Massacre (8 page)

The Prussians had allowed Napoleon III to depart for exile in Great Britain, the third French head of state (following King Charles X after the Revolution of 1830 and King Louis-Philippe after that of 1848) to be sent packing across the English Channel.

With Prussian forces besieging Paris, the
arrondissement
‘vigilance committees’ selected ‘delegates’ to an all-Parisian Vigilance Committee, which was dominated by left-wing republicans and socialists. The Government of National Defence named new mayors for each
arrondissement
. The republican Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements also demanded participation in decisions concerning the defence of Paris. National guard units began to tighten their organisation and achieved imposing authority in the neighbourhoods from which they had been recruited.

One Parisian, Félix Belly, opened up an office hoping to attract enough women – 30,000 – to fill ten battalions, each of eight companies. These all-female defence units would be attired in black trousers and blouses and
hats with orange bands and would promise not to drink or smoke. Belly’s egalitarian units never materialised, however. He briefly needed protection from neighbours who complained about the noise, and the plan quickly evaporated when Trochu banned the new units.
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The young republican Sutter-Laumann, conscripted into the army, described the strange sense of security that existed in Paris during the siege. The army assumed that the exterior forts could keep the Prussian troops at bay, but they would soon be proven wrong. Sutter-Laumann’s baptism of fire was in a
sortie
on the route de Neuilly-sur-Marne, followed by several other episodes of fighting. The Parisian population had began to manifest ‘considerable irritation’, Sutter-Laumann noticed, as Prussian troops easily fended off the
sorties
.
²⁶

In early October, Gambetta, the minister of the interior, courageously flew over the Prussian lines in a balloon, and raised a sizable army that continued the fight against the enemy. And then incredible news arrived from Lorraine. On 27 October, Bazaine inexplicably surrendered his army of 155,000 soldiers at Metz. This virtually ended any hope of relieving the besieged Parisians and defeating the Prussians and their allies. Rumours of treason abounded, particularly when it became known that the French commander had been secretly negotiating with his Prussian counterparts.

Parisians were quick to react. On 31 October, Sutter-Laumann heard shouts of ‘Long live the Commune!’ in faubourg Saint-Denis, as Paris, hungry and freezing, held out. Angry workers charged down the hill from Belleville and other plebeian
quartiers
into central Paris and the Hôtel de Ville, goaded by members of radical clubs and vigilance committees who called for insurrection. Blanquists stormed into the Hôtel de Ville. Gustave Lefrançais, a national guard officer, jumped on a table and proclaimed the end of the Government of National Defence, just two months after it had been proclaimed. The militants announced a new government, headed by old names from the Revolution of 1848: Félix Pyat and Charles Delescluze, as well as the inveterate revolutionary Auguste Blanqui. Gustave Flourens arrived with some national guardsmen and pushed Lefrançais off centre stage, adding new members to the government. Flourens and Lefrançais hated each other and the latter simply went home. Rigault had arrived as well, and Blanqui ordered him to take men to the Prefecture of Police to secure it.

But soon the workers returned to their
quartiers
in north and north-eastern Paris, many thinking that they had succeeded in overthrowing the provisional government, and only Flourens’s group of guardsmen remained at the Hôtel de Ville. Trochu and Jules Ferry, another member
of the provisional government, took advantage of the crowd’s departure and the next day regained control of the municipal building. Blanqui barely escaped a manhunt organised by the police of the re-established Government of National Defence.
²⁷

Following the attempted insurrection on 31 October, militants organised even more political clubs, driven as much by political desires as by despair during the ongoing siege. Hunger gnawed, as soaring food prices defied the best efforts of
arrondissement
officials to deal with the situation by handing out ration cards and distributing what food could be found. Club speakers denounced hoarders and made more heated demands for a ‘revolutionary Commune’. A republican Central Committee was formed, led by prominent militants who had spoken in public meetings during the last two years of the empire. The results of a plebiscite on 3 November and municipal elections two days later may have reflected the ascendancy of moderate voices, but they did nothing to still the militancy of the left, increasingly based in working-class
quartiers
. Some
arrondissement
mayors encouraged the creation of producers’ cooperatives and vigilance committees that played a role in the allocation of food and weapons. Blanquists and other revolutionaries began to form their own clubs, firming up the relationship between militant intellectuals such as Rigault and Parisian workers.
²⁸

