The World That Never Was (16 page)

The mood of mockery quickly turned into a clamour for retribution. Forcing open the doors of the guardhouse, the mob poured in and drove the two captive generals into the walled garden of the building to face its rough justice. Powerless to intervene, Clemenceau witnessed the terrible scene. ‘All were shrieking like wild beasts without realising what they were doing,’ he would write. ‘I observed then that pathological phenomenon which might be called bloodlust.’ General Thomas was the first to die, staggering to stay on his feet, cursing his assailants, until riddled by bullets; Lecomte was dispatched with a single shot to the back. Of the rifles fired, most belonged to his own mutinous troops. The identity of those who then desecrated the corpses is less certain.

Sated or sickened by its own violence, the mob quickly ebbed away, leaving the rue des Rosiers in eerie silence. The other, lesser prisoners were immediately released, with Ferré claiming that he wished to avoid ‘cowardice and pointless cruelty’; Michel later insisted that she had only demanded that the dead men be kept prisoner, without any intent to do them injury. But it was already too late for either scruples or denials to carry any weight or serve any purpose. For the time being, no authority remained in Paris to judge their crimes.

Senior officials at the Hôtel de Ville and those ministries still based in Paris had begun their evacuation to Versailles early in the afternoon, while events were still unfolding in Montmartre. Not long after, Adolphe Thiers himself, chairman of the executive and de facto head of the interim government, had made his escape, riding out to his new capital at the head of a great column of troops, who had been ordered by General Vinoy to withdraw en masse from their barracks in the city. Jules Ferry, the mayor of Paris, had to sweat out his fate for a few hours before following them in ignominious style. But their departure had been neither a rout nor flight, suggesting a premeditated strategy in case the confiscation of the cannon provoked resistance, and their disdain for the disrespectful crowds that lined the streets boded ill for how they might avenge their humiliation on the people of Paris.

By dusk the central committee of the National Guard was in full control of the city. The gas flares usually reserved for the celebration of military triumphs were lit to illuminate the facade of the Hôtel de Ville, celebrating the first time since 1793 that Paris as a whole had been subject to insurrectionary rule. Yet as Benoît Malon, the leader of the International in Batignolles, would ruefully reflect, for all their bellicose posturing of the previous months, ‘Never had a revolution taken the revolutionaries more by surprise.’

The mood of the Montmartre vigilance committee that night was reflective, its young members pondering, perhaps, whether a revolution born in such brutality might not be fated to end in like manner. Louise Michel’s veins alone still coursed with adrenaline. Like a child eager for approval, she proposed to set out directly for Versailles, where she planned to assassinate Thiers in the supposed safety of his palace and ‘provoke such terror that the reaction against us would be stopped dead.’ It took the combined efforts of Ferré and his young friend Raoul Rigault, usually the most extreme voices in the group, to dissuade Michel from an action that would surely have been suicidal. Yet her instinctive sense that swift action was needed to press the advantage would soon be confirmed by the advice of General Duval, who demanded an immediate sortie of the National Guard to catch the Versaillais government on its heels. That his warnings went unheeded was perhaps the greatest error made by the insurrectionists.

Determined to erase the memory of the generals’ murder, the central committee of the National Guard instead set out to demonstrate its legitimacy as a responsible and effective civic government. Even while the roadblocks thrown up around the city to impede the removal of the guns were being dismantled, it was announced that municipal elections, suspended for almost two decades under Napoleon III, would be held within a fortnight. When the results were returned, the left had a fat majority of sixty-four seats. Though war and the subsequent tensions had driven many bourgeois families from the city, the turnout was still a good two thirds of what it had been for the Assembly elections, making it difficult for Thiers, try as he might, to declare the result invalid. The correspondent for
The Times
in London was right to discern in the vote ‘the dangerous sentiment of Democracy’.

