THIRTEEN
. . . the Empire was like those unfortunate women who wear a silk dress but under it have a dirty slip, stockings with holes, and a torn camisole.
—Lettres Parisiennes, Emile Zola
They had in them that little flame which never dies.
—Jean Renoir, on the Communards
FOR THE BEST PART OF TWO YEARS, the new President of the Second French Republic trod warily, and kept his counsel. Then, on the evening of 1 December 1851, he received guests at the Élysée, the new presidential palace on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He behaved with great calm, betraying no emotion, but tomorrow was the anniversary both of Austerlitz and of his uncle’s coronation as emperor. After the last guest had left, he opened a file labelled Rubicon—obsessed, like Napoleon I, by the memory of Caesar. At dawn, under pretext of monarchist threats, his troops occupied key positions in the capital.
In contrast to the revolts of 1848, fewer than 400 were killed; one was a courageous deputy, Dr. Jean-Baptiste Baudin, who gained immortality by rashly climbing atop a barricade, proclaiming, “See how a man dies for twenty-five francs a day!” (The daily wage of a Republican deputy.) He was promptly felled by three bullets. A further 26,000 “enemies of the regime” were arrested.
A brief period of terror stunned Paris, and on 20 December a plebiscite confirmed the latest Bonapartist coup by a huge majority of nearly 7,500,000 to 650,000. Louis-Napoleon now declared himself emperor, as Napoleon III (1852–70).56 A Te Deum was sung in Notre-Dame. The following December an unctuous deputation from the (conservative) Corps Législatif came to salute him with the words: “No royal forehead will ever have worn a more legitimate or more popular crown.”
AGED FORTY-THREE AT THE TIME of the 1851 coup, Louis-Napoleon had twice failed to overthrow Louis-Philippe. While in exile in England he enrolled as a special constable during the London troubles; there he had studied carefully how an authoritarian figure like the Duke of Wellington could bring to heel a great city, and outflank the revolutionaries. In his outward appearance, France’s new ruler possessed little presence. One who met him while in exile found “a short, thickish, vulgar-looking man without the slightest resemblance to his imperial uncle or any intelligence in his countenance,” while those who saw him in his full glory enthroned, like his uncle, were disappointed to find a man with dull eyes, a long moustache and faintly absurd impérial goatee beard—the delight of caricaturists like Daumier who immortalised him as Ratapoil, a broken-down Don Quixote. To George Sand, who was swiftly disgusted by the bourgeois rapacity alongside so much misery that came to stigmatise his rule, he was “a sleepwalker.” It was a view later upheld by his conqueror, Otto von Bismarck, who saw him as “really a kindly man of feeling, even sentimental; but neither his intelligence nor his information is much to speak of . . . and he lives in a world full of all sorts of fantastic ideas.”
To the perplexity of his biographers, seldom has so controversial a character held the sceptre of such power in Europe. It is hard to name an opposite not contained in him; outrageous audacity and personal courage wrestled with timidity; astuteness with almost incredible fallibility; seductive charm with the reverse; downright reaction with progressiveness and humanity ahead of their age. Machiavelli jousted with Don Quixote, and the arbiter was Hamlet. Kindly writers dubbed him “the Well-intentioned,” but unfortunately most of his schemes were destined to end in dangerous failure because of his erratic character. “One must never rush things” was his favourite maxim; but this was something which in fact he never ceased doing. Above all, he pledged his people that “the Empire means peace,” but he gave them their most disastrous war.
Although his political legitimacy was questionable, he was a man of diverse interests and talents, his reading during the years of imprisonment having made him much better educated than most of his peers. Taking up chemistry, he had written a serious treatise on sugar, while a pamphlet on unemployment gained him a burst of popularity with the labouring classes. As early as 1835, his Manuel d’Artillerie had impressed military men; and he suggested a form of conscription similar to that in Prussia, which—if adopted—might have helped France match her adversary in 1870. That catastrophe still might have been averted had he not been confronted with two of the most adroit and dangerous statesmen of the nineteenth century, Cavour and Bismarck.
LOUIS-NAPOLEON’S SECOND EMPIRE pledged France to a return to the old Bonapartist ethos of authoritarian order, in contradistinction to the anarchic chaos of the short-lived Second Republic—yet it would end its days in a failed attempt to regain liberalism. To the envious world outside, it represented the acme of gaiety and frivolity, the music of Offenbach and the rediscovery of a joyous world in the splashes of Impressionist colour; it represented sexual liberation—yet, on its underside, decay and venereal disease. It would irreparably sweep aside much of what remained precious in the ancient capital. For the bourgeoisie and the new rich, like Daudet’s Nabob, there would be an increment to the prosperity consolidated under Louis-Philippe; for the poor, however, it would signify no improvement in the misery of life—on the contrary. In foreign affairs, it would offer self-determination for “nationalities” abroad; but it would end with a friendless France in military collapse— her proud capital starved, bombarded, humiliated and, finally, incendiarised by her own citizens.
Louis-Napoleon’s authoritarian regime valued prosperity over liberty. A Daumier cartoon of 1851 depicts two simple Parisians remarking: “ Ce bon Monsieur Ratapoil promises that after they have signed his petition skylarks will fall down from the sky already roasted!” 1 In the early years of the Second Empire (admittedly cashing in on the groundwork laid by Louis-Philippe) he had been strikingly successful, and prosperity had become an acceptable substitute for some basic freedoms among the majority of Frenchmen. Industrial production doubled and within only ten years foreign trade did the same. Gold poured in from new mines in California and South Africa. The Bourse re-established itself as the biggest money market on the continent. Mighty banking concerns like the Crédit Lyonnais and the Crédit Foncier were established, the latter especially designed to underwrite Louis-Napoleon’s vast building programme. In Paris there sprang up huge emporia which to women like Denise, Emile Zola’s provincial heroine in Au Bonheur des Dames, were modern wonders of the world: “Here, exposed to the street, right on the sidewalk, was a veritable landslide of cheap goods; the entrance was a temptation, with bargains that enticed passing customers.”
The railway network increased from virtually nothing in 1840 to 11,000 miles by 1870. Telegraph lines radiated out all over the country, and shipbuilding expanded as never before. Fortunes and reputations bubbled and burst as speculation raged: “It’s a contagious frenzy. Nowhere is one safe from it—nowhere.”57 The contagion spread to the summit of the Establishment, with even the Emperor’s most esteemed adviser, the Duc de Morny, heavily tainted; while de Morny was Ambassador to St. Petersburg, Bismarck recalled that he had used the diplomatic bag to send trainloads of valuables back to France duty-free, which were later auctioned and reputedly brought him a profit of some 800,000 roubles.
Yet out of this cauldron a new wealthy bourgeoisie had arisen, installing itself in the châteaux from which its forebears had driven the aristocrats. Just as ostentatious but determined not to be displaced in its turn, the bourgeoisie was the chief political mainstay of the regime, with which it flourished hand in glove, but with little mutual affection. France’s population at the census of 1866 had grown up to 37.5 million, but the most remarkable feature was the immense growth of the big cities, especially Paris, as a result of industrialisation. In the twenty years between 1831 and 1851, Paris alone grew from 786,000 to 1,053,000, and it would reach 1,825,300 by 1866.
If only Louis-Napoleon could have stopped at expanding France’s economic frontiers.
IT WAS PARIS, however, which reflected possibly the single most important measure enacted under the Second Empire, certainly its one truly ineffaceable landmark. “I want to be a second Augustus,” declared Louis-Napoleon even before coming to power, “because Augustus made Rome a city of marble.” One of the first measures enacted by him after the coup of 1851 was for all future work connected with the transformation of Paris to be sanctioned by decree. From then on he would pursue the city’s reconstruction with almost maniacal fervour. As an urban developer Louis-Napoleon ranks with Henri IV, leaving behind him far more than his uncle. The Paris of today is essentially that of Napoleon III—and Baron Haussmann. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91) had no training in architecture, but—a Protestant Alsatian with German in his genes—was a highly efficient, single-minded planner chosen principally “as a demolition artist.” (To Richard Cobb, who deplored his works, he was “the Alsatian Attila.”) In a city still with no mayor, his powers were untrammelled and reinforced by Louis-Napoleon’s dictatorial decrees, enabling him to expropriate whole streets for development.
