Massacre (7 page)

On 17 August, the Emperor named Trochu military governor-general of the Paris region. The conservative’s nomination seemed to most Parisians to be sheer provocation. Napoleon III had rejected Trochu’s idea that Bazaine’s forces return to defend Paris, believing that such a move would suggest near-defeat and could endanger his empire. Instead of attempting to defend Paris from a Prussian siege, it seemed, the Emperor was more concerned about checking civil unrest, a move that only angered an already anxious populace. Nonetheless, Trochu immediately returned to Paris with 15,000 Parisian Mobile Guards (
Gardes Mobile
), newly created companies of reservists, to ensure security in the capital.

French morale continued to falter. The arrival of Mobile Guards near the front increased tensions, in part because they had little military experience. They lounged around Châlons-sur-Marne and other camps in their shiny new uniforms, in contrast with the increasingly tattered apparel of regular soldiers. Moreover, a number of senior officers with strong ties to the empire were now in a mood for peace, in part because of concern about their careers should more defeats follow. The ongoing French military catastrophe accentuated political tensions that had increased in the late 1860s between Bonapartist loyalists and republicans.
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After sending Trochu to Paris, the Emperor then ordered MacMahon to move his army from Châlons-sur-Marne to Reims, before changing the destination to Montmédy, on the Belgian border. Napoleon III accompanied MacMahon, intending to organise a new army and march on Metz to relieve Bazaine’s besieged forces. No French troops now stood between the Prussian armies and Paris; and Trochu, upon his arrival in Paris, found that almost no preparations had been made to defend the capital.

Napoleon III’s plan was quickly derailed. On 30 August, von Moltke’s army attacked, inflicting heavy casualties and forcing the army of 100,000 men to retreat to the fortress town of Sedan, near the Belgian border. The French army was surrounded. Napoleon III was so weakened by illness that he could barely stay on his horse. On 1 September, the French army tried
to break out of Sedan, but were badly defeated by the Prussians, losing more than 17,000 killed and wounded, with another 20,000 captured. The next day, the Emperor and 100,000 of his soldiers surrendered.

As imperial armies floundered, the political truce between the empire and the republican opposition brought on by the war quickly evaporated. In Paris, revolution already appeared a distinct possibility, not least because the city’s National Guard had grown in strength during the war and had become an increasingly organised and militant republican force. As of 12 September, national guardsmen received 1.50 francs per day –
trente sous
; later 75 centimes was added for a spouse and 25 centimes for each child. Poorer families depended on this paltry sum in order to be able to purchase food. National guardsmen elected their company officers, who in turn elected battalion commanders, workers and lower middle-class men largely unknown outside of their neighbourhoods.
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The Left considered the National Guard, which had grown to 134 battalions during the Franco-Prussian War, incorporating 170,000–200,000 men, perhaps even more, as a balance against the professional army, used before the war by the imperial regime to repress strikers. The majority of the units were drawn from the ranks of working-class Parisians, although fancy
quartiers
boasted elite units. The National Guard may not have had access to many
chassepots
, which were held by the regular army, but they were armed and had cannons.

On 3 September, Empress Eugénie received a terse message from Napoleon III: ‘The army has been defeated and surrendered. I myself am a prisoner.’ Her situation was not much better. Shouts against the empire already echoed in the streets, although many Parisians were unaware of what had transpired of the defeat at Sedan. Eugénie offered provisional authority to Adolphe Thiers, who had served as prime minister from 1830 to 1840 under the Orléanist July Monarchy, but he refused, saying that there was nothing left that could be done for the empire.
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Late on 3 September, deputies of the imperial Legislative Body (Corps Législatif) meeting in the Palais Bourbon could hear shouts outside for the proclamation of a republic. In a general tumult, the moderate republican Jules Favre proclaimed the end of the empire well after midnight. Twenty-six deputies named a ‘government commission’, whose members were yet to be determined, while maintaining Trochu as governor-general of Paris.

