The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  In a dispatch to Secretary of State Fish dated March 25th, Washburne reported ‘… the appearance of things today is more discouraging than ever. The insurrectionists in Paris are gaining power and strength every hour….’ It was true. Still the seductive spring weather continued, as did the ‘terrible silence’ in Paris which had so alarmed Edwin Child. Underneath it was an acute nervousness, betrayed by ‘shopkeepers who were brave enough to keep open, guarding their shutters close at hand so as to be ready to close at an instant’s notice’. Now, on top of the realization that it was master of all Paris, deceptively good tidings from the provinces fortified the resolve of the Comité Central. There had been sympathetic uprisings, and Communes declared, in important centres as far apart as St.-Étienne and Marseilles, Le Creusot, Lyons, and Toulouse. Throwing to the winds its earlier undertakings to the Mayors, and in total defiance of the Assembly, the Comité decided to hold forthwith the postponed municipal elections.

  On March 26th Paris went to the polls. From a register of 485,569, 220,167 voted. Thiers proclaimed a victory based on the apparent number of abstentions; but the truth was, and he knew it, that a large proportion of these represented the bourgeoisie who had ‘abdicated’ by quitting Paris during the armistice, or after the first flare-up on March 18th. In fact, compared with those of the municipal elections held the previous November, the results did denote a considerable advance in support of the revolutionaries; it was proof of just how seriously Thiers and the new Assembly had alienated Paris.

  Now the wild-eyed men who with Flourens had strode up and down the table a few inches from Trochu’s nose on October 31st had gained, belatedly, what they had demanded that day. Paris’s new municipal council was controlled by Reds in a proportion of four to one, and they promptly assumed the title of ‘Commune de Paris’, with all the awe-inspiring associations that conveyed.

  On Tuesday, March 28th, amid immaculate spring sunshine, the Commune officially installed itself at the Hôtel de Ville. Superbly stage-managed by Brunel, for sheer spectacle it was a day of brilliance such as the city had not seen—paradoxically enough—since the braver days of the despised Louis-Napoleon. Some Parisians even found themselves thinking back to the magnificent parades of the Great Exhibition. All Paris seemed to be there, and cheering wildly. In front of the Hôtel de Ville had been erected a platform decked in scarlet cloth on which stood the members of the newly elected Commune, also wearing red scarves, taking the salute as the massed units of the National Guard marched past. Never had this semi-trained militia, which had given so poor an account of itself during the Siege, marched better. There seemed to be a new spring in its step, a new swagger in its salute. At 4 p.m. salvoes of cannon-fire pealed out from batteries mounted on the quay. Assi, who stood near a bust of the Republic that wore a beribboned Phrygian cap, attempted to make a speech, but his words were drowned out by repeated roars of ‘Vive la Commune!’ Abandoning his text, he shouted at the top of his voice: ‘In the name of the people, the Commune is proclaimed!’, and the crowd went mad. Thousands of National Guards stationed in the Place raised their képis on the points of their bayonets, as the massed bands thundered out the Marseillaise. All through the afternoon and late into the evening, two hundred battalions of them marched past; the officers saluting the Phrygian-capped bust of the Republic with their sabres. The sinking sun glittered fierily on the bayonets, catching all the patches of red in the scene, from the streamers tied to the Guards’ bayonets to the statue of Henry IV, completely hidden under its scarlet draperies and clinging urchins.

  ‘What a day!’ exclaimed Jules Vallès, the novelist: ‘O great Paris!’ That same day in London, accompanied by unparalleled scenes of great jubilation, Queen Victoria opened the new Albert Hall. Meanwhile, in Versailles, Thiers announced that the revolts in the provincial cities had been successfully suppressed. But the news would not arrive in time to cast a shadow over the rejoicing at the Hôtel de Ville. Indeed there was little enough to cause anyone to reflect in this carefree moment that the day’s events had brought France beyond the brink of civil war. Between Paris and Versailles the bridges were down.

  Communard Barricade before the Hôtel de Ville

  19. The Red Spectre

  ‘Now that our Commune is elected, we shall await with impatience the acts by which it will make itself known to us. May God wish that this energetic medium will prove beneficial, and will procure us genuinely honest and durable institutions. That’s what everybody wishes and desires, for we have been dissatisfied for a long time. That’s why, I believe, everybody accords it his good wishes.’ Thus wrote Louis Péguret, formerly Corporal of the National Guard, who admitted himself strongly in sympathy with the Commune, in a letter to his sister dated March 28th.