The extension of Napoleon I’s Rue de Rivoli so pushed up the value of property bordering the development that the city was able to finance part of its costs virtually for nothing. Finally, too, the slums between the Louvre and the Tuileries were cleared. The Hôtel de Ville was besieged—for once—not by insurgents, but by battalion-size teams of masons and carpenters stirring up mud, dust and rubble.
On her state visit to Paris in 1855, Queen Victoria expressed boundless admiration for what had already been achieved: “Everything is so truly regal, so large, so grand, so comprehensive it makes me jealous that our great country and particularly our great metropolis should have nothing of the same kind of show!” French critics then and now, however, question the merits of Haussmann’s new Paris. The conservative Goncourts said it made them think of “some American Babylon of the future.” In the rough surgical language of Haussmann himself: “We ripped open the belly of old Paris, the neighbourhood of revolt and barricades, and cut a large opening through the almost impenetrable maze of alleys, piece by piece, and put in cross streets whose continuations terminated the work.”2 At a stroke of the Baron’s quill pen, whole medieval quartiers that had resisted Henri IV, Louis XV, the revolution and Napoleon I were now swept away. The most radical impact was felt in the heart of Paris, in the Île de la Cité. Around Notre-Dame, great boulevards cut through the labyrinthine alleys of the old city, straight as a die like the Roman roads first bestowed on ancient Lutetia. The longest, Rue La Fayette, ran for 5 kilometres without a single kink, and remains one of the city’s main arteries.
Achieving (at a cost of ff2 million) that which the long line of rulers dating back to Philippe-Auguste never had, he completed the Louvre. Continuing the long line of galleries along the Rue de Rivoli, and finishing those initiated by Louis XIV along the Seine, Louis-Napoleon turned the Louvre into the greatest palace in the world, larger even than Philip II’s sombre vast pile of the Escorial. Westwards from its massive outstretched arms, and past the Tuileries Palace, with unprecedented speed Paris began to extend with beautiful regularity far beyond the Champs-Élysées. For Haussmann, however, architectural aesthetics had been only one of several priorities. It was evident what excellent fields of fire Haussmann’s long, straight streets afforded, what opportunities to turn the flank of a barricade, of “cutting through the habitual storm-centres.” Paris now seemed “as strategically ordered as any battlefield.” In fact, and with what force will be seen later in the hideously destructive Communard revolution of 1871, he defeated his own purpose.
For Haussmann, ameliorating the life of the poor was a secondary priority. Indeed, the prices in the newly developed quartiers drove poorer residents eastwards and outwards, from the charmed city of the boulevards to crowded ghettos where a resentful sub-class, of which one in every sixteen was living off public charity, struggled to exist. Far from “piercing” the traditional trouble-centres, Haussmann had merely created new more marginalised and volatile districts, where in the latter days of the Empire no policeman would dare appear alone.
THE RECEIVED VIEW that has been handed down of Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire seldom pays due attention to the plight of the Parisian poor; yet it was that which, in the long run, was to destroy it. The image tends to be one of Offenbach and gaiety; of cancans and grandes horizontales; of glittering balls and lax morals. As Philip Mansel records in his excellent Paris Between Empires, 1814–1852, Louis-Napoleon once maintained that “his true friends were to be found in cottages, not in gilded salons.”3Nevertheless, it was the “gilded salons” that set the tone, and—just as social mores in England followed the example of the sovereign—so Second Empire society eagerly followed the wandering paths of its pleasure-loving Emperor. The haut monde endeavoured to recapture the paradise of Louis XV. In the Forest of Fontainebleau courtesans went hunting with their lovers, attired in the plumed hats and lace of that period. The upper crust delightedly sought escape from the bourgeois virtuousness of Louis-Philippe’s regime.
A curious film of hypocrisy slicked over the surface of the Second Empire; Flaubert was prosecuted in 1857 for offending public morals with Madame Bovary, Manet was subjected to most virulent press attacks for the “immorality” of his Olympia and theDéjeuner sur l’herbe; and women smoking in the Tuileries Gardens were as liable to arrest as were young men bathing without a top at Trouville. According to Paris police records, during one month in 1866, 2344 wives left their husbands, and 4427 husbands left their wives; there were some 5000 prostitutes registered at the Préfecture, and another 30,000 “freelances.” Sexual gallantry was the contemporary obsession. Underneath all the glitter there was corruption, with Renoir once lamenting that—because he alone of his friends like Maupassant, Goncourt, Baudelaire and Manet had not caught syphilis—he could not be a true genius. Zola’s prostitute, Nana, was an icon of the Second Empire, and its motto the rhetorical question from Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène:
Tell me, Venus, what pleasure do you find
In robbing me thus of my virtue?
What life behind the brilliance of the Second Empire was actually like for the majority has seldom been more vividly described than by the Goncourts. Jules Goncourt’s former mistress, a midwife called Maria, had gone to deliver a child at the upper end of Paris’s new Boulevard Magenta; there she found a room where the planks that form the walls are coming apart and the floor is full of holes, through which rats are constantly appearing . . . The man, a costermonger, who has known better days, dead-drunk during his wife’s labour. The woman, as drunk as her husband, lying on a straw mattress and being plied with drink by a friend of hers, an old army canteen attendant who developed a thirst in twenty-five years’ campaigning and spends all her pension on liquor. And during the delivery in this shanty, the wretched shanty of civilisation, an organ-grinder’s monkey, imitating and parodying the cries and angry oaths of the shrew in the throes of childbirth, piddling through a crack in the roof on to the snoring husband’s back.4
Hogarth could scarcely have done better.
As much as anyone else Louis-Napoleon was aware of the problem, and the dangers. He told Cobden ominously, “It is very difficult in France to make reforms. We make revolutions in France, not reforms.” The proceeds of industrialisation were prodigious, but did little to soften the life of workers; typified by the fact that between 1852 and 1870 the wages of a miner in the Anzin collieries increased by a mere 30 per cent, while the company’s dividends tripled. Though wages increased, almost nowhere had they kept up with inflation in the cost of living. Food alone could account for 60 per cent of earnings, which left very little over for the other good things in life. Bourgeois chroniclers of the period claimed that the workers of Paris had little taste for meat; the truth was that they simply could not afford it, and it was no coincidence that in 1866 butchers first sold cheap horsemeat, thereby introducing a taste which, within four short years, would be forced upon a much wider clientele. Indebtedness was general, and workers seemed to spend half their lives at the pawnbrokers of the mont-de-piété, where the family mattress was the standard pledge. According to Prefect Haussmann himself, in 1862 over half the population lived “in poverty bordering on destitution.” For the ff3.81 which (in 1863) was the average wage, the Parisian worker was required to labour eleven long hours a day. Bad as the conditions of Victorian England were, a visiting apprentice like Edwin Child would note how much harder life was in Paris, with his own day beginning at 5 a.m.
Louis-Napoleon wanted sincerely to improve the lot of the working man. Herein lay the source of perhaps the saddest paradox of his reign. It was the sector for which he strove hardest, yet when the crunch came, the working class provided his most violent enemies. He set up institutions of maternal welfare, societies of mutual assistance, the establishment of workers’ cities, and homes for injured workers; also projected were shorter working hours and health legislation; the loathsome prison hulks were abolished and the right to strike was granted. The Emperor’s personal contribution to charitable works was considerable, and in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the workers he even decreed that, instead of being named after his mother, Reine Hortense, a new boulevard over the covered-in Saint-Martin canal should be given the name of a worker, Richard Lenoir. Many of Louis-Napoleon’s more progressive ideas, however, were frustrated by the greed of the new bourgeoisie and the conservatism of the provinces, facts which did not escape the notice of the classes laborieuses.
