The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Pushed hard by Freycinet and Gambetta, Aurelle moved in with 100,000 men to strike the Bavarians in France’s first major offensive since the fall of Louis-Napoleon. On November 9th, a battle was fought at Coulmiers some ten miles west of Orléans. Von der Tann was outnumbered by more than three to one; for once the French artillery, now supplied with percussion fuses, was as effective as the enemy’s; and by nightfall von der Tann was forced to retreat, beaten, and with his personal baggage abandoned to the French. Had the French cavalry shown more persistence, defeat would probably have been turned into annihilation; but as it was Gambetta’s forces had won for France her first clear victory of the war. The next morning Orléans was reentered, and for several days the scenes of jubilation there astonished by their fervour members of the Anglo–American ambulance left behind with the German wounded.

  Valid as the reasons for rejoicing were, the victory at Coulmiers was, alas, but part of a strategical error which was to pave the way to France’s final catastrophe. In his first apprecaitions, Gambetta, vésted with absolute authority and complete freedom to communicate with the remainder of unoccupied France, saw himself now as the sole arbiter of the nation’s strategy; clearly, the supreme planning could no longer reside with Trochu and Ducrot locked up in Paris. To Gambetta, the amateur strategist, the objective was equally clear; Paris must be relieved from the outside, and by the most direct route. This meant via Orléans, a distance of less than seventy miles as the crow flies. But Gambetta committed a cardinal error in overlooking the tenuousness of his communications with Trochu. For whereas the balloon service had already provided a tested and reliable means of Paris informing and instructing the provinces, signals in the reverse direction had to depend solely upon the spasmodic, insecure, and quite unreliable pigeon post; for this reason it would obviously be a great deal easier for Tours to co-ordinate with Paris’s plans than vice versa.

  Thus, while throughout October Paris had been pursuing Ducrot’s plan, aimed at linking up with the provinces along a north-westerly axis, Gambetta was planning to join hands with the Paris garrison from almost the opposite angle. At least part of the fault for this divergency of strategy seems to lie in Trochu’s procrastination in informing Gambetta. On his own admission, he first told his deputy, Favre, of Ducrot’s Basse-Seine project during the first fortnight of October. ‘Have you briefed Gambetta?’ asked Favre. ‘No’, replied Trochu, advancing by way of explanation his doubts about Gambetta’s ability to make a serious effort in the provinces. Favre and other members of the Government insisted that Gambetta be informed at once, but it was not until the 14th that this was actually undertaken, by means of a friend of Gambetta’s called Ranc who was intending to balloon out of Paris. In case Ranc should fall into enemy hands it was decided to give him no written orders; instead, he was summoned to the Louvre and there personally briefed by Trochu. After the war, to Trochu’s indignation, Ranc denied having received any instructions at all for Gambetta. It does seem likely that, bearing in mind Trochu’s habitual long-windedness and his early pusillanimity towards Ducrot’s plan, nothing so precise as a clear-cut order was issued for Ranc to convey. Certainly Gambetta claimed he took Ranc’s dispatch as no more than a suggestion, and one that did not happen to attract him. As follow-ups to Ranc’s mission, more definite orders to Gambetta were, however, sent on the 19th, 23rd, and 25th of October. But by this time Gambetta was thoroughly committed to his Orléans strategy. Like Nelson, he turned a blind eye to Trochu’s signals, later insisting, disingenuously, that they had never been seriously discussed at Tours as constituting anything so definite as a plan, and at the same time failing to inform Trochu of his own project. By November 10th, Trochu—thoroughly frustrated—had still heard no word from Gambetta and now sent yet another dispatch, this time specifying that Bourbaki be sent to establish himself on the Basse-Seine. But it was too late; Aurelle’s troops were at that moment reoccupying Orléans, and Gambetta was already considering his next move

  On November 14th the news of Coulmiers was brought to Paris by a line-crosser, Ernest Moll, a farmer whom the Prussians had used as a guide. The city exploded in a delirium of joy. ‘We have passed from the lowest depths of despair to the wildest confidence’, exclaimed Labouchere. ‘I am so happy’, declared Juliette Lambert, ‘that I would willingly give myself up to arrogance. Yes, we have a success….’ Strangers kissed each other on the boulevard; Le Figaro saw the hand of God at work, and acclaimed Aurelle a modern Maid of Orléans. In the excitement, the revolt of October 31st and the growing food shortage were forgotten. At long last the spell of defeats had been broken!