On the morning of 4 September, a crowd moved from place de la Concorde across the Seine to Palais Bourbon. A count described the people he watched with condescension as belonging to ‘the most diverse
classes’, including women, ‘who, as always, were noteworthy for their enthusiastic, violent, and hysterical performances’.
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Sutter-Laumann, an eighteen-year-old republican, went down from Montmartre to the boulevards, where he found people in a state of noisy agitation. Not long before, he had been arrested and beaten after giving a speech in a public gathering in an old dance hall on boulevard Clichy. Now the word ‘treason!’ was in the air. Upon hearing that the Emperor had been taken prisoner at Sedan, he walked to place de la Concorde and sat on the pavement to reflect. ‘A triumphant clamour’ moved towards him, the people shouting for a republic. The young man described his emotions as reflecting ‘a triple drunkenness: that of patriotism, that of wine, and that of love’.
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At Palais Bourbon, troops and the crowd warily eyed each other. Conservative national guardsmen drawn from nearby neighbourhoods were also there, their bayonets glistening in the sun. Then, as late-arriving deputies appeared, someone opened the gates. Parisians stormed into the Palais Bourbon. There, the debate went on: Favre’s early-morning proclamation of the end of the empire competed with proposals put forth by the government and by Thiers, which called for the nomination of a ‘commission of the government and of national defence’. Léon Gambetta, a radical anti-imperial activist, proclaimed a republic. Crowds then crossed the Seine, moving towards the Hôtel de Ville, that ‘superb Louvre of revolutions’ that had come to symbolise revolutionary Paris. A number of prominent radical Jacobin republicans and socialists were already there, including the old
quarante-huitards
(forty-eighters, veterans of the 1848 Revolution).
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Jacobins were an amorphous group of nationalist republicans, inspired by the French Revolution and the role that Paris played in it, who espoused direct democracy and believed that the centralised state ought to look out for the welfare of citizens.

Later, on 4 September, Gambetta proclaimed the Republic for a second time, cheered by the throngs below. The crowd had forced the release from prison of Henri Rochefort, a strident but erratic opponent of the imperial regime. The republican crowd saluted him in triumph. Gambetta proclaimed himself minister of the interior and Favre took on the role of minister of foreign affairs. Rochefort joined the list as the only member of the left. Two days after Napoleon III’s defeat at Sedan, his Second Empire had collapsed and the Third Republic had been established.

With Prussian armies moving toward Paris, challenges plagued the new Republic from the start. Serious divisions between moderates and radicals
became immediately apparent, as Paris assumed the right to speak for the rest of the country, much of which was much more conservative than the capital. Blanquists present were particularly outraged by the extremely moderate political composition of the provisional Government of National Defence, but their voices could barely be heard in the chaos.
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Most Parisians believed that only a republic could save France. Members of the Government of National Defence, the title of which suggested political neutrality, feared another Parisian insurrection and were determined to elbow aside radical republicans and socialists. A Bonapartist wrote in his diary that ‘the internal dangers were dreaded as much as the Prussians’.
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The continued presence of Trochu as the interim president of the government was intended to reassure conservatives and moderates; he made clear his commitment to ‘God, Family and Property’. In the meantime, Paris took on a festive air, its people confident that republican unity, unlike the regime of Napoleon III and Eugénie, would ultimately defeat the Prussians.

Empress Eugénie fled Paris, leaving behind the disorder of empty jewel boxes tossed on the floor in haste, as well as an unfinished, elegantly prepared meal which ‘revolutionaries’ finished upon storming into the Tuileries.
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Fearing both Prussian troops and a republic, many other wealthy residents also took the easy way out, leaving the more prosperous western
arrondissements
for the safety of country houses. As they did, workmen replaced Paris signs announcing ‘rue du 10 décembre’, the date Louis Napoleon Bonaparte had been elected president in 1848, with ‘rue du 4 septembre’, still the name today. Hammers pounded away the ‘N’ for Napoleon on bridges and stone monuments.

