The World That Never Was (14 page)

With a favourable weather forecast, eleven o’clock on 7 October marked Gambetta’s moment of destiny. The bulging eye of which caricaturists were so fond stared anxiously as he held the lip of the gondola of the
Armand-Barbes
with a tightening grip, his usually florid face blanching at the prospect of flight.
‘Lâchez tout!’
shouted the pilot, the mooring ropes were cast off and the crowd gathered in place Saint-Pierre cheered as France’s putative saviour raced into the sky, accompanied by a second balloon, the
George Sand
, carrying sympathetic American arms dealers.
Both behemoths then dipped alarmingly, descending towards the Prussian lines from where a barrage of shots was heard. The hearts of those watching from Paris dropped with them, before rising again as the gas warmed and Gambetta soared away.

At Gambetta’s moment of apotheosis, however, those republicans in the crowd of a racist disposition doubted whether he could truly be trusted, influenced by repeated, knowing references in the combative and scurrilous
La Lanterne
to his ‘Jewish nose’ and resemblance to a ‘Polish Jew’. And had they looked for a lead to the reaction of their long-standing hero, Victor Hugo, easily identifiable in the crowd by the kepi that he had worn since the fall of Napoleon had allowed his return from exile, they would have seen standing next to him the very editor responsible for the insidious slanders, the marquis de Rochefort-Luçay.

A tall figure, whose dark, pointed beard, high cheekbones and inimitable brush of wild hair created an appearance somewhere between Mephistopheles and Don Quixote, Rochefort was a contrarian to his fingertips and, more than that, an inveterate egotist. Both he and Hugo waved off the balloons, but Rochefort did so with gritted teeth. For whilst Gambetta was supposedly an ally, who had gifted Rochefort his own unused seat in the Chamber of Deputies little more than a year earlier, Rochefort seethed with resentment at the prospect of his benefactor being greeted in Tours as a ‘Messiah fallen from the sky’, convinced no doubt that he could have played the part with more panache than the grocer’s son from Cahors. Even the graze that Gambetta’s hand received from a Prussian sharpshooter’s bullet irked him: a veteran duellist of notorious cowardice, he knew only too well how effectively, by conceding a flesh wound, one could win sympathy even in defeat.

Had Rochefort sincerely wanted the honour of the balloon flight, it might conceivably have been his, since Gambetta, though always a promising candidate, had been chosen only by default after his cabinet colleagues had cavilled at the risks. Yet just as Rochefort was adept at eluding death at the hands of one of his enraged challengers, despite his dauntless audacity in print, he had also revealed himself to be equally good at absenting himself whenever real danger threatened. What now troubled Rochefort most was a growing but unspoken anxiety that his own lack of nerve would forever prevent him claiming the demagogic leadership of the radical left: a position that alone, for all his vaunted egalitarianism, might have freed him from the compromises he found so painful.

Until recently, Rochefort’s political future had looked so promising.
Every Saturday morning during 1868, subject only to intermittent bans that the government would have liked to make permanent, the orange-red ink from the cover of
La Lanterne
had bled on to the hands of well over 100,000 eager readers, who were happy to flaunt their complicity with its virulent republicanism. Then, he had preferred exile to silence, fleeing Paris for Brussels, from where he had smuggled the weekly editions into France while enjoying the hospitality of Hugo, who adopted him as ‘another son’. And when, at the time of the 1869 elections to the republican Chamber of Deputies, Elisée Reclus had written to a friend that ‘those who have the most resolution, the most love of progress and justice, those whom the government detests the most’ must vote for ‘the most revolutionary’ candidate on the ballot, it had been Henri Rochefort to whom he was referring.

The funeral of Victor Noir the previous January, though, had revealed the cowardice that flawed Rochefort’s character. Having stoked up the marchers to a high pitch of militancy with his rhetoric, at the very moment when the crowd was slavering for Napoleon’s deposition, Rochefort had gone missing. Hunger had made him faint, the radical marquis claimed. In his absence, the mob’s ardour had cooled and the insurrectionary moment passed. The debacle had sent his credibility tumbling. Without the proof of resolute action, erstwhile friends asked, did his satirical journalism and revolutionary pronouncements amount to anything more than a safety valve for popular exasperation, dissipating pressure rather than bringing it to a head? Even a spell in prison, from where he was liberated by the jubilant crowds on the day of the republic’s birth, failed to restore his reputation.

Following Gambetta’s departure to Tours, the gulf between Rochefort and hard-line colleagues such as Gustave Flourens, Paschal Grousset and Benoît Malon from his old paper,
La Marseillaise
, seemed set to widen further. For whilst they remained free to challenge the Government of National Defence with more radical visions of a new society, Rochefort could not resist the offer of a place as the token radical on its twelve-man executive, tied in to collective responsibility as a minister without portfolio. As a deputy, in 1869, Rochefort had campaigned for universal conscription to the French army. Now, though, his arguments that Paris should resist to the end found little favour with colleagues in the executive who hoped for an accommodation with the Germans. Meanwhile, fearing mob rule, the government equipped the burgeoning National Guard with only the most antiquated weapons. Rochefort was torn: stay and compromise, or rebel. To take the former option, he insisted to old
friends among the radicals, required his descent ‘to all but the most impenetrable cellars of my conscience’. And yet, for the moment, he decided to retain his position.

