The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (18 page)

The National Guard at Rifle Practice

6. Trouble on the Left

Just after the Battle of Châtillon, Henry Labouchère made ‘a few calls’ around Paris. Everyone ‘seemed to be engaged in measuring the distance from the Prussian batteries to his particular house. One friend I found seated in a cellar with a quantity of mattresses over it, to make it bomb-proof. He emerged from his subterraneous Patmos to talk to me, ordered his servant to pile on a few more mattresses, and then retreated.’ But once a momentary panic at the imminence of an all-out Prussian assault had passed, a more sober and resolved mood began to reveal itself among the populace at large. The Châtillon reverse seemed to have administered a sharp (and in many ways salutary) corrective to that feverish optimism which had dominated Paris since September 4th. In a balloon letter home, Edwin Child described ‘… the streets and people very quiet. All that enthusiasm has cooled down. Were it not for the enormous consumption of newspapers the difference of Paris ordinary and in a state of siege would be almost imperceptible’. Strolling along the banks of the Seine on the
Sunday after Chtillon, Goncourt noticed that ‘the placid fishermen’ were now all wearing a képi of the
Garde Nationale
, while a friend of O’Shea of
The Standard
was rebuked for playing billiards. Even Rochefort, the new Director of Barricades, was to be found administering a mild sedative with an order that citizens should curb their patriotic zeal and not ‘spontaneously’ erect barricades without reference to his commission; since some had been built so close behind the ramparts as to hinder seriously their defence!

The passing of the gaudiness of the early days left a vacuum which was beginning to be occupied by something dangerously like boredom; dangerous, because Paris knows no more promising incubator of revolt and kindred diseases than that most dreadful of states,
l’ennui
. The theatres and the opera had closed their doors, a ten o’clock curfew had descended on the cafés following Châtillon, and the streets at night had become so dark and deserted that they reminded Tommy Bowles of London. As early as September 25th, Edward Blount, the banker, was writing ‘… the evenings are awfully dreary…’, which Labouchere endorsed with a characteristic Fleet Street complaint that by 11 o’clock at night ‘one would have supposed oneself in some dull provincial town at three in the morning’. By October 21st, more than a month since the investment in which no major action had been initiated by either side, Bowles seemed to be regretting his yachting-holiday decision to throw up the gay life and come to Paris, grumbling ‘it is a melancholy fact that life is getting dull here’.

What the Siege was beginning to mean to a sensitive and intelligent Parisian was (as so often) admirably summarized by Goncourt, who on October 15th wrote in his journal:

To live within oneself, to have no other exchange of ideas than something as undiverse and limited as one’s own thought, rotating around one obsession; to read nothing but thoroughly predictable news about a miserable war;… to enjoy modern life no longer in this early-to-bed city; to be able to read nothing;… to be deprived of all that provided recreation for the mind of educated Paris; to miss all that was new and all that renewed [literally,
à manquer du nouveau et du renouveau
]; finally to vegetate in this brutal and monotonous state of affairs, war, thus is the Parisian imprisoned in Paris by a boredom comparable to that of a provincial city.

The lack of news from outside was without doubt the chief contributory cause of this incipient boredom. Many who underwent the Siege considered in retrospect that this was a worse privation even than the subsequent food shortage, and it soon revealed itself as a most pernicious psychological factor, operating on a multiplicity of levels. After only a week of isolation, Minister Washburne confided
to his diary: ‘I wish there could be a balloon to come in, for this absence of all intelligence from the outside world is becoming unbearable.’ But it was a vain wish, as it became quickly apparent that although balloons could leave Paris with impunity, a return flight was quite another matter. When in October a copy of the
Journal de Rouen
was somehow smuggled into the city, and reprinted in
extenso
, Child remarked that ‘whoever had said 3 months ago that a Provincial paper a fortnight old arriving in Paris would cause a sensation would have been laughed at; however such was the case’.

