I have just come from Paris … The sight of the ruins is nothing compared to the great Parisian insanity. With very rare exceptions everybody seems to me fit only for the strait-jacket. One half of the population longs to hang the other half, which returns the compliment.
Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
AFTER THE EMPEROR’S surrender, Bismarck and the Prussian commander-in-chief, General von Moltke, had asked him to sign the preliminary documents of a peace treaty, but he had refused. He was, he said, no longer empowered to do so; peace negotiations would be the responsibility of the French government, now headed by the regent, the Empress Eugénie. But this government too had ceased to exist, and on 4 September the French Third Republic was proclaimed by the deputy Léon Gambetta at the Hôtel de Ville. Meanwhile the war was still on. With the knowledge that the Prussian army was now marching on Paris, which would consequently very soon be in a state of siege, a Government of National Defence was established under the presidency of General Louis Jules Trochu, with Gambetta as his Minister of the Interior and Minister for War. To defend the capital they needed every man they could get: together they assembled a force of about 60,000 regular soldiers who had returned from Sedan, some 90,000 mobiles – essentially territorials – and a brigade of perhaps 30,000 seamen, to which could be added 350,000 untrained members of the National Guard. The total must have been something around half a million.
The city’s own defences consisted principally of what was known as the Thiers Wall, twenty-five miles long, built between 1841 and 1844 under a law enacted by the Thiers government and following a route similar to – though a little shorter than – the present Boulevard Périphérique; there was also a ring of sixteen fortresses, also dating from the 1840s. But it soon became clear that Moltke had no intention of trying to take the city by storm. He did not even seek a quick French capitulation, which would leave the new French armies undefeated and allow France to renew the war. He was putting his faith in attrition: Paris, he was determined, would be starved into surrender.
In the capital morale was still high; but the situation was now grave indeed, and the Parisians knew it. On 7 September, Jules Favre, Trochu’s vice-president and minister for foreign affairs, begged the American minister Elihu B. Washburne to ‘intervene to make peace’, and two days later he sent Thiers to London in the hopes of rallying British support. Thiers travelled on from London to Vienna, St Petersburg and Florence – then the temporary capital of the new united Italy – but nowhere did he receive much more than polite sympathy. Favre then asked for an audience with Bismarck himself. Their conversation, held in the vast Rothschild palace of Ferrières some twenty miles east of Paris, continued long into the night but once again got nowhere, with Bismarck constantly and deliberately puffing smoke from his Meerschaum pipe into the face of Favre, a non-smoker. Prussia’s demands, he said, were simple: Alsace, and most of Lorraine. ‘I am certain’, he added – and how right he was proved to be – ‘that at some future time we shall have a fresh war with you, and we would wish to undertake it with every advantage.’ Favre replied that no French government, if it yielded to such a demand, could hope to survive. ‘You wish to destroy France!’ he exclaimed, and burst into tears.*
When he returned to Paris and reported the interview, the government was outraged. Immediately Gambetta telegraphed to the Prefects of Paris: ‘Paris, incensed, swears to resist to the end. Let the provinces rise up!’ The only question was, how were they going to do so? How were provincial armies to be raised, trained and organised, and who was going to lead them? Clearly a member of the government must be made responsible for any resistance there might be, but how was he to leave Paris? The Prussians had already taken Versailles, making it their headquarters. The encirclement of the city was now complete and the siege had begun, under the direction of Count Leonhard von Blumenthal, hero of the battles of both Sadowa and Sedan. Paris was now virtually sealed, cut off from the rest of France.
Suddenly a possible solution appeared. Somebody found an old hot-air balloon, a montgolfière, which had been one of the attractions of the International Exhibition of 1867. It was called the Neptune and was now patched up to the point of something approaching airworthiness. It took off on 3 September, and after a three-hour flight landed safely at Evreux. The blockade was, if not broken, at least cracked. Then came the next question: who, among the senior ministers, was prepared to risk his life on a flight to the outside world? There proved to be just one. As Trochu admitted with commendable frankness, ‘Monsieur Gambetta was the only one of us who could regard without apprehension the prospects of a voyage in a balloon.’
