The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Beyond the ranks of the revolutionaries, the news of the lynching of the two old generals had widely disgusted Frenchmen; Goncourt said he experienced ‘a sensation of weariness at being French’. Disastrously, the Comité Central through its utterances in the Journal Officiel now became identified with the outrage. At Versailles, anger surged through the officer’s messes of the regular Army, and with it went a grim determination to avenge Lecomte and Thomas. What little prospect there now existed of conciliation between the Government and the insurgents was made clear by Jules Favre when he declared, in tougher language than he had ever been known to use about the Prussians during the Siege: ‘one does not negotiate with assassins’. Yet at this juncture it was difficult to see, if negotiation were excluded, just how Thiers was going to implement his intentions of emulating Windischgrätz’s reconquest of Vienna, and of taming Paris once and for all. He had already twice gravely under-estimated the situation. In the first place, although Marxists later claimed he had deliberately provoked a revolution, it is in fact quite clear that he had never anticipated that Vinoy’s operation on March 18th would lead to open insurrection. Like most of the new Assembly, he had minimized the determination of the Parisian left wing. And now he had dangerously under-estimated the potential military power of the hostile National Guard, relative to his own. On the march out to Versailles during the evening of the 18th, the regulars had revealed the shakiness of their morale by insulting the loyal police and gendarmes who marched at their side. Once at Versailles, they went about refusing to salute their officers and openly declaring that they would not fight against their brethren in Paris. Lord Lyons reckoned that probably the only troops on whom Thiers could depend were the Papal Zouaves, and this view was supported by Captain Patry who, after spending three days ‘reconnoitring’ in Paris in civilian clothes, departed for Versailles to discover that all that remained of his company was one sergeant and three officers. All the rest had melted away. Moreover, owing to the exodus of the bourgeois during the armistice, the ‘reliable’ units of the National Guard in Paris, which under the Siege had once numbered between fifty and sixty battalions, could now be reckoned at little more than twenty; compared with some three hundred dissident battalions, now liberally equipped with cannon. It was with the greatest difficulty that Vinoy had established posts between Versailles and Paris, and the dawning of each day brought renewed and genuine fears of a descent by the insurgents in overwhelming force, before ever Thiers had a chance to build up his counter-offensive.

  This was what Brunel and others had urged upon the Comité Central from the start, and Thiers was in fact saved only by the paralysis that confusion bred in the Hôtel de Ville, which ultimately would, cause the ruin of all Red dreams. Just, as, in the state of euphoria which existed outside on the streets, there was no hint that a bloody civil war might be about to break out at any moment, so in the dazed revolutionary councils was there no sense of urgency, no suggestion that a rebellion had been launched that any legitimate Government would be bound eventually to suppress with force. Most of the discussions turned on the essentially parochial political issue of Parisian autonomy, on the election of a municipal council—the famous ‘Commune’—and on the social issue of repealing the inequitable laws on debts and rents. Militarily, the first action of the Comité had been to place an unknown figure called Lullier in command of the National Guard, instead of the more obvious choice of Brunel. Lullier was an ex-naval officer discharged for bad conduct, and later described by a fellow Communard as ‘an alcoholic fool without morals or talent’, who on one occasion had had to be guarded by his colleagues to prevent him throwing himself out of the window. He seems to have been obsessed by fears of a surprise Government attack reoccupying the Hôtel de Ville by means of the subterranean passages which had already played so significant a role on recent occasions. Three were located and sealed off, but others believed to exist could not be traced. Thus a vast force was kept at the ready in the immediate area, and inside the building mitrailleuses appeared at the windows, mounted on tables and desks, and the windows themselves were stuffed with sandbags and feather beds. But apart from taking these quite unnecessary defensive precautions, Lullier did nothing. Worst of all, he made no effort to occupy Mont-Valérien, which had so effectively dominated the city’s western approaches throughout the Siege. On the evening of the 18th, Thiers had ordered its garrison to withdraw and for nearly three days the huge fortress, key to both Paris and Versailles, remained untenanted. Then, reluctantly and under pressure from General Vinoy, Thiers sent some of his few regulars to resume occupation. The insurgents had lost the initiative and Versailles began to regain its badly shaken confidence.

