The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (14 page)

Yet, however grave its deficiencies, the line of forts filled out a circumference of nearly forty miles; which meant that any investing army would be required to occupy a front of approximately fifty miles for a siege to be watertight, and this might require every spare soldier of even Moltke’s vast army. Meanwhile, to make up for the valuable time lost in August when his every endeavour as Governor had been thwarted by Palikao, Trochu set to work energetically to supplement the defences. Twelve thousand labourers were employed digging improvised earthworks in the weak places and laying electrically-fired landmines; the catacombs were sealed, and elaborate barrages
placed across the Seine; the beautiful trees in the Bois were felled to make barricades and provide fuel; and Bessy Lowndes, an Englishwoman living out at St.-Cloud, watched while a huge gun was installed in the former Emperor’s park there. There were inevitable delays owing to legal wrangles over land appropriation, and personal tragedies as houses on the outskirts of Paris were demolished to improve fields of fire. There was the sad story of M. Flan, a famous vaudeville artist of the Second Empire, who had retired with his magnificent library to Neuilly. Now the engineers came to tell him that his house was to be demolished that same evening; ‘But it will take at least a week to shift my library’—‘So much the worse for your
bibliothèque
!’ That night the poor man took a room in a neighbouring hotel and was found dead of a broken heart in the morning. As work progressed, Goncourt paid a visit to the interior circular road running behind the ramparts and noted ‘the lively animation and grandiose movement of the National Defence’:

Throughout the length of the road, the manufacture of fascines, gabions, sand-bags, and in the trenches the digging of powder magazines and petroleum stores. On the paving of the former customs barracks, the dully echoing thud of cannon-balls tumbling off waggons. Above, on the ramparts, gunnery practice by civilians; below, musketry by the National Guard. The passage of silent groups of workers; the passage of the blue, black and white blouses of the
Mobiles
; and in a kind of grassy canal where the railway runs, the flashing-past of trains with only their superstructures visible, red with military trousers, stripes, epaulets and caps of this completely martial population, improvised in the midst of the bourgeois population. And amid all this, everywhere the uncontrolled scurrying-about of little open carriages, displaying slightly infatuated feminine curiosity.

For a visit to the fortifications was rapidly replacing a drive in the Bois as the smart Parisian’s favourite Sunday-afternoon entertainment.

In the centre of Paris, the Tuileries stables and gardens had been turned into a vast artillery park, and with grim foresight common graves were dug in the wasteland at Montmartre to prevent the possible spread of disease. As it was discovered that there were only two hundred rounds per heavy gun, Dorian, the vigorous new Minister of Works, ordered the rapid transformation of Paris factories into munitions plants and cannon foundries. Trainloads of treasures from the Louvre were shipped off to Brest (Goncourt had watched while a weeping functionary crated up
La Belle Jardinière
, ‘as if in front of a dead sweetheart when she is being nailed into her coffin’), and the empty galleries became another arsenal. The
cocottes
and other members of the profession that had grown so inflated under the
Second Empire were chased off the boulevards and into workshops making uniforms. The partially completed new opera-house was turned into a military depot, the Gare du Nord became host to a flour-mill, and most of the theatres (closed in national mourning after Sedan) became hospitals, as did other such large buildings as the Luxembourg, the Palais Royal, the Palais de l’Industrie, and the Grand Hôtel. At the Bourse were billeted staff officers of the National Guard. On the top of the highest buildings, including the Arc de Triomphe, were installed semaphore stations; many of these were later taken over by the Jesuits, doubtless because of the legendary excellence of their grapevine communications.

