The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (15 page)

There was no mistaking the miraculous extent to which Trochu seemed to have repaired the morale of the shattered Army, and by September 13th he felt he was able to risk a mass military parade of the troops in hand. Stretching all the way from the Bastille to the Étoile, it struck one of Trochu’s staff officers, Captain d’Hérisson, as ‘the finest review I have ever seen’. In the background there were distant rumbles as the last Seine bridges were blown up, but there was comic relief when an elderly admiral with long white whiskers was carried out of sight by a bolting horse. Trochu took the salute astride a magnificent steed, which did not bolt; the drums beat and the bugles sounded, and there were rousing and reassuring shouts of ‘Long live Trochu!’ that were heartily echoed by the civil population. Certainly there had been nothing quite like it since that famous Longchamp parade held by Louis-Napoleon for the Tsar and the King of Prussia in 1867. The following day Trochu exhorted the Paris National Guard to ‘be completely confident in the knowledge that the
enceinte
of Paris, defended by the resolute effort of public spirit, and by three hundred thousand rifles, is unapproachable’. An eminent British banker in Paris who watched the review, Edward Blount, felt so reassured by what he had seen that he wrote to a friend in London expressing the conviction that the French ‘will not accept dishonourable conditions—I mean by this territory or ships. They will rather fight to the end, and, when Paris is lost, retreat to the last fortress left in France’. Tommy Bowles was already full of praise for Trochu, thought that Paris ‘will fight and fight well’, and sharply criticized the English armchair critics who didn’t agree. An Englishwoman on her last trip to Paris came away feeling more respect for the Parisians than hitherto, and thinking that they would not easily give in; while Mr. Brown wrote his wife on the day of the review ‘If it ever comes to fighting (
which I do not think it will
), I do not think Paris will fall.’ Of the British community in Paris, one of its most distinguished members, Dr. Alan Herbert, was in something of a minority when he wrote to his brother, the Earl of Carnarvon, ‘I believe the Parisians will not allow a regular siege. The general impression is that it is not possible to support one….’ and again the following day ‘I do not believe that there will be any serious defence of Paris….’, predicting (on more certain ground) that after the war ‘we shall very likely have a revolution more or less bloody’. In England,
The Times
, which had had its nose badly put out of joint by
the unexpected performance of ‘Pumpernickel’, had now switched to supercilious forecasts of how long the ‘city of luxury and pleasure’ could take it.

As the Prussians drew closer, one thing was fairly apparent; there had seldom been a more powerfully armed fortress than Paris, or one apparently so strongly defended. The big question, and one which nobody seemed to bother to ask at the moment, was just how, and with what long-term strategy, the new leaders were going to use these considerable assets. The commissars of Leningrad in 1941 had had a generation of absolute power and a ready-formed ruthless apparatus upon which to base their conduct of affairs, but the Government of National Defence could claim no such advantage. Its men had spent a lifetime in hopeless and helpless opposition; they had been swept into power before being able to formulate any united policy, or forward strategy; and by conviction they were kindly-minded liberals, not revolutionary Dantons. Fundamentally theirs was a weak position in that they had no other title to be in power than the acclaim of the Paris mob. The Government’s enemies to the Left were to taunt it constantly that it regarded its chief function as being to maintain order, and thus the ‘bourgeois’
status quo
, as much as to make war on the Prussians; and there was more than a grain of truth in it. There was certainly truth in Rochefort’s complaint that there were too many lawyers in the Government. Jules Favre, who with his high hat and badly-made legal frock-coat might have been a Daumier model, seemed to set the tone. Ollivier once remarked unkindly that Favre ‘considered a political discourse was just one more counsel’s speech’, and it was perhaps typical of his eloquent oratory that, having assured the immortality of his client, Orsini the bomb-thrower, he had then abandoned him to the death sentence. Simon, Ferry, Picard, and Crémieux were all lawyers; old Garnier-Pagès, whose long white hair, neatly parted over his forehead, flowed at the back past an enormous collar and down on to his shoulders, spoke as windily as any advocate; Gambetta was also a lawyer, but he was a different proposition altogether, as will be seen later. But it was Trochu, the man of September 4th, whose personality predestined what the Government of National Defence was to become, and in whose mind the strategy (such as it was) for the whole siege was determined.

In his portraits, one sees a short man with a round and bony head; bald, but with a waxed moustache and the inevitable little ‘imperial’ of the epoch. He had a lively voice and there was a look of intelligence in his eye. He enjoyed iron health, a phlegmatic, even temper, and was capable of working eighteen hours a day. He was a pipe-smoker.

As he had told his colleagues on his appointment as President, ‘
Je suis Breton, catholique et soldat
’ (to which the cynical Rochefort remarked that all this was ‘a matter of perfect indifference’). His father had striven, against great hardship, to make a living as a farmer on wind-swept Belle-Île off the Brittany coast. In 1866 Trochu’s elder brother had died, leaving eleven destitute children. Trochu, whose wife was barren, adopted the seven younger children and brought them up as his own. His long, rather sermonizing letters to them, constantly referring to ‘
la philosophie de la vie
’, are in the true tradition of the provincial bourgeois of the age, as well as being revealing of Trochu’s character. In his distinguished work
L’Armée francaise
of 1867 he had also harped on the urgency of finding a ‘moral philosophy’ to replace that of material self-seeking in the Army. Profoundly religious, he would have been extremely contented in the contemplative and sanctified atmosphere of a monastery. Jules Favre wrote ‘With Trochu, the Christian philosopher dominates the soldier’. It was true; though he was an extremely able soldier, it was as a military thinker rather than a man of action. Washburne, the American Minister, who was once received by the new President in slippers and dressing-gown, thought that ‘he did not look much like a soldier’, and General Burnside was equally surprised during a visit he paid him. On that occasion Trochu had spoken for half an hour on how wicked France had been, how she had fallen away from the Catholic faith and how the sins of her people were now being visited upon her, and then he burst into tears. Even among a Government of lawyers, he could outdo any of them when it came to long-winded, tedious speechifying. As Maxime du Camp remarked unkindly, ‘When he spoke, he believed himself; and as he spoke without cease, he always believed himself’. His lack of worldly ambition, commented on earlier, made him a kind of Ferdinand the Bull among generals, but at the same time he was a man of great personal honour. As the Siege progressed, he would steadfastly refuse any privileges and insisted on drawing the same rations as the troops; to the astonished annoyance of their colleagues, he and Rochefort alone declined the 20,000 francs salary the new Government had voted itself. After the war, he would accept neither the Légion d’Honneur nor the marshal’s baton that were offered him.