Gambetta, however, was possessed of a lot more than physical courage. He was still only thirty-two. Born in Cahors, the son of an Italian grocer, he was described as ‘inclined to thinness, with long black hair, a Jewish nose, and an eye which protruded so terribly from its socket as to lead one to fear lest it should escape altogether’. His morals were deplorable, and we are credibly informed that some of his personal habits were worse; but he was a superb speaker, passionate in his sincerity and capable of stirring the blood of all those who listened to him. He was, in short, just the man for the job. At eleven o’clock in the morning of 7 October in the Place Saint-Pierre, Montmartre,* before an excited and admiring crowd, he clambered into the open wicker basket looking, as everyone agreed, pretty nervous. As well he might: apart from all the other risks, there was also the possibility that the huge bag of highly inflammable coal gas above him might be punctured by a Prussian bullet and explode in a ball of flame. As the balloon rose into the air, he unfurled an enormous tricolour; and so it climbed over the Parisian rooftops and slowly disappeared from view.
A balloon factory was quickly established at the Gare d’Orléans together with a training school for pilots, and within a short time balloons were taking off at the rate of two or three a week; henceforth getting messages out of the city was no longer an insuperable problem. Getting them in, however, was a good deal harder, and it was soon accepted that there was only one effective way: carrier pigeon. Fortunately the government was able to find an expert in micro-photography, who was sent to Tours with all his equipment in two balloons: one of them – fortunately the one in which he was not travelling – came down and was seized by the Prussians; but he himself arrived safely and set up his equipment. Official despatches were now photographically reduced to an infinitesimal size, to the point where 40,000 of them – probably the length of the average book – could be carried by a single pigeon. If and when they arrived in Paris, they were projected by a ‘magic lantern’ and transcribed by regiments of clerks. Personal messages of twenty words or less could also be sent, though the French Post Office was careful to disclaim responsibility for non-delivery. It was just as well that it did, because the system proved a good deal less reliable than the balloons. In the course of the siege 302 pigeons were to be despatched, of which only 59 reached Paris. The remainder were taken by birds of prey, died of cold and hunger, or were shot and consumed by hungry Prussians.
The Parisians, however, were a good deal hungrier. On 5 December, Edmond de Goncourt recorded in his diary: ‘People are talking only of what they eat, what they can eat, and what there is to eat. Conversation consists of this, and nothing more …’ ‘I sigh’, wrote Minister Washburne, ‘for doughnuts.’ Already by October, horsemeat had become a staple; in the past it had been eaten only by the poor; now it was eagerly seized by everyone. To a young lady who had unaccountably refused to dine with him, Victor Hugo wrote:
J’aurais tué Pégase, et je l’aurais fait cuire
Afin de vous offrir une aile de cheval.*
Cats and dogs were next. Henry Labouchère, correspondent of the London Daily News, wrote in mid-December: ‘I had a slice of spaniel the other day’, and a week later of how a man he had met was fattening up an enormous cat, which he hoped to serve up on Christmas Day, ‘surrounded with mice, like sausages’.† Rats and mice were in fact consumed much less often than horses, cats and dogs. They tended to carry diseases, and tasted revolting; the elaborate sauces needed to make them palatable were hugely expensive; they were thus eaten, paradoxically, by the rich rather than the poor. So, as the grim days wore on, were the animals from the Zoo. Lions and tigers were spared: nobody ate carnivores if they could help it. Spared too were the hippopotami, simply because no butcher could face the challenge. But the Zoo’s two elephants, Castor and Pollux, were not so lucky. A few menus survive from enterprising restaurants; one, for Christmas Day, offered stuffed donkey’s head, elephant consommé, roast camel, kangaroo stew, antelope terrine, bear ribs, cat with rats, and wolf haunch in deer sauce. Another, rather more ambitious, included brochettes de foie de chien maître d’hôtel, civet de chat aux champignons, salamis de rats, sauce Robert, and gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Tommy Bowles of the Morning Post noted in early January: ‘I have now dined off camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule and elephant, which I approve in the order in which I have written … horse is really too disgusting, and it has a peculiar taste never to be forgotten.’ In the last days of the siege the government introduced a new type of bread, named pain Ferry after the minister who thought it up. It was composed of wheat, rice and straw, and seemed, according to one brave Parisian, ‘to have been made from old Panama hats picked out of the gutters’.
Two days after Christmas the bombardment began. It had not originally been part of the Prussian programme, but Bismarck and Moltke both felt that the siege had gone on long enough. It is almost a cliché to point out that sieges are often as bad, or even worse, for the besiegers as for the besieged. That may not have been entirely true of 1870–1, but the Prussian soldiers – most of whom were confined to the flimsiest of tents – were beginning to suffer, and if the siege lasted much longer there was felt to be a serious danger of epidemic. When the attacks started the shells came over at the rate of between three and four hundred a night, normally between ten o’clock and two or three in the morning. The right bank of the Seine was fortunately out of range, but the Rive Gauche suffered badly. The domes of the Invalides and the Panthéon made irresistible targets, as did the church of Saint-Sulpice. The Salpêtrière Hospital was also hit repeatedly, to the point where it was suspected that the Prussians were deliberately aiming at it.* A direct hit on the balloon factory at the Gare d’Orsay was another blow: the factory was obliged to move hastily out of range to the Gare de l’Est.
