The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (94 page)

1
A certain degree of indifference to the suffering inflicted by the bombardment seems to have rubbed off on the British correspondents themselves. While walking with the representative of
The Times
one day, Labouchere came across a man ‘with his legs shattered, his head in the lap of a girl who was crying bitterly’. They did their best for him, but the man was evidently beyond hope. Professional instincts then asserted themselves; ‘Shall you give a description of what we have seen?’
The Times
enquired politely, ‘It was on my side of the road.’ Labouchere replied ‘No, we both saw it, and it belongs to both of us’. Finally the two journalists tossed for sole rights, and
The Times
won.

1
By comparison, the winter shelling of Leningrad in 1941–2 resulted in a total of 519 civilians killed, and 1,447 wounded.

1
On hearing Trochu had complained that, because of the mist, he could not see.his troops, Rochefort was heard to remark savagely: ‘Thank God; if he could see them he would recall them!’

1
Labouchere, however, appears to have got no closer to the actual battlefield than he had on past occasions, so the ‘scene’ was probably not observed at first hand, though it has been corroborated by other witnesses.

1
Meaning, literally, to have ‘fallen excessively’.

2
‘Soldier brave, honest, pious, null, A good cannon, but with too much recoil’.

1
The future Kaiser Wilhelm II.

1
‘Guardsman Child, foreign volunteer, has had his name removed from the company at his own request.’

1
One final comparison to the Siege of Leningrad may here be relevant; according to Léon Goure, ‘at least 1,000,000 to 1,250,000 persons, or about one-third of Leningrad’s war-time population, are unaccounted for and may be presumed to have died from the effects of starvation, cold, and illness, most of them during the winter and early spring of 1941–42’. And even during Henri IV’s three months’ siege of a far smaller Paris in 1590, 12,000 are said to have died from hunger and disease.

1
Forbes also found himself besieged by news-starved Britons, bombarding him with such questions as ‘Is Ireland quiet?’

1
As it turned out, Thiers was elected by twenty-six different constituencies, Gambetta by ten.

1
The
département
of the Seine.

1
Although Italian, Garibaldi qualified for election in that he had been born in the former Savoyard territory of Nice; similarly, Richard Wallace, as another French-born foreigner, had also wished to stand for the Assembly, and resented the implied slur when—after all his charitable work during the Siege—he could not gain nomination.

1
What the proletariat thought of Thiers was depicted by a woman who shouted at him (according to Maxime du Camp), ‘with a terrible Bordeaux accent: “Monsieur Thiers, you are a man of talent, you have written books, you have a brilliant wit; but you are a scoundrel [
canaille
] because you are a bourgeois and you have no love for the people…”’.

2
‘A first-class funeral’.

1
£200 million, or $ 1,000 million.

1
Although the Assembly was to move to Versailles, most of the Government Ministries were still in Paris, which they had never left.

1
‘Blow upon blow, loss upon loss, Ah! The ordeal is redoubled.’

1
Blanc was to play no part in the Commune.

1
The Comité Central of the National Guard, formed only after the siege, should not be confused with the Comité Central of the Twenty
Arrondissements
, the essentially political grouping of the extreme Left formed the previous September.

1
She seems to have exaggerated the noise of rifle-fire.

1
Garibaldi, having had enough of French internal wrangles, wisely declined the invitation.

1
Cassell’s History of the Franco-German War.

2
To avoid confusion, it should perhaps be recalled here that the term ‘Red’ was applied to left-wing revolutionaries long before Marxist ‘Communism’ made its first appearance.

1
Georges Laronze,
Histoire de la Commune de 1871 d’après des documents et des souvenirs inédits
.

1
At the same time Clemenceau, who had not been elected to the Commune, resigned from the Assembly at Versailles in protest against the pusillanimity of its conciliation attempts.

1
Under the Empire and its high cost of living, the pawnshops—the
monts-de-piété
—had become an inherent factor in the lives of the Paris poor; many of whom were regularly obliged to pawn their mattresses to provide food. During the Siege, the poor had fallen more and more into the pawnbrokers’ clutches, pledging most of their few precious belongings at interest rates of 9½ per cent.

1
According to another (Versailles) account, Vinoy asked Duval: ‘If I were your prisoner, what would you do to me?’ ‘I would have you shot’ ‘Good. You have just passed your own sentence.’

1
The bodies of Duval and Flourens had not been recovered.

1
In his excellent book,
The War against Paris 1871
(London 1981), Robert Tombs (who seemed to regard Thiers’ success as a much finer run thing than historians had previously thought) describes well the delicate state of health of the Versailles Army, quoting a
chasseur
as having declared at the end of March: ‘If they make me march against the Parisians, I shall march… but in no case will I fire on them, and every other member of the army must do the same.’ On the other hand, if the Communards attacked, many soldiers were reported as having said ‘they would defend themselves… but they would not march on Paris’ [Tombs, pp. 69–70, 144]. But the Fédéré attack of 3rd April had changed all that. However, as Tombs goes on to point out, ‘Even in the middle of the fighting, the generals could never be sure of the reactions of their men.’ There was always the fear that they might be won over by the Communards, even after the main assault on Paris had begun in May.