One immediate result of the news blockade was a plethora of incredible rumours, which, since no one could refute them, the Paris Press printed with avidity. On September 29th it was reported that the Prussians were in retreat towards the coast, an anonymous American being quoted as having ‘heard them pack up last night’. The following week the Duc d’Aumale was advancing from Le Havre at the head of an army; a magical tunnel had been dug to connect Paris with the provinces, through which sheep and cattle were now pouring into the city; and among a mass of ‘secret weapons’ invented was a deadly new
mitrailleuse
that could slaughter the enemy three thousand at a time. Moltke was dead and the Crown Prince of Prussia dying; the Prussians outside Metz had been so reduced that any resident wanting to leave the city was chloroformed, in order that he might not notice their weakness as he passed through the lines; Prussia had been so drained of regular troops that the
Landsturm
were about to launch a revolution in Berlin; and there were even rumours of revolution in England. On October 24th when an
aurora borealis
turned the sky blood-red, it was said that the Prussians were firing the woods round Paris in the hopes of ‘smoking out’ the Parisians.

Hand in hand with these spurious reports went column after column of the kind of nonsensical bombast that particularly infuriated the British correspondents in Paris. ‘In order that Paris, whose genius has given her the empire of the world, should fall into the hands of the barbarians’, declared
Le Figaro
, ‘there must cease to be a God in heaven. As God she exists, and as God she is immortal….’ Another paper complained of the world looking on impassively ‘at the ruin of a nation which possesses the most exquisite gifts of sociability, the principal jewel of Europe and the eternal ornament of civilization’. There was, snorted Labouchere, ‘nothing like having a good opinion of oneself’. When later, after a new series of disasters, an American read in a morning paper the comment ‘Thank Heaven, we can subsist for a while on our antecedents; they are sufficiently illustrious’, he was reminded of the boy on Bunker Hill, who, asked by a stranger what people there lived on, replied ‘Pumpkin Pies and Past Recollections’.
The example for this bombast was set from the top, by Trochu with his passion for long-winded grandiloquence and Spartan aphorisms; and certainly as long as Victor Hugo breathed there would be no shortage of material. On September 21st he had marked the anniversary of the First Republic with yet another of his florid orations, proclaiming that ‘Paris, which has been accustomed to amuse mankind, will now terrify it. The world will be amazed….’ These mock heroics may have reduced sympathy for Paris’s plight among the foreign community, but they were lapped up with the greatest zeal by the Parisians. Despite the lack of real news (or perhaps because of it), there had never been a greater demand for newspapers in Paris. Some forty-nine new ones were actually started during the Siege, and to Labouchere it was a constant mystery where they obtained their newsprint. What was even less easy to understand, in the light of subsequent developments, was the fact that throughout the Siege the Government made no effort to control by censorship the steady outpouring of harmful rumours, of bombast, and later of violently seditious attacks on itself. (By comparison, it is worth noting that one of the very first steps taken during the Siege of Leningrad was the confiscation of all radio sets and the disconnection of telephones.)