Behind the frustrations of the Parisian proletariat lay the dangerous legacy of three bloody uprisings within the past century, the Great Revolution of 1789, the July Days of 1830 and the June uprising of 1848, from the benefits of which they felt swindled. Only three ingredients were required to spark insurrection again: weapons, organisation and a moment’s relaxation of the police state. By 1870–1, all three would be in place to explode with the most appalling consequences.
BEFORE THAT, Louis-Napoleon would throw one last party, what was to prove the finale of his “bread-and-circuses” regime, Paris’ Great Exposition of 1867. The heart of it stood on the Champs de Mars, where Napoleon I had reviewed his troops before heading for Waterloo, and close to where the Eiffel Tower stands today. It was, quite simply, the biggest show of the age. There “art elbowed industry,” wrote Théophile Gautier, “white statues stood next to black machines, paintings hung side by side with rich fabrics from the Orient.” The pavilion was divided into seven regions, each representing a branch of human endeavour, where the various nations of the world exhibited their most recent achievements. It was the year that Lister introduced antisepsis, and Nobel invented dynamite; and a German-Jewish professor published a fateful book called Das Kapital.
Just recovering from its civil war, the USA had sent a complete field service or “ambulance,” as it was then called, representing the peak of military medicine of the day. But the crowds passed it by, bestowing more attention upon a patent new piece of American furniture, described as a “rocking chair.” Britain sent locomotives and imposing bits of heavy machinery, as well as a mass of Victoriana that attempted (with limited success, Parisians thought) to combine comfort with elegance. But from Bismarck’s Prussia came an immense 50-ton gun exhibited by Herr Krupp of Essen, who had started life as a manufacturer of railway wheels. It was the biggest artillery-piece the world had ever seen, and for this—tactfully—it was awarded a prize. French military men eyed Herr Krupp’s prize exhibit with more attention than they might have done, had that nation of droll professors and beer-swilling bombasts not astonished Europe by trouncing Austria, in a staggeringly short campaign, the previous year. For the moment, however, the world was all smiles, and more appropriate to the mood of the moment was Louis-Napoleon’s own contribution of a statue of a robust nude reclining upon a lion—entitled Peace.
The beautiful and the frivolous formed a major part of France’s exhibits, and illustrious visitors poured into Paris from every corner of the globe; among them England’s Prince of Wales, smiling appreciatively on the pleasure city he relished. There was the King of Prussia and—above all—the Tsar of All the Russias. He was the real guest of honour because Louis-Napoleon ardently desired an alliance with him against the perceptibly growing threat of Prussia. Only Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria, and his brother, unhappy Maximilian, trapped in Mexico on Louis-Napoleon’s foolish expedition there, were conspicuously absent.
One evening, the Emperor attended the premiere of Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein, staged in honour of his royal guests. With the immortal Hortense Schneider playing the lead role, La Grande Duchesse depicted an amorous grand duchess of a joke German principality, embarking on a pointless war because its chancellor, Baron Puck, needed a diversion. Its forces were led by a silly German general called Boum, as incapable as he was fearless, who invigorated himself with the smell of gunpowder by periodically firing his pistol into the air. The farce, tallying so closely with Europe’s private view of the ridiculous Teutons, was too obvious to be missed. When the Tsar came to see it, his box was said to have rocked with unroyal laughter. Between gusts of mirth, members of the French court peeped over at Bismarck’s expression, half in malice, half in apprehension, wondering if the joke had gone too far. But nobody appeared to be laughing harder than the Iron Chancellor himself; was he enjoying some very secret joke of his own?
Few nights passed without one of the magnificent balls in which the Second Empire so excelled. At the sparkling embassies they waltzed till dawn to the latest Strauss number, “The Blue Danube.” At the Tuileries, where the Empress gave a ball in honour of her Russian guests, Strauss himself led the orchestra. The gardens had been rendered more enchanting by cordons of that new invention, electric light, which made the extravagant uniforms and jewels glitter and flash. When could this féerique dream of a Thousand-and-One-Nights ever end, and what would replace it?
Then, suddenly, the party turned nasty. On the way back from the great military review at Longchamp, a twenty-two-year-old Polish patriot called Berezowski leaped out of the crowd and fired a pistol at the Tsar. He missed, but the white gloves of the Tsarevich were spotted with blood from a wounded horse. Louis-Napoleon was distraught; “Sir,” he said gallantly, “we have been under fire together; now we are brothers-in-arms.” The Tsar, shaken by this preview of the dreadful death in store for him, was icy. In one second all Louis-Napoleon’s dreams for an accord with Russia had been shattered. Soon there was more bad news. On 19 June, Emperor Maximilian I, abandoned by his French protectors to the mercy of the Mexican nationalists, was shot at Querétaro. All celebrations were at once cancelled, for with the death of Maximilian died the hopes of the Bonapartes’ last foreign adventure. Manet immediately produced a huge painting of the tragedy, but was forbidden to hang it in his gallery, on the grounds that it might be construed as a criticism of imperial policy. And there were predictions of a bad harvest in France, portending a rise in food prices—and news from Algeria of cholera and famine. At the end of August, Baudelaire, paralysed by syphilis, died aged forty-six in a madhouse; two months later, workers began the dreary task of dismantling the Great Exposition.
“IT WAS TOO LOVELY!” was Gautier’s nostalgic reflection on the Second Empire in sadder days three years later. Meanwhile, the sounds of revelry lingered on. The masked balls continued; in 1869, the last would be held, with Empress Eugénie magnificently, but ominously, attired as Marie-Antoinette. The historian, with his potent instrument of hindsight, might wish that Louis-Napoleon could have concentrated his energies on the “bread and circuses” of 1867. Instead, foreign adventures would leave him with no friends and allies just when, suddenly, he most needed them. In Italy, in an echo of French policy from Charles VIII down to Napoleon I, his meddling cost the support of the Church without winning the friendship of the King or Cavour. The ill-advised “policy of nationalities” courageously backed Polish independence, but earned the hostility of the Tsar. The rash endeavour to found a new empire in Mexico, ending with the execution of Maximilian, cost the allegiance of his brother, the Emperor of Austria, while causing frowns in America and Britain.
Suddenly there was a powerful Prussia, and Bismarck bent on trouble, facing an isolated France.
At home, under pressure of public dissatisfaction, in 1869 Louis-Napoleon was forced to permit elections. Victory for the liberal candidates brought in the “Liberal Empire”—against the better judgement of the hard-liners. As de Tocqueville observes, the most dangerous moment for a dictatorship is when it begins to release the brake. So it was to prove for Louis-Napoleon. The Emperor himself was a tired and sick man, with a large stone growing in his bladder. The Tuileries was beset by nervousness. The writer, and friend of the regime, Prosper Mérimée, described the atmosphere as “like that aroused by Mozart’s music when the Commendatore is about to appear.” His name might be reread as Otto von Bismarck.
By contrast that June, the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, gazed out with satisfaction on the world scene from London and claimed—with reason—that he could not discern “a cloud in the sky.” He could never recall “so great a lull in foreign affairs.” In Paris, Napoleon III’s Prime Minister, Émile Ollivier, echoed Granville by declaring—less convincingly—that “at no period has the maintenance of peace seemed better assured.” It was the kind of summer, not unlike those fateful summers of 1914 and 1939, when tempers frayed. At the beginning of July 1870, a small cloud passed across the sun—but it seemed only a very small cloud. For the past two years the throne of Spain had been vacant, following the deposing of the unsatisfactory Queen Isabella. One of the possible candidates was a German princeling, Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The idea of the Hohenzollern candidacy had originated in Spain, but when Bismarck pressed the case, Paris rose up in alarm at the thought of German princes on the Pyrenean frontier as well as the Rhine. This was the kind of hegemony that Louis XIV himself had sought to impose on Europe.