  Just what was the Commune going to do? This was the question which now lay uppermost in the minds of all Parisians, bourgeois and proletarian alike. But first of all, what was the Commune? What, precisely, did it stand for, this mystical word ‘murmured under the Second Empire, shouted under the Government of National Defence’? Even many of those who shouted loudest, who were later to die unhesitatingly beneath the red standards of the Commune, could hardly give a coherent definition; and—reaching back over the years today one’s fingers clutch awkwardly at vague slogans, at conflicting ideologies and nebulous abstractions. Those who, like Delescluze and Varlin, might have enlightened historians, were to be killed on the barricades or by the firing squads at Sartory before they had a chance to write their memoirs or record their creeds. Pyramids of tracts and books have been written since upon the social and philosophical content of the Commune, but much is so flagrantly biased in one direction or the other as to be worse than unhelpful. In its contemporary setting, the Commune came at a time when memories still recalled apprehensively the revolutions that had broken out all over Europe, when bombs thrown at princes killed innocent bystanders, when industrial unrest was everywhere at hand and behind it apparently the sinister red hand of Marx’s International; and the period following the Commune saw still more anarchist bombs and more unrest. To the denizens of the otherwise tranquil nineteenth century, any threat to the established order of things was instinctively regarded as a far more pernicious heresy than it would to our world, its sensibilities long dulled by custom. During its lifetime, the Commune had few friends beyond the ranks of its immediate supporters in Paris, and these were rendered fewer by the unchallenged falsifications later put out by the eventually triumphant forces of legality, which spotlighted the bloody deeds of the Commune, while passing over the fact that they themselves had wreaked infinitely greater bloodshed upon the Communard supporters. For these reasons, over a prolonged period few respectable bourgeois historians were able to view the Commune, except through the most violently red-tinted spectacles. On the other side, for their own dialectic purposes the Marxists have distorted the Commune to create a myth portraying something it never was.

  This present book is not the place, nor has it the space, to do more than try to sketch a brief course between the opposing untruths. But one may start by defining what the Commune was not. Despite the similarity of the names, as of March 1871 it had nothing to do with Communism. As Engels himself later admitted, ‘The International did not raise a finger to initiate the Commune’.

  At this time Karl Marx, now a mature fifty-two, sat in London operating like a skilful puppet-master the strings of the various branches of the International across the world, and dispatching a copious correspondence in all directions. Of the French branch he had no high opinion, and in 1868 had complained to his friend, Kugelmann, that ‘these ragamuffins are half or two-thirds of them bullies and similar rabble.’ Its receipts for the previous year had totalled only £63, and during the last years of the Empire it had been further weakened by successive trials and incarceration of its leaders. After the downfall of the Empire, Marx had abruptly switched his sympathies from Prussia to France, and had written to Engels criticizing the desire of the Paris Internationalists to �
��perform stupidities in the name of the International. They wish to overthrow the Provisional Government, establish a Commune of Paris, and recognise Pyat as the French ambassador to England.’ Although he strongly disapproved of the bourgeois moderates who had taken over from Louis-Napoleon, he wrote again in the Second Manifesto, dated September 9th, that ‘any attempt to overthrow the Government in the present crisis, while the enemy is beating practically upon the doors of Paris would be a desperate folly’.

  From the lessons of 1848, Marx had appreciated the dangers of inadequately prepared revolutions that went off at half-cock, and he now considered that the first duty of a revolutionary leader was laboriously to educate the masses towards their eventual destiny. Right up to March 18th, Marx remained strongly opposed to any outbreak of revolt in Paris, and its success thoroughly took him by surprise. Although he never held many illusions about its long-term prospects, he now suddenly, intuitively saw a vast potential significance in the new Paris revolution and, with all the nimbleness of an incomparable opportunist, leaped aboard the bandwagon. In the long run, the Commune would exercise a far profounder influence upon Marx than vice versa.

  On March 23rd, Marx issued directives to the International in French provincial cities, urging it to help create ‘diversions’ to relieve pressure upon Paris, and at the same time sent one of his trusties, Serrailler, to act as a liaison officer in Paris. But meanwhile the Internationalists there vacillated, bickering with the revolutionaries of the Comité Central, many of whom they regarded as—to use more modern parlance—‘deviationists’, and awaiting advice from the Master. It was not until the revolution was firmly established and the Comité entrenched at the Hôtel de Ville that they actually decided to join in. But the world was conditioned to spotting the ‘Red Spectre’ behind all that was happening in Paris. The Rev. Gibson declared on March 24th that ‘most of the members of the Comité Central are members of the International Secret Society’; although in fact they were a small minority, and even later at the peak of their influence there were never more than a score of Internationalists on the ninety-strong council of the Commune. It was also an illusion (though perhaps a lesser one) to say, as did Goncourt; ‘… What is happening is nothing less than the conquest of France by the worker… the convulsive agents of dissolution and destruction.’ Certainly, as compared with the Revolution of 1848 where most of the leaders had belonged to the bourgeoisie, the founders of the Commune imparted a more proletarian flavour. But even so, only twenty-one of its members could be rated genuine workers, while another thirty were journalists, writers, painters, and assorted intellectuals, and thirteen were clerks and small tradesmen of the petite bourgeoisie; moreover, not one of the demands put forward at its inception in anyway smacked of Socialism, let alone of Marxism.