  For the rest, in those first days the Comité Central carried out none of the actions normally associated with revolutionary rule. Lord Lyons was agreeably surprised. To the Foreign Secretary he wrote on March 21st that its various proclamations in the Journal Officiel ‘seem to me to be in form much more calm, dignified and sensible than the proclamations of the Government of National Defence used to be. In substance they are not specimens of political knowledge and wisdom. It is to be hoped that the Assembly will not make matters worse by violent and ill-considered resolutions.’ He closed on a note of personal pessimism: ‘Anyway, I should not be at all surprised if the Assembly transferred itself to some dismal French provincial town.’ The next day, just as Dr. Alan Herbert returned, Lord Lyons received orders once more to leave Paris with his staff, and betake himself to Versailles. Once again, the British residents found themselves without an Ambassador. But, for the time being, there seemed little to worry about. On the 21st, the Rev. Gibson was writing: ‘Paris is much quieter today… and the omnibuses are for the most part running as usual. Still there are groups of people talking most earnestly at the corners of the streets, and there is much excitement and but little business.’ The next day he visited the scene where it had all begun, Montmartre, but there too ‘all was quiet’. For several days Edwin Child had also been making the same observation, and took the opportunity to get out of hock forty watch-chains his employer had pawned during the Siege; but he thought there was something ‘minous’ about the unusual ‘silence and quietness’ on the boulevards. The calm, however, led all talk around to the possibility of conciliation and, according to rumours which reached the Rev. Gibson, ‘the Assembly at Versailles will not deal with the insurrection with a high hand, but will come to terms with the leaders of the National Guard’.

  With the withdrawal of the Government, the last vestiges of legal authority left in Paris were embodied in the Mayors of the twenty arrondissements. As early as the 19th, Thiers had instructed them to mediate with the insurgents; although his motives were rather to stall for time, which he so badly needed, than to attempt any genuine conciliation. The Mayors themselves were as mixed, politically, as the various districts they represented. They ranged from Tirard, the conservative Mayor of the 2nd, the arrondissement of the banks and businesses, who was essentially Thiers’s man, to Mottu of the 9th and Ranvier of the 20th, who were supporters of Delescluze. Most, however, were left of centre; while even the right-wingers resented the Assembly’s ‘decapitalization’ of Paris, and wanted to restore her ascendancy by gaining some degree of municipal autonomy. All were anxious to avert any possibility of the situation heading towards civil war. The most important of them was the radical Mayor of Montmartre, Clemenceau, who was also a Deputy and who had attempted as early as March 8th to mediate between the Government and the National Guard over the disputed cannon. Under his lead, a series of meetings between the Mayors and members of the Comité Central had begun on the 19th, opening at 2 p.m. in the Bonvalet Restaurant. To the insurgents, Clemenceau pointed out the illegality of their position; ‘Paris has no right to revolt against France and must recognize absolutely the authority of the Assembly. The Comité has only one means of getting out of this impasse: give way to the Deputies and Mayors who are resolved to obtain from the Assembly the concessions demande
d by Paris.’ Varlin responded by giving a surprisingly moderate list of demands: ‘We want not merely an elected Municipal Council, but genuine municipal liberties, the suppression of the Prefecture of Police, the right of the National Guard to appoint its leaders and to reorganize itself; the proclamation of the Republic as the legitimate Government, the postponement, pure and simple, of payment of rent arrears, a fair law on maturities….’ The demands were by no means unreasonable.

  Until 4 a.m. on the 20th the talks dragged on. When the appellation ‘rebels’ fell from Mayor Tirard’s lips, tempers rose. Jourde, a fiery Auvergnat, was roused to mention the deadly words ‘civil war’, and went on to prophesy ‘it will be ignited not only in Paris, but throughout France, and it will be bloody, I warn you… if we are conquered we shall burn Paris, and we shall turn France into a second Poland’. But to the voices of conciliation was added the influential one of old Louis Blanc, just returned from his long exile in England. At last, an agreement was reached whereby the Mayors would strive to get the terms of the Comité accepted by the Assembly; the Comité would postpone the municipal elections it was planning to hold on the 22nd until the Assembly should vote a municipal law for Paris; and it would hand the Hôtel de Ville over to the Mayors. But the next day the Comité Central came under heavy fire from the Vigilance Committees of the Twenty Arrondissements,1 comprised of the more ardent revolutionaries, for having been too weak and compliant in their dealings with the Mayors. They had heard the fiercely uncompromising speeches being made at Versailles by Favre and others, and there was nothing to assure them that in fact the Assembly would yield to the Mayor’s intercession. They could not rid their minds of instinctive distrust of the bourgeois ‘Establishment’, recalling how in every previous revolution it had somehow contrived to swindle the proletariat out of its presumptive birthright. Now, for the first time since the Great Revolution, the revolutionaries possessed temporary superiority in arms—a situation they had awaited throughout the century. But time was clearly not on their side—so could they afford to waste it on protracted negotiations?