Disconcerted by inflammatory articles in the French press, Bismarck withdrew the Hohenzollern candidacy. But in Paris hotheads called for Prussia to be humbled for her presumption. None was pushing harder than the Empress, while Louis-Napoleon’s heavy-handed Foreign Secretary, the Duc de Gramont, held a personal grudge against Bismarck for having once described him (not unreasonably) as “the stupidest man in Europe.” Gramont now began to adopt a plaintive, hectoring tone towards Prussia. He sent the French Ambassador in Berlin, Count Vincent Benedetti, to badger the King at Bad Ems, where he was taking the waters. Benedetti was received with greatest courtesy by King Wilhelm, who had no desire (any more than his fellow German rulers) for war, observing that the unification of Germany would be “the task of my grandson,”58 not his.
Bismarck had a different vision. He was in no way prepared to wait two generations, and calculated that a war with France would provide the essential mortar required to cement the loose German federation into a unified nation—dominated, of course, by his native Prussia. But the casus belliwould have to be most carefully selected, to cast France as the initiating party in the eyes of Europe—and particularly of Prussia’s German allies. As he once remarked, “A statesman has not to make history, but if ever in the events around him he hears the sweep of the mantle of God, then he must jump up and catch at its hem.” With France now bent on scoring diplomatic victories, Bismarck saw his chance. Irritated by Benedetti at Bad Ems, the benign old King refused to guarantee that the Hohenzollern candidacy would never arise again, declining a request for a further audience. A telegram giving an account of the interview was duly dispatched to Bismarck in Berlin. Bismarck heard “the mantle of God”; he sharpened the tone of the dispatch before passing it to the Berlin press—and the world.
Even with Bismarck’s editing, the famous Ems Telegram hardly seemed to constitute a casus belli. But Bismarck was well attuned to the mood in Paris. Frenzied crowds surged through the streets shouting, “À Berlin!” In one of the rashest claims in all military history, the French commander, Marshal Leboeuf, encouraged the hawks with his foolish declaration that the army was “ready down to the last gaiter-button.” (Wits remarked that this was largely true, as there were no gaiters in stock anyway!) For one bright day, on 14 July, the peace party in the French government, moderates like Adolphe Thiers, had precariously gained the upper hand, and the Emperor himself urged Leboeuf to delay summoning up the reserves. Thiers observed glumly that, in France’s foreign policy, there was not one mistake that remained to be made. But on receipt of Bismarck’s telegram on 15 July, urged on by his Empress and Gramont, fired by the ever-shriller Paris press, Napoleon III declared war. In a state of exhilaration, the hawks recalled Napoleon’s successes beyond the Rhine. But, through Bismarck’s cunning, she found herself at once branded as a frivolous aggressor with neither friend nor ally. In England, Mr. Gladstone made it perfectly plain that Britain would only intervene “to take arms against either French or German violation of Belgium’s neutrality.” Said the Illustrated London News: “The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette,” and this was precisely how opinion, in America as in Europe, saw the new conflict. France was blundering into war “with the greatest military power that Europe had yet seen, in a bad cause, with her army unready and without allies.”5
In sharpest contrast, the Prussian military machine was superbly prepared, superbly equipped and led, and well tested in battle. Within eighteen days of mobilisation, Bismarck and his German allies were able to field an unheard-of force of 1,183,000 men. The German organisation man, scourge of Europe over the next seventy-five years, had arrived. It was led by an imposing triumvirate of Bismarck, Field Marshal von Moltke and Roon, the Minister of War. They had been tested in war against Austria at Sadowa in 1866, while the French army commander Bazaine (who would later find himself locked up in Metz with his army) was an ex-ranker who had never commanded more than 25,000, and that only on manoeuvres. While Prussia could depend on a vast mass of well-trained reservists, when Marshal Niel, the French Minister of War, had asked for ff14 million for his Garde Mobile he had got ff5 million. Zola would understandably later write of a “Germany ready, better commanded, better armed, sublimated by a great charge of patriotism; France frightened, delivered into disorder . . . having neither the leaders nor the men, nor the necessary arms.”6 The laughter about General Boum and La Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein at the Great Exhibition of three years previously was suddenly muted; instead, Herr Krupp’s terrifying great cannon seemed more pertinent. Scenes of dismal chaos accompanied French mobilisation: “Have arrived at Belfort,” telegraphed one desperate general. “Can’t find my brigade. Can’t find the divisional commander. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are.”
It did not bode well. Over the first six weeks of war, in swiftest succession there followed for France disaster after military disaster in the frontier provinces. The Prussian Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke, rapidly appreciated that the French Army would be divided by the line of the Vosges mountains, and deployed his forces so that they could concentrate with overwhelming superiority against either half, and defeat it in detail. It was taking a leaf out of the book of Napoleon I, who could not have done it better. The first blow fell at daybreak on 4 August, when men of General Abel Douay’s division of MacMahon’s army were caught breakfasting at Wissembourg in Alsace, in eastern France. The French fought heroically against superior numbers, but became demoralised when their general was killed by a shell. The main blow fell two days later at Woerth, when MacMahon, deceived as to the numbers that the Prussians could bring against him, allowed himself to be brought to battle by the Prussian Crown Prince, with twice as many infantry as himself. That same day, the other half of the French forces, optimistically labelled “The Army of the Rhine,” and under command of the Emperor himself, suffered an equally crushing defeat at Spicheren to the left of the Vosges. For the Prussians they were costly battles— 3000 to 4000 French at Spicheren, about 11,000 each at Woerth (substantially less than in a Napoleonic battle)—but they were clear-cut successes.
After Spicheren and Woerth, the French never again left the defensive. A long, disheartening retreat began. On the 12th, Louis-Napoleon handed over command to Marshal Bazaine. Following a sequence of disastrous orders and counter-orders, Bazaine fell back on the fortress of Verdun. But after all the French vacillations and changes of plan, he found his route cut off by Uhlan cavalry of Moltke’s fast-moving Second Army near the village of Gravelotte, in the middle of the Woëvre Plain. On 16 August, a desperate battle-of-encounter took place. Here the Prussians and their other German allies were outnumbered, and only saved by Bazaine’s excessive caution. Moltke had two days in which to bring up the whole strength of his combined First and Second Armies— 188,332 Germans supported by 732 guns, against 112,800 Frenchmen with only 520 guns, tired and somewhat demoralised. Watched by General Sheridan of American Civil War fame, on the 18th Moltke inflicted a decisive defeat on Bazaine at Saint-Privat. The 20,000 casualties he suffered, to 13,000 French, attested to the heroism with which Bazaine’s men had fought; but, out-generalled, they now flooded back eastwards into Metz, where they remained isolated and under siege for the next two-and-a-half months.
In Paris news of the first defeats had caused the defeat of Louis-Napoleon’s liberal Premier, Ollivier, by General Cousin-Montauban, Comte de Palikao, a right-winger. Abandoning all its previous pretences of pacifism, the left now relentlessly assailed the government for its military failures. Meanwhile, at the front, on 30 August, the Prussian Third Army, executing a grand right-wheel, caught up with MacMahon, trapping him inside the small citadel town of Sedan. It was the birthplace of the great Turenne, hammer of the Germans under Louis XIV—but also destined to be the scene of a second dreadful French disaster, in May 1940. In the forthright words of one of the French corps commanders, General Ducrot: “We’re in a chamber-pot, and they’ll shit on us.”
There were rations in Sedan sufficient only for a few days. The situation was hopeless. On 1 September, a sick and defeated Napoleon III, rouged to hide his pallor, surrendered to King Wilhelm of Prussia at the head of his army. He handed him a brief note, dignified but tragic: “Not having been able to die among my troops, I am left with no alternative but to surrender my sword into the hands of Your Majesty. I am Your Majesty’s good brother.” Bismarck replied harshly, describing France as a nation full of envy and jealousy, and added, “We must have territory, fortresses and frontiers which will shelter us from an attack on her part.” This hardly spoke of the prospect of a generous peace, in the style of the Congress of Vienna.
