The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (75 page)

Convalescence! This was indeed the keynote of Thiers’s review. France is an astonishingly resilient patient, and now—shamefully defeated, riven by civil war, bankrupted by the German reparation demands and the costs of repairing Paris—she was to amaze the world and alarm her enemies by the speed of her recovery.

The defeat of the Commune meant the loss, once and for all, of Paris’s special claim to independence; but it was still the recovery of Paris which set the pace for the convalescence of the country at large. At the end of May, the city presented a terrible sight. In the Place de la Concorde, the Tritons in the fountains were twisted into fantastic shapes; the candelabras torn and bent; the statue of Lille decapitated. Théophile Gautier, returning to a city whose silence oppressed him, was particularly appalled by the Rue de Lille, on the Left Bank, where his colleague Mérimée had once lived; ‘it seemed to be deserted throughout its length, like a street of Pompeii’. Of Mérimée’s old house, nothing remained but the walls; his famous library was in ashes. ‘A silence of death reigned over these ruins; in the necropolises of Thebes or in the shafts of the Pyramids it was no more profound. No clatter of vehicles, no shouts of children, not even the song of a bird… an incurable sadness invaded our souls….’ But at the Hôtel de Ville, Gautier found a certain Gothick romanticism and beauty about the ruins. The immense heat had imparted to the stone and the metal the most exotic colours; ‘All pink and ash-green and the colour of white-hot steel, or turned to shining agate where the stonework has been burnt by paraffin, it looks like the ruin of an Italian palace…’, sighed Goncourt. Penetrating to conquered Belleville, he was confronted by ‘Empty streets. People drinking in cabarets, mute in a sinister fashion. The appearance of a quarter conquered,
but not subjected….’ Also touring the ruins, Edwin Child went to see the murdered Archbishop lying in state. As an additional reminder of the horrors only so recently past, other Britons noticed Parisians for a long time walking in the road rather than on the pavements—to avoid any suspicion that they might be
pétroleuses
intent on popping their incendiary packets through basement windows.

Yet more of the city had survived than people thought. The Louvre and its treasures had been saved; but only just. Gautier recalled the irrepressible excitement when the Venus de Milo was brought forth from her hiding-place in the incendiarized
Préfecture de Police
, where by a miracle a burst water-pipe had apparently preserved her. As she was removed from her ‘coffin’, ‘everybody leaned forward avidly to contemplate her. She still smiled, lying there so softly… this vague and tender smile, her lips slightly apart as if all the better to breathe in life….’ It seemed like a symbol of the return of life to Paris herself. June brought with it many pleasant surprises for private individuals; people, like Louis Péguret’s neighbours, reported to have been killed at the barricades or in the repression turned out to be still alive; all the Rafinesques’ valuables and Jules’s medical notes, which they had evacuated to safe keeping in the Rue de Lille and which they heard had all gone up in flames, also turned out to have been unharmed.

While the last fighting raged overhead, Georges Rouault the painter had been born in a cellar. It seems, now, symbolic of the regeneration of the city. Now life was returning to normal at a remarkable pace. Already by June 2nd, Washburne noted ‘a marvellous change… the smouldering fires have been extinguished and the tottering walls pulled down’. Worth, the couturier, bought up part of the wreckage of the Tuileries to make sham ruins in his garden, and the work of rebuilding Paris was already beginning. Writing to his father on June 12th, Edwin Child remarked ‘in about 6 months and we shall wonder where all the fires took place’, and then went on to express annoyance at not receiving a rise of pay in his job. On the 15th, he recorded in his diary ‘opened
magasin
for the first time since the siege, but did not see many clients… hot sultry day.’ For this young Englishman the extraordinary events of the past year, to which he had been so close a witness, were at an end.

It was not long before even the famous façade of Paris was back in place, too. Omnibuses and
fiacres
were plying the streets again,
bateaux-mouches
bustling up and down the Seine. As early as the beginning of June, the enterprising Thomas Cook was sending special excursions to visit the ‘ruins’ of Paris, and soon a horde of English tourists began to descend; looking for, and finding, the immortal
diversions that Paris has to offer.
Polichinelle
was back on the boulevards, and the Rev. Gibson noted in a slightly aggrieved tone that this modern Babylon did not in any way seem ‘saddened by the disasters’ that had befallen it. For some time the sale of petroleum and all inflammable products was banned, and cafés were required to close by 11 p.m., but on June 3rd the theatres reopened. Although only the previous day Goncourt had complained how dowdy and provincial the Parisians—now flooding back from the country—looked, on June 6th the remarked upon the ‘reappearance of the crowds on the Boulevard des Italiens, even on the thoroughfare, deserted only a few days ago. This evening, for the first time, one begins to have difficulty in pushing a way between the lounging men and the women prostituting themselves.’ Paris was recuperating fast.