Trochu was by nature a Cassandra, and from the moment of his taking office he was frankly pessimistic about the prospects for Paris. As early as August 18th he had told the Empress’s Council on his return from Châlons that ‘
tout etait perdu
’, and he admitted later in his memoirs that the rejection of his plan to have Bazaine and MacMahon fall back on Paris ‘had extinguished in my eyes the last
gleam of salvation… Paris besieged could no longer expect help from outside and must inevitably fall after a defence of long or short duration…’ By prolonging the defence of Paris as long as possible, Trochu as a regular Army officer felt that at least the honour of the Army could be salved; and that was the most that could be expected. Throughout the Siege, in contrast to the fiery and optimistic Gambetta, this question of ‘honour’ was to occupy his thoughts quite as much as success, in which he never really believed. Part of his pessimism lay in the misgivings he felt right from the start about the forces at his behest; if the best of the regular Army had been so mauled by the Prussians, how could this armed rabble in Paris do any better? Although he had drawn the last of France’s Army into Paris, he feared that its quality would render any adventurous strategy immensely hazardous. ‘I had neither any strategic, nor tactical idea’, he later admitted in a passage of his memoirs that was to be ferociously attacked by his enemies. And it was roughly true; such little strategy as he devised was strictly opportunist and entirely dependent upon Moltke’s intentions. ‘In our Government deliberations’, wrote Rochefort
ex post facto
, ‘we were just like a gardener who, instead of watering his plants, waits for rain, certain that it will come sooner or later.’ Obsessed by the experience of his old chief, Marshal Bugeaud, at the Siege of Saragossa in 1808 (which lasted eight months), Trochu was convinced that Paris’s only hope was to sit tightly on the defensive and wait for the Prussians to pound themselves to death against the forts and bastions of the city. But what if they never attacked….?

In mid-September this was a thought that did not greatly exercise the Government, and still less the populace in whose hearts confidence had grown by leaps and bounds since the grand review of the 13th. The mood reflected by Goncourt and his circle on September 6th, when they had parted at Brébant’s with the words ‘perhaps in a fortnight the Prussians will be dining at this table’, had completely evaporated. Indeed, once more there was possibly more confidence than was healthy. The continuing superlative weather certainly helped to allay anxieties; though it was a little marred by the dust and the occasional unpleasant smell, since the street-cleaners and water-carts seemed to have gone out with the Empire, and most of the sewage-disposal men had apparently been Germans. An atmosphere of benevolent unity—something not seen in Paris for many a year—was now displayed by all segments of the population. The Place de la Concorde had become a kind of open-air patriotic theatre, and Britons in Paris began to weary of the never-ending strains of the Marseillaise. America—the first nation to do so—had recognized the
new Republic, and Washburne conveyed her ‘congratulations’. The Bourse fluttered optimistically upwards as Italy, Spain, and Switzerland followed suit, and beliefs were revived that the rest of the world could not possibly leave Paris in the lurch for long. Mr. Brown passed on to his wife the rumour that ‘we hear America has put in a word to say she cannot look upon France being further humiliated…’, and Paris buzzed with other
canards
—that Britain and Russia would soon intervene, that the Prussians would give up the war as they had declared that only Louis-Napoleon was their enemy. Above all, there was growing incredulity that Paris,
la ville lumière
, the marvel of the world, should really be compelled to submit to the fate of any ordinary provincial fortress. If there was to be a siege, it was society that would be shut out from Paris, not vice versa, and this was clearly a situation that the world would not long tolerate.

All this was typified by that vigorous septuagenarian, Victor Hugo, who—with a military képi perched permanently on his head—had hardly drawn breath since his return from exile. On September 9th he had issued an eloquent appeal to the Prussians:

It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities. Paris is the city of men. There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and there is a Paris…. Is the nineteenth century to witness this frightful phenomenon? A nation fallen from polity to barbarism, abolishing the city of nations; German extinguishing Paris…. Can you give this spectacle to the world? Can you, Germans, become Vandals again; personify barbarism decapitating civilization?… Paris, pushed to extremities; Paris supported by all France aroused, can conquer and will conquer; and you will have tried in vain this course of action which already revolts the world.

A Briton in Paris commented scathingly, ‘He writes as if he were King of France, or President, at least’, but the Prussians appeared to be unimpressed, so Hugo now turned all his rhetorical passion to whipping his countrymen into a state of frenzy:

Let the streets of the town devour the enemy, let windows burst open with fury… let the tombs cry out… despotism has attacked Liberty. Germany is assailing France…. As for Europe, what do we care about Europe?… She can come to us if she likes. We do not ask for help. If Europe is afraid, let her remain so. We shall do a service to Europe, that is, to all….

and elsewhere:

Lyons, take thy gun; Bordeaux, take thy carbine; Rouen, draw thy sword; and thou, Marseilles, sing thy song, and become terrible!