Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Because it was more profitable to sell under the counter, but also because the inept distribution system meant that often their shops really were empty, traders would put up their shutters for long periods. This resulted in interminable food queues. Such a queue, one British correspondent wrote, was often “more than a couple of hundred strong. Its outer edge towards the street was kept by armed Gardes Nationaux, who, patrolling like sheepdogs here and there, suppressed with difficulty the almost continual disputes.” For hours the unfortunate housewives would wait, often ending up empty-handed, burning with hatred equally for the petit bourgeois as represented by the ruthless butcher and for the rich bourgeois who could afford to buy without queuing. Pretty well the only effective rationing was accomplished by that most unfair instrument: price. The cost of most foodstuffs rocketed as the weeks passed. Compared with pre-war days, for example, the price of butter jumped by over one-third, and those of potatoes and rabbits had more than doubled. Oddly enough, there was never any shortage of wine or other alcohol. In the poorer districts of Paris drunkenness was never more pervasive, nor more pitiable. While the working-class women of Paris queued and hungered, the men got drunk on the barricades—all the while railing against the government.

  BOMBARDMENT AND CAPITULATION

  To the misery of hunger and cold, in a move aimed at ending the siege at the end of December, Bismarck and Moltke now added a new component of horror: the systematic bombardment of the civilian population. On the morning of the 27th, a French colonel and his wife were hosting a breakfast party for friends at the outpost of Avron, to the east of the city. All of a sudden, a Prussian shell burst right on top of them, killing six of the breakfasters instantly and seriously injuring the colonel. For the next two days Prussian heavy guns of a calibre hitherto unknown continued to hurl their huge shells down on Avron. On 5 January 1871, bombardment of Paris proper began. As Moltke put it with icy precision, “an elevation of 30 degrees, by a peculiar contrivance, sent the shot into the heart of the city.” A small girl walking home from school near the Luxembourg was cut in two; six women in a food queue were killed; so was a cantinière of the National Guard while sleeping in her bed; in a bistro in the aptly named Rue de l’Enfer several drinkers were struck down.

  Three or four hundred shells fell every day, at random and with no attempt to single out military targets. It marked the beginning of the Germanic technique of war by Schrecklichkeit. But, once the initial fear of the unknown had passed, indignation became the principal Parisian reaction—indignation that reached a peak on 11 January with the funeral of six little children all killed by the same shell. Then, in a manner comparable to the London Blitz of 1940, indignation was replaced by a surprising indifference to the indiscriminate shelling. Life went on as usual. House doors were left unlocked so that passers-by could take refuge from the shells. In the Louvre the Venus de Milo was crated up and stowed in a secret vault by the Prefect of Police himself; and piles of sandbags were stacked around the Arc de Triomphe and such treasures as the originals of the Chevaux de Marly (the fiery horses sculpted by Guillaume Coustou in 1740–5) on the Concorde. But soon the Prussians, under pressure from an outraged Europe, realized that the bombardment was proving a failure. The heavy guns (behemoths though they were by nineteenth-century standards) could not inflict that much serious damage. The humanitarian Crown Prince himself was beginning to oppose the bombardment. When he learned that Prussian shells had exploded among a Parisian church congregation, he exclaimed, “Such a piece of news wrings my heart.”

  Meanwhile, the Prussian court ensconced at Versailles had more immediate priorities. These were to have consequences that were much more far-reaching for European history than the disembowelling of innocent children in Paris by the terror-weapons of the new warfare. A large number of princes and princelings had gathered in Louis XIV’s great château to participate in an event that was to bring Bismarck to the pinnacle of his life’s ambitions. The big restaurant in the Hôtel des Reservoirs was full of food and wine and German voices. In a strange reversal of fortune, while the former Emperor of France sat dismally a prisoner in a provincial Schloss in Germany, his Empress in a depressing house in Kent, the King of Prussia took his afternoon tea in the Prefecture of Versailles, while Bismarck smoked, talked, drank and ate inexhaustibly in another unpretentious Versailles house as he planned the great day. At the nearby château, the proud lettering of the façade which dedicated it “à toutes les gloires de la France” looked bleakly down on Prussian guns parked below. In the great staterooms where the Roi Soleil and Mme. de Maintenon had paraded less than two centuries previously, German wounded lay in cots dominated by the rows of vast patriotic canvases proclaiming past French victories over their countrymen. From beyond Louis XIV’s Rhine, court painters were being rushed to Versailles to record the historic event.