  At the Louvre, however, once the initial excitement had subsided, the Government was far from sharing the exultation of the boulevards. Gambetta’s success struck at the heart of le plan, which had now gone far towards fruition. The whole weight of the Paris Army had already been shifted towards the north-west; immense preparations had been made, including the construction of pontoon bridges; and the sortie was scheduled to begin within the next week. To the non-military members of the Government with their simple civilian understanding of logistical problems, the solution was straightforward; ‘Cheer up, mon cher général’, was the cautious Picard’s immediate reaction, ‘here’s a stroke of good fortune which will perhaps save us from proceeding with our heroic folly’. If nothing else, public opinion, of which, since October 31st, the Government was increasingly mindful, and which was already ejaculating slogans of ‘lls viennent à nous; allons à eux!’1 was forcing the Government’s hand. But Trochu, aware of the ponderous technical difficulties involved, hesitated. Then, on November 18th, a second message arrived from Gambetta, urging him to co-operate by striking southwards towards Orléans. This decided the Government. The next day Trochu told a shocked Ducrot that his offensive would now have to be transported lock, stock, and barrel to the other side of Paris. For the third time in two months, Ducrot fumed with, rage and frustration; as he put it his disappointment was ‘not less than his embarrassment’.

  It was hardly an exaggeration to say, as Trochu did, that what Ducrot was now being asked to perform was ‘the most extraordinary tour de force of the Siege of Paris’. Through the Paris streets had to be shifted 400 guns, 54 pontoons, and 80,000 men with all their supplies and equipment.

  Worst of all, whereas Ducrot had selected the Gennevilliers peninsula in the first place because the enemy was relatively weak there, the route connecting with Gambetta’s advance from Orléans now lay across the famous Châtillon Plateau, wrested from Ducrot at the end of September, which had since become perhaps the strongest sector of the whole Prussian line. Quickly discarding this approach, Ducrot decided instead to mount his attack south-eastwards across the Marne, before its confluence with the Seine. Once he had broken through the ring, his intention was to swing westwards to meet up with Gambetta’s forces somewhere in the area of Fontainebleau. In contrast to the Basse-Seine project, however, his new line of advance lay through territory controlled by German Armies, and an attack across the Marne necessitated complicated bridging operations in the face of the enemy. With five weeks in which to prepare the previous offensive, there was, he claimed, only five days for the planning of this one; therefore certain omissions were inevitable.

  With all the activity involved in transposing Ducrot’s Army, it was impossible that the enemy should not have learnt something of what was afoot. In any case, as has been demonstrated on other occasions in France’s military history, good security is not where her most formidable talents lie. Despite Trochu’s assertion that only five officers were in on the original plan, most of the British correspondents seem to have gleaned details of it, and by the beginning of November it was being freely discussed among Goncourt’s circle at their favourite dining place, Brébant’s, where derisive laughter met the suggestion that Trochu was planning to ‘lift the blockade of Paris within a fortnight’. As early as October 21st, when Ducrot was carrying out his preliminaries at Malmaison, the Crown Prince of Prussia
noted in his diary admissions by French prisoners that ‘a sortie on the largest scale is being planned against Versailles and Saint-Denis, with the object of bringing into Paris a convoy of provisions from Rouen’; and as soon as Gambetta had begun to march on Orléans, even before the Battle of Coulmiers, the Crown Prince was predicting a major sortie out of Paris in that direction. On November 16th, while Trochu was still making up his mind, Moltke ordered the Third Army, as ‘a temporary measure’, to concentrate its forces on the left bank of the Seine south of Paris, showing that he was fully aware of the potential threat. By November 27th, Bowles was reporting, ‘I have had confided to me nothing less than General Trochu’s famous plan, and have witnessed the preparations for its execution’; officers had even boasted to him ‘that in eight days we shall be in communication with the outside’. Also on this same day Jules Claretie noted the demolition of the barricades at Nogent-sur-Marne so that the artillery could pass; while, after dinner that evening, General von Blumenthal received a telegram warning that the French had thrown a bridge across the Marne near Joinville, opposite the Württemberg division. The next day orders were sent out to reinforce the division. Finally, on November 30th, Labouchere wrote that Ducrot’s new plan had been ‘confided to me by half a dozen persons, and, therefore, I very much question whether it is a secret to the enemy’.