The bombardment was bad enough; but Wednesday 18 January 1871 saw what was, for many a patriotic Frenchman, the worst humiliation of all: in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, where only fifteen years before Queen Victoria had danced with Napoleon III in all the splendour of the Second Empire, King William I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor, or Kaiser, of the Germans. ‘This’, wrote Edmond de Goncourt, ‘truly marks the end of the greatness of France.’ It was, on the face of it, a purely gratuitous insult: one that only Bismarck could have dreamed up, and one that was to poison Franco-German relations for many years to come.
The Parisians soon got used to the shelling, in much the same way as, seventy years later, Londoners were to grow accustomed to the Blitz. But starvation was far worse, and by late January 1871 the capital was coming to the end of its tether. Occasional attempts at a breakout had been markedly unsuccessful – one at Buzenval had cost 4,000 in dead and wounded – and discipline was rapidly breaking down, particularly among the National Guard. On 22 January there was another serious uprising, after which Favre noted ‘civil war is a few yards away; famine, a few hours’. On the following day he summoned Captain d’Hérisson,* one of Trochu’s former staff officers, and entrusted him with a personal message to Bismarck. A ceasefire was quickly arranged, but Favre’s own presence was required at the negotiations. He and d’Hérisson crossed the Seine in a rowing boat which, owing to a number of bullet holes, proved far from watertight: witnesses much enjoyed the sight of the vice-president, in his top hat and frock coat, frantically bailing with an old saucepan.
When he met Bismarck, the chancellor’s first words were: ‘Ah, Monsieur le Ministre, you have grown greyer since Ferrières.’ Later he reported to the Crown Prince that Favre had shown a ‘perfectly wolfish hunger’ and had eaten a dinner that would have sufficed for three. The talks continued till the 27th when a three-week armistice was declared, during which it was agreed that no Prussian troops would enter Paris. The French army, apart from a single unit, was to surrender its weapons; France would pay an indemnity of 200 million francs. A new assembly would be elected, and would meet at Bordeaux to discuss on what terms it could accept or reject a peace treaty. The Prussians promised meanwhile to do all they could to assist and where possible to accelerate the revictualling of the capital.
Many Parisians – including the Mayor of Montmartre, a young man named Georges Clemenceau – were furious at the capitulation. (So, far away in Bordeaux, was Léon Gambetta, who bitterly complained that he had not even been informed in advance† and resigned on the spot.) But although the most disastrous war in French history was over at last, Paris took some time to recover: the government was found to have gravely overestimated the quantity of food remaining in the city, and for two weeks after the armistice – despite Prussian promises – the supplies grew worse instead of better, to the point where Kaiser William himself ordered that 6 million army rations should be sent to the near-starving Parisians. Supplies also flooded in from Britain: in Deptford, twenty-four great ovens blazed away night and day baking bread, and the Lord Mayor’s relief fund could hardly keep pace with donations. The United States was equally quick to respond, sending 2 million dollars’ worth of food; but such generous gestures were not always well repaid. The appearance of the first British supply wagons at Les Halles* provoked a riot, with disastrous results; vast quantities of chickens, eggs and butter were trampled underfoot. And when the American relief ships reached Le Havre, days passed before anyone could be found to unload them.
By mid-February the situation was gradually returning to normal. Except among the poorest of the poor – for whom survival had always been a struggle – great hunger was a thing of the past. Psychologically, however, the wounds were still deep. France was a defeated nation; and as Ernest Renan pointed out, previous victorious races had always had something to offer – their art, their civilisation or their faith – while Bismarck’s Germany offered nothing except brute force. In the hearts of all too many Parisians hatred, bitterness and resentment lingered on. They had somehow lost interest in life: they were bored, and boredom made them ill-humoured. It would take very little to arouse their anger – as they were all too soon to show.