  Even a study1 produced a generation after the Commune (though still under the spell of the Red Spectre)’ calls it erroneously the ‘Communistical Republic of Paris’. But in fact the word ‘Commune’ had its origin many centuries before the publication of Marx’s Manifesto, in the Middle Ages, where it eventually came to be used of any self-governing town. Such ‘Communes’ of townsfolk were often established in quest of independence from a local feudal baron. In 1789 a Commune de Paris had been improvised simply to assume responsibility for the administration of Paris, following the fall of the Bastille. Gradually, as the Great Revolution progressed, the extremists displaced the moderates until, on August 10th, 1792, they dissolved the earlier body to form a Revolutionary Commune. As Carlyle remarked of it, ‘there never was on earth a stranger Town-Council. Administration, not of a great City, but of a great Kingdom in a state of revolt and frenzy, this is the task that has fallen it.’ It was the Revolutionary Commune that forced the Assembly to dethrone Louis XVI, and, by default became itself the real provisional Government of France until such time as the Convention Nationale was elected. Led by the violent Danton, on the one hand it firmly established the first French Republic, while on the other it successfully chased the foreign, Royalist invaders from French soil; it was the combination of these two magical deeds that specifically first induced the Reds2 during the Siege of Paris to reach back in history for the all-powerful amulet, la Commune. Even after the election of the Convention in September 1792, the Commune continued to be the real power behind the scenes, forcing the Convention to consult it at every turn, while being largely responsible for the worst excesses of the Terror. Until the downfall of Robespierre, nearly two years later, the Revolutionary Commune so effectively controlled France that it was frequently known as the ‘Parisian Dictatorship’. This in itself endeared its memory to those Parisian revolutionaries of 1870 to whom the ascendancy of Paris over France was still sacrosanct; just as the historian Thiers would forever be haunted by the precedent of the simple, unambitious, semi-legitimate Commune of 1789 which had turned into an omnipotent, insatiably devouring monster.

  Thus, by definition, the Commune as it came to power in 1871 was little more than a slogan with no ideology, no programme, constantly glancing over its shoulder to 1793—despite Marx’s admonition of the previous September to the French proletariat ‘not to begin the past over again, but to build the future’. (Typical of this backward-looking posture was the arrest on the day the Commune was proclaimed of a seventy-eight-year-old man called Bignon; he was accused of having denounced in 1822—half a century earlier—four sergeants of La Rochelle, who were subsequently executed for conspiracy.) In the words of one of the French historians of the Commune,1 ‘The title was too imprecise to proclaim a programme, but, waving in the wind like a flag, it united the traditionalist souvenirs of some with the dreams of others and thus rallied French revolutionaries….’ In the name of the Commune, its supporters tended to see either their own personal Utopia, or a means of settling a grudge against, or dissatisfaction with, the established order.

  Of grudges and dissatisfaction there were no shortage. Although it was the residuum of the Siege that, directly, had ignited the Commune revolt, much of the inflammable material had been piling up long before. There was the resentment, mentioned earlier, keenly felt by the revolutionaries that the working class had been successively swindled out of their birthright inherited from the Great Revolution, and there were still savagely bitter memories of the brutality with which subsequent uprisings had been repressed; Manet for one, though no Communard, would never forget being taken as an art student to file past five or six hundred bodies, laid out ‘under a layer of straw’, of those massacred during the 1851 coup d’état. There was also the sense of disillusion, coupled to mistrust, that—as Louis Péguret complained—‘since the 4th of September not a single Republican institution has been created’ (although it was perhaps a little unrealistic to assume the Provisional Government could have spared time to create ‘Republican institutions’ while fighting the war).

  But by far the biggest backlog of discontent stemmed from the poor social conditions existing under the Second Empire, from the reforms that Louis-Napoleon had not been allowed to complete. There were the appalling slums into which the workers were now concentrated despite (and partly because of) the works of Haussmann; the vastly inflated cost of living which had far outpaced wages; the long hours of work under disgraceful circumstances; child labour still involving several thousands of éight-year-olds in Paris alone; no security of employment, no sickness benefits, no pensions; restrictions on the right to affiliate, on freedom of the Press, and upon any means by which the workers might have achieved less intolerable conditions. Rossel, a regular soldier of middle-class extraction who later threw in his lot with the Commune, was moved by what he saw among the Parisians under his command to exclaim: ‘These people have good reason for fighting; they fight that their children may be less puny, less scrofulous, and less full of failings than themselves.’ The workers’ attitude to all the glories left by the Second Empire was summed up simply by one who declared in Goncourt’s hearing: ‘What is it to me that there should be monuments, operas, café-co
ncerts, where I have never set foot because I had no money?’ As the Communards would ultimately prove, there were those who would rather all these glories of civilization were expunged by fire than that the Parisian workers should continue to forfeit their claims to a better life.