Of all the factors confronting a city about to stand siege none is obviously more fundamental than the state of its provisions. How long would Paris be able to feed its vast population? It was a question the new Government asked itself daily. Fortunately the most efficient of Palikao’s late Government, Clément Duvernois, had as Minister of Commerce shown great initiative in amassing foodstuffs inside the city. The Bois de Boulogne had been transformed into an incongruously bucolic scene; ‘As far as ever the eye can reach,’ wrote the
Manchester Guardian’s
Paris correspondent, ‘over every open space, down the long, long avenue all the way to Longchamp itself, nothing but sheep, sheep, sheep! The South Downs themselves could not exhibit such a sea of wool.’ In the Bois alone, there totalled some 250,000 sheep, as well as 40,000 oxen, and there were even animals grazing in the smaller city squares. But by one grave oversight, Duvernois had overlooked the need for milch cows, which was later to cause terrible suffering among the children. On the outskirts of Paris Goncourt watched a cavalcade of market-gardeners, bringing into Paris all that ‘must not be left for the enemy, carts of cabbages, carts of pumpkins, carts of leeks….’ In the forest around Paris murderous public hunts were carried out to prevent any game falling into Prussian hands. Unfortunately the sight of all the beasts in the squares and groaning granaries encouraged Parisians in the belief that the city was more than well provided for, and therefore few thought of accumulating more than modest private stocks of food. The poor, in any case, could not afford to.

The Government itself had little idea just how much food it had in stock, or indeed how many mouths there were to feed. Vaguely it calculated there was enough flour and grain to last for eighty days and fuel for about the same time; and this in itself was assumed to be comfortably in excess of what might be required, on the Micawberish reckoning that before little more than a month was up Paris would be rescued by the provinces she had abandoned, or by some more or less divine form of intervention. Certainly no one imagined that there
would be a siege lasting well over four months. Thus, although a rudimentary system of price controls was established, there was no idea of rationing. The actual control of supplies lay in the hands of the mayors of the twenty different
arrondissements
, which resulted in some grave inequalities. Eventually, and inevitably, high prices and interminable queues became the only effective method of rationing. From the very first this danger had been loudly predicted by Blanqui and the Socialist factions, and as early as September 14th the Central Committee of Workers had urged the Government to have all food expropriated and equitably distributed. Later that month, Labouchere, writing as the ‘Besieged Resident’ of the
Daily News
, wrote gaily to his paper ‘I presume if the siege lasts long enough, dogs, rats and cats will be terrified’; little did he know that he would soon be eating more than just his words.
¹

It was here that the Government of National Defence made one of of its worst miscalculations. No effort was made to get useless mouths out of the city; and indeed it was hardly reckoned that any effort would be needed. The herdsmen driving their beasts into the city were confronted daily with a solid mass of impatient coaches leaving it; and there were fearful scenes of chaos at all the railway stations, which—as departing Britons discovered to their sorrow—already refused to accept any luggage. Many foreigners and most of the
corps diplomatique
had pulled out; including Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador (which was to be a source of great bitterness to the remaining British community), but with the important exception of the American Minister, Mr. E. B. Washburne. Edwin Child’s employer, M. Louppe, hastened off to Geneva with most of his jewels, but Child himself, although he had got his passport ready, finally decided to stay and see the fun. There were many Frenchmen who with their passion for excitement shared his feeings, and ‘
Il faut être là
’ became an impulsive slogan.

The trains seemed to bring people in as fast as they took them out. ‘One might have thought Paris was the only safe place upon earth’, an English commercial traveller called Brown wrote to his wife in England; ‘thousands were crowding in all directions towards the barriers…. Men, women and children of all classes were carrying, wheeling or dragging some kind of vehicle, and the richer ones
employed carts of every description from the costermonger to the brougham.’ There was an additional factor which was not without its impact upon the thrifty Parisians; the Government ordained a ‘fine’ on any resident leaving the city, proportional to their rents.

