Seven Ages of Paris (48 page)

THE COMMUNE TAKES OVER

Capitulation to Bismarck confirmed the worst fears of the belligerent Parisian left that Thiers (who succeeded Trochu as president) 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, however, Trochu’s government 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 paid for by public subscriptions during the siege. Then, at the end of February, detachments of the Guard seized the guns in a sudden coup de main. 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—and despite the efforts of Mayor Clemenceau. With dramatic suddenness, the seizure of the Montmartre guns shifted the whole balance of power in Paris—indeed in France as a whole.

Thiers now moved the army out of Paris—just as he had recommended Louis-Philippe to do in 1848—to Versailles, which became the official seat of government. In Paris, the revolutionaries set up a rival regime, the Commune de Paris, inside the Hôtel de Ville. On 22 March, a counter-demonstration by unarmed conservative Friends of Order was broken up by gunfire in the Rue de la Paix, close to the present-day Ritz. A dozen were killed and many more wounded. The bridges between Paris and Versailles were now well and truly down. In Versailles Thiers regrouped his forces and prepared a second siege of Paris. In Paris, the Commune bickered, indulged in marginal social reforms—such as the abolition of night work in the bakeries—and squandered valuable time. For 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 definitive work on the Commune, claimed this to have been one of its two cardinal errors (the other was its reluctance to seize the Banque de 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.

Thus the insurgents had lost the initiative; and—with Prussian support—gradually Versailles was permitted to regain its badly shaken confidence. With what was more of a mob than an army, on 2 April, Palm Sunday, the Commune finally made a half-hearted move on Versailles. It was easily repulsed. One of the Guard’s most flamboyant leaders, Gustave Flourens—who had led the insurgents into the Hôtel de Ville the previous October—was captured unarmed, and despatched with a single sabre blow. All the viciousness of civil war now appeared. Two days later, the Commune’s Chief of Police and Procureur (a title with dread connotations from 1793), Raoul Rigault, ordered the taking of hostages. These were headed by no less a person than the Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy. It was a deed by which Rigault’s name would be longest remembered. During the interrogation of one of the imprisoned priests, a famous exchange ensued:

Rigault: What is your profession?

Priest: Servant of God.

Rigault: Where does your master live?

Priest: Everywhere.

Rigault (to a clerk): Take this down: X, describing himself servant of one called God, a vagrant.

Apart from being anti-religious, Red and left-wing, what really was the Commune? First of all, it was not, strictly speaking, “Communist,” having originated in 1789, when its precursor had been improvised simply to assume responsibility for administering Paris after the fall of the Bastille. With the extremists taking over in 1792 it was transformed into the Revolutionary Commune, which forced the Assembly to dethrone Louis XVI. By default, it then found itself for a time the real government of France. Led by the violent Danton, on the one hand it firmly established the first French Republic, while on the other—with almost miraculous success—it chased the foreign Royalist invaders off French soil. The recollection of these two extraordinary achievements was what induced the Reds during the siege of Paris to reach back in history for the all-powerful amulet, the Commune. As one of its more significant leaders, Eugène Varlin (who was to be killed after being taken prisoner in the semaine sanglante of May), wrote to Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary, it wasn’t a revolution they desired; they wanted only to set up a municipal council and defend the rights of Paris. In effect, the Commune was a kind of diffuse rallying point for all manner of social, political and philosophical grievances against the establishment—real or imagined. “These people have good reason for fighting,” wrote Louis Rossel, one of its few impressive military commanders: “they fight that their children may be less puny, less scrofulous, and less full of failings than themselves.”

There were the Jacobins, left-overs from the radical extremists of the Revolution of 1789, many of whom would have nothing to do with the Internationalists, or Socialists, on the Commune. Their leader was Charles Delescluze. His deeply eroded, tragic face still commanded support as well as sympathy, but at sixty-one he was prematurely worn out. There were the veterans of the barricades of 1848 and 1851—and even of 1830. There were revolutionary feminists who belonged to the anarchist faction, such as the redoubtable vierge rouge, Louise Michel, who simply wanted Paris to rise “in remembrance of its proud and heroic tradition.” “Barbarian that I am,” she declared, “I love cannon, the smell of powder, the machine-gun bullets in the air.” Like many other Communards the vierge rouge was an illegitimate, the progeny of a French châtelain and his chambermaid. Then there were history’s homeless Poles, including Dombrowski and Wroblewski, formidable fighters in the cause of freedom.