  On the 21st, the Comité informed Clemenceau that it was repudiating the agreement, as far as handing over the Hôtel de Ville was concerned. But it would still adhere to the postponement of the elections. This in itself was no small victory for Thiers, though not for the cause of peace. Clemenceau was both annoyed and disappointed; from now on the Mayors were largely discredited by both parties, suspected by Versailles as being too extremist, and by the insurgents as being too moderate. Their suspicions of Thiers’s motives were enhanced by a Government proclamation that day forbidding any civil or military functionary to have relations with the Comité. The next day, the 22nd, another Thiers proclamation declared in uncompromising language: ‘The greatest crime with a free people, a revolt against national sovereignty, adds fresh disasters to the troubles of the country. Senseless criminals, on the morrow following a great misfortune, when the foreigner had scarcely evacuated our ravaged fields, have not blushed to carry disorder, ruin, and dishonour into Paris, which they pretended to honour and defend. They have stained the city with blood, which raises the public against them….’ Hardly the language of conciliation, but there was worse to come that day.

  While with his left hand Thiers appeared to be offering conciliation, with his right he was testing the potential strength of his support within Paris. On the 19th he had appointed yet another officer to command the National Guard, in succession to the unpopular d’Aurelle. This was sixty-year-old Admiral Saisset, who had emerged with rare distinction from the Siege, in which he had also lost his son. He was promptly dispatched to Paris by Thiers, with the risky task of rallying round himself the ‘loyal’ units of the National Guard. How impossibly weak his position was, and what little likelihood there was of his mission succeeding, soon became apparent to him. As a factor to be reckoned with, the bourgeois National Guard had virtually disintegrated and no longer responded to any centripetal force its leaders could exert. Yet after the first paralysing shock had passed, a mild reaction had begun to build up in Paris. A motley of anti-revolutionary and ‘moderate’ elements, retired colonels, respectable shopkeepers, elderly gentlemen, and petits crevés, as well as the remnants of the bourgeois National Guard, gravitated around the Opéra and the Bourse, and especially Tirard’s Mairie in the focal 2nd Arrondissement. Another rallying-point appears to have been the premises of a tailor in the Boulevard des Capucines, a M. Bonne, formerly a captain in the National Guard. In his window, Bonne displayed the following poster: ‘Time presses for the formation of a dyke against the Revolution. Let all good citizens come to lend me their support.’ It was signed ‘Reunion of the Friends of Order’, and the name stuck.

  On the 21st, the ‘Friends of Order’ demonstrated, peacefully enough, outside the National Guard headquarters in the Place Vendôme. They were dispersed by the local commander, Bergeret, with the aid of two companies; but he, fearful lest the ‘Friends’ might be contemplating a serious coup to seize the H.Q., and would return in greater strength, called for reinforcements to seal off the Place. Sure enough, his fears seemed to be justified when a far larger force of the ‘Friends’ appeared the next morning. Now led by the intrepid old Admiral himself, they had assembled in the Place de l’Opéra with the aim of marching into the Rue de Rivoli, and thence to demonstrate in front of the Hôtel de Ville, collecting supporters as they went along. They deliberately came unarmed—with the exception of a few sword-sticks and pistols secreted about the persons of some of the more nervous. They bore banners inscribed ‘Pour la Paix’, and proclaimed in alternate breaths as they marched, ‘Vive l’Assemblée!’ and ‘Vive la République!’ As they turned into the short Rue de la Paix, they collided with Bergeret’s National Guards, ready and somewhat trigger-happy, who were drawn up across the entrance to the Place Vendôme. Insults were exchanged and tempers rose; according to the Comité, Bergeret ten times read the sommation ordering the demonstrators to disperse. But his voice was drowned by the noise, and all the time pressure from the rear was thrusting the leading ‘Friends of Order’ closer and closer on to the line of the National Guards. Then it happened, and as so often under these circumstances, no one ever knew which side fired first.

  Just before the arrival of the ‘Friends’, Washburne’s friend, the young and beautiful Lillie Moulton, reached the Place Vendôme on her way to visit the salon of Worth the English couturier. Picking her way through the barricades, she had entered his premises on the Rue de la Paix unmolested, and then heard the noise of the approaching cavalcade. Absent during the Siege, it was the first time she had seen anything like this in Paris. She rushed to an upstairs window, and fixed her eye upon a ‘handsome young fellow’ in the crowd, whom she recognized: Henri de Pène, a director of Paris-Journal, who seemed to be one of the leaders of the demonstration.