On 28 March, the ‘Paris Commune’ was officially declared, ‘in the name of the people,’ in a benign spectacle staged outside the Hôtel de Ville, with red flags flapping in the wind and red sashes worn with pride. That the representatives of the city, whose election had restored to Paris after a long absence the same administrative rights enjoyed by ‘communes’ of
villages, towns and cities throughout France, should have chosen to adopt a similar corporate appellation was unsurprising. An already nervous bourgeoisie, however, would have received the news with profound unease, for it had been ‘the Commune’ of Paris that had deposed Louis XVI in 1792, and that had wielded substantial power behind the scenes throughout the Terror, growing ever more monstrous in its whims. Nevertheless, for many the ceremony was to be cherished as a rare cause for jubilation.

‘What a day!’ proclaimed Jules Valles, editor of
Le Cri du Peuple
. ‘That clear, warm sun that gilds the gun-muzzles, that scent of flowers, the flutter of flags, the murmur of passing revolution … Whatever may happen, if we are to be again vanquished and die tomorrow, our generation is consoled! We are repaid for twenty years of anxiety.’ Michel celebrated the occasion by leading a procession that bedecked the statue representing Strasbourg in the place de la Concorde with swags of flowers, and left a tricolour propped in the crook of its arm in a pledge of the Commune’s commitment to the integrity of France that the Assembly had traded away for the benefit of the affluent few, by ceding Alsace and Lorraine to Germany.

Popular expectations were sky-high, buoyed up on a sense of empowerment. ‘We are not rogues and thieves, we are the people, nothing more, and nothing is above us,’ one young craftsman wrote to his family in the country, assuring them of his safety and warning them against the lies of the reactionary press. He then went on to list the Communards’ aspirations: ‘We do not want looting or theft, we do not want pomp and ceremony. Here is what we want and nothing else. A united and indivisible republic; the separation of Church and State; free and compulsory education by lay teachers; the abolition of all permanent armies and every citizen to bear arms, but in his own district, that is, as the National Guard.’ Across France, revolutionary communes were declared in Lyons and Marseilles, Toulouse and Le Creusot, Saint-Etienne, Limoges, Perpignan and Cette. Viewed from Paris, the country appeared to be ablaze with revolutionary fervour.

Yet victory would not be quite so easy to achieve. Even in the capital there were pockets of reaction to be found, with the newly formed ‘Friends of Order’ offering a standard to which those who feared the Commune could rally. And the Commune ignored at its peril the guiding hand of Thiers, who had orchestrated the ‘Friends’ as an early part of his far larger strategy to take back the capital and rid France for good of the troublemaking radicals.

In Versailles, Thiers watched and waited, presiding over the affairs of the Assembly with an air of lawyerly predation, his cropped head and thick neck swivelling within the high, starched collars he favoured, his hooked nose befitting his owl-like nature. The weeks preceding the debacle over the cannon had seen Chancellor Bismarck and other foreign leaders urge Thiers to confront his enemies on the left. Evoking a conspiracy hatched in London, that had supposedly cast its net across France and which, if unchecked, might spread far beyond its borders, their aim was the extirpation of the International, led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. That the German pair’s influence over how the ‘desperate folly’ of the Commune unfolded was quite negligible was disregarded by Europe’s forces of reaction. Colonel Stieber and the Prussian leadership may have vacated Versailles, leaving many tens of thousands of German soldiers to garrison France until the agreed reparations were paid in full, but Thiers, installed in the same offices, needed little encouragement to act resolutely from a shared hatred of socialist sedition.

Some would later suggest that Thiers had conceived the attempt to seize the guns as a ruse to draw the sting out of the revolution, pointing as evidence to the notorious unreliability of the regiment handed the job and the failure of the limbers to materialise. Either way, he had a long-cherished plan available to exploit its failure, following the government’s withdrawal from Paris. During 1848, when wildfire uprisings had spread across Europe, he had been France’s prime minister, advising King Louis-Philippe on how to stamp out radicalism: the fourteen fortresses surrounding Paris, including Mont-Valérien, had been built under his supervision with, some said, half an eye on implementing just such a strategy of internal control. He would now pursue the very policy he had recommended in vain back then: playing for time, to allow the army to regroup outside the capital, he would then launch a massed attack on Paris that would silence radicalism for a generation to come. Nothing, though, was a foregone conclusion.