TWO DAYS LATER Paris received the news of the Emperor’s capitulation in Sedan. “What a sight,” recorded Goncourt:
The news of MacMahon’s defeat and the capture of the Emperor spreading from group to group! Who can describe the consternation written on every face . . . Then there is the menacing roar of the crowd, in which stupefaction has begun to give place to anger . . .59
Very soon it was mixed with some delight, too—even in some bourgeois quartiers—for Louis-Napoleon and his Second Empire were gone for good. Like her two predecessors in the Tuileries, Empress Eugénie fled to England through a palace side door, leaving pathetic signs of an unintended departure: a toy sword half-drawn on a bed, empty jewel cases strewn on the floor, and on a table some bits of bread and a half-devoured egg.
In the time-honoured sequence of French revolutions, the mob quickly set about effacing all traces of the fallen regime. Just as, at the onset of the Hundred Days, the fleurs-de-lys had been unpicked from the Tuileries carpets and replaced with Napoleonic bees, so now all the Ns and imperial eagles were chiselled and ripped off the public buildings, and busts of the deposed Emperor pulled down. At the main entrance of the Tuileries, later in the afternoon of 4 September, Edmond Goncourt saw scribbled in chalk the words “Property of the People.”
It was a sparklingly sunny day, no blood had been shed, and all Paris now turned out in its Sunday best to celebrate the most joyous revolution it had ever had. George Sand, now aged sixty-six, rejoiced: “This is the third awakening; and it is beautiful beyond fancy . . . Hail to thee, Republic! Thou art in worthy hands, and a great people will march under thy banner after a bloody expiation.” Everyone seemed united by an irrational optimism. The new sixteen-year-old wife of Paul Verlaine (her marriage postponed by conscription) voiced the widely shared mystique of La République, asking, “Now that we have her, all is saved— that’s so, isn’t it? It will be like in . . .” “Like in ’92, she wanted to say,” explained Verlaine. “They won’t dare to come now that we have her,” declared a workman, echoing Mme. Verlaine.
Not all writers agreed. In September 1870, ten days before he died, that great patriot, supporter of the Empire and friend of the Empress, Prosper Mérimée, wrote in grief to Mme. de Beaulain: “I bleed today from the wounds of these imbecile Frenchmen, I weep for their humiliations and however unpleasant and absurd they are, I still love them.” 7
On the street it was automatically assumed that—now the mediocre Emperor and his bellicose regime were gone—the Prussians would return home. The Parisians could not see the solid German phalanxes advancing ever closer, or hear the German press at home shrieking for the destruction of “the modern Babylon.” A bitter four-month siege lay ahead, waged on the Parisian side with varying degrees of incompetence, until late January 1871. At the Hôtel de Ville, the government set up to succeed the Emperor consisted of moderate republicans—men like Favre, Ferry, Gambetta, Picard, Crémieux and Arago. Thiers declined office, but remained a powerful influence, while the post of President was handed to General Trochu, the lethargic and uninspiring Governor of Paris.
More dangerous, on the extreme left professional revolutionaries like Blanqui and Delescluze, and firebrands like Pyat and Flourens, fulminated in the Red “Clubs” and gained military influence within the National Guard. A constant threat to the organised government, for them the invading Prussians equalled imperialism, which, triumphant, would bring back the hated Emperor. Under this left-wing pressure, with some reluctance Trochu and his team were pushed into continuing the war. It was with an extraordinary degree of traditional arrogant self-assurance that Paris did so virtually without consulting the rest of France; once again she had decided on the country’s behalf. This would be almost the last time.
AS PARIS SETTLED DOWN to siege, some 170,000 territorial Mobiles from the provinces reinforced the National Guard, which expanded with indecent rapidity from 24,000 at the outbreak of war eventually to number some 350,000. It was to prove more a liability—and a most dangerous one—in the course of the siege. But the surest defence Paris had were the ring of forts constructed (with foresight?) by Thiers in 1840. It meant that any investing army would be forced to occupy a contiguous front of approximately 50 miles against a possible break-out— and this might require every spare soldier of even Moltke’s vast army. Meanwhile some 12,000 labourers set to work to reinforcing weak spots with improvised earthworks, and laying land-mines. As in days of Henri IV’s siege, foodstuffs from all the surrounding countryside streamed in. In the Bois de Boulogne alone, there were herded an estimated 250,000 sheep and 40,000 oxen, while an army of foresters began cutting down the fine old trees in the Bois for fuel in the winter ahead. It seemed that, this time, in contrast to 1590, there was no way Paris could be starved into submission.
On 20 September, Uhlan cavalry from the two Prussian armies linked arms near Versailles, which surrendered without a shot. For the first time since Henri IV’s investment of Paris the city was encircled, and besieged; in fact, it was the first full-scale siege of a capital in modern history. Out in the provinces—far from capitulating—France’s surviving forces now took their orders from a provisional government in Tours; and under its command new armies were preparing for the day when, in concert with the Paris garrison breaking out, they could seize the occupying Prussians in a deadly vice. Gustave Flaubert, enlisted as a lieutenant in his local Garde Nationale in Rouen, was writing (with some optimism) to his niece of “armies being forged”: “in a fortnight there will be perhaps a million men around Paris,” and to Maxime du Camp on the day the Prussians completed the encirclement of Paris: “I guarantee that within a fortnight all France will rise. Near Mantes a peasant has strangled a Prussian and torn him apart with his teeth.”
Now that Paris—the holy capital—was menaced by the enemy, there did seem to be a new, tough mood of resistance at large in France. The question was, who was going to exploit and canalise this will to fight; and how would these operations between Paris and Tours be coordinated with the city now totally cut off? What was needed was a kind of Winston Churchill. But was there such a man among France’s new leaders—and, even if there was, how could he be got out of Paris?
A possible answer to the second question was sent, literally, from above. A patriotic Frenchwoman living in Prussian-occupied Versailles, on first seeing a balloon rise out of the besieged city, exclaimed, in the hearing of W. H. Russell of The Times: “Paris reduced to that! Oh good God! Have pity on us!” Yet it was the balloons of Paris that were to constitute probably the most illustrious, courageous and inventive episode of the siege. Today, the Siege of Paris usually evokes principally two images: the eating of cats and rats, and balloons. If the first represents the degradation and misery to which a modern civilisation can be reduced, the second shows the soaring imagination and resourcefulness that can be inspired by adversity. Often taking off into the night with primitive machines and no Houston Ground Control for back-up, the bravery of the balloonists of Paris surely compares to that of the early astronauts.
Seven balloons had been located around Paris, though most of them were in disrepair. One, the Neptune, was sufficiently patched up to be wafted out of Paris on 23 September. Its intrepid pilot, Durouf, landed safely at Evreux beyond the enemy’s reach with 103 kilograms of dispatches, after a three-hour flight. Four other balloons took off in quick succession, with none of their crews being shot down or captured, or even coming to grief.
Manufactured in the deserted Gare d’Orléans, and the Gare du Nord, the balloons were constructed simply of varnished cotton because silk was unobtainable, and filled with highly explosive coal gas, which made them exceptionally vulnerable to Prussian sharp-shooters. Capable of unpredictable motion in all three dimensions, none of which was controllable, in inexperienced hands the balloons had an unpleasant habit of shooting suddenly up to 6000 feet, then falling back again almost to ground level. Altogether some sixty-five manned balloons left Paris during the siege. They carried 164 passengers, 381 pigeons, 5 dogs and nearly 11 tons of official dispatches, including approximately two-and-a-half million letters. Only five fell into enemy hands and only two balloonists died. The news they exported of Paris’s continued resistance did much to kindle hope in the provinces. But above all, the knowledge that the city was not entirely cut off from the outside world, the ability to communicate, however haphazardly, with relatives there, and to learn that other French forces were still resisting the enemy somewhere in the provinces, went far towards maintaining Parisian morale. Whatever its fate, Paris could point—with pride—to the epic of the balloons as having been its “finest hour.”