Meanwhile the national government, still in Bordeaux, called for the new elections provided for in the armistice. They were held on 8 February 1871. The vast majority of electors in France were rural, conservative and Catholic; consequently it came as no surprise that the vote was overwhelmingly for a return to constitutional monarchy. The voters were however split between supporters of the Bourbon line and the Orléanists, and so the final choice for first minister went to the old republican Adolphe Thiers, now seventy-three but as energetic and vigorous as ever. His first task was to conclude the peace treaty with Prussia. He did his best to negotiate, but Bismarck was adamant, making it clear that if the treaty were not signed at the end of the armistice period, hostilities would be immediately resumed. His principal demands were unchanged: Alsace and most of Lorraine, including the key cities of Metz and Strasbourg. The financial indemnity was higher even than that which he had mentioned during the armistice negotiations: 500 million francs, though the figure was subsequently reduced to 400 million. Until that sum was paid, France would have to submit to partial occupation. Thiers had no alternative. With the greatest possible reluctance, he signed on 26 February.
When he presented these conditions for ratification by the Assembly in Bordeaux, the delegates were appalled; but there was little they could do. Gambetta and the deputies from Alsace and Lorraine resigned in a body, as shortly afterwards did Victor Hugo. The Assembly’s last act was to agree to reconvene on 20 March, but where? Paris, they all agreed, would be impossible: too inflamed, too disordered, too radical, too atheist. It was better that they should meet at Versailles. The decision was, as things turned out, a wise one, as was shown on the very day Thiers signed the treaty by an unpleasant incident that took place in Place de la Bastille.
Units of the National Guard had already been demonstrating there for two days in protest against suspected government plans to disarm them, and on 26 February they staged a mass march, which lasted from 10 a.m. to six in the evening. About 300,000 Parisians took part, and at some point the Guard appropriated some 200 government cannon and hauled them up to Montmartre. The atmosphere was already highly charged, and the seizure of the cannon seemed a further act of aggression. In the space of a few hours, the balance of power in Paris changed. On 8 March, Thiers ordered the army – of which one unit only had been allowed to keep its weapons – to recover the guns; the National Guard resisted; and chaos ensued. The horses needed to move the guns failed to appear; the army was soon surrounded by a hostile crowd. General Claude Lecomte, who was in command, was seized by mutinous guardsmen and dragged off to their local station at 6 Rue des Rosiers; later that afternoon he was beaten into insensibility and shot in the back.
Unlike the army, the National Guard had not been disarmed – in order, ironically enough, that it should be properly equipped to keep the peace in Paris. On paper it now numbered nearly 400,000 men – though effectively there were a good deal fewer – and in mid-February they began to take power into their own hands. On 15 March the Commune, as it was called, created a Central Committee, whose first action was to refuse to recognise the authority of the general recently appointed by Thiers as their commander – or of the Military Governor of Paris. On the same day, at around five in the afternoon, another general, Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas, was spotted in civilian clothes. Though now retired, he had always been deeply unpopular; but he hardly deserved the fate that awaited him. He too was taken out into the little garden of the house in Rue des Rosiers and shot, not by a properly formed firing squad, but by an uncontrolled bunch of guardsmen who riddled him with some forty bullets. At this moment Georges Clemenceau arrived, shouting ‘Pas de sang, mes amis, pas de sang!’* – only to learn that he was too late. When he saw the bodies of the two generals he broke down and wept.
That evening and throughout the night, the National Guard gradually took control of the city. Twenty-four hours later, 20,000 guardsmen were encamped in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and a red flag – rather than the tricolour – flew above it. The Central Committee meanwhile sent a delegation of the mayors of each arrondissement, led by Clemenceau, to negotiate with Thiers at Versailles. They asked for nothing less than a special independent status for Paris, allowing it effectively to govern itself. Meanwhile they reintroduced the revolutionary calendar, abolished the death penalty and military conscription, and passed a resolution to the effect that membership of the Paris Commune was incompatible with that of the National Assembly. Later there would be more decrees, including the abolition of night work in bakeries (surely, for the French, this spelt disaster) and the remission of rents owed for the entire period of the siege.
But perhaps the most draconian decree concerned the Church, which the Committee publicly accused of ‘complicity in the crimes of the monarchy’. It declared the immediate separation of Church and State, confiscated state funds that had been allotted to the Church, seized the property of religious foundations and ordered the secularisation of all church schools. Over the next seven weeks some two hundred priests, monks and nuns were arrested and twenty-six churches were closed. Certain members of the National Guard even went so far as to stage mock religious processions and obscene parodies of Christian services.
By far the most spectacular of the Commune’s actions, however, was the felling of the great Napoleonic column in the Place Vendôme, built in 1806–10 to celebrate the victory of Austerlitz. Its destruction was largely due to the painter Gustave Courbet. ‘Inasmuch’, he wrote, ‘as the Vendôme column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty … Citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the government of National Defence will authorise him to dismantle it.’
