The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (93 page)

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Meaning, in this context, ‘abdication’.

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In the Middle Ages the Place de Grève (now Place de l’Hôtel de Ville) had become a traditional gathering-place for dissatisfied or unemployed workers; hence the expression
en grève
, on strike.

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He had been imprisoned the previous year for writings offensive to the regime.

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The
chaloupes
were mostly converted
bateaux-mouches
that had made their debut at the Great Exhibition of 1867.

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Many of the Paris forts are still in use as barracks for the Army or security forces; one of them, more recently, was the scene of execution of condemned O.A.S. officers.

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In passing, it is perhaps worth comparing the measures taken by the Russians prior to the Siege of Leningrad, at nine hundred days the longest and most terrible in history. Already by mid-July 1941, more than two months before the actual investment of Leningrad, stringent rationing had been introduced and by August 24th more than one-fifth of the total population had been evacuated.

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After Villejuif a prematurely optimistic little jingle went the rounds:

‘Bismarck, if you go on,

Of all your Prussians there will be left barely one,

Bismarck, if you go on,

Of all your Prussians, there will be left not a one.’

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The cynical Bismarck gave this version of Favre’s tears: ‘He seemed to be crying and I endeavoured in a fashion to console him; but when I looked a little closer, I positively believe that he had not shed a tear. He intended, probably, to work upon my feelings with a little theatrical performance, as the Parisian advocates work upon their public’.

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The total of 2.25 francs was rather more than half the average pre-war Parisian worker’s wage, but of course made no allowance for the rapid rise in food prices during the Siege.

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Even though, at times, braggadocio tended to exaggerate his deeds: after the battle of Châtillon Tommy Bowles claimed to have seen Flourens, talking ‘as if he had directed all the movements, and had been the sole hero of the day; the fact being that he only arrived on the ground when everything was over, and that he had no business to be there at all’.

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Today the gloomy little church still stands on the way to the airport, with traces of Prussian bullets and its walls hung with primitive murals commemorating the battle.

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Bazaine’s dilemma was one of legitimacy, happily unknown to members of a British or American officer corps, but which was to dog French history right through the Second World War to the Algerian War of the 1950’s. Maintaining a perhaps misplaced loyalty towards the deposed Emperor, Bazaine was articulate in detesting the new Republican Government and he rejected its authority. ‘I had no government,’ he declared as his trial. ‘I was, so to speak, my own government.’

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Rochefort in his memoirs gives a different, and not wholly plausible account of his departure; one of the invaders, he claimed, told him ‘they’re fighting at Belleville. You alone can prevent a disaster’, and then dragged him off by force.

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Florence, old girl, you’re weakening!’

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‘Loud-mouth’.

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‘Human audacity! the struggle of the prisoner! blessed rage!

At last, eruption stronger than the cage!

What does that creature, atom with generous brow, require

To conquer that which has no end, nor edge, nor base,

To tame the wind, tornado, sea-foam, avalanche?

In the sky a canvas, and over the sea a shelf!’

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This meant that one balloon alone consumed the equivalent of seven tons of coal, out of Paris’s total stocks of some 73,000 tons.

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One of the cherished myths of
The Times
history was that, during the Siege, micro-photographed copies of its front page were also flown
into
Paris by pigeon. This particular
belle légende
was finally shot down by
The Times
itself, following some learned research, a hundred years later. An analysis carried out by a Mr. John Hayhurst, of the British Ministry of Technology, of all micro films received in Paris revealed that none had a front page of
The Times
on it, thereby effectively destroying claims made by the paper shortly after the siege ended. [
The Times
, 4/2/70.]

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As a counter-measure, the Prussians imported falcons; to which one of the many Paris ‘inventors’ suggested that pigeons be equipped with whistles, to frighten off the predators!

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St.-Cloud was in fact gutted early in the Siege by a shell from French guns at Mont-Valérien.

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A visionary, heavily armoured ‘land monitor’, dating back to 1854 and invented by an Italian engineer called Balbi, which was to be propelled by steam, was actually offered to Mayor Clemenceau of Montmartre; so it was alleged when Clemenceau was Premier of France in World War I. Clemenceau had opened up public subscriptions to build one large and two small ‘monitors’, with a view to breaking the Prussian stranglehold; but before any model could be developed the war had been lost. [From
Mid-Week Pictorial: an Illustrated Weekly
, Vol. VII, No. 13, 30 May 1918, p. 23; Letter from M. Rosen, 30/4/72.]

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In
Le Combat
, Pyat went wild about this weapon, ‘which, adhering to and corroding the flesh, forces men under the impact of violent pain to relinquish their position and take flight’.

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The ‘Amazons’ seem to have had a precedent in the ‘
Vésuviennes
’ of the 1848 Revolution who, equipped with ‘Greek fire’, were to strike some fearful fiery blows for feminist rights.