At the beginning of the siege, Parisian families had ridden the train around Paris’s walled circumference and picnicked near the ramparts, before they realised that Prussian shells could actually kill them. The ‘Scientific Committee’ of the Government of National Defence received many suggestions beginning early in the siege about how Parisians might extricate themselves from the siege. Ideas submitted were laughable and included letting loose ‘all the more ferocious beasts from the zoo – so that the enemy would be poisoned, asphyxiated, or devoured’. Another proposed the construction of a ‘musical
mitrailleuse
’ that would lure unsuspecting Prussian soldiers by playing Wagner and Schubert, and then mow them down; another arming the thousands of prostitutes of Paris with ‘prussic fingers’ – needles filled with poison that would be injected into the Prussians at a crucial moment during a close encounter.
²⁹

But reality set in after Bazaine’s surrender, as the siege continued and the weather worsened. The only mail going in or out of Paris was transported by sixty-five balloon flights that flew over enemy lines. Pigeons carried messages beyond the Prussian lines. By late October, all became deadly serious, as the weather became unbearably cold, the Seine froze, and food supplies dwindled. A military attempt to break out of Paris – a
‘
Grand Sortie
’ – and inflict damage on enemy forces failed miserably on 31 October, the same day of the failed political insurrection. The French lost more than 5,000 troops, twice that of their German adversaries.

Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal on 8 December: ‘People are talking only of what they eat, what they can eat, and what there is to eat … Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon.’ Signs advertising ‘canine and feline butchers’ began to appear. Pet-owners had to guard their dogs instead of the reverse. Mice and even rats began to be eaten, an American claiming that the latter tasted rather like a bird. Slices of zoo animals, such as bear, deer, antelopes, and giraffes, ended up on Parisian plates. The very elderly and very young suffered most, with small coffins being carried through the streets an increasingly common sight.
³⁰

The long siege had further isolated Paris – politically as well as economically – from the provinces, particularly the west of France. In Paris the conservative
L’Opinion nationale
on 1 January regretted that some
quartiers
had fallen into the hands of ‘
Communeux
’, a bourgeois fear that ‘evoked the Terror’ of the French Revolution. For conservatives who remained in Paris, any mention of a ‘Commune’ began to take on a terrifying aspect.
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On the morning of 6 January, Parisians awoke to see another bright red poster plastered on the buildings that read, ‘Make way for the Paris Commune!’ Rigault was among the signatories of this
affiche rouge
. The Club Favié of Belleville approved the resolution: ‘The Commune is the right of the people … it is the
levée en masse
and the punishment of traitors. The Commune, finally … is the Commune.’ In club meetings the term ‘Commune’ was still being heard in the sense of municipal rights, but now with a more progressive turn, with Paris and its teeming working-class neighbourhoods imagined as the centre of a democratic and social republic. The vigilance committee of the Eighteenth Arrondissement proclaimed that ‘the
quartiers
are the fundamental base of the democratic Republic’.
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Another military defeat heightened calls for a Commune. On 18 January, a force of 100,000 troops commanded by Trochu attempted to break out of Paris and defeat Prussian forces. The result was a catastrophe, with the loss of more than 4,000 men killed or wounded. This led to a frenzied demonstration that verged on insurrection on 22 January. Crowds shouted against Trochu. Blanquists called for the proclamation of a Commune. Blanqui himself sat in a café near the Hôtel de Ville, and from the windows of the latter, shots ordered by the moderate republican Gustave Chaudey, a friend of Rigault, greeted the demonstration. The gunfire left five dead on the pavement below, including another of Rigault’s friends,
Théophile Sapia, his blood drenching Rigault. The crowd quickly dispersed, but this latest mobilisation of the Left and the violence that followed only increased the gap between the Left and conservatives in the Government of National Defence.
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On 28 January, the Government of National Defence agreed to an armistice with the Prussians and their allies that would finally end the siege. Jules Favre signed the surrender two days later, meeting Bismarck in Versailles. Paris had held on for four months, but Prussian cannons had destroyed parts of the city and Parisians had suffered enormously. Unsurprisingly, most Parisians remained against any concessions to the Prussians, although Bismarck now allowed convoys of food to enter the capital. The terms of the armistice were harsh and outraged Parisians, among many other French people. France would owe an enormous indemnity to the new German empire, which was proclaimed, to the great humiliation of France, in the Hall of Mirrors in the Château de Versailles. Even worse, by the Treaty of Versailles signed by Thiers and Bismarck on 26 February – later formalised by the Treaty of Frankfurt on 6 May – France would lose the relatively prosperous region of Alsace and much of Lorraine to Germany.
³⁴
Léon Gambetta resigned in disgust from what was left of the Government of National Defence on 1 March. Prussian forces remained camped around Paris, with ready access to the city.

