The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Finally there were also those who were simply attracted to the Commune by its face value; by its demands of municipal independence for Paris. Ever since the removal of the Revolutionary Commune that had terrified France, executive power over the city had been placed in the hands of the Prefect of the Department of the Seine, so that in effect any small rural community possessed more real autonomy than this great, industrialized capital. Their claims for a municipal budget and local taxation, for control over local education and the police, and for the right of the city to choose its own magistrates, gained the Communards the sympathy of many outsiders; an aristocratic lieutenant-colonel on leave of absence from the Grenadier Guards, then working with the American Red Cross in Paris, the Hon. John C. Stanley, admitted: ‘I have got into a strong unreasonable sort of sympathy with the best of the Reds. They are fighting for municipal liberties—what all our towns have always enjoyed.’

  Nothing revealed the confusing multiplicity of ideas and aims more than the various components creating the Commune. The two biggest factions which dominated it from beginning to end were the Jacobins, headed by Delescluze, and the Blanquists. The Blanquists were Socialists of the old school—except in the eyes of Karl Marx, who considered them entitled to the name ‘only by revolutionary and proletarian instinct’. They based their creed upon Proudhonist theories of a decentralized society comprised of small property-owners; strongly individualistic with anarchist undertones, the Blanquists’ ideals ran directly counter to the ‘new’ teaching of Marxism, dependent as it was upon the organization of the masses. Innocent of any precise economic platform, the Blanquists were violently hostile to the Church and to the regular Army; the one they wished to disestablish, the other to hamstring by abolishing conscription. They were for the most part dedicated revolutionaries, and even Marx had grudgingly acknowledged the leader from whom they took their name to be the greatest revolutionary of the century. Sometimes called ‘the Old One’, or less affectionately the ‘Spider of Revolution’, or sometimes ‘l’ Enfermé’, on account of the twenty-eight years he had spent incarcerated in Mont-St.-Michel and various other French prisons, Auguste Blanqui was by far the most popular, and almost a legendary, figure among the Red leaders. Now sixty-six, his drawn, elongated features, white-cropped hair and thin beard gave him the look of a Greco apostle. The arch-priest of résistance à outrance, during the Siege it was Blanqui whose influence had lain behind most of the uprisings and demonstrations against the Provisional Government, although the long years of imprisonment had taught him to eschew the limelight. Nevertheless, for all his evasive cunning, the sudden sentence imposed upon him by the Assembly, ex post facto, for his part in the events of October 31st, caught him off balance and on March 17th he had been picked up by Thiers’s police. Once again l’Enfermé languished in gaol, and his faction in Paris was left leaderless.

  Still more lacking in any coherent programme was the large body of revolutionaries loosely classified as Jacobins. They were wedded to abstract ideas of political liberty, and were thoroughly conservative in the sense that they constantly looked to their namesakes of ’93 for guidance; ‘Their memory is always with me’, admitted one of them. They mistrusted Marx’s new fangled philosophy, and many Jacobins would have nothing to do with the Internationalists on the Commune. Their leader was Delescluze, the man around whom the mob had rallied on October 31st; his deeply eroded, tragic face still commanded support as well as sympathy, but he was old and ill. At sixty-two he was prematurely worn out, his physique ruined by long bouts of deportation to Devil’s Island. Because of the state of his health, he had played no conspicuous part in the Commune’s seizure of power, and he no longer felt capable of playing a leading role in its councils. Next to Delescluze, the best-known Jacobin in France was Rochefort, who had been returned as a Deputy for Paris in the February elections. But Rochefort, his aristocratic sensibilities possibly recoiling from the spectacle of the ‘great unwashed’ in command at the Hôtel de Ville—a situation which he, as the century’s most outstanding polemicist, had done so much to assist—had not stood for election to the Commune. Instead he sat in his newspaper office, firing broadsides at Versailles, and occasionally the Commune too. (The other great rhetorician whose rhodomontades had helped inflame Parisians to a revolutionary pitch, Victor Hugo, had absolved himself of all responsibility, withdrawing once again to Brussels, whence he cried a pox on both houses. As a reason for leaving Paris, he explained—with some truth that his presence could ‘only exacerbate the situation’.) Also at heart a Jacobin was Félix Pyat, Delescluze’s pet aversion, whose paper Le Combat appeared revivified as Le Vengeur, as scurrilous as ever and destined to become the principal organ of the Commune; Pyat was both the most ineffectual and irresponsible of the leading Communards, as well as being among the noisiest.