In July 1873, the National Assembly voted the erection of an immense basilica—‘in witness of repentance and as a symbol of hope’—to be called the Sacré-Cœur, and to be at Montmartre on the spot where the Commune had broken out in March 1871.
¹
But, before the foundation of this great epitaph to the Commune could be laid, there still remained a residue to be disposed of. Justice had to be apportioned among the more than 40,000 prisoners held in Government hands. Twenty-six courts martial were instituted, and the work continued until 1875. The first trial, held in the riding-school close to the Palace of Versailles, began in August. Before it appeared fifteen former members of the Commune and two of the Comité Central. Of them Théophile Ferré and Lullier were condemned to death. Despite the intervention by Victor Hugo, Ferré was executed, but Lullier was subsequently reprieved. Urbain, the author of the ‘Hostages’ Decree’ was sentenced to hard labour for life; Assi, Billioray, Paschal Grousset, and four others, transportation to a fortified place. Jourde, the last Minister of Finance, who had behaved so scrupulously in office that his wife continued to the end as a laundress, and who had made a point of formally handing over to the authorities 9,770 francs of Government moneys that he was carrying on him when arrested, was sentenced to simple transportation.
²
Courbet received a sentence of six months imprisonment, and (if ever there was a case of the punishment fitting the crime) was ordered to pay up 250,000 francs towards the reconstruction of the Vendôme Column. Rather than find this astronomic sum of money, he fled to Switzerland where he spent the remainder of his days.

Many of the trials were held in
absentia
, since quite a remarkable number of the leading Communards had somehow made their getaway abroad. Altogether twenty-three death sentences were carried out; seventy-two death sentences were commuted, including that passed on young Gaston de Costa who was made to wait seven months in the condemned cells before reprieve; 251 were sentenced to forced labour for life; 1,160 to transportation to a fortified place; 3,417 to simple transportation (principally to New Caledonia in the South Pacific, where Berezowski, the young Pole who had shot at the Tsar in 1867, was already doing time), while there were another five thousand lesser sentences passed.

Rochefort, too—the darling of the mob who had eventually taken flight from the Commune—was condemned to lifelong transportation to New Caledonia. In vain he had appealed for assistance to his former chief, Trochu; in whose Government he had served during the first Siege. Among the women, Louise Michel (not brought into court until December 1871), wearing a black veil in mourning for the recently executed Ferré, impressed the court with her defiant spirit, totally devoid of any sense of self-preservation; yes, she had helped in the burning of Paris, because ‘I wanted to oppose the Versailles invaders with a barrier of flames’; she wanted to die with her friends, and if you let me live, she cried, ‘I shall never cease to cry vengeance’. Her sentence was transportation to a penal colony in Nouméa. But no trial aroused quite so much emotion as that of Rossel, captured on emerging from the hiding-place where he had sought to escape trial by the Commune. Many a patriotic Frenchman identified himself with the brave but misguided Rossel, and at his first trial even the prosecutor was observed to have tears in his eyes as he demanded the death sentence. A campaign was started on Rossel’s behalf; the death sentence was annulled and a new trial ordered. But it was Rossel’s background as a senior officer in the regular Army, as well as the brash threat he had issued to the would-be captor of Fort Issy, that were his undoing. On October 7th he was tried anew, and in a note scribbled to Rochefort, lodged in an adjacent cell, he wrote: ‘MY DEAR NEIGHBOUR, It is death again. I’m beginning to get used to it.’ This time there was no reprieve. On November 28th, courageous to the end, Rossel—accompanied by the ice-cold terrorist, Ferré—was led out on to the wind-driven plain of Satory, tied to a post, and shot. The next February saw the execution of three men accused of complicity in the murder of Generals Lecomte and Thomas; in March, one man for the killing of Chaudey. In April, Genton was executed for his part in the shooting of the Archbishop; he was followed that July by Francois, the Governor of La Roquette; and in September by
young Lolive and two others involved in the death of the Archbishop (Lolive had already been previously sentenced for lesser offences, but was later overheard blurting out that he had been one of the Archbishop’s firing-squad). It was not until June 1874 that the last official executioners did their work; this time shooting a soldier accused of participation in the drowning of Vincenzoni in February 1871.

