The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (24 page)

The next day the Government insisted and Adam resigned. More than any other figure on the Government side, he had been the real hero of October 31st, and his departure represented a serious loss. Dorian, whose honour was also involved, suffered the pangs of being pulled in two directions; with full justification he explained, ‘I make cannon…. If I stopped, soon neither a bullet nor a cannon would be made’, and so, tearfully, he decided against resigning. A new Prefect of Police, Cresson, was appointed, who wasted no time in rounding up the principal insurgents. Twenty-two were arrested and flung into the Mazas. They included Blanqui, Millière, Vermorel, Vallès and Eudes (for the second time since the war began). The net brought in even the elusive Pyat, and Flourens was arrested while actually at the front line with his battalion—though not until a month later. In addition, sixteen battalion commanders of the National Guard were cashiered; all of whom, including Karl Marx’s future son-in-law, Longuet, subsequently became Communards.

Even a right-winger like Jules Clarétie, the journalist, considered the arrests to be ‘pitiful, useless, dangerous’. A sour sense of betrayal now permeated the whole of left-wing Paris, and what little prestige still remained to the Government vanished with the realization that the double-dealers among it included even the once-revered Dorian. To the existing list of grievances was added a new bitterness that would have incalculable results when the Siege was ended. Optimistically Tommy Bowles wrote: ‘The day will have taught the Parisians one thing, that the dreaded
spectre rouge
is a very harmless turnip-headed ghost after all.’ Events were to prove him horribly wrong. Nor were the arrests the only respect in which the Left felt it had been double-crossed. After the
entente
with Dorian, Deescluze claimed—probably in good faith—that the insurgents had been promised elections to replace the Provisional Government. What actually took place, on November 3rd, was nothing more than a plebiscite requesting
an answer of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a vote of confidence in the Government. The result was 560,000 to 53,000; which was regarded by the Government as a notable victory, and by the ‘Reds’ as a manifest swindle—which indeed it was. Worthy of note, however, was the fact that three of Paris’s twenty mayors had declared themselves in sympathy with the uprising of October 31st, including Clemenceau of Montmartre.

Among the other immediate consequences, Victor Hugo protested against the abuse of his name on the ‘Red’ Government ‘lists’ without his consent; Rochefort resigned once and for all and joined the artillery of the National Guard; and General Tamisier was replaced as commander of the Guard by General Clément Thomas, an even more unfortunate choice than his predecessor in that he was detested by the Left for his brutal repression of the uprisings of 1848. From now on the Government never again risked meeting in the Hôtel de Ville, and among its members mistrust of the military value of the National Guard reached a new zenith. Finally, to Thiers who returned on the night of November 2nd to the Prussian camp with the aim of pursuing the armistice talks, Bismarck—having been well informed of what had transpired and realizing how much the French hand had been weakened—regretted that he could not continue the talks, on the pretext that the Government by whom Thiers had been sent probably ‘no longer existed’.

Balloon Factory at the Gare d’Orléans

8. A Touch of Verne

W
HEN
, at the beginning of October, a Frenchwoman in Prussian-occupied Versailles first saw a balloon rising out of Paris, she exclaimed in the hearing of Russell of
The Times
: ‘Paris reduced to that! Oh good God! Have pity on us!’ Yet the balloons of Paris were to constitute probably the most illustrious single episode of the Siege. To the average person today, the Siege of Paris evokes principally two images: rat-eating and balloons. The first represents the depths to which a modern civilization can be reduced; the second, the zenith of its resourcefulness in adversity.

The development of the balloon had always been a preserve of the inventor nation. De Montgolfier’s first ‘hot-air’ balloon of 1783 was a perilous device in which the passengers had to stoke a fire with straw and wood immediately beneath the highly inflammable paper envelope; so perilous, indeed, that Louis XVI had proposed that the first manned flight be made by two criminals under sentence of death. In fact, it was carried out by Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, who flew for twenty-five minutes across Paris, at a height of three hundred feet. Almost simultaneously, a French physicist, Professor Charles, was experimenting with a hydrogen-filled balloon, which made its first ascent from the Tuileries in December 1783. When someone cast doubts on the usefulness of Charles’s invention,
one of the spectators, Benjamin Franklin, was provoked to make a famous retort: ‘Of what use is the new-born baby?’ Two years later, Blanchard managed to cross the Channel in a
charlière
(throwing out even his own trousers in an endeavour to maintain altitude), for which feat he earned £50 and a life pension from Louis XVI. But the unfortunate de Rozier was killed while emulating Blanchard that same year, and in 1819 Madame Blanchard, the wife of the Channel-crosser, died in a balloon crash over Paris.

As early as 1793, the French were using balloons for military purposes—to carry dispatches over the heads of the enemy—and the following year Robespierre established an ‘
École Aérostatique
’ at Meudon. This was closed down by Napoleon I; perhaps one of the few instances where he showed less prescience than his tragic nephew. For Napoleon III at least appreciated the military potentialities of balloons, and had employed a man called Nadar to spy out Austrian positions at Solferino. At the Siege of Venice, the Austrians themselves had tried to set fire to the city with numerous small unmanned paper balloons, each carrying an incendiary bomb; but fortunately (and true to form), all had landed within their own lines. During the American Civil War, the North used captive balloons to photograph Confederate lines at the battles before Richmond, and McClellan is said to have derived considerable advantage from their intelligence. Later the balloons were even linked by telegraph to the ground. But when the South brought into service a fairly effective rifled antiaircraft gun, and after a balloon bearing a Yankee general had broken loose, nearly delivering him to the Confederates, the North apparently began to lose interest.