In the midst of the brewing storm, Rochefort’s responsibilities as president of the Barricades Commission at least afforded him the chance to rehabilitate his reputation for leadership while proving that he ‘was not given by nature and temperament to systematic opposition’. Throwing his energies into the practical work of organising Paris’ civil defences, he signed the appeal, posted around Paris, for every home to prepare two bags of earth for the barricades that would provide a last line of resistance against any Prussian assault. Meanwhile, bottom drawers and overwrought minds were ransacked in search of national salvation. ‘Hardly a day passed’, Rochefort recorded, ‘without seven or eight Archimedes coming in to propose some infallible means of destroying the besieging army in one blow.’ A giant hammer could be lifted by balloons and dropped on the Prussian lines, suggested one proposal, another that lions from the zoo be set loose against the enemy. Most of the ideas received were rather less practical, but the republic offered a broad church for scientific talent: the commission for designing a super-explosive for use against the Prussians went to the man responsible for the bomb with which Orsini had failed to kill Napoleon III.

The highest priority was still the maintenance of robust communication with the outside world. Recollecting his first, hated job at the Department of Patents a year before, Rochefort may have regretted dismissing too hastily the myriad proposals for balloon guidance mechanisms that had then crossed his desk. In the absence of any great leap forward in the years since, it seemed that the most outlandish suggestions were now to be encouraged with funding. Pigeons equipped with whistles to deter Stieber’s falcons proved especially effective, the pellicles strapped to their legs carrying photographically reduced letters. Each delivery kept a team of hunched copyists busy for several days, transcribing from a megascope projection. Even the eccentric Jules Allix’s twenty-year-old notion of a communications system based on ‘sympathetic snails’ – pairs of molluscs rendered telepathic over huge distances by the exchange of fluid during mating, whose synchronised movement could communicate letter codes – saw a brief revival of interest.

Like the endless hours that the National Guard spent in drill, however, such displacement activities could keep the radicals of Paris occupied only for so long. As suspicion mounted that the government was preparing to sell out the country, the talk in Batignolles and Belleville became as
feverish as the inventors’ imaginings, and demonstrations more frequent and more heated: as long as Gambetta’s Army of the Loire was awaited, the true patriots of the left, it was argued, deserved their chance to claim victory where the armies of the empire had failed. Trapped in a political no-man’s-land, Rochefort was finally presented with a way out of his predicament on 26 October, when the commander-in-chief of the republic, General Trochu, confided in him that the fortress city of Metz, which alone had stood unconquered in the path of the Prussian advance for the previous month, was about to surrender. What was more, he was told, Jules Favre and Adolphe Thiers, the government’s leading doves, had already entered into secret negotiations with Prussia.

Burning with indignation at having been kept in the dark for so long, Rochefort turned to Victor Hugo for advice. ‘Don’t remain any longer with a party of men who deceive everybody, yourself included’ affirmed the novelist, but for Rochefort simply to submit a letter of resignation would have gone against his scheming nature. Instead, he leaked Trochu’s secret disclosure to Flourens, with only an empty promise that it would go no further as a fig leaf for his mischief-making. The next day, news of the fall of Metz was splashed across the headlines. Frayed nerves finally gave way, and crowds burned the newspapers in public, while the headstrong commander of the fortress of Saint-Denis, inflamed to insubordination, launched a surprise attack on a salient that the army had previously abandoned as indefensible. Paris went wild for a glimmer of solace but speedy victory turned to even more sudden defeat as the Prussian guns opened fire on the jubilant French troops. Then, just as the city thought it could bear no further disappointment, rumours began to circulate of the armistice negotiations.

In a heavy drizzle, angry crowds converged on the Hôtel de Ville, steaming sulphurously under their umbrellas. While the drums and trumpets of the National Guard sounded, Flourens seized his chance. Dressed in a theatrical uniform from his service in the Cretan uprising against the Turks three years earlier, scimitar swinging by his side, he arrived at the flashpoint with his personal retinue of devoted sharpshooters, several hundred strong. Conciliatory officials invited him in to the council room to discuss the situation, but once there he leaped on to the great table to assert his will, carelessly shredding the baize surface with his spurs while he spat out denunciations of government treachery. In scenes more worthy of a second-rate farce than an attempted
coup d’état
, the standoff lasted late into the night, by when the Hôtel de Ville was packed with 8,000 Guardsmen, the air fetid with their nervous sweat. Not until
three o’clock in the morning was a settlement brokered by Edmond Adam, the prefect of police: municipal elections would be staged within eight days, with immunity from reprisals for the insurgents. Two days later, though, the government reneged, arresting some leading radicals and driving more underground, where they would regroup with an even sharper sense of righteousness and entitlement.

Commentators in the Parisian press mistakenly agreed that, with the ‘Red threat’ exposed as impotent, the danger had passed. More pragmatic minds merely hoped that the arrival of the army from Tours might stymie the threat of revolution and save the republic. In Versailles, however, Colonel Stieber was doing everything in his power to ensure that both were proved wrong.

For all Stieber’s boastful letters to his wife claiming that six aeronauts had been seized in a day – more, in fact, than were captured during the entire siege – the Krupps anti-balloon gun had scored few hits. Meanwhile, new balloons continued to float off the production lines under the vast vaulted roofs of the Gare du Nord and Gare d’Orléans. Seamstresses worked overtime along platforms from which the trains had nowhere to run, to produce vessels blessed with the names of Rationalism’s heroes: Kepler, Galileo, Newton and Lavoisier. But by forcing Nadar to switch to night launches, Stieber’s strategy of targeting the balloons proved a decisive factor in the conclusion of the war.