  By 18 January the scene was set in the glittering Galerie des Glaces, where only a few years before Queen Victoria had danced with Louis Napoleon amid all the splendours of the Second Empire at its zenith. King Wilhelm I was to proclaim himself emperor of a Germany united over the corpse of a defunct French Empire. At twelve noon, recorded W. H. Russell of The Times:

  The boom of a gun far away rolls above the voices in the Court hailing the Emperor King. Then there is a hush of expectation, and then rich and sonorous rise the massive strains of the chorale chanted by the men of regimental bands assembled in a choir, as the King, bearing his helmet in his hand, and dressed in full uniform as a German general, stalked slowly up the long gallery, and, bowing to the clergy in front of the temporary altar opposite him, halted and dressed himself right and front, and then twirling his heavy moustache with his disengaged hand, surveyed the scene at each side of him.

  This pleasing scene was multiplied in the great mirrors. Then the heavy figure of Bismarck, in the blue tunic and great boots of a Prussian cuirassier, stepped forward, holding his Pickelhaube by its spike, to proclaim the German Empire.

  Bismarck at Versailles had triumphed over Louis XIV. Russell’s very English comment on the extraordinary scene which had been enacted beneath a painting of Frenchmen whipping Germans was “What a humorous jade Fortune is!” But, in besieged Paris, the humour was hardly evident, and Goncourt lamented prophetically, “That really marks the end of the greatness of France.” Some thing of the old order of Europe died in the Galerie des Glaces. More than that, to the injury inflicted on France by the bombardment of la ville lumière an unforgettable insult had been added. In brutal combination, this injury and this insult would infuse into Franco-German relations for the next three-quarters of a century a terrible bitterness.

  About the same time as the proclamation in the Galerie des Glaces, Trochu made one last, hopeless attempt to break the Prussian stranglehold. It was the turn of the National Guard, which had been so loud in its condemnation of the Hôtel de Ville’s ineptitude and apathy. It attacked at Buzenval to the west of Paris, with half-trained troops debilitated by hunger and cold. Predictably, the result was a massacre. Once again, on 22 January, furious Reds blaming the Trochu government launched an assault on the Hôtel de Ville. “Civil war was a few metres away,” wrote Jules Favre. With Paris in a dreadful state, and faced now with this new spectre of an enemy within the walls, Trochu sent an emissary to Bismarck to ask for an armistice. The Iron Chancellor whistled a huntsman’s air and remarked, “Gentlemen, the kill!”

  The hunt was over. The peace negotiations were painful, the Prussian terms savage. France lost Alsace and Lorraine, two of her fairest and richest provinces, and was required to pay a crippling indemnity of five billion francs, or more than seven times the total reparations demanded by the Allies in 1815 after twenty years of war in which French armies had devastated half the continent. But the term most hurtful to the pride of the defeated nation, and particularly to its half-starved and frozen capital, was Bismarck’s insistence on a triumphal, symbolic march along the Champs-Elysées. It was brief, but sufficed to raise Parisian indignat
ion to boiling point.