His wish was granted, and on 16 May at around six o’clock in the evening the column came crashing to the ground. But his triumph was short-lived. When, after the defeat of the Commune, the decision was made to re-erect the column, Courbet was required to pay the full cost, estimated at 323,000 francs, in annual 10,000-franc instalments. The French government seized and sold his paintings, while he himself fled to self-imposed exile in Switzerland, where he was to spend the rest of his life.
In Versailles, Thiers was meanwhile planning the recapture of the capital, and working hard to reassemble a new and reliable regular army. Fortunately there was a large number of returned prisoners of war, released under the armistice; and many other fighting men were coming in from all over France. To command this new army, he chose Patrice de MacMahon, now sixty-three; the old marshal had been quite seriously wounded at Sedan, but was now recovered. Highly popular with everybody and still full of his old spirit, by mid-May 1871 he was ready; and on the 20th, now virtually at the city walls, his artillery opened fire on the western districts, some of the shells almost reaching the Etoile. By four o’clock in the morning of Sunday the 21st, 60,000 soldiers had occupied Auteuil and Passy, and two days later much of the centre of the city was effectively theirs; the communards, with little discipline or coordination and lacking a proper central command, were decisively outnumbered and could not hope to put up more than token resistance. But the government forces were not to have it all their own way: the following seven days were to become known as la semaine de sang – the week of blood – owing to the unspeakable violence and cruelty shown on both sides. Thus, when Montmartre was taken on the 23rd, the soldiers seized forty-two guardsmen together with several women, took them to the same house on Rue des Rosiers where Generals Lecomte and Clément-Thomas had been executed, and shot them all. On Rue Royale, the army captured the immense barricade surrounding the church of the Madeleine and there took another 300 prisoners, all of whom suffered a similar fate.
On the same day the National Guard began setting fire to public buildings. Dozens of houses and offices in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Rue Saint-Florentin and the Rue de Rivoli, and on the left bank the Rue du Bac and the Rue de Lille, went up in flames, as did the Tuileries Palace. The Richelieu Library in the Louvre was also destroyed, the rest of the building saved only by heroic action by the museum staff and the local fire brigades. Jules Bergeret, the local communard commander, sent a message to the Hôtel de Ville: ‘The last vestiges of royalty have just disappeared. I wish the same would happen to all the monuments of Paris.’ The very next day, the Hôtel de Ville itself was reduced to a charred skeleton. And meanwhile the executions continued, hundreds a day, including that of Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris. On the evening of 25 May, Charles Delescluze, now leader of the Commune, put on his red sash of office, walked unarmed to the nearest barricade, climbed to the top and showed himself to the soldiers. He was promptly shot dead, as he intended to be.
Two days later, the capture of the Père Lachaise Cemetery marked the end of the semaine sanglante. The Commune was finished, but the executions went on. No one knows how many there were: at least ten thousand, quite possibly twenty. Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: ‘Austria did not go into Revolution after Sadowa, nor Italy after Novara, nor Russia after Sebastopol. But our good Frenchmen hasten to pull down their house as soon as the chimney catches fire.’
On 24 July 1873 the National Assembly voted for the construction of the Church of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, at the highest point of Paris. It is generally believed to have been dedicated to the memory of all those who lost their lives in the war and the siege, and if it were indeed a monument it would be a superb one – unforgettable and unmistakable in outline, and visible from all over the city. Technically, however, it is not a monument at all: the Assembly’s decree is careful to specify that its purpose is ‘to expiate the crimes of the Commune’. Now, a century and a half later, the point hardly matters; we can only be grateful for what is just about the only good thing to emerge from the sad and shameful years that this chapter has had, alas, to record.
* Bismarck was unmoved. ‘He probably intended’, he wrote later, ‘to work upon my feelings with a little theatrical performance.’
* Near where the Sacré Coeur now stands.
* I’d have slaughtered Pegasus and had him well cooked In order to serve you the wing of a horse.
† For these anecdotes – and much else in this chapter – I am greatly indebted to my late friend Alistair Horne and his superb book The Fall of Paris.
* Trochu protested to Moltke on this point. Moltke’s reply, that he hoped soon to push his guns close enough to be able to spot the Red Cross flags, hardly inspired confidence.
* Captain Hedgehog – an unusual name.
† In fact Favre had sent him a message by balloon, but the pilot had failed to stop at Bordeaux and had come down in the Atlantic. The reason remains a mystery.
* Paris’s central food market.
* ‘No bloodshed, my friends, no bloodshed!’