The World That Never Was (15 page)

Midnight was close to striking when the
Ville d’Orléans
took off into a cold fog, carrying essential information to the Loire army. Not until daybreak did the crashing waves of the North Sea down below alert its crew to their navigational error. Having cast all excess weight overboard, including the mailbags, they finally made land in Norway after a record-shattering journey of more than 1,000 miles, tumbling into thick snow when their basket became entangled in pine trees. Amazingly, the key message concerning the movements of the two armies, from inside and outside Paris, was caught in fishermen’s nets and finally forwarded to Tours, only to arrive too late. Without the key information, it had been impossible to coordinate the French attack and the Army of the Loire were forced back in disarray, while the 100,000 troops who crossed a pontoon bridge over the River Marne from Paris were decimated when they encountered the strongest sector of the encircling Prussian front line.

The North German Confederation had demonstrated to the dissenting
southern states that it could hold together far beyond the first thrilling rush of war, and attention now returned to preparations for the official unification of the German Empire.

Short of a humiliating surrender, the Government of National Defence had no more answers to offer, nor many remaining concessions to pacify the radicals. As the frosts of a harsh winter ate into the resolve of those in the capital, and even the middle-class population was reduced to eating rats or, for the lucky few, exotic cuts from the animals in the zoological garden, the fault lines in Parisian society widened. In the revolutionary clubs, growing crowds gathered night after night to listen to Rochefort or Flourens press for ever greater freedoms for the people. Half starved and frozen, grief-stricken for the infants who had died on a diet of cloudy water masquerading as milk, those attending warmed themselves with the wine that was the only consumable which Paris had left in abundance, and swore that all their suffering should not be in vain. Meanwhile the Montmartre women’s group, chaired by the revolutionary virago Louise Michel, thrashed out details of long-mooted social projects that made the prospect of a better world seem tantalisingly close to souls in desperate need of some source of hope.

Then, on 27 December, the city was suddenly shaken by the onset of a thunderous bombardment. From the Châtillon Heights, the newest Krupps cannon,
Grande Valérie
, rained down shells of an unprecedented calibre, each weighing 119 pounds. One by one, the outer ring of forts – Issy, Vanves, Montrouge – were pounded into submission, and the capital braced itself for a direct onslaught. General Moltke recorded the shift in tactics in chillingly abstract terms: ‘An elevation of thirty degrees,’ he observed, ‘by a peculiar contrivance, sent the shot into the heart of the city.’ The first shell to land smashed into the home of Madame Montgolfier, whose father and uncle had made the pioneering balloon flights that had so thrilled rational France in the years before the Revolution of the previous century; before long, the Panthéon and Salpêtrière hospital, the pride of Paris, were targeted directly. Placards appeared across the city: ‘Make way for the people! Make way for the Commune!’

Two weeks into the bombardment, King Wilhelm of Prussia was crowned kaiser of a united Germany in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Military dress boots clattered across the polished floors under the protective eye of Colonel Stieber, who had secured the palace against a mass assassination attempt by French partisans to avenge the grotesque affront. In fact, the patriots of Paris were too busy with other matters.
Returning to his residence that evening, the secret councillor received gratifying news from his spies. Even as the new Germany celebrated its victory, the first shots had been exchanged between the troops of the regular army and the radical battalions of the National Guard during a confrontation around the Hôtel de Ville. By the end of the month an armistice was agreed, subject only to ratification by a new National Assembly.

Elected to the Assembly, Elisée Reclus was clear, if hopelessly idealistic, about his duty: ‘Orléanists, legitimists, simple patriotic bourgeois have said to us: dream now, guide us, triumph for us, and we shall see what happens! Let us accept the dream, and if we carry out our mandate, if we save France, as we are asked to do, then the republic will be secured and we shall have the pleasure of beginning for our children an era of progress, justice, and well-being.’ Arriving in Bordeaux, where the Assembly was to sit, the scales fell rapidly from his eyes as the ‘morally perilous’ nature of the venture on which he had embarked revealed itself. Elected by the whole of France, the body was republican in name only, and overwhelmingly monarchist, Catholic and conservative in complexion; less than a fifth of the 768 delegates were genuine republicans, barely one in forty a radical. By choosing as its leader the seventy-three-year-old Adolphe Thiers, the strongest proponent of the armistice in the Government of National Defence, the Assembly signalled its intolerance of anyone who advocated continued resistance.

