Emperor’s own personal contribution to charitable works was considerable, and in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the workers he even decreed that, instead of being named after his mother, Reine Hortense, a new boulevard over the covered-in St.-Martin canal should be given the name of a worker, Richard Lenoir. But many of Louis-Napoleon’s more progressive ideas were frustrated by the greed of the new bourgeoisie and the conservatism of the provinces, facts which did not escape the notice of the workers of Paris.

As much as anyone else he was aware of the problems and the dangers; ominously, he told Cobden ‘It is very difficult in France to make reforms; we make revolutions in France, not reforms.’

Under the surface life in fact had altered little, with both economic and political problems sharpening the French workers’ discontent. They alone it seemed had been left out of the general wave of ‘
enrichissez-vous
’, as was typified by the fact that between 1852 and 1870 the
wages of a miner in the Anzin collieries increased by a mere 30 per cent, while the company’s dividends had tripled. Though workers’ wages had increased, almost nowhere had they kept up with the rise in the cost of living. In Paris, for example, the average daily wage rose only 30 per cent over the duration of the Second Empire, while the cost of living rose a minimum of 45 per cent. Conditions were particularly harsh for the workers of Paris, where, as one unfortunate by-product of Haussmann, their rents roughly doubled during the period, so that by 1870 they ate up one-third of their wage packet. Meanwhile food could take another 60 per cent, which left very little over for the other good things of life. Bourgeois chroniclers of the period claimed that the workers of Paris had little taste for meat; the truth was that they simply could not afford it, and it was no coincidence that in 1866 butchers first sold cheap horsemeat (thereby introducing a taste which in four short years would be forced upon a much wider Parisian clientele). Indebtedness was general, and Parisian workers seemed to spend half their lives at the pawnbrokers of the
mont-de-piété
, where the family mattress was the standard pledge. According to Prefect Haussmann himself, in 1862 over half the population of Paris lived ‘in poverty bordering on destitution’, and of these the lot of the 17,000 women earning only between 50 centimes and 1.25 francs a day was particularly atrocious. For the 3.81 francs which (in 1863) was the average wage, the Parisian worker was required to labour eleven long hours a day. Bad as the conditions of Victorian England were, even apprentice Edwin Child noted how much harder life was in Paris, with his own day beginning at 5 a.m.

The high rents of Haussmann’s new city gradually forced the workers out into insalubrious slums on the fringes that were every bit as evil as those demolished in the centre. By comparison, their places of work were often ‘palaces’. The
cabarets
, which increased in number immeasurably during the Second Empire, offered slightly less sordid refuges where for a few sous the worker could obtain temporary Lethe. Drunkenness became worse than it had ever been. With it all went a heavy increase in child mortality, a desire for idleness, and a taste for white-hot political discussion within the safety of the
cabaret
.

What life below the glittering façade of the Second Empire was actually like for a great many Parisians has never been more vividly described than by the Goncourts. Jules’s former mistress, a midwife called Maria, had gone to deliver a child at the upper end of the Boulevard Magenta, and there she found

a room where the planks that form the walls are coming apart and the floor is full of holes, through which rats are constantly appearing, rats
which also come in whenever the door is opened, impudent poor men’s rats which climb on to the table, carrying away whole hunks of bread, and worry the feet of the sleeping occupants. In this room, six children; the four biggest in a bed; and at their feet, which they are unable to stretch out, the two smallest in a crate. The man, a costermonger, who has known better days, dead-drunk during his wife’s labour. The woman, as drunk as her husband, lying on a straw mattress and being plied with drink by a friend of hers, an old army canteen attendant who developed a thirst in twenty-five years’ campaigning and spends all her pension on liquor. And during the delivery in this shanty, the wretched shanty of civilization, an organ-grinder’s monkey, imitating and parodying the cries and angry oaths of the shrew in the throes of childbirth, piddling through a crack in the roof on to the snoring husband’s back!

Hogarth could hardly have done better.

‘Above, wealth increases; below, comfort disappears’ was a reasonable enough summing-up of the period. Throughout Louis-Napoleon’s reign, for all his good intentions, the gulf between the workers and the rest of the population grew wider and wider, and in Paris it was particularly exacerbated by the works of Haussmann. Whereas in the old days different streets had coexisted side by side, often with the intimacy of village life, now the spiralled rents of the rebuilt
arrondissements
had resulted in a kind of resentful apartheid. Far from ‘piercing’ the traditional trouble-centres of Paris, Haussmann had in fact merely created new and infinitely more dangerous ones, solidly proletarian and ‘Red’
arrondissements
like Belleville and Ménilmontant, where in the latter days of the Empire no police agent would dare appear alone and where—as the Commune was to show—concentration had made the work of organizing a revolt easier than it had ever been.

It was not merely the physical plight of the workers that made relations between the classes increasingly bitter; after all, in the industrial nineteenth century the majority of workers still regarded poverty and misery as part of their ineluctable lot. There were other factors for discontent under the Second Empire, philosophical and political, that at the moment were less easily classified. Workers who had the time and strength to think began to be gnawed by the fear that, as the gulf between
patron
and employee widened, not only was the latter’s relative prosperity diminishing, but also any say he might have in the actual development of the new industrial system, which was turning out increasingly to his disadvantage. It was a fear that was by no means confined to the French worker, as 1848 had shown, but there lay a particular, dangerous legacy behind French frustrations. After each of the three major uprisings within the past century, the Great Revolution of 1789, the July Days of 1830, and the February
and June uprisings of 1848, the French workers felt in retrospect that they had been swindled. It was mostly their blood that had flowed at the barricades, but on each occasion the bourgeoisie had somehow slyly reaped the benefits. The resentment was particularly keen among Paris workers, who with some justification regarded themselves as initiators of all three revolutions; and above all their memories smouldered from the most recent one. During the June insurrection of 1848 a higher proportion than ever before of the several thousands killed in Paris were workers. In the resistance to the
coup d’état
of December 1851, which Louis-Napoleon himself quelled with unmitigated brutality, some 160 were killed in Paris, most of them workers, and in the regime of terror that followed 26,000 were arrested and transported in hulks. Henceforth the Parisian proletariat, more politically conscious than any other, would never forgive Louis-Napoleon for destroying the Republic
they
had created; nor would they forget the way the
petit bourgeois
had betrayed them when they were so brutally mown down on these last occasions. Only three ingredients were required to spark off a new and even more menacing explosion: a diminution of the vigilant police state, weapons, and organization.