As Lord Lyons left, so young Tommy Bowles, who had been sailing on a private yacht in the Solent when the revolution took place, arrived to constitute himself
de facto
Special Correspondent of the
Morning Post
. Among his journalist colleagues hastening to Paris, Bowles was preceded by Henry Labouchere, who was to gain fame as the ‘Besieged Resident’ of the
Daily News
. An Englishman with Huguenot ancestry, ‘Labby’ was something of a character. Aged thirty-nine at the time of the siege, in his youth he had once joined a Mexican circus in pursuit of a lady acrobat. Lover, wit, cynic, stage manager, and diplomat; he had filled all these roles, and had then been elected to Parliament in 1865, where—as a radical and a republican—he was to be apostrophized by Queen Victoria as ‘that viper Labouchere!’ Inheriting £250,000 at approximately the same time as he lost his seat, Labouchere bought a quarter share in the
Daily News
and promptly appointed himself to Paris; an appointment which was to treble the paper’s circulation. During the September 4th ‘Revolution’ he had terrified his companion and fellow-radical, Sir Charles Dilke, by ‘making speeches to the crowd in various characters…’, causing Dilke to fear they would both be seized as Prussian spies. Thick and fast flowed other curious British and Americans, into the city, so that enterprising estate agents were soon circulating advertisements that read; ‘Notice for the benefit of English gentlemen wishing to attend the Siege of Paris. Comfortable apartments, completely shell-proof; rooms in the basement for impressionable persons.’ Thus, with the influx of foreigners, refugees, outsiders, and—above all—the armed forces, instead of having 1,500,000 inhabitants to feed as the Government estimated, there were in fact considerably over 2,000,000.

By mid-September a truly remarkable transformation had occurred in Paris. As a Frenchman, Louis Péguret, wrote to his mother in the provinces, ‘If you saw Paris today, you would be astonished. It’s no longer a city, it’s a fortress, and its squares are nothing more than parade-grounds. Everything is cluttered up with soldiers and
Mobiles
carrying out manœuvres in rivalry against each other.’ The Champ-de-Mars was a seething mass of troops, among whom Edmond Goncourt ironically spotted pedlars selling paper and pencils for them to write out their wills. Observing the workers out at St.-Denis, the ubiquitous Goncourt noted that ‘everybody who eats or drinks outside the
cabarets
holds a rifle between his knees’, and grocers had taken to
selling sugar clad in National Guard képis. There was indeed ‘a smell of saltpetre in the air’.

This new-found martial enthusiasm had its unpleasant side: a mounting obsession for uncovering Prussian ‘spies’. A M. Patte wrote to a friend in England; ‘We are surrounded by spies. The other day… we arrested two German spies, disguised one in Garde Mobile and the other in woman [
sic
]; under the dress he had a loaded pistol and a German letter.’ Nobody—least of all anyone with a foreign accent or any eccentricity of dress—was safe. Among the first foreigners to be arrested was young Tommy Bowles of the
Morning Post
, as a suspected ‘Uhlan’, and soon after his release he watched a ‘very handsome and elegantly dressed lady’ picked up wearing mens’ clothes, and claiming that she had ‘been in the artillery’. She too was released when her case was discovered to have a simple, romantic explanation to it. Another Englishman saw a woman dragged off triumphantly by the National Guard, amid exclamations of ‘It is Madame de Bismarck!’, and from this episode he concluded that ‘it was positively dangerous for any flat-breasted female of more than the ordinary height, and with the suspicion of down on her upper lip, to venture on the streets.’ A Philadelphian and his daughter were seized while sketching in the Bois, and the Anglo-American school attended by one of Minister Washburne’s sons was ransacked by troops after an innocent pigeon was reported to have flown out of its garden and over the ramparts. After the Germans had arrived at the gates, a spinster’s garret was broken into because people in the street mistook the flapping of her scarlet and green macaw for some kind of semaphore signalling to the Germans, and as the Siege wore on such episodes became commonplace.

Often the ‘spy-mania’ led to situations that were far from comic. On September 16th, eighty-year-old Marshal Vaillant, the head of the fortifications committee, was manhandled by a mob which claimed he had been spying out the defences, and came within an inch of being shot out of hand. According to Bowles, one wretched drain-worker was actually ‘stalked by three hundred National Guards and… blown to pieces the next time he put his head out of his sewer’. Suspicions were whipped up further by the Paris Press, with even
Le Figaro
alleging that a consignment of French uniforms had been intercepted on its way to the King of Prussia’s headquarters; the most rational of men became susceptible, and Goncourt himself admitted that one day as he passed the shuttered mansion of La Païva he wondered ‘if this has not been a great bureau of Prussian espionage in Paris’. For the foreign community in particular things became so dangerous that one Englishman at least was to be found
advertising in the press, ‘Mr. Crummles is not a Prussian, having been born at Chelsea’. Eventually, special passports were issued; nevertheless, by the end of the Siege one English doctor could claim he had been arrested no less than forty-two times.