  Still dubious about Gambetta’s prospects, and perhaps (belatedly) also influenced by security considerations, Trochu had once again procrastinated before notifying Tours of the change in plan, and the date of the new sortie: November 29th. Not until the 24th, only five days before the attack, did he finally dispatch a message; and then it was prevented from reaching Gambetta in time by probably the most extraordinary mishap of the entire war. The balloon to which Trochu entrusted the crucial intelligence was called, appropriately enough, the Ville d’Orléans. The thirty-third to leave Paris, it carried a crew of two: Rolier, the pilot, and Béziers. Since Prussian anti-balloon measures had made daylight flights increasingly risky, the Ville d’Orléans took off from the Gare du Nord under cover of darkness, shortly before midnight. As dawn came up, the two men saw that a heavy fog obscured the earth. Lacking anything but the most primitive navigational instruments, they had not the faintest idea of their position, but—as they had set off in a propitiously moderate south-south-east breeze—comfortably assumed that they were heading towards unoccupied north-western France. In the utter stillness of the ether, Béziers thought he heard beneath them something like the sound of continuous railway trains. Then the fog rolled away, and to their horror the aeronauts realized that the noise was in fact waves. As Béziers noted down in his log: ‘The sea for us, that’s death!’ By mid-morning the Ville d’Orléans was still flying out over the sea. At last they sighted a number of ships; Rolier came down as low as he dared, and let out the 120-yard guide-rope in the hopes that a ship might be able to grab it. But, as the ships seemed quite oblivious to their cries and signals for help, they decided to seek the safety of greater heights by jettisoning ballast. Among the objects sacrificed to the waves was a 60-kilogramme bag of dispatches containing the vital message on which hung the fate of Paris.

  The balloon rose into dense cloud, and once again the earth vanished out of sight. It became bitterly cold, and the two men’s moustaches turned to icicles. In noble devotion, Béziers took off his mantle to protect the carrier pigeons; though at this point it must have seemed that the prospects of survival for both birds and men were extremely low. On and on the balloon sailed. Then, just before 2.30 p.m., it began to descend rapidly. Out of the clouds the top of a pine tree suddenly emerged; a sight no less welcome than the coastline of Greenland must have been to the Vikings. It was too much for the half-frozen men who had begun to abandon hope. Without hesitation they leaped out, falling (according to Béziers) twenty metres into deep, soft snow. The unweighted balloon promptly soared and disappeared, carrying with it their food and clothing, as well as the unfortunate pigeons. The aeronauts climbed down a precipitous mountain, and walked and stumbled for hours without finding any signs of civilization; least of all any clue, as to what part of the world they had landed in. Was there any terrain like this to the west of Paris? Where were they? In the Vosges mountains? The Black Forest? But what about the sea they had traversed? Exhaustion was setting in, and several times Rolier collapsed in the snow. Then, as night was falling and it seemed only a matter of time before Rolier succumbed to a lethal urge to sleep, they came across a ruined cabin, where they spent the night. The next day they resumed their march and eventually reached a poor hovel, tenanted but empty. They ate what they could find, and a few hours later two peasants clad in furs appeared, speaking a strange language. The French tried to explain their presence by drawing sketches of their balloon; but without success.

  It was not until one of the peasants lit a fire with a box of matches marked ‘Christiania’ that Rolier and Béziers realized that they had landed in the centre of Norway! In fifteen hours they had travelled nearly nine hundred miles from Paris; it was a voyage worthy of the imagination of Jules Verne. The aeronauts were taken to Oslo (then called Christiania), fêted by blonde young women draped in tricolores and banqueted for several days like visiting gods, then returned home.1 Astonishingly enough, both their balloon with its pigeons as well as the sacks of dispatches jettisoned into the sea eventually turned up, safe and sound. The latter were brought in by a fishing boat, and at once expedited to France by the French Consul. But they were to reach Tours too late for Gambetta to do anything about co ordina ting with Trochu’s break-out.