1
In England Frederic Harrison, the Positivist, was among the few non-Marxists to sympathize with the Commune, and even the International leaders were badly divided.

1
The whole question of badges of rank raises some interesting comparisons with the Russian Revolution of October 1917, where epaulets were at first banned as a hangover from Tsarist days, and then reintroduced.

1
According to his descendant, Miss Nancy Mitford, he also reckoned ‘that no doubt the fellows… were glad to be attended to by a gentleman!’

1
The Versailles Commander, Colonel Leperche, had apparently called on Issy to surrender; but, on receiving no reply from the empty fort, took this for a refusal, and therefore failed to take advantage of the garrison’s withdrawal.

1
The
Journal Officiel
revealed that, out of a total National Guard strength of 190,425 on May 3rd, there were no less than 27,774 absentees, of whom 14,335 were absent without permission.

1
Karl Marx, still minutely studying every move from London, wrote a warning letter in May to the two Internationalist leaders, Varlin and Frankel in which he remarked: ‘The Commune seems to lose too much time in trifling affairs and personal quarrels…. None of this would matter, if you had the time to recover the time already lost….’

1
One outside observer, Washburne—his feelings undoubtedly exacerbated by the proximity of events—observed no diplomatic moderation when describing Rigault; he was ‘… one of the most hideous figures in all history… consumed by the most deadly hatred of society and the most intense thirst for blood. All his associate assassins bowed before his despotic will….’

2
There were also certain specific economic grievances against the Church; for instance, more than half of the women working in industry in Paris were employed as seamstresses of one kind or another, while the convents also turned out exquisite work which could often undercut that produced by ‘lay’ workers by as much as 25 per cent.

1
Marx commented cynically: ‘The priests were sent back to the recess of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the Apostles.’

2
The Mazas prison.

1
Roughly midway.

1
As far as artistic taste was concerned, the values of the Proudhonist Courbet were simple; he once declared: ‘I have no master; my master is myself. There is not, and never has been, any painter other than myself.’

1
His diplomatic status enabling him to pass through the lines with little hindrance.

1
Wickham Hoffman estimated that 300,000 left during the first month alone.

1
‘They’re the rabble, Ah well! I’m one of them!’

1
Possibly the lieutenant referred to above?

1
Karl Marx, pleading justification on behalf of the Commune in
The Civil War in France
, pointed to the British burning of Washington during the War of 1812; ‘To be burned down has always been the inevitable fate of buildings in the front of battle of all the regular armies of the world…. The Commune used fire strictly as a means of defence.’

1
This fragment of electric cable was in fact sent to the author for inspection by Mrs. W. M. Denham, into whose possession it had passed via Noble’s daughter, together with his notebooks.

1
His predecessor, Mgr. Affre, was killed at the barricades in 1848 when attempting to mediate.

1
The Place du Château d’Eau is now the Place de la République.

1
Beyond the city walls, at Vincennes, a Communard detachment did in fact hold out inside the fortress until Monday (May 29th). On its surrender nine out of its twenty-four officers were promptly shot, on what is one of France’s best-known execution-grounds, close to the spot where the Duc d’Enghien was executed in 1804, and Mata Hari in 1917.

1
By comparison, the total executions carried out under the Commune numbered under 500.

1
Over 40,000 Communards still remained to be tried, though of these only 23 more would actually be executed.

2
Just over 2,500, executed by the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal.

3
In
The War against Paris
, [pp. 107–11, 187] Robert Tombs offers three useful explanations for this savage metamorphosis: first of all the Army saw itself as representing order against the mounting anarchy of the Commune. Predominantly bourgeois, the officers of 1871 feared and hated the Communards’ seizure or destruction of private property, culminating in the wilful conflagration of large parts of Paris during the
semaine sanglante
. Secondly, it represented the nation against faction. Thirdly, it held itself to be the champion of liberty against tyranny.

1
In Berlin, just two weeks earlier, a triumphal march had been held at the Brandenburger Tor, when the old Emperor had received the keys of the city from a deputation of white-clad virgins—remarking to his young grandson, the future Wilhelm II, ‘This is a day you will never forget.’

1
It was not in fact completed until 1919.

2
Old Beslay, whose compliance with the Marquis de Ploeuc had saved the Bank of France from depredation by the Commune, was never brought to trial, but was quietly led across into Switzerland by a grateful Government.

1
One immediate legacy of the nightmare of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune was to persuade France’s political leaders that henceforth the Army would have to be treated with the utmost tender loving care. ‘The army had been brought into politics by civil war,’ Dr. Tombs writes of its aftermath [Tombs, op cit, p. 200]: The extreme Right saw it as a bulwark of society… but even with MacMahon as President, the army made no move to stem the tide of Left-wing advance, however much its officers would have liked to try. The lesson of March 18th seems to have been learnt: that the cohesion of the army itself was put at risk by involvement in internal disputes… The army had won a military victory in 1871, but had been forced to realise the limits of military victory. This was to apply for many years to come.