That outstanding British historian of France, Richard Cobb, was always struck by the mediocrity of the Communards: “They were, above all, des candides. Never can leadership of a political movement have been so naive, so incoherent, and so incompetent.” Except for the horrible police chief Raoul Rigault, “most were innocents who were not built for the scale of such tragic events.” The best one could say of the Commune was to define it as “a tragic irrelevance, hopeless from the start, yet basically well intentioned, the brief spring of a Paris attempting to break away.” As events were to prove, however, the Commune was overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of aims arising out of the mishmash of personalities, ideologies and interests that it embraced.

After the April débâcle, military command of the Paris Commune devolved into the hands of the forty-seven-year-old Gustave-Paul Cluseret. A true soldier of fortune, he had graduated from the elitist military college Saint-Cyr, was wounded in the Crimea, then cashiered for “irregularities” concerning army stores in Algeria. He found his way to America, enlisting as a volunteer on the side of the North during the Civil War before—startlingly—being promoted to brigadier-general. “Never,” said Cluseret on taking over his undisciplined force, “have I seen anything comparable to the anarchy of the National Guard … It was perfect of its kind.” He appointed Rossel as his chief of staff, and the thirty-five-year-old Polish nobleman Jaroslaw Dombrowski as commandant of Paris. These were to prove the Commune’s two ablest officers. But lacking was any kind of staffwork, or a proper commissariat. There seemed to be no effective chain of command: everybody gave orders, few obeyed them. And the Versaillais were closing in.

Already their guns were shelling central Paris, in a second bombardment just as indiscriminate towards the civil population as Moltke’s had been. The courageous American Minister, Elihu Washburne, who stuck out both sieges, in May recorded shell splinters striking the U.S. Legation near the Etoile “within twenty feet of where I was writing.” Ironically, it was also the most staunchly bourgeois, anti-Communard parts of Paris that bore the brunt of government gunfire. Forming a tentative plan of campaign, Thiers’s generals appreciated 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 his army would try to break in. Cluseret, summoning up a rare burst of energy, on 30 April marched out himself with 200 men to relieve Fort Issy; but, on his return to Paris, he found himself under arrest—charged with having sold himself to Versailles. Spymania was beginning to grip the city.

Cluseret’s Chief of Staff, Rossel, now replaced him. Born of a Scottish mother, at twenty-six he had been promoted to colonel of the engineers during the first siege, and was by far the most efficient soldier ever available to the Commune. Had he been in charge back in March, events might well have taken a different course. Now he ordered the rapid erection of a ring of barricades behind the city ramparts, those constructed by Thiers himself in the 1840s—a second line of defence in the event that MacMahon broke through the perimeter. But it was all too late. When he ordered a fresh attack to relieve Fort Issy, his battalion commanders evaporated. This was the last straw for Rossel, and on 8 May he sent in his resignation. For Fort Issy, having suffered over 500 dead and wounded, this also was the death-knell. Charles Delescluze, slowly dying of consumption, now took over.

Meanwhile as Thiers and his regulars looked more and more menacing, within the city the Communards—having seized the Archbishop—went from folly to irrelevant folly. Thiers’s 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 down. Its destruction now presented a final, futile gesture of contempt for the fallen Empire. (After the collapse of the Commune one of those held responsible, Gustave Courbet the painter, was condemned to pay for it, but took refuge in Switzerland.)

A CONCERT IN THE TUILERIES

On the sunny summer evening of Sunday, 21 May 1871, the self-elected Commune de Paris held a grandiose concert in the resplendent Tuileries Palace. Only the previous year it had been inhabited by the now deposed Emperor. No fewer than 1,500 musicians were engaged to take part.