The Left mobilised quickly. Raoul Rigault, a militant Blanquist who had been hiding in Versailles from the police, arrived in Paris on 5 September, the day after the proclamation of the Republic. That day, members of ‘Vigilance Committees’ that radical republicans had created in each
arrondissement
(and which constituted a Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements, organised by members of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association, which had been founded in London in 1864) demanded elections for a municipal government. Ten days later, a red poster (
affiche rouge
) repeated this demand. Rigault and other Blanquists began feverishly planning an insurrection. They rushed to Mazas prison near the Gare de Lyon, freeing Eudes and several other political prisoners. Rigault then went to the Prefecture of Police and installed himself in the office of the head of security. Rigault combed through documents in the police archives to uncover the names of those
who had worked as imperial police spies, in the hope of later punishing them. Given his obsession with the police, Rigault was the perfect person for the job. Blanqui described his ardent disciple as having ‘a vocation … He was born to be Prefect of Police.’
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France was a divided, fledgling Republic. Many on the left believed that the circumstances might provide an opportunity to establish a radical, progressive Republic. Reconstituted Parisian political clubs joined the chorus. Plebeian Paris led the way. On 6 September, Jules Vallès, a radical journalist, organised a club in Belleville. It met in the Salle Favié, one of the bastions of the public meeting movement before the war. In Montmartre in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, André Léo (Victoire Léodile Béra, a writer who took the names of her twin sons) and Nathalie Le Mel (a bookbinder, a frequent orator in the public meeting movement, and one of the founders of a consumers’ cooperative in Montmartre) were among militant women devoted to the cause of defending Paris, working-class families, and the Republic. There the
mairie
(the town hall of each
arrondissement
) provided some social services in response to letters written by working-class women asking for assistance. These letters reflected the women’s suffering as they tried to make do for themselves and their families with the help of friends and neighbours.
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In the Thirteenth Arrondissement, the Club Démocratique Socialiste announced it would study ‘all of the social and political problems related to the emancipation of work and of workers’, while remaining vigilant against any attempt to restore monarchy. The Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements held its first meeting on 11 September. It gradually evolved into the equivalent of a party of the Left, committed to the Republic and to continuing the war. Blanquists were active in the Central Committee, meeting in clubs in Montmartre and in the Sixth Arrondissement.
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It was also in September that ‘Commune’ began to be heard in the context of the ‘revolutionary nationalism’ that followed the outbreak of the war. The historical precedent was the ‘revolutionary Commune’ that took power in August 1792, when France had been besieged by foreign states. Now demands for popular sovereignty and Parisian self-government emerged as part of the definition of what a desired ‘Commune’ was meant to be, even as Prussian troops threatened the capital. For people on the political left, the Commune’s role would be expanded to include major social reforms. Thus ‘Commune’ would take on different meanings to different people, depending on their allegiances.
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On 15 September, the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements signed a wall poster calling for the arming of all Parisians
and ‘popular control’ over defence, food supply and lodgings. This was part of an explosion of demands for municipal autonomy in the early days of the Republic, a desire that had emerged in the context of heavy-handed imperial centralisation under Napoleon III. Calls for municipal autonomy were even louder given the threat of a Prussian invasion. In the tradition of the French Revolution, and most recently in the public meeting movement that had begun in 1868, republicans believed that popular organisation alone would permit the defence of Paris against enemy troops surrounding the city. Political clubs and the vigilance committees therefore put forth calls for an ‘all-out war’ (
guerre à l’outrance
) in defence of Paris. To make things a little easier for ordinary Parisians readying for war, the Government of National Defence on 30 September declared a moratorium on the payment of rents and instructed the Municipal Pawnshop (Mont-de-Piété) to return pawned items at no cost if they were worth less than 15 francs.
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The armies of Prussia and its allies laid siege to Paris from 19 September, while other enemy forces moved away from the city towards the Loire River. On 10 October, a Prussian force of 28,000 men attacked a position held by the reconstituted French Army of the Loire, its numbers swollen by a flood of volunteers. The Prussian troops carried the day and captured Orléans. The French army withdrew, grew in strength to about 70,000 men, and retook that city. However, the arrival of more Prussian troops from north-eastern France led to more French defeats in the Loire region and at Le Mans on 11–12 January 1871.
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