  The role of the Internationalist faction has already been discussed; but it too—unlike its descendants, the modern Communist Party—was far from being a monolithic structure. One of its leading lights, for instance, Benoît Malon, shocked Laura Marx by admitting he had never heard of Das Kapital and knew of her father only as ‘a German professor’. That the bickering Paris International had thrown its weight behind the Commune was to a large extent due to Varlin, who had urged it to act ‘as members of the Comité Central, rather than of the International’. Eugéne Varlin was a remarkably handsome thirty-one-year-old bookbinder, who under the Second Empire had taken refuge in Belgium. Returning after September 4th, he had recruited and commanded the 193rd Battalion of the National Guard, until it was dissolved following the October 31st uprising. He was to reveal himself one of the most sympathetic among the Communard leaders, and perhaps their most competent administrator. To his co-Internationalists, Theisz and the Hungarian Leo Frankel, the Commune later owed most of the social legislation that it was able to achieve during its short and disturbed life. Another interesting supporter of the International was a twenty-year-old Russian, Elizabeth Dimitrieff, an elusive figure somewhat reminiscent of one of Dostoevsky’s self-willed heroines, who by her beauty and plurality of lovers injected a certain glamour into the Commune. The illegitimate daughter of a Tsarist ex-cavalry officer, she had been well educated in St. Petersburg, during which time she became an impassioned adherent to ‘progressive’ circles there. Contracting a marriage de convenance with an elderly, consumptive colonel, she then took off to Switzerland where she made contact with the International. In 1870 she moved to London, became a close friend of Karl Marx and his daughters, and at his impulsion went to Paris in March 1871; nominally to organize an Internationalist ‘Union des Femmes’ to aid the Commune, but also to act as private rapporteuse to Marx.

  Around the three main blocks comprising the Commune there hovered a nebula of assorted individuals: anarchists, intellectuals, Bohemians, Gambettists, disgruntled petit bourgeois, general layabouts, déclassés, and unclassifiables. Prominent among the anarchists was the redoubtable Louise Michel. Like Elizabeth Dimitrieff, Louise was a bastard, the daughter of a French châtelain and his chambermaid. Now forty, before the age of twenty she had fallen under the spell of Hugo, with whom she had begun a long correspondence, and to whom she dedicated a number of indifferent poems. As a schoolteacher, by 1853 she had already established a reputation of being an anti-Bonapartist ‘Red’. During the Siege, she had become a familiar, somewhat masculine, figure, stalking into churches to demand money for the installation of National Guard ambulances, wearing a wide red belt and seldom without a rifle (with bayonet fixed) slung from her shoulder. One of the principal mob-rousers during the shooting outside the Hôtel de Ville on January 22nd, it was Louise who wanted to go to Versailles to assassinate Thiers after March 18th (subsequently she even made the return trip in disguise, just to prove that it could be done). In the months to follow, Louise would be found everywhere; a member of both the male and female Vigilant Committees of Montmartre, organizing the women with Elizabeth Dimitrieff, helping with the Commune ambulances, firing a rifle on th
e barricades, and orating.