Despite all efforts, it only ever proved possible to balloon out of Paris, and not back in. Hence the government in Tours resorted to the humble carrier-pigeon, bearing messages reduced to a minute size, printed on feathery collodion membranes, and dispatched back to the capital. One pigeon could carry up to 40,000 dispatches, equivalent to the contents of a complete book. Unfortunately, their flights were unreliable. During the siege, 302 pigeons were sent off, of which fifty-nine actually reached Paris. The remainder were taken by birds of prey, died of cold and hunger, or ended in Prussian pies. As a counter-measure, the Prussians imported falcons; to which one of the many Parisian “inventors” suggested that pigeons be equipped with whistles, to frighten off the predators!
THE TROCHU GOVERNMENT decided to balloon a new plenipotentiary to the Provisional Government at Tours. Few volunteers came forward—except Léon Gambetta. As Minister of the Interior, Gambetta seemed to be an obvious choice when it came to organising a levée en masse in the provinces, though his more remarkable attributes were not then apparent. He was only thirty-two, the son of an Italian grocer living in Cahors, but a careless bohemian life had prematurely aged him so that his beard and his mass of unkempt black hair was streaked with grey. However, he had already established himself as one of the great orators of France, with “authority even in his laugh,” and all that he seemed to lack was military experience. Gambetta having arrived safely in Tours, he set about vigorously organising the Army of the Loire to continue the fight.
As far as Paris was concerned, given the vagaries of pigeon post, Gambetta’s intentions remained unclear. Nevertheless, Trochu decided to launch a major sortie from Paris, across the Marne to the south-east. It was very late in the day—and a couple of counter-strokes had previously failed to break through the Prussians’ ring of iron. The date for the “Great Sortie” was fixed for 29 November, and it was to break the siege in coordination with an offensive by Gambetta’s forces outside. But not until the 24th, only five days before D-Day, was the vital intelligence to Gambetta dispatched—aboard the Ville d’Orléans. The thirty-third balloon to leave Paris, it carried a crew of two: Rolier, the pilot, and Béziers. Because Prussian anti-balloon measures now made daylight flights so risky, the Ville d’Orléans took off under cover of darkness, shortly before midnight. After a record-breaking journey, it in fact landed in Norway—having had to jettison the crucial dispatches for Tours. Miraculously, these were eventually recovered from the sea, but they reached Tours too late for Gambetta to coordinate his forces with Trochu. In consequence, the supreme effort to break the Prussian stranglehold collapsed.
Trochu’s defeated forces reeled back into Paris. Morale plummeted, then the indiscriminate bombardment by Prussian heavy guns began. INSIDE PARIS, as the siege ground on, anger on the left was steadily mounting. There was a very real sense that nothing was being done— just “spin” from the Hôtel de Ville. It seemed that Trochu would rather do a “deal” with the Prussians than face a Dantonesque war à outrance— and which risked the physical destruction of Paris. Another bourgeois swindle at their expense in the offing! At the end of October, after news of Marshal Bazaine’s surrender at Metz, angry “Reds” broke into the Hôtel de Ville. There had been farcical and humiliating scenes as the swashbuckling Gustave Flourens, magnificently booted and spurred and wielding a massive Turkish scimitar, leapt on to the table, kicking over inkwells on a level with President Trochu’s nose. Order was only restored by loyal troops quickly reaching the Hôtel de Ville via a secret subterranean passage from the nearby Napoleon Barracks, built by its namesake for just such an eventuality.
“The sufferings of Paris during the siege?” Edmond Goncourt wrote in his diary for 7 January 1871, from the comfort of his house in the semi-detached village of Auteuil: “A joke for two months. In the third month the joke went sour. Now nobody finds it funny any more, and we are moving fast towards starvation.” Among Goncourt’s circle, Gautier lamented that he had to wear braces for the first time, “his abdomen no longer supporting his trousers.”8 They were luckier than most, but by early October even bourgeois Paris had begun to eat horsemeat. To a belle who (exceptionally) had refused to dine with him, a frustrated Victor Hugo wrote:
I would have offered you a meal beyond compare:
I would have killed Pegasus and had him cooked,
So as to serve you with a horse’s wing.
As belts were tightened, so many a champion of the turf ended its days in the casserole; among them were the two trotting horses presented by the Tsar to Louis-Napoleon at the time of the Great Exhibition, originally valued at ff56,000, now bought by a butcher for ff800.
From the desperate shortages of mid-November onwards originated the exotic menus with which the siege is immortally coupled. Most of the animals from the Jardin d’Acclimatation disappeared; even its pride, two young elephants called Castor and Pollux, were dispatched after several disgracefully inept attempts with explosive bullets. The lions and tigers survived; as did the monkeys, protected apparently by the exaggerated Darwinian instincts of the Parisians, and the hippopotamus from the Jardin des Plantes, for whose vast live-weight no butcher could afford the reserve price of ff80,000. Otherwise no animal was exempt. The signs “Feline and Canine Butchers” made their debut. At first the idea of slaughtering pets for human consumption provoked indignation in dog-loving Paris. But necessity bred familiarity, and by mid-December Henry Labouchère, the “Besieged Resident” of the London Daily News, was reporting in a matter-of-fact way, “I had a slice of spaniel the other day” (though it made him “feel like a cannibal”). Next it was the turn of the rats. Together with the carrier-pigeon, the rat was to become the most fabled animal of the siege of Paris, and from December on a good rat-hunt was one of the principal activities of the National Guard, although the number actually consumed was relatively few. The elaborate sauces required to make a rodent palatable meant that rats were essentially a rich man’s dish; hence the famous menus of the Jockey Club, featuring such delicacies as salmi de rats and “rat pie.”
Despite the quite sensible entreaties of the left wing, no measures were taken to establish proper control of food distribution. Meanwhile Labouchère noted that “in the expensive cafés of the Boulevards, feasts worthy of Lucullus are still served.” The situation altered little as the months passed. More reprehensible were the speculators who sat on foodstuffs until prices seemed sufficiently attractive. Beetroots bought in October at 2 centimes a piece later sold for ff1.75. It was more profitable to sell “under the counter”; so, hour after hour the wretched housewives waited, often leaving empty-handed, with hatred in their hearts equally for the petit bourgeois as represented by the heartless butcher and for the rich bourgeois who could afford to buy without queuing. Curiously enough, there was never any shortage of wine or alcohol. In the poorer districts of Paris drunkenness was never more widespread, nor more wretched. While the women of proletarian Paris queued and hungered, the men got drunk on the barricades—all the while fuming against the government.
On 22 December, Trochu signalled to Tours warning that Paris would have no food left by 20 January. Cold now added to the miseries of hunger, with the Seine freezing over in the bitterest winter in living memory. In a move aimed at ending the siege at the end of December, Bismarck and Moltke now added a new component of horror: the escalated bombardment of the civilian population. The shells—from monster cannon like the one Herr Krupp had shown off at Expo ’67—fell at a rate of 300–400 a day, at random and with no attempt to single out military targets. It marked a beginning of the German technique of war by Schrecklichkeit. But, once the initial fear of the unknown had passed, in a manner comparable to the London Blitz of 1940, or the Allied bombing of Berlin, indignation was replaced by a remarkable indifference.
THE PRUSSIAN COURT had ensconced itself at Versailles early in the siege. Inside the great staterooms where the Roi Soleil and Mme. de Maintenon had paraded less than two centuries previously, German wounded lay in cots dominated by the rows of vast patriotic canvases, endlessly proclaiming past French victories over their countrymen. Court-painters were rushed to Versailles to record at top speed an historic event, one that was to have far more significant consequences for European history than the disembowelling of innocent children in Paris by the terror-weapons of the new warfare. By 18 January the scene was set in the Galerie des Glaces, where only so few years previously Queen Victoria had danced with Louis-Napoleon amid all the splendours of the Second Empire at its zenith. King Wilhelm I had himself proclaimed emperor of a Germany united over the corpse of a defunct French Empire. At 12 o’clock, recorded Russell of The Times:
The boom of a gun far away rolls above the voices in the Court hailing the Emperor King. Then there is a hush of expectation, and then rich and sonorous rise the massive strains of the chorale chanted by the men of regimental bands assembled in a choir, as the King, bearing his helmet in his hand, and dressed in full uniform as a German General stalked slowly up the long gallery, and bowing to the clergy in front of the temporary altar opposite him, halted and dressed himself right and front, and then twirling his heavy moustache with his disengaged hand, surveyed the scene at each side of him.9
This pleasing scene, multiplied in the great mirrors, may have been less colourful than that of 4 December 1804, in Notre-Dame, but it was none the less dramatic—and consequential. As the heavy figure of Bismarck, clad in the blue tunic and great boots of a Prussian cuirassier and holding hisPickelhaube by its spike, stepped forward to proclaim the German Empire, he was in effect triumphing over Louis XIV and everything he had stood for.