Despite Rochefort’s presence on the Assembly’s executive, even his attempts to plead for the protection of ‘a young and tottering republic against the clerical element that menaced it’ were barracked into inaudibility. Reacting to near certain defeat by developing a case of almost asphyxiating erysipelas, his resignation this time was prompt, followed by an extended rest cure in the Atlantic resort of Arcachon. Gambetta opted to spend his conveniently timed convalescence in Spain.

That the stresses of the previous months should have made both ill is hardly surprising, but their absence was also politic, allowing them to remain temporarily above the fray as Paris and metropolitan France reacted with inevitable anger to the Assembly’s perceived betrayal of the national interest. Even the normally buoyant Reclus struggled to disguise his despondency. ‘Now that everything is lost,’ he wrote to Nadar, ‘we must begin life over again, as though, waking from a 1,000-year sleep, we realise that everything is there for us to gain: homeland, liberty, dignity, honour …’ A similar sense of determination led his more extreme associates in Paris, and those of Rochefort, to start preparing in earnest for a revolutionary year zero.

When the German army marched through the capital on its victory parade, it can have derived little pleasure from the experience. Crowds of Parisians watched its progress in lowering silence, while any innkeepers who might have thought to sell the enemy a drink were deterred by the threat of a beating. Nevertheless, the guerrilla attacks that Stieber feared had failed to materialise: having dragged the hundreds of cannon, bought for their use by public subscription, to the safety of the Red districts, the National Guard were keeping their powder dry. And whilst great pyres were lit to fumigate the place de l’Etoile after the Germans had passed through, they did nothing to dispel the germs of civil war.

2
Communards

Paris, 1871

Louise Michel wiled away the early hours of 18 March 1871 at the sentry post on the rue des Rosiers in Montmartre, drinking coffee with the National Guardsmen stationed there. A teacher by profession, with her own school in the rue Oudot that she ran on progressive principles, her political views had made her an increasingly prominent feature of the radical landscape of Paris. As comfortable now among political extremists and citizen soldiers as in the classroom, she rarely missed the chance to preach the social revolution. This time, though, it may have been the prospect of the funeral later in the day for Victor Hugo’s son that kept her awake.

The months of the siege had provided ample cause for mourning, but the thirty-six-year-old Michel’s deep affection for the great writer and republican lent her grief that day a special poignancy, for since she and Hugo had first met twenty years earlier, they had developed an intimacy that transcended his usual philandering habits. The ‘N’ in Hugo’s diaries beside her name suggests that they had, at least, been naked together, but for Michel, their relationship was above all a meeting of poetic souls. To the novelist she was his ‘Enjolras’, so named after the heroic student revolutionary in
Les Misérables
, and perhaps in teasing reference to her strong and somewhat masculine features; she addressed him simply as ‘Master’. Only he, she felt, could truly appreciate her ‘exalted temperament’ and the mystical imaginings that filled her mind and her verse: of ravening wolves, boiling oceans, revolution and martyrdom.

As well as being confidant and mentor, Hugo was also the dependable protector that she desperately needed, as the illegitimate daughter of the heir to a family of provincial gentry now making a name for herself as one of the most outspoken radicals in Paris. For Michel had an uncanny ability to place herself at the centre of historic events, where the danger
was greatest. She had been among those embraced by Jules Favre, her old night-school instructor, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville after the proclamation of the republic the previous September; when she had returned there in January, rifle in hand, to join in the firefight between the Breton army regulars defending the building and Flourens’ brigade of insurrectionary sharpshooters, it had taken Hugo’s intervention to secure her release from custody. The escapade had been the most violent manifestation to date of the rumbling resistance of radical Paris to the authority of the National Assembly, and had demonstrated a seriousness of intent that the government could not afford to ignore. Now Michel was about to find herself caught up in the decisive showdown.