  In marked contrast to the fiery Louise, among the intellectuals was to be found Paschal Grousset, a twenty-six-year-old journalist later appointed as the Commune’s Delegate for External Affairs. Grousset was a fiery, dapper little Corsican, so carefully groomed that Rochefort nicknamed him the ‘ladies’ hairdresser’; in January 1870 he had challenged Prince Pierre Bonaparte to a duel, but in a fit of rage the Prince had shot down Victor Noir, Grousset’s second issuing the challenge, thereby provoking one of the biggest anti-Bonapartist demonstrations in the last days of the Empire. Upon the thoroughly anti-Red Washburne, who was to see more of him than did any other foreign diplomat, Grousset made a good impression. Washburne may have been perhaps slightly prejudiced by his first interview, when ‘unlike my previous visits to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, I did not have to await my turn, for no representative of any foreign power had ever called….’; nevertheless, three weeks later Washburne was still able to describe Grousset to Fish as a man of ‘intelligence, education, and genteel personal appearance’. Two other distinguished intellectuals were the Reclus brothers; Élisée, the famous geographer, whose career with the Commune was cut short by his falling into the hands of the Versailles forces, and Élie, who was nominated as Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The writers included Jules Vallès, permanently embittered by experiences of miserable poverty in his youth, and Verlaine—already partly estranged from his young wife and corrupted by drinking habits acquired during the Siege—who took over a humble post as chief of the Commune Press Office. The art world was represented principally by Gustave Courbet, gross and heavily bearded, and also sodden with drink which made him seem far older than his fifty-two years. Courbet, who became elected to the Commune at its subsidiary elections in mid-April, seems to have been motivated largely by the dismal treatment which l’art nouveau and the Impressionists had been accorded by the Establishment under the Empire. Pissarro also supported the Commune, while Renoir was sympathetic towards it because of Courbet’s association with it.

  There were a number of almost totally apolitical soldiers of fortune who had thrown in their lot with the Commune. Among them might be included the gasconading Flourens, the mob’s leader during the demonstration of October 31st, who since his imprisonment, liberation, and subsequent sentence to death in absentia, had lain rather low in Paris, but was now elected to represent the turbulent Belleville. There were also a number of Polish exiles, among whom Dombrowksi and Wroblewski were to prove two of the Commune’s ablest military commanders, drawn by the desperate belief that a blow for liberty anywhere represented a blow for oppressed and divided Poland. Motivated by less elevated ideals were pure terrorists like Montmartre’s Théophile Ferré and the Bohemian layabout, Raoul Rigault, an Eichmann or a Beria born before his time; two sombre figures that come into their own in the final stages of the Commune. Finally, there were the representatives of the Red Clubs, still as full of wild and perfervid ideas as ever. They were typified by the lunatic Jules Allix who, thwarted in his ambition to mobilize Parisian women and equip them with his deadly doigt prussique during the Siege, now appointed himself Secrétaire d’Initiative of the ‘Union of Women’; but such organization of the Communard women as existed was achieved principally by Louise Michel and Elizabeth Dimitrieff.

  Thus, from the day it assumed office, the danger was apparent that the Commune might be overloaded, indeed overwhelmed, by the sheer diversity of desires as represented by so polygenous a multitude of personalities, ideologies, and interests. And there was no obvious leader to guide the multitude. Had Blanqui been there, it might have been quite a different story. But Blanqui was securely in the hands of Thiers, while Delescluze, the only other possible leader, was so ailing that he would have preferred nothing better than to have retired from the scene altogether. Thiers, it now seemed, had at least made two excellent initial calculations; one was the seizure of Blanqui, and his other had been to force the Communards to commit themselves before either their plans or their policy had time to crystallize. His ‘great hope’, so Lord Lyons reported to London on March 30th, ‘appears to be that the members of the Commune will quarrel among themselves….’ He had not long to wait.

  On the night of the proclamation of the Commune, March 28th, its newly elected members met for the first time inside the Hôtel de Ville. At once there was an atmosphere of the fetid confusion prevailing in the Red Clubs. Nobody had been delegated from the Comité Central to hand over to the new body, whose representatives could not even find a room to convene in until a locksmith was sent to pick the locks of the Council Chamber. National Guards lolled, drunk or asleep, in corridors thick with tobacco smoke. In the fatigue generated by the stirring events of the day, personal squabbles erupted. There was immediate disagreement as to who should take the chair. Delescluze opposed a motion that his absent rival, Blanqui, be made ‘Presidént d’Honneur’, and eventually the choice fell, by way of compromise, upon seventy-five-year-old Charles Beslay, as the oldest present. Between interjections proposing such irrelevant luxuries as abolition of capital punishment, there was much theoretical discussion concerning the legality of the Commune’s position. (Indeed, in a country that over the past half-century had had four different forms of regime—Bourbons, Orleanists, Republicans, and Bonapartists—none of them elected, but each recognized abroad as the legal Government of France, it was an argument that could be continued indefinitely; the Commune certainly never resolved it.)