After spending a long, grim winter in the hulks, over 20,000 of the Communard prisoners were finally acquitted in 1872. But with the killings of the previous year, the banishments and the voluntary exiles of those lucky enough to escape, the face of Paris remained changed in one curious way, for some years; half the house-painters, half the plumbers, the tile-layers, shoemakers, and zinc-workers had disappeared. At Belleville there were streets which seemed to be tenanted solely by old women. For some time Parisian industry was hamstrung. There was bitter irony in the fact that, for all the Commune’s endeavours of social reform, it was as much its defeat which, by creating such a rarity value among the artisan class, enabled them to obtain better terms of employment.

Following trial, the Communards sentenced to transportation were herded into cattle-trucks for journeys to Cherbourg or Brest often lasting forty-eight hours. Aboard the penal ships, conditions seem to have belonged to the age of Botany Bay. Sometimes prisoners were not allowed on deck for three months on end. Many died of scurvy or heat exhaustion on their way to the South Pacific. Even in their eventual place of exile, life was harsh. Several of the Communards tried to escape, and were drowned or eaten by sharks. Finally Roche-fort (who had already tried unsuccessfully to escape from La Rochelle Prison), Jourde, and Paschal Grousset, after a remarkable saga of adventure, managed to escape penniless to Australia. They cabled to Edmond Adam, Trochu’s one-time police chief, for funds, and after he and Gambetta organized a popular subscription the fugitives were helped back to Europe, where Rochefort’s account of the miseries of transportation moved Frenchmen to plead for an amnesty for the Communards. But it was not until 1880 when, introduced by Gambetta, an amnesty bill was finally adopted.

A quite astonishing number of the leading Communards had nevertheless escaped the trials, the death sentences, and the transportations. Bergeret, condemned to death
in absentia
, fled to Jersey and thence to the United States, where he died in 1905. Cluseret, who was about to be tried by the Commune on the eve of the
Versaillais
entry, took no part in the fighting of ‘Bloody Week’ but devoted his energies to finding a means of escape. Having been hidden by a priest for several weeks, he left France in clerical disguise and claimed (as an American
citizen) protection from the American Minister in Belgium. When this was turned down, he wandered in exile through Switzerland, Turkey, Britain, and the U.S.A.; returning to France after the amnesty to be elected as a (Socialist) Deputy. The beautiful Elizabeth Dimitrieff, wounded in the last days of the Commune, took refuge in Switzerland, then returned to Russia and married an exile to Siberia, where she died. Paul Verlaine (who was not arrested) took increasingly to drink, fell under the spell of Rimbaud in October 1871, and was left by his wife.

Many of the Communards sought exile in London, where they lived in close contact with each other. Longuet and Lafargue each married one of Karl Marx’s daughters. Pyat remained there, fulminating, until the amnesty when he returned to France and eventually became a Senator; in 1888 the British Ambassador described seeing him in the Chamber of Deputies ‘with a flowing white beard, the image of all that is venerable’. Mounting the tribune he addressed the Chamber as ‘
Citoyens
’, and ‘delivered with great seriousness and vehemence a speech which was greeted with convulsions of laughters’. Wroblewski, also condemned to death
in absentia
, managed to get to London on a false passport provided by a fellow Pole; when the amnesty came he too returned to France, to live quietly near Nice. After serving her time on Nouméa, Louise Michel was repatriated to France—a violent anarchist—in 1880. She appeared in court three times more to receive terms of imprisonment for her revolutionary activities, and eventually sought refuge in London where she made a strong impression on a young art student with anarchist leanings, called Augustus John, who recalled how ‘a little old lady in black, pointed a denunciatory claw at a Society of mammon worshippers….’ She died in 1905, exultant at the news of revolution in Russia. Of all the ex-Communards who migrated to England, probably none had a more surprising career than Brunel, the Burner. Though badly wounded, he slipped through the Versailles net (escaping a death sentence) and four years later found employment on the staff of the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. There he remained until he died in 1904; the very pillar of respectability, known as ‘Mons Brunel’ to the cadets whom he taught French—one of whom appears to have been the future King George V.