  On the last night of February, all the customary nocturnal noises of Paris had fallen silent. The cafés emptied, and no fiacres rattled across the cobbles with late passengers. A few cavalry patrols moved silently through empty streets. As dawn came up blinds were drawn and windows shuttered. Early on Wednesday, 1 March, a lone German officer came riding down the Champs-Elysées with an escort of Uhlans. Behind him followed the rattle of kettle drums, with 30,000 German troops marching up an empty, silent avenue draped with black flags towards a sand-bagged Arc de Triomphe. Then, in the afternoon, they marched down again, wheeling into the Place de la Concorde as the music died away. Uniformed German sightseers at the Louvre were spotted by an angry crowd and pelted with coppers—a first instalment of reparations. There was more military music from the bivouacs in the Concorde that night. By the next morning, the last German had left. Paris’s ordeal was over. But the insult lingered on. The city was enraged; patriotic Paris would have none of the treaty of shame; republican Paris would have none of the new Assembly created in the provinces; Paris, the capital, would not tolerate the government’s decision to establish itself at Versailles, occupying billets only recently vacated by the Prussian conquerors. Revolutionaries of the left and patriots of the right found themselves united in anger, as a peace came which was no peace.

  At last food, most of it from England, could be rushed into the devastated city. But Parisians were now in the grip of what physicians called “obsidional fever,” a sort of collective paranoia or mistrust. Psychologically, they were in no state to confront the humiliation of unprecedented defeat or of the harsh peace terms that came with it. The very appearance of the city, with most of the handsome trees on its boulevards cut down and many houses shattered by shellfire, was worlds away from the glittering Paris of 1867—a contrast that did nothing for morale. In the streets men drifted aimlessly about, staring in desultory fashion into shop windows: regular troops and mobiles waiting to be sent back to their homes, National Guards with no employment, petits bourgeois with no trade. The scene, after months of confinement, terror and hunger, might seem peaceful enough. Yet, hidden away, a seething fury was ready to erupt into violence. This unhealthy condition required a leadership sensitive not just to the shifts in politics but also to the demands of psychology. Unfortunately the new government of France turned out to be as deficient in this respect as its predecessor had been in its handling of the war. At the end of February, Goncourt—though his own taste for work had at last returned—sensed that Paris was suffering “under the most terrible of apprehensions, apprehension of the unknown.” More optimistically, an English commercial traveller, William Brown, about to leave Paris for good, wrote to his wife, “it is all over now I feel sure, thank God,” and spoke of “the prospect of peace and business, the abundance of every kind of food, the beautiful Spring weather.” Nonetheless, it was certainly rash of Jules Ferry, on 5 March, confidently to telegraph from Paris to his colleague Jules Simon in Bordeaux, “The city is entirely calm. The danger has passed.” It had not—far from it.

  THE COMMUNE TAKES OVER

  Capitulation to Bismarck confirmed the worst fears of the belligerent Parisian left that Thiers (who succeeded Trochu as president) and the new Republican Assembly were doing a deal with the enemy to restore the old imperial regime. The ingredients which were to spark off the Russian Revolution in 1917—military humiliation, suppressed revolutionary fervour and deprivation—were all there. Missing only were the weapons. As the siege ended, however, Trochu’s government had established safely up at Montmartre a guarded artillery park of some 200 cannon. Most of the guns bore National Guard numbers and had been paid for by public subscriptions during the siege. Then, at the end of February, detachments of the Guard seized the guns in a sudden coup de main. Efforts by loyal troops to regain them in March were not only repulsed but ended in the brutal lynching of two elderly generals—shot in a courtyard of Montmartre’s Rue des Rosiers, amid scenes reminiscent of 1789—and despite the efforts of Mayor Clemenceau. With dramatic suddenness, the seizure of the Montmartre guns shifted the whole balance of power in Paris—indeed in France as a whole.

  Thiers now moved the army out of Paris—just as he had recommended Louis-Philippe to do in 1848—to Versailles, which became the official seat of government. In Paris, the revolutionaries set up a rival regime, the Commune de Paris, inside the Hôtel de Ville. On 22 March, a counter-demonstration by unarmed conservative Friends of Order was broken up by gunfire in the Rue de la Paix, close to the present-day Ritz. A dozen were killed and many more wounded. The bridges between Paris and Versailles were now well and truly down. In Versailles Thiers regrouped his forces and prepared a second siege of Paris. In Paris, the Commune bickered, indulged in marginal social reforms—such as the abolition of night work in the bakeries—and squandered valuable time. For had the Communards promptly marched on Versailles, with their 200 cannon, they could almost certainly have defeated an army that had been largely disarmed by the Prussians. Karl Marx, who later made his name from his definitive work on the Commune, claimed this to have been one of its two cardinal errors (the other was its reluctance to seize the Banque de France): “the defensive,” he wrote, “is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies.” This was an error that his future pupil, Lenin, born the previous year at Simbirsk, would not repeat when his time came.