  As it became clear that the majority present wished the Commune at once to arrogate to itself more than purely municipal functions, Tirard, the right-wing Mayor elected by the 2nd Arrondissement, seized the excuse to resign, followed by several others.1 On the much more immediate issue as to whether or not the Commune should now march against Versailles, there were also lengthy debates; but these too were permeated with abstract considerations. Had the Commune been elected as a revolutionary body? Even some of those who were certain that it had been, and was, harboured hesitations. What would the Germans do if the Commune took the offensive against Versailles? Although, under the armistice, they had evacuated Versailles (on March 12th) and a large area to the south and south-west of Paris, they still occupied their old siege positions on the eastern half of the city’s perimeter. Would the Germans now stand by and watch as the protagonists of résistance à outrance crushed the Government with whom they had just concluded so favourable a peace treaty, or would Bismarck not intervene to crush the Commune instead? It seemed a real danger. On the other hand, there were those Communards who argued that the Germans had had a bellyful of war, that many of their best troops had already gone home, and that they were far from anxious to get further involved in French internal affairs. Nothing was decided, and the first session of the Commune broke up in discord and dissatisfaction after midnight.

  The following day the Commune met again. This time it managed to agree to the formation of ten Commissions to carry out its various affairs. At the top of the list was the Executive Commission, consisting of Eudes, Tridon, Vaillant, Lefrançais, Pyat, Duval, and Bergeret. But despite its name, and although it was supposed to implement the decrees passed by the other Commissions, in effect it had no executive powers, as every measure had to be referred back to the Commune Council itself. Where the actual power of the Commune resided was by no means clear; and meanwhile, much as the original Commune of ’93 had harassed the Convention, so the Comité Central continued to exist and to interfere with the working of the Commune’s Executive Commission. Next in immediate importance came the Military Commission, whose best-known members were Eudes, Bergeret, Duval, and Flourens. (The more impressive Brunel appears to have been dropped for having shown too conciliatory an attitude towards the Mayors and their peace initiatives.) To the key posts in the Sûreté Générale went the sinister pair, Ferré and Raoul Rigault. Perhaps the Commission to achieve most under the Commune was that of Labour, Industry, and Exchange, operated by a heavy majority of Internationalists, incl
uding Malon, Frankel, Theisz, and Avrial. Another of great significance was the Finance Commission, comprising Clément, Varlin, Jourde, Beslay, and Régère.

  For the most part, the delegates of the various Commissions assumed their functions with positively unrevolutionary diffidence. Theisz, appointed Postmaster-General, presented himself at the Post Office and ‘invited’ Rampont, the inaugurator of the balloon services during the Siege, to hand over his duties. Rampont replied that he would not, that he would only acquiesce to violence; in which case he and all the Post Office employees would decamp to Versailles. Theisz retired for further instructions. There was an even more comic situation when old Beslay—himself a failed banker—nervously arrived to ‘take over’ the Bank of France. Rouland, the Governor, had already fled to Versailles, leaving this mighty institution in the hands of the Marquis de Plœuc, who confronted poor Beslay with his four hundred employees drawn up outside, armed with sticks. There was a conversation, during which de Plœuc appealed to Beslay’s patriotism, reminding him that ‘the fortune of France’ was in his hands. Obviously overawed, Beslay reported back to the Hôtel de Ville that if the Commune laid hands on the Bank there would be ‘no more industry, no more commerce; if you violate it all promissory notes will become worthless’. In the meantime, Varlin and Jourde had assured the finances of the Commune temporarily by borrowing 500,000 francs from Rothschilds, and securing an advance of another million from the Bank. The National Guard could be paid, and immediate commitments met; thus removing any temptation to seize the Bank. This oversight was rated by both Marx and later Lenin as comprising one of the two cardinal errors committed by the Commune; for in the Bank’s vaults lay over two milliards-worth of assets which could have provided the Commune with its most powerful weapon and hostage. Had it laid its hands on these assets, said Marx, ‘the whole of the French bourgeoisie would have brought pressure to bear on the Versailles Government in favour of peace with the Commune’. Instead, Beslay amiably allowed himself to be installed in a small office next to de Plœuc’s, completely under the latter’s wing, while the astute Marquis doled out the advance to the Commune as slowly as possible, all the time smuggling out to Versailles the plates for printing banknotes and what money he could.