  Inside Paris, Trochu was just as much in the dark about Gambetta’s advance towards him—so essential to the success of the ‘Great Sortie’ on which the city’s defenders were staking their all—as Gambetta was about Trochu’s plans. In actual fact, after the recapture of Orléans, Aurelle seems to have been stricken with mental paralysis, or alarmed by his own success. For the best part of a fortnight he had sat still, vigorously disputing the next move with Freycinet. During this lost fortnight (a fatal one for France), when Aurelle had bogged down at Orléans and Ducrot was switching fronts in Paris, Prince Frederick-Charles was marching the Prussian Second Army rapidly westwards from Metz, whose surrender had released it. By the end of November it was firmly in position between Orléans and Paris, able to intervene in either direction.

  The Great Sortie—Ducrot crosses the Marne

  10. The Great Sortie

  ABOUT the time that the Government was pinning its hopes on the break-out across the Marne, the voice of Victor Hugo was heard once more. This time he wrote, more soberly, in a new poem entitled ‘Paroles dans l’Épreuve’;

  Nous arrivons au bord du passage terrible;

  Le précipice est là, sourd, obscur, morne, horrible;

  L’épreuve à l’autre bord nous attend; nous allons,

  Nous ne regardons pas derriére nos talons;

  Pâles, nous atteignons l’escarpement sublime,

  Et nous poussons du pied la planche dans l’abime.1

  MAP 1. The Great Sortie

  The feeling that Paris, and behind her France, had reached the brink of an abyss—or at least a Rubicon—was one shared by all Parisians as the hour of the ‘Great Sortie’ drew closer, but they were perhaps less pallid in their apprehension than the poet. Despite the last distribution of fresh meat to civilians having been made on November 21st, spirits had never been higher. That day Mr. Brown wrote to his wife in Kentish Town: ‘The most perfect order reigns and the resignation of the people to support the privations is admirable beyond all praise, they are as gay as ever and determined to support the Government they have chosen to the last extremity….’ The next day, Edwin Child, now a proud member of the National Guard, was writing enthusiastically to his mother: ‘A tremendous battle is expected day after day. There will be more than 200,000 men engaged upon the French side. What has been done in Paris since the Siege is nothing less than marvellous. This modern Babylon celebrated for its dol
ls and bonbons now makes cannons, mitrailleuses, converts ancient guns into modern ones, makes shots, shells and gunpowder by ton…. 100,000 men have been selected from out of the National Guard, armed and fully equipped for war, and a finer set of men it would be difficult to find…. The flower of the nation….’ He ended by declaring he would ‘like to see every Prussian exterminated’, adding a derogatory note for the neutralist Mr. Gladstone. On the 27th, the seventieth day of the Siege, Washburne remarked that ‘Paris has never before been so tranquil, and never before has there been so little crime. You do not hear of a murder, robbery, theft, or even a row, anywhere.’

  Everywhere in these last few days there was a sense of urgent preparation, and nowhere more so than among the National Guard. Under the pressure of the repeated demands that the Guard participate in actual fighting, culminating in the outbreak of October 31st, the Government had yielded to the extent of forming special Compagnies de Guerre of the youngest and fittest which would march with the regulars in the ‘Great Sortie’. ‘If our brave brothers succumb’, their new commander, General Thomas, told them, ‘on us be the duty to avenge them!’ Endlessly they drilled themselves in the empty spaces around Paris, and a new vigour and sense of purpose seemed to have entered their movements. O’Shea of the Standard watched some Guard battalions, in a weird multiplicity of uniforms, march off to the front after a review outside the Opéra. He thought the accompanying vivandières, with their gaudy ‘Bloomer costumes’, plumed hats, tricolore-painted brandy-kegs slung from the hips, and Roman daggers or even little ivory-handled pistols tucked into their belts, a little too theatrical; but he admired the regimental bands composed of pensioners who made brave attempts to wheezeout the Chant du Départ; and, above all, thought he detected for the first time ‘the groundwork of discipline’. The Belleville battalions, despite orders not to take their colours to the outposts, nevertheless marched with pennants on which had been embroidered Phrygian caps to distinguish them from the bourgeois units.