After the armistice, the French Government of National Defence, which had utterly failed in its mission of defending France, immediately called for elections for a new National Assembly which would create a new regime. Despite protests from republicans that such a short time between military capitulation and elections would favour monarchists, the elections were scheduled for early February. Republicans and socialists organised a Central Committee of the National Guard to defend the Republic, now clearly threatened by the possibility that monarchists would dominate the new National Assembly.
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They appeared ready to take matters into their own hands.

The national elections on 8 February, the results of which were somewhat of an aberration because of the exceptional circumstances and lack of preparation, returned overwhelmingly conservative, monarchist deputies to the National Assembly, which was to meet not in Paris but in Bordeaux. In sharp contrast, thirty-six of forty-three deputies elected from Paris were republicans, most who believed that France, led by Paris, should keep fighting the Prussians. Yet in Paris revolutionary candidates won only 50,000 of 329,000 votes (15.2 per cent) and accounted for only seven of
the forty-three men elected.
Le Rappel
on 8 February commented: ‘It is no longer an army you are facing … it is no longer Germany … It is more. It is monarchy, it is despotism.’
³⁶
And on cue, on 17 February 1871, the National Assembly meeting in Bordeaux voted Adolphe Thiers executive powers.

Thiers might have been identified with the Parisian bourgeoisie, but, born out of wedlock in Marseille in 1797, he remained Provençal in some ways. His father Louis, a hustler who had compromised the family status and wealth, had disappeared. With the help of a partial scholarship, Thiers entered the
lycée
in Marseille in 1809. Absorbed by liberal politics, in November 1815 he began law school in Aix-en-Provence.

When he was offered a position with
Le Constitutionnel
, a moderate royalist newspaper critical of the Bourbon monarchy, Thiers moved to Paris. A contract to write a history of the Revolution earned him money and he made useful salon contacts in the capital. Thiers was relatively small at five feet two inches, and anything but handsome. He had little patience for anyone else. The poet Lamartine recalled, ‘He speaks first, he speaks last, he doesn’t pay much attention to any reply.’ Thoroughly from the Midi, he spoke quickly and in colourful language, with a Marseillais accent leaning on the last syllable, accompanied by rapid gestures for emphasis. He had a solemn voice as orator, and seemed to an admirer ‘graced with an almost divine authority’. Ambitious and hard-working, he had a reputation for garrulousness and cutting retorts. Here perhaps was a Napoleonic complex, if there is indeed such a thing. Even a friend noted that Thiers reacted to anyone who ‘refused him blind confidence’ with outrage and verbal violence.
³⁷

The election of a National Assembly dominated by monarchists and led by Thiers, whom many people on the Left had reason not to trust, increased tension and galvanised revolutionaries in Paris. On 15 February a crowd of working-class Parisians stormed into the archbishop’s palace. Archbishop Georges Darboy asked what the people intended, telling them that, if they were eyeing the furniture, it all belonged to the state. As for the books, he pointed out that they were precious to him, but not to them. All that remained would be his life. The Parisians left him alone.
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