  Thus the insurgents had lost the initiative; and—with Prussian support—gradually Versailles was permitted to regain its badly shaken confidence. With what was more of a mob than an army, on 2 April, Palm Sunday, the Commune finally made a half-hearted move on Versailles. It was easily repulsed. One of the Guard’s most flamboyant leaders, Gustave Flourens—who had led the insurgents into the Hôtel de Ville the previous October—was captured unarmed, and despatched with a single sabre blow. All the viciousness of civil war now appeared. Two days later, the Commune’s Chief of Police and Procureur (a title with dread connotations from 1793), Raoul Rigault, ordered the taking of hostages. These were headed by no less a person than the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy. It was a deed by which Rigault’s name would be longest remembered. During the interrogation of one of the imprisoned priests, a famous exchange ensued:

  Rigault: What is your profession?

  Priest: Servant of God.

  Rigault: Where does your master live?

  Priest: Everywhere.

  Rigault (to a clerk): Take this down: X, describing himself servant of one called God, a vagrant.

  Apart from being anti-religious, Red and left-wing, what really was the Commune? First of all, it was not, strictly speaking, “Communist,” having originated in 1789, when its precursor had been improvised simply to assume responsibility for administering Paris after the fall of the Bastille. With the extremists taking over in 1792 it was transformed into the Revolutionary Commune, which forced the Assembly to dethrone Louis XVI. By default, it then found itself for a time the real government of France. Led by the violent Danton, on the one hand it firmly established the first French Republic, while on the other—with almost miraculous success—it chased the foreign Royalist invaders off French soil. The recollection of these two extraordinary achievements was what induced the Reds during the siege of Paris to reach back in history for the all-powerful amulet, the Commune. As one of its more significant leaders, Eugène Varlin (who was to be killed after being taken prisoner in the semaine sanglante of May), wrote to Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary, it wasn’t a revolution they desired; they wanted only to set up a municipal council and defend the rights of Paris. In effect, the Commune was a kind of diffuse rallying point for all manner of social, political and philosophical grievances against the establishment—real or imagined. “These people have good reason for fighting,” wrote Louis Rossel, one of its few impressive military commanders: “they fight that their children may be less puny, less scrofulous, and less full of failings than themselves.”

 
There were the Jacobins, left-overs from the radical extremists of the Revolution of 1789, many of whom would have nothing to do with the Internationalists, or Socialists, on the Commune. Their leader was Charles Delescluze. His deeply eroded, tragic face still commanded support as well as sympathy, but at sixty-one he was prematurely worn out. There were the veterans of the barricades of 1848 and 1851—and even of 1830. There were revolutionary feminists who belonged to the anarchist faction, such as the redoubtable vierge rouge, Louise Michel, who simply wanted Paris to rise “in remembrance of its proud and heroic tradition.” “Barbarian that I am,” she declared, “I love cannon, the smell of powder, the machine-gun bullets in the air.” Like many other Communards the vierge rouge was an illegitimate, the progeny of a French châtelain and his chambermaid. Then there were history’s homeless Poles, including Dombrowski and Wro-blewski, formidable fighters in the cause of freedom.

  That outstanding British historian of France, Richard Cobb, was always struck by the mediocrity of the Communards: “They were, above all, des candides. Never can leadership of a political movement have been so naive, so incoherent, and so incompetent.” Except for the horrible police chief Raoul Rigault, “most were innocents who were not built for the scale of such tragic events.” The best one could say of the Commune was to define it as “a tragic irrelevance, hopeless from the start, yet basically well intentioned, the brief spring of a Paris attempting to break away.” As events were to prove, however, the Commune was overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of aims arising out of the mishmash of personalities, ideologies and interests that it embraced.