After a short while, and loud huzzahs, it was all over; the silhouette of the new Germany passed boldly across the mirrors, the footsteps died away and the great mirrors were left waiting in an empty gallery—for another historic scene nearly half a century later. In besieged Paris, Goncourt spoke for many Frenchmen when he mourned prophetically: “That really marks the end of the greatness of France.” A special bitterness was injected into Franco-German relations for the next three-quarters of a century. Though it might hardly be seen at the time, the event also marked the beginning of the end of the greatness of Britain.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME as the scene in the Galerie des Glaces, Trochu made one last, hopeless attempt to break the Prussian stranglehold. It was the turn of the National Guard, which had been so loud in its condemnation of the Hôtel de Ville’s ineptitude and apathy. They attacked at Buzenval to the west of Paris, with half-trained troops debilitated by hunger and cold; predictably, the result was a massacre. In fury, the left launched yet another assault on the Hôtel de Ville, on 22 January. “Civil war was a few yards away,” wrote Jules Favre, in retrospect. His government at the end of its tether, Trochu sent an emissary to Bismarck, asking for an armistice.
The peace negotiations were painful, the Prussian terms brutal. France lost Alsace and Lorraine, two of her fairest and richest provinces, and was required to pay a crippling indemnity of ff5 billion—the equivalent of £200 million in contemporary money—or more than seven times the total reparations demanded by the Allies in 1815 after twenty years of war, in which French armies had devastated half the continent. Most hurtful to the pride of the defeated nation was Bismarck’s insistence on a triumphal march along the Champs-Élysées. The Prussian occupation lasted just twenty-four hours, but the insult lingered on.
The city was united in rage; patriotic Paris would have none of the treaty of shame; republican Paris would have none of the new assembly created in the provinces; would not tolerate the government’s move to Versailles, just vacated by the Prussians. Food supplies came rushing in, largely from Britain. Yet it was rash of Jules Ferry, on 5 March 1871, confidently to telegraph from Paris to his colleague, Jules Simon, in the tranquillity of Bordeaux, “The city is entirely calm. The danger has passed . . .” It had not; far from it.
THIERS SUCCEEDED TROCHU as president of a new council. Capitulation to Bismarck now convinced the belligerent Left of Paris that Thiers and the new Republican Assembly were doing a deal with the enemy to restore the old imperial regime. The ingredients which were to spark off the Russian Revolution in 1917—military humiliation, suppressed revolutionary fervour and deprivation—were all there. Missing only were the weapons. As the siege ended, Trochu’s commanders had established safely up at Montmartre a guarded artillery park of some 200 cannon. Most of the guns bore National Guard numbers, and had been “bought” by public subscription during the siege. Thus the left-wingers of the Guard were persuaded they were the rightful owners. At the end of February, detachments of the Guard seized the guns. Efforts by loyal troops to regain them in March were not only repulsed but ended in the brutal lynching of two elderly generals—shot in a courtyard of Montmartre’s Rue des Rosiers, amid scenes reminiscent of 1789; this despite the efforts of the mayor, a young Georges Clemenceau, who would later rise to fame as the uncompromising leader of France in bringing victory in the First World War.
The Montmartre guns shifted the whole balance of power, causing Thiers to move the army out of Paris to Versailles—just as he had recommended Louis-Philippe should have done in 1848. The revolutionaries set up a rival regime, called the Commune de Paris,inside the Hôtel de Ville. Had the Communards promptly marched on Versailles, with their 200 cannon, they could almost certainly have defeated an army that had been largely disarmed by the Prussians. Karl Marx, who later made his name from his work on the Commune, claimed this to have been a cardinal error (the other, its reluctance to seize the Bank of France): “the defensive,” he wrote, “is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures itself with its enemies.” This was an error that his future pupil, Lenin, born the previous year at Simbirsk, would not repeat when his time came. Mutual atrocities widened the gulf between Paris and Versailles. The Commune ordered the taking of hostages, beginning with no less a person than the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy.
THE COMMUNE was certainly anti-religious, “Red” and left-wing, but it was not strictly speaking “Communist,” having in fact pre-dated Marx to 1789. Then it had been improvised simply to assume responsibility for administering Paris. With the extremists taking over in 1792 it was transformed into the “Revolutionary Commune,” which forced the Assembly to dethrone Louis XVI. By default, led by the violent Danton, it then found itself for a time the real government of France. The almost miraculous success with which it had then chased the foreign royalist invaders from French soil during the Revolution now, in 1871, helped to provide it with an all-powerful, though somewhat mystical appeal for all manner of social, political and philosophical grievances against the “Establishment.” In its ranks there were the veterans of the barricades of 1848 and 1851—and even 1830. There were revolutionary feminists like Louise Michel, and there were history’s homeless Poles, like Dombrowski and Wroblewski, redoubtable fighters in the cause of abstract freedom: “They were, above all, des candides. Never can leadership of a political movement have been so naive, so incoherent, and so incompetent,”10 as Richard Cobb says. Except for the horrible Communard police chief, Raoul Rigault, “most were innocents who were not built for the scale of such tragic events.”
The Commune was overloaded, indeed overwhelmed, by personalities, ideologies and interests. By the end of April 1871, the Versaillais troops, reinforced from the provinces, were beginning to close in, their guns already shelling central Paris in a second bombardment—just as indiscriminate towards the civil population as Moltke’s had been. The Communards had still failed to establish any effective chain of command: everybody gave orders, few obeyed them. Meanwhile, Thiers’ generals had spotted that the Achilles’ heel of the Communard defences lay at the Point du Jour, the extreme south-western tip of the city, close to where the Seine flows out towards Sèvres. It was here that they would try to break in.
In a city riddled with spy mania and accusations of conspiracy, twenty-six-year-old Louis Rossel, son of a Scottish mother, a colonel of the engineers during the first siege, now found himself in charge of the Communard forces. He was by far their most efficient soldier, who should have been put in charge back in March. Now he ordered the immediate construction of barricades behind the city ramparts, like those constructed by Thiers himself in the 1840s, as a second line of defence. But it was to little avail. When ordering an attack, Rossel found his battalion commanders had evaporated. On 8 May he resigned in disgust.
Regardless of the imminent military menace from Versailles, the Communards went from folly to irrelevant folly. Thiers’ private house was spitefully demolished. In the Place Vendôme the great column erected by Napoleon I to celebrate the victories of 1805 was brought crashing in a final, futile gesture of contempt for the fallen Empire. Then, on the sunny summer evening of Sunday, 21 May 1871, the Commune held a grandiose concert in the resplendent Tuileries Palace. No fewer than 1500 musicians were engaged to take part. While the Communards enjoyed the party, just outside the walls troops belonging to the legitimate government of Adolphe Thiers were entering the besieged city from Versailles, unchallenged. Close to the Point du Jour gate, they had spotted a white flag. Waving it was a civil engineer named Ducatel, who felt no love for the Commune and who had happened quite by chance to stroll near the battlements on his afternoon promenade. He was astonished to perceive that, around the Point du Jour, which had been heavily pounded by Thiers’ cannon over the past few days, there was not a defender to be seen. By dawn the next day, Marshal MacMahon, Napoleon III’s old commander, had already poured thousands of troops through five gaping breaches in the walls. With a belated sense of purpose the Communards rushed up the barricades that should have been completed weeks earlier.