  De Pène, seeing people on Worth’s balcony, beckoned to them to join him; Mr. Worth wisely withdrew inside and shaking his Anglo-Saxon head said ‘Not I’… This mass of humanity walked down the Rue de la Paix, filling the whole breadth of it. One can’t imagine the horror we felt when we heard the roar of a cannon,1 and looking down saw the street filled with smoke, and frightened screams and terrified groans reached our ears. Someone dragged me inside the window, and shut it to drown the horrible noises outside. De Pène was the first who was killed. The street was filled with dead and wounded. Mr. Hottinguer (the banker) was shot in the arm. The living members of Les Amis scampered off as fast as their legs would carry them, while the wounded were left to the care of the shopkeepers, and dead were abandoned where they fell until further aid should come. It was all too horrible!

  Worth smuggled Mrs. Moulton out of a back exit. She returned home safely, was given a sedative of camomile tea, and put to bed after her harrowing experience.

  Among those who had marched with the ‘Friends of Order’ was Gaston Rafinesque, a young medical student and son of the Passy doctor. After the first volley, fired by the National
Guard, he claimed, ‘then the shooters started to march continuing to fire, which was why some of them were wounded by their comrades who were left behind….’ When the firing died down, Gaston and another medical student helped pick up the dead and wounded; the first corpse they collected was that of an elderly gentleman wearing the Legion d’Honneur. Later Gaston recalled ‘the whole scene lit up by the brilliant hot sun, unfeeling as it has been since eternity at the spectacle of human misery….’ It so disgusted him that he felt urged at once to take arms against the rebels, and his father, Jules Rafinesque, wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law in London, Louis Hack; ‘Sometimes I wonder if it would not be wise to go and practise medicine in Switzerland.’ The ‘Massacre in the Rue de la Paix’, as it came to be known, resulted in a dozen dead among the ‘Friends of Order’ and many more wounded, while Bergeret’s National Guards lost one killed and two or three wounded. Each side accused the other of having fired first, and the true blame has never been apportioned; though it seems as if it were most likely to rest with Bergeret’s men. But at the time this hardly mattered. What did matter was that, for the first time since the shooting outside the Hôtel de Ville on January 22nd, blood had been spilt. As Daudet wrote, ‘the farce was turning towards the tragic, and on the boulevard people no longer laughed’. The rift between Paris and Versailles had now gone beyond conciliation.

  The Comité had meanwhile invested the military command of the National Guard, pending the arrival of Garibaldi, to whom they had offered it,1 in Brunel, Eudes, and Duval—all now raised to the rank of ‘general’—in place of the bibulous Lullier who had been arrested for incompetence. The new commanders at once set about winkling out Thiers’s remaining footholds in Paris. Tirard’s Mairie in the 2nd Arrondissement was occupied, as was that of Clemenceau in Montmartre; Clemenceau himself was incarcerated briefly by his insubordinate deputy, Ferré. As mediators, the Mayors had reached the end of the line. At Versailles, the talk was now all of ‘suppression’. On the 25th, Thiers instructed Tirard: ‘Do not continue a useless resistance; I am in the process of reorganizing the army. I hope that before two to three weeks we shall have a force sufficient to liberate Paris.’ But when Tirard had asked Thiers for two regiments of gendarmes, he had been told, ‘I have not got four men and a child to give you’; while Admiral Saisset, quitting Paris on foot and in disguise to report back to Thiers on the failure of his mission, gloomily pronounced that it would require 300,000 men to crush the insurgents. Not one of the facts seemed to support Thiers’s optimism. Certainly nothing Washburne found at Versailles (he had decided to move his official residence there on the 24th, through still keeping a foothold in Paris) impressed him. Chaos and disorganization reigned. In the overcrowded conditions, some sixty of the Deputies were sleeping in the Council Chamber, sometimes appearing in their night-shirts in the midst of a debate; it was, thought Washburne, ‘worse than a Western steamboat in emigration times’. They booed the Paris Mayors for their attempts at conciliation, but when Washburne visited the Assembly he found ‘that august body fiddling while Paris burned’. Sitting between Washburn and Wickham Hoffman in the gallery of the theatre where Marie-Antoinette had spent her last evening at Versailles, Lillie Moulton heard Thiers declaim in his squeaky voice (with thorough hypocrisy) against the use of force; Favre then orated about the glorious ‘destiny of France’, remarks which were received with tremendous applause and much waving of feminine handkerchiefs. But Hoffman on one side of her growled ‘How typical!’, and Washburne on the other, ‘What rubbish!’