The next recorded military employment of balloons, and the first time that they were used to carry mail on a big scale, was at besieged Metz (appropriately enough the pioneer de Rozier had been a native of Metz). The service was initiated by an enterprising Englishman, G. T. Robinson, of the
Manchester Guardian
, the only British staff correspondent there, as a means of getting his reports out after runners had refused bribes of up to 1,000 francs. Because of the shortage of raw materials (all the sulphuric acid required to manufacture hydrogen had been used up in making soda water), it was impossible to send up manned balloons from Metz, so that many were to fall into enemy hands. Robinson’s first balloon had a ladder driven through it by a clumsy French worker, but despite all handicaps one successfully took off on September 15th, carrying 8,000 letters, and thereafter they were launched at a rate of nearly one a day. The service continued until October 3rd, by which time it had transported over 150,000 letters and dispatches.

When the Siege of Paris began, there were only seven existing balloons in the city, most of them in disrepair. Symbolically, the
Impérial
, which had arrived just too late to observe the dynasty triumph at Solferino, was in shreds; the
Céleste
, which by giving captive flights had dazzled visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1867 with French prowess, was described as being as gas-tight as a ‘sieve’. But undismayed the intrepid French aeronauts at once went to work; literally, with paste-pot and paper. Within two days of the closing of the ring, the first balloon was prepared for flight, but burst while being inflated. That same day, however, Nadar carried out a successful reconnaissance of the Prussian lines. The corpulent Nadar was a man of many talents—photographer, caricaturist, journalist, and a friend of the Impressionists (it was in his house that Renoir held one of his first exhibitions). In Jules Verne’s
De la Terre à la Lune
he appeared under the anagram of ‘Ardan’, and seven years before the war he had flown in the double-decker
Géant
all the way to Hanover. He also appears to have been an astute businessman; Nadar’s enemies later accused him of dropping advertisements for his own company over the Prussian outposts, instead of propaganda leaflets!

On September 23rd, Durouf made his successful solo flight to Evreux, and three days later the Minister of Posts, M. Rampont, decreed the establishment of a ‘Balloon Post’. Among the first to be invited to send a letter by it was the eighty-six-year-old daughter of the inventor, Mlle de Montgolfier. Two kinds of epistle were permitted, ‘
monté
’ and ‘
non-monté
’, according to whether the balloons were manned or not; the former limited to small sheets resembling today’s air letters, not exceeding four grammes in weight, and costing the standard 20 centimes; the latter to be simply postcards bordered, for the benefit of the enemy should they fall into his hands, with such slogans (in stilted German) as ‘Crazy people, shall we always throttle each other for the pleasure and pride of kings?’ and ‘Paris defies her enemy! All France is rising; death to the invaders!’ As it was, only one ‘
non-monté
’ balloon (the fifth) left Paris, to be shot down by the Prussians after a flight of only a mile, so that this service was subsequently abandoned.

After Durouf, balloons took off at a rate of about two or three a week, usually from an empty space at the foot of the Solférino Tower on top of Montmartre, or from outside the Gare du Nord and the Gare d’Orléans. Godard, one of a family of veteran aeronauts, got away succesfully suspended from two small balloons lashed together and appropriately named
Les États-Unis
. Tissandier, flying in the patched-up
Céleste
, which in peacetime had never been capable of staying in the air for more than thirty-five minutes, managed to reach
Dreux (fifty miles from Paris) after passing so low over Versailles that he could see Prussian soldiers sunbathing on the lawns. Lutz, travelling aboard the
Ville de Florence
, found himself descending rapidly into the Seine, and was forced to jettison a sack full of top-secret Government dispatches. Remarkably enough, it was returned to him on landing by some peasants, and he managed to escape with them through the Prussian lines to Tours, disguised as a cowherd. Another unfortunate, faced with a similar crisis, threw his lunch pack overboard in mistake for ballast; yet a third threw himself out, but fortunately landed in a soft beet-field. The crew of the seventh (unnamed) balloon fell into a swamp just outside Paris, and for hours lay in icy water with Prussian bullets skimming over their heads, but they too escaped. It was not only as postmen that the balloons acted; later, one perilously carried a consignment of dynamite destined for Bourbaki’s Army; and another took up a scientist who merely wanted to study an eclipse of the sun—an event that provoked amusement among the British correspondents, coming as it did at the height of the fiercest battle of the Siege.

Writing home on September 30th, Edwin Child remarked sceptically: ‘This letter the glorious French Republic has promised to forward by means of a balloon but the writer has about as much confidence in the punctuality of a balloon, as a Parisian lady has in the ‘
parole
’ of a ‘man of honour”. The letter did in fact arrive, but looking back from this age of science, it does seem little less than miraculous that so many of the French balloonists succeeded in getting through. It was not until the eighteenth flight on October 25th that a manned balloon (curiously enough named the
Montgolfier
) fell into Prussian hands. Equipment was incredibly primitive. The balloons themselves were constructed simply of varnished cotton, because silk was unobtainable, and filled with highly explosive coal-gas; thus they were exceptionally vulnerable to Prussian sharp-shooters. Capable of unpredictable motion in all three dimensions, none of which was controllable, in inexperienced hands they had an unpleasant habit of shooting suddenly up to six thousand feet, then falling back again almost to ground-level. Huddled in their baskets (which Bowles noted to his horror were only ‘the height of a man’s waist, with just enough room for two people to sit or rather squat’), devoid of any protection from the elements, the balloonists suffered agonizingly from cold as the winter grew more bitter. The most useful items of equipment carried on board were a six-hooked anchor and a 150-metre ‘trail’ rope. The latter was invaluable as a form of automatic ballast, depending upon how much of its weight was deposited on the ground, as well as for slowing down a descending balloon. Often
the aeronauts carried no compass, and after a few minutes of twisting, giddy progress they had in any case lost all sense of direction.