On the Left Bank, they fought at Montparnasse Station until ammunition ran out; then their withdrawal was covered by a single defender, who kept up a steady fire into the station from a one-man stronghold inside a newspaper kiosk. Haussmann’s layout of the new Paris, with the provision of diagonal intersections for outflanking revolutionaries’ barricades, now worked in favour of the government forces. Nevertheless, about their only advance on the Monday afternoon had been to capture the garden of the British Embassy on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In scattered little packets, the Communards were beginning to fight as never before—the fight of despair.
THE DAWN OF TUESDAY THE 23RD broke on another ravishing May day, and with an assault on the bastion of Montmartre from two directions. Up there, about the only Communard detachment that showed spirit was a squad of twenty-five from the Women’s Battalion, headed by the redoubtable Louise Michel, the vierge rouge, who had orders to blow up the entire Butte Montmartre if necessary. Now began the “expiation” for which Thiers had called. Some forty-nine captured Communards were collected at random and summarily shot in the Rue des Rosiers, scene of the lynching of the two generals back in March. All through the 23rd, Paul-Antoine Brunel and his men had continued to hold out with the utmost tenacity at the barricades in the Rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde. Turning movements from the direction of the Opéra were threatening their rear, and now rifle-fire from sharp-shooters on top of the high buildings along the Rue Royale mowed them down behind the barricades. Swiftly Brunel—justifying the nickname of “The Burner” that he had gained during the first siege— ordered the firing of these buildings.
That night, away in the darkness, Parisians saw the red glow of a great fire. Inside the Tuileries Palace, where only two days previously the last of the famous concerts had taken place, barrel after barrel of gunpowder had been piled. With a tremendous roar the central dome housing the Salle des Maréchaux disappeared.
By the following night, the Tuileries, a large part of the Palais-Royal, the Palais de Justice, the Préfecture de Police, the Légion d’Honneur and the Conseil d’État had been set on fire. Whole sections of streets like the Rue de Lille and much of the Rue de Rivoli were ablaze; so was the Ministry of Finance, housed in one wing of the Louvre, threatening the priceless treasures in the museum itself. At Notre-Dame, which had escaped destruction by so narrow a margin during the Great Revolution, National Guards built up a large “brazier” from chairs and pews. They were just forestalled in time; but, evacuated by the desperate Commune, the superb medieval building of the Hôtel de Ville, the focus of so much Parisian history from Philippe-Auguste onwards, was also consigned to the flames.
Now there entered into the limelight Les pétroleuses; whether by legend or fact, these were fearful maenads from some infernal region, women who allegedly crept about the city, flinging Molotov cocktails into basement windows belonging to the bourgeoisie. That night, too, the Communards committed their most infamous crime: the execution, in an alley outside the prison of La Roquette, of the hostage Archbishop of Paris. Retribution was not long delayed in catching up with Raoul Rigault, the Communard Chief of Police responsible. The next day Rigault was seized on the Left Bank, at lodgings he shared under an assumed name with an actress. Shot in the head, for two days his body lay in the gutter, partly stripped by women of the district and kicked and spat upon by passers-by.
On the evening of Thursday the 25th, as Commune resistance was beginning to crumble, its last leader, Charles Delescluze—dressed as always like an 1848 revolutionary, in a top hat, polished boots, black trousers and frock coat, a red sash around his waist and leaning heavily on a cane—set off towards an abandoned barricade. He was seen slowly to clamber to the top; then pitch forward on his face.
Friday 26 May was a day of savage killings on both sides, in which the battle became a ruthless mopping-up operation. Goncourt was moved to pity by the sight of the Communard prisoners:
The men had been split up into lines of seven or eight and tied to each other with string that cut into their wrists. They were just as they had been captured, most of them without hats or caps, and with their hair plastered down on their foreheads and faces by the fine rain that had been falling ever since this morning. There were men of the people there who had made themselves head coverings out of blue check handkerchiefs. Others, drenched to the skin by the rain, were carrying a hunk of bread.
One of the Versailles generals, the dashing Marquis de Gallifet, now secured for himself a reputation for ferocity that Paris would never forget. “I am Gallifet,” he told prisoners. “You people of Montmartre may think me cruel, but I am even crueller than you can imagine.” Twirling his moustachios, with his mistress on his arm, pointing out who should die and who should live, he is described as “making caustic jests as he did so.” Thiers’ regulars were also approaching the last of the Commune’s remaining strongholds: the vast cemetery of Père Lachaise that Napoleon I had laid out. There the last Communard defenders, firing from the cover of its elaborate family mausoleums, had to be winkled out gravestone by gravestone. Fifteen miles outside Paris, Alphonse Daudet recalled hearing the last rumbling of the cannon, which reminded him of:
A great ship in distress . . . I felt that the Commune, about to go down, was firing its last distress rockets. At every minute I could see the wreck heave up, the breach in it grew bigger, and then inside I could see the men of the Hôtel de Ville clinging to their stage, and continuing to decree amid all the din of the wind and the tempest.
The next morning, 28 May, Thiers’ army moved in for the kill. It was Whit Sunday. Within a few hours, there was only one Communard barricade left, on the Rue Ramponneau, where an unknown lone defender held off the attackers with a cool and deadly aim; having fired off his last cartridge, he strolled calmly away and disappeared. At La Roquette the unburied corpse of the murdered Archbishop had been discovered. That Whitsun morning the Versailles troops marched 147 of the captured Communards out to Père Lachaise and shot them against a wall of the cemetery. Over two days, inside La Roquette and Mazas prisons, over 2000 Commune prisoners were shot.
THE LAST GREAT SIEGE of Paris was at an end. France was sick of the slaughter. “Let us kill no more, even murderers and incendiaries!” the Paris-Journal implored on 2 June. “Let us kill no more!” The number of lives lost during la semaine sanglante was probably between 20,000 and 25,000—far more than the blood-letting of the Terror of 1793 in Paris. The orgy of killing represented, to some extent, a savage but deliberate settling of accounts that dated back to 1789. Among the surviving Communards deported to insalubrious colonies for long sentences, Louise Michel eventually returned to France; still a violent anarchist, she was arrested several times more before having to flee to London, where she died in 1905—exultant at the news of revolution in Russia. “Burner” Brunel, though badly wounded, escaped from Paris (and a death sentence) and four years later found employment teaching French at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, until he died in 1904. Among his pupils, incongruously, was the future King George V.
At the end of the hostilities in May 1871, Paris presented a terrible sight. Théophile Gautier, returning to a city whose silence oppressed him, was appalled by the familiar Rue de Lille, on the Left Bank, where his fellow author Prosper Mérimée had once lived: “it seemed to be deserted throughout its length, like a street of Pompeii.” Of Mérimée’s old house, nothing remained but the walls; his famous library was in ashes.
A silence of death reigned over these ruins; in the necropolises of Thebes or in the shafts of the Pyramids it was no more profound. No clatter of vehicles, no shouts of children, not even the song of a bird . . . an incurable sadness invaded our souls . . .
Yet more of the city had survived than people could imagine. The Vénus de Milo was lifted reverently from the storage “coffin” within the incendiarised Préfecture de Police, where she had been preserved since before the first siege. As she returned to the Louvre, it seemed like a symbol of the return of life to Paris herself. Almost like a sign of regeneration, too, Georges Rouault, the painter, had been born in a cellar while the last fighting raged just overhead. Worth, the couturier, bought up part of the wreckage of the Tuileries to construct sham ruins in his garden, and the work of rebuilding Paris was under way almost immediately when the fighting ended. That summer omnibuses and carriages were plying the streets again, bateaux-mouches bustling up and down the Seine. Even the enterprising Thomas Cook was sending hordes of English tourists to goggle at the “ruins” of Paris. But, as a reminder of the horrors of the recent past, some noticed Parisians for a long time preferring to walk in the road rather than on the pavements—to avoid any suspicion that they might be pétroleuses intent on popping their incendiary packets through basement windows.
As an epitaph to those terrible days of May 1871, “they were madmen,” said painter Auguste Renoir, who himself had narrowly escaped death at Communard hands; “but they had in them that little flame which never dies.”