Every hue and shade of French politics was represented by this mass of Parisian journals. On the extreme Left were three notable organs which, not satisfied by a simple effusion of bombast like most of their competitors, had already started baring their teeth at the new Government. There was
La Patrie en Danger
and
Le Réveil
, edited respectively by Blanqui and Delescluze, those two professional revolutionaries who between them had spent so much time in various imperial gaols; but the most scurrilous of all was Félix Pyat’s
Le Combat
. Pyat was sixty years old, and in common with Blanqui and Delescluze had passed twenty-nine of these in prison, and much of the remainder in exile. His experience had given him a remarkable sixth sense which somehow enabled him to turn up invariably at the critical moment of a revolution or a conspiracy; more remarkable still was his facility for disappearing when things went wrong. His companion in exile, Louis Blanc, once remarked of him to Juliette Lambert: ‘His mistrust is extraordinary; in London we never knew his address. His best friends were kept in ignorance of it. Félix Pyat never even told it to Félix Pyat for fear that Félix Pyat would betray it’. Having helped precipitate the June uprising of 1848, when others came to pay the bill Pyat had vanished, and in May 1871 this slippery figure would be one of the few leading Communards to wriggle out of the net. His appearance belied his outstanding lack of physical courage; slightly resembling Louis-Philippe, he has been described by one writer as
‘superbly tall, with a romantic mane and beard, proud leonine gaze and a voice that could carry incredible distances… the purest romantic terrorist that ever flung a paper bomb…’ Pyat was a kind of backroom Rochefort, devoid of the letter’s appeal for the masses, but almost as brilliant a journalist and even more capable of being seduced into folly by the power of one of his own metaphors. It was Louis Blanc again who described him as ‘a distinguished man of subtle ideas and sensible speech. But as soon as he writes he becomes a madman, incapable of controlling himself…’ To Rochefort he was simply ‘a misanthrope embittered by twenty years of exile, grumbling at not filling the position in the Republic that was his due’. A renegade bourgeois, no one was more effective at enraging the class he had deserted; at the same time, among the extreme Republicans there was no one whose political ideas were more ineffectual and inchoate than Pyat’s.

Returning from exile in London when the Empire fell, Pyat had launched
Le Combat
on September 16th. His first stunt had been to set up a subscription fund for a ‘rifle of honour’ to be bestowed upon any Parisian sniping the King of Prussia, and it was only a matter of time before
Le Combat
was making it plain that it would equally welcome the dispatch of General Trochu. The uneasy truce between the ‘Reds’ (as they had become known in more moderate circles) and the Government which had followed September 4th had not survived the initial disaster at Châtillon. In their assaults on the Government,
Le Combat
and its allies were now thoroughly representative of proletarian opinion in Paris, while at the same time they fanned the embers. Behind this rapidly growing opposition to the Government were a number of complex causes, not altogether explicable in terms of pure reason. The extreme belligerence of proletarian France towards the Prussians has already been noted, but is worth commenting on again; especially since it is a phenomenon that contrasts strangely with the tendency in intervening years for left-wing and ‘popular’ movements all over the world to become indentified with antimilitarism. At the beginning of the Siege, elements from Belleville held daily patriotic manifestations outside the American Legation, on which Hoffman, the Assistant Secretary, commented acidly, ‘Day after day Washburne was called out to thank them for this
démonstration patriotique
; I got very heartily sick of it.’ However odd its flavour from time to time, this left-wing patriotism was nevertheless ardent and sincere, but there was also a strongly particularist element to it. For it was Paris, sacred Paris, that was now more directly in danger than the rest of France, and Paris had to be defended
à outrance
. To its working classes especially Paris was France, while the rest of the country consisted principally of feudal landowners, reactionary
peasants, and clerics. Paris was the sacred city of revolution, and as Dantonesque memories were revived of how the foreign invaders were repelled in 1792, so for the first time there began to be heard clamours for the rebirth of a
Commune de Paris
which, like its famous predecessor, would in some mystical way repeat the miracle.

As far back as the year of the Great Exhibition, Prosper Mérimée had remarked that ‘the bourgeois regard war with horror; but the people… are longing to eat Prussians’, and since September 4th the divergence between the two classes in Paris had become if anything wider. As the Siege progressed it seemed likely to grow wider still; for one thing, though the harshness of Bismarck’s terms at Ferrières had temporarily united all France in favour of continuing the war, the supreme binding element of terror with which the Nazis (in their folly) confronted Leningrad by stating their intention of destroying the city and its whole population, regardless of surrender, was absent. To the property-owning and commercial classes, the war as it dragged on was bound to equal a waste of material assets; assets which the Paris proletariat had never possessed. Meanwhile, in the latter’s minds, the war since September 4th had taken a vital ideological turn. Before that date, there had been a somewhat equivocal situation where the Prussians were also enemies of
the
enemy, Louis-Napoleon. But now they were threatening the Republic, the glorious new revolution, which had to be defended at all cost. And not only against the Prussians.