It was three o’clock in the morning when the soldiers of the 88th regiment of the line, loyal to the Assembly, marched up the winding road towards Montmartre, their tramp muffled by ground left soft after a recent fall of snow. A Guardsman named Turpin, taking his turn on sentry duty, peered through the thick fog, before challenging their approach. Suddenly, a crack of gunfire rang out in the dark and he slumped to the ground. Rushing to assist the wounded man, with a characteristic disregard for her own safety, Michel was instantly apprehended by the troops of General Lecomte.

One of fourteen operations launched simultaneously across the city under cover of night, Lecomte’s objective was the artillery park on the Buttes Chaumont, where the National Guard had, following the peace agreement with Germany, secured half of the cannon bought by public subscription during the siege. While dragging them to safety, the Guardsmen had sung the ‘Marseillaise’, and the guns, pointing towards Versailles, where the Assembly was now based, represented a practical symbol of their independence. Their confiscation would deliver a crippling blow to the National Guard, whose shadowy central committee had in recent weeks begun to assert itself as an alternative power in the city. In Michel’s eyes, Lecomte’s mission exposed the government’s wholehearted contempt for the disproportionate sacrifice that the capital’s poor had endured in the national cause, but more than that its timing, on the day of the funeral of Hugo’s son, struck her as a deep personal affront. For it was under Hugo’s patronage that the campaign to buy the cannon had been conducted.

Intoxicated with indignation, hands bloody from her attempts to staunch Turpin’s wound, by her own account Michel eluded her captors and made a run for it. Down the cobbled streets of Montmartre to raise the alarm she careered, past the creaking windmills that crowded the
upper slopes of the hill. The denizens of Montmartre were slow to wake despite the vehemence of her cries and not until almost eight o’clock did a sizeable crowd gather, by which time the captured guns should have been long gone. In fact, they were still there, an administrative oversight having delayed the arrival of the horse-drawn limbers needed to carry the artillery away.

From atop the Buttes, the beat of the tocsins could be heard in the streets below; ‘All that miserable sound,’ Louise Michel marvelled, ‘produced by a pair of sinewy wrists clutching a pair of fragile sticks.’ Then up the hill the mob surged, women in the lead, draping themselves over the cannon, challenging the soldiers of the 88th to open fire. A tense stand-off ensued, during which the mayor of Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau, a trained doctor, pleaded with Lecomte to be allowed to move Turpin to his surgery for treatment. The general refused. With discipline among his tired and hungry men rapidly breaking down, as they accepted breakfast from motherly hands and stronger refreshment from the National Guard, it was a fatal mistake. In an attempt to assert order, Lecomte ordered his men to stand clear and fire. No one moved. Fix bayonets! For a moment, nothing; then his own soldiers turned on the general, hauling him from his horse. Amidst scenes of jubilation, rifle butts were tossed skywards and fraternisation turned to desertion. From the big guns themselves, a salvo of three blanks was fired, and the scenes at the Buttes were repeated at the smaller artillery compounds across the city.

After facing the famously loyal Breton soldiers holed up inside the Hôtel de Ville two months earlier, Michel had asserted her faith that ‘One day you’ll join us, you brigands, for you can’t be bought.’ For a blissful moment that March morning it seemed that the dreamed-of day had at last arrived, and that a peaceful revolution might be under way. Such hopes barely lasted into the afternoon, as festering resentments were given murderous vent, and the tensions between radicalism and reaction that had long troubled French political life finally revealed themselves in a mutual desire for outright confrontation to settle matters once and for all.

The first violence occurred where the debacle of the guns had itself begun, in Montmartre. Clemenceau had instructed that General Lecomte should be taken, for his own protection, to the Chateau-Rouge dance hall, one of the bohemian pleasure palaces for which the area was famous. Overruling him, Théophile Ferré, the young deputy mayor, ordered Lecomte’s transfer back to the guardhouse in the rue des Rosiers. Barely five feet tall, Ferré’s bespectacled air of fastidiousness belied a ruthless streak echoing that of the Jacobins who had perpetrated the Terror in 1793,
when ideological purity had been pursued by means of the guillotine. Though he was sixteen years her junior, Louise Michel was infatuated with him. Entering the spirit of the wild carnival breaking out around her, she joined the horde that followed Lecomte’s journey back, only to be met, unexpectedly, by a second mob arriving from place Pigalle with General Clement Thomas, the loathed ex-chief of the National Guard, as its captive.