Had the leaders of the Commune realised the true fragility of Thiers’ position, both political and military, General Duval’s argument for a swift and decisive attack out of Paris might have received a more positive hearing. For Thiers’ very legitimacy, like that of the National Assembly as a whole, was fading by the day, with hard-line monarchist representatives sniffing for any signs of weakness that might allow them to usurp power. Even the crack battalions filled with ‘the flower of French chivalry’ that Thiers claimed to have at his disposal were a chimera, comprising no more than the 12,000-strong residue of the regular army, a force vastly
outnumbered by the National Guard in Paris. And most troublesome of all for Thiers’ strategy was the fact that, in the rush to withdraw loyalist units from Paris, the key fortress of Mont-Valérien that loomed over the road out to Versailles had been unintentionally abandoned to the rebels.

To capitalise on the challenging circumstances that prevailed, Thiers required all the considerable cunning he could muster. Desperately needing time for the army to rebuild, he deftly confided to the press that he expected the city to be back under the rule of the Assembly within three weeks. Meanwhile, protracted talks with the Communards, carried out through proxies, allowed him to pose as a peacemaker. By indulging the hopes of conciliation still harboured by those who had found themselves Communards more by accident than design, he delayed for the moment any military offensive from the capital.

Meanwhile, Thiers set about harnessing the defeated French army to his will by manipulating its impugned sense of martial honour. The Communards flattered themselves that they were the true defenders of the republic, who alone had held out when the rest of France buckled. To counter the perception of their diehard patriotism, Thiers labelled them as treacherous fanatics whose subversion of the state was to blame for the fall of France and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine: they were ‘communists’ not ‘Communards’, the Paris administration’s choice of name twisted to conjure the phantasm of global conspiracy against which the Catholic Church so vehemently inveighed, as a heretical pestilence that threatened civilisation. Eliminate the communists, Thiers seemed to wink at the troops, and your own, unfairly tarnished reputation will be restored.

In their naïve enthusiasm, the insurrectionists played into his hands. Publishing a letter from a general at Prussian headquarters to the new government in Paris, Paschal Grousset, a firebrand journalist, colleague of Rochefort and now the Commune’s minister for foreign affairs, carelessly translated as ‘friendly’ the general’s far vaguer assurance that ‘peaceful’ relations existed between Germany and the Commune. It was all grist to a Versailles propaganda mill that was busy grinding out rumours, including one that detailed how the Prussians had stood on the terraces of their billets around the city and laughingly watched through telescopes the events of 18 March unfold, while military bands played a jaunty accompaniment to the folly of the French.

Meanwhile, resentment of the Commune was further fermented by the cost to the National Assembly, in money and pride, of the predicament in which it now found itself. Lacking access to the National Bank
of France, there were humiliating delays in paying the indemnity due to Germany. ‘Paris has given us the right to prefer France to her,’ Thiers had announced after the killing of generals Lecomte and Thomas, and
la France profonde
now rallied to his cause.

After a fortnight’s hiatus, on Palm Sunday, 2 April, the supporters of the Versaillais government were finally given something to cheer when its guns opened up with a brief bombardment of the suburb of Courbevoie. ‘Thank God!’ Thiers confided to his diary, ‘civil war has begun.’ His Catholic and monarchist opponents would have been gratified that the deity’s shadow fell heavily over the first clash of arms.
‘Vive le roi!’
shouted the Zouaves as they charged and broke the Communard lines; only six months earlier they had been serving in the international regiment that protected Pope Pius IX as he strong-armed a fractious Vatican Council into declaring him infallible in all matters of faith and morality. The atheistic Communards may not have considered themselves to have much in common with the Protestant Huguenots massacred 300 years earlier in the French Wars of Religion, but in the weeks and years to come they would discover a growing affinity with their heretical forebears.