As the Paris Commune enjoyed its last party, however, just outside the walls troops belonging to the legitimate government of Adolphe Thiers were waiting to enter the besieged city from Versailles. If ever there was a repeat of fiddling while Rome burned, this was it—though not even the most pessimistic apostle of gloom could possibly have foreseen that, within less than a week, much of the centre of Paris (including the historic and sumptuous Tuileries Palace itself) would lie in smoking ruins. Over 20,000 Parisians would have died in the grimmest bloodletting la ville lumière had ever known. The face of Paris, of France herself, and indeed the whole political philosophy of the West, would have been changed. Out of the grim semaine sanglante, Karl Marx would construct a cornerstone for his future doctrines, and an abyss of deep bitterness would be dug between the haves and have-nots of the nineteenth century. The savage street-by-street fighting would bequeath a legacy of a new style of warfare, and horror, to the twentieth century.

At the end of the concert that May evening, a Communard officer rose to announce, “Citizens, Monsieur Thiers promised to enter Paris yesterday. Monsieur Thiers did not enter; he will not enter. Therefore I invite you here next Sunday, here at this same place.” At that very moment, however, in a scene more reminiscent of the Middle Ages if not of Greek mythology, Thiers’s troops were actually entering the city through the Point du Jour gate, where a white flag had been spotted. Waving it was a civil engineer named Ducatel, who felt no love for the Commune and who had happened quite by chance to take his afternoon promenade near the battlements. He had been astonished to see that, around the Point du Jour, which had been heavily pounded by Thiers’s cannon over the previous few days, there was not a single defender. It was not until Monday morning that most Parisians learned the news of the Versaillais’s entry into the city. In the chic suburb of Auteuil, Dombrowski’s forces had been taken completely by surprise. Sent out on reconnaissance, Assi, an incompetent early chairman of the Commune, was seized near the Trocadéro—the first of the Communard leaders to be captured.

By dawn on the 22nd, Marshal MacMahon had already poured 70,000 troops through five gaping breaches in the walls between the Portes of Passy and Saint-Cloud. They had been welcomed warmly in this predominantly bourgeois arrondissement, and 1,500 National Guards had surrendered. A frenzy of energy now belatedly gripped the Commune. At bayonet-point reluctant passers-by were forced to assist in the construction of barricades that should have been completed weeks before. “If possible two or three trolleys, cabs or carts would form the foundation; all the apertures being filled with sand, the cubic paving stones from the road, sandbags, bricks or anything else,” reported Dr. Powell, an English physician recently arrived in Paris.

On the Left Bank, Communards fought at Montparnasse Station until their ammunition ran out; their withdrawal was covered by a courageous singleton, who kept up a steady fire into the station from a one-man stronghold inside a newspaper kiosk. At the other end of the front, the Versailles troops were advancing rapidly towards Montmartre. Near the Madeleine, another English doctor, Alan Herbert, soon found himself a fascinated spectator of the Communard defence as, with mounting ferocity, Frenchmen killed Frenchmen:

The first who fired was a grey-headed, grey-bearded old man, who was the most bloodthirsty old fellow I ever saw. He hounded the others on … it was a horrible sight. They quarrelled as to … whose turn it was to shoot and from time to time one heard such expressions as these: “Oh, that caught him!” It was just like boys rabbit-shooting. I do not believe, however, they killed many.

As already noted, Haussmann’s layout of the new Paris under Napoleon III had had as one of its objectives the provision of diagonal intersections so as to outflank barricades thrown up by revolutionaries. Now these proved highly effective for the regular troops to execute turning movements on the Communard defences. But about the only government advance on the Monday afternoon on the Right Bank had been to capture the garden of the British Embassy on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In their scattered little packets, the Communards were beginning to fight as never before—the fight of despair. As the front stabilized by nightfall on the 22nd, it lay roughly along a north–south axis, running from the Gare des Batignolles in the north, through the Gare Saint-Lazare, the British Embassy, the Palais de l’Industrie (now the Grand Palais), across the Seine to the Chamber of Deputies, and up the Boulevard des Invalides to the Gare Montparnasse. Behind it, on the western side, one-third of Paris lay solidly in government hands.