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One of the first victims, much mourned, was little Giuseppina Bozzacchi the ballerina. The previous May, Bozzacchi as Swanilda had delighted Paris in the Second Empire’s last glittering première, Delibes’s
Coppélia
. She was only seventeen.

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‘I know Trochu’s plan,

Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan!

My God! What a fine plan!

I know Trochu’s plan,

Thanks to him, nothing is lost.’

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Well might one speculate upon what would have happened had Gambetta held Trochu’s command in Paris, while the vigorous Ducrot had ballooned to Tours in his place; certainly, under Gambetta, the ‘torrential sortie’ out of Paris would have been attempted—and before it was too late.

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‘They are coming to us; let’s go to them!’

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Béziers, a born adventurer, tried a month later to run the blockade on foot into Paris, carrying dispatches. He was captured, imprisoned in a cellar, and told that he would be shot, but somehow managed to escape.

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Words during the Time of Trial

We arrive at the edge of the terrible crossing;

The precipice is there, veiled, dark, gloomy, horrible;

On the other side awaits the ordeal; we go,

We do not look behind us,

Pale, we reach the sublime escarpment,

And we kick the plank into the void.

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Her daughter-in-law, and mother of Bertrand Russell.

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Some of the collier crews marched in protest through London, holding a Union Jack covered with muddy marks and inscribed ‘trampled on by the feet of Germans’.

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The description is from Bernard Falk.

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An ‘ambulance’ in 1870 parlance denoted rather more than today; it was usually a field hospital plus its means of collecting the wounded. One of Wallace’s ambulances possessed at least fifty beds.

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Roughly £100,000, or 500,000 dollars.

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There were approximately 4,000 in Paris during the Siege, compared to only 250 Americans.

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This seems to have been one family failing from which Hertford’s descendants could not escape. Some years after the Siege, when Wallace had acquired a baronetcy and total respectability, his son—himself also born out of wedlock—announced his wish to marry a woman by whom he had already had a number of children. The shock was too much for Wallace, who is said to have exclaimed ‘Is there to be no end to bastardy in this family?’, thereby creating an irreparable breach with his heir.

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Labouchere defined
petits crevés
as ‘those youths who are best described by the English expression “nice young men for a small tea-party” ’.

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Goncourt, perhaps harshly, describes some of them as ‘old whores, fat, superannuated
lorettes
, delightedly preparing themselves to mess about with the wounded with sensual hands, to find erotic pleasure in the amputations’.

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Some French officers evidently carried cards with requests to this effect printed on them.

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I would have offered you a meal beyond compare:

I would have killed Pegasus and had him cooked,

So as to serve you with a horse’s wing.

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According to one contemporary American calculation (although on what it was based is not revealed), only 300 rats were eaten during the whole Siege, compared with 65,000 horses, 5,000 cats, and 1,200 dogs.

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Extracted principally from detailed weekly accounts of prices kept by Professor Sheppard.

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By the following week potatoes had risen to 28·00 francs per bushel.

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The official rate of exchange in 1870 was approximately 25 francs = £1, or 5 francs = 1 dollar. What this means in terms of today’s money is hard to assess accurately, though it may be taken—as a very rough guide—that the £ sterling of 1870 had something like four times the purchasing-power of the £ of 1965; perhaps a more useful guide is the fact that, in 1870, the average wage of the Parisian worker was less than 5 francs a day.

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‘Una’ survived the Siege and followed her master back to England as a household pet. When she died she was stuffed and mounted in a glass case and remains to this day in Tetton House, Alan Herbert’s old home (see illustration, between pages 130 and 131).

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According to George Orwell, in
Down and Out in Paris and London
, no dace have been caught in the Seine since the Siege of Paris.

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His mistress Juliette Drouet.

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‘The regions of hell are all there, sombre spirals, Hate, winter, war, mourning, disease, famine, boredom, Paris has the seven nodes of the underworld upon her.’

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‘There is pleasure in being in a boat whipped by the storm, when one is sure that it will not perish….’

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Forbes was to become of the most renowned war correspondents of his day, and the author of biographies on both Louis-Napoleon and the Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany.

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During the war, he once shocked a German writer by declaring ‘I hate this slaughter. I never desired the honours of war, and would gladly have left such glory to others…’.

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‘Go on until you fire your last shell, that is perhaps the one which will win.’

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On his death, his brother-in-law, the future Edward VII, wrote to his son George: ‘Try… never to forget Uncle Fritz. He was one of the finest and noblest characters ever known; if he had a fault, he was too good for this world.’

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Ce chic exquis

Par les Turcos acquis,

Ils le doivent à qui?

A Bourbaki!
’