The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (26 page)

Next, on November 4th, the
Galilée
was captured near Chartres with 420 kilograms of mail, followed on November 12th by the
Daguerre
. The prospects began to look so grave that the French now decided to send up their balloons only by night, in order to baffle the German observers. This change of schedule resulted, as winter drew in, in some of the grimmest and most dramatic flights of the Siege. After taking off at 1 a.m. on November 25th, the
Archimède
came down at dawn in Holland and would undoubtedly have been blown out to sea had its flight lasted a few minutes longer. In December the
Ville de Paris
landed at Wetzlar in Germany, believing it to be Belgium, and five days later the
Chanzy
ended up in Bavaria after an eight-hour flight. But no flight was more perilous or more remarkable than that of the sister balloon of the
Archimède
, the
Ville d’Orléans
, about which more will be heard later.

By a real miracle, until November 28th and the thirty-fourth balloon, there had not been one single fatality. That day a young sailor called Prince climbed aboard the
Jacquard
, announcing (so it was said): ‘
Je veux faire un immense voyage—on parlera de mon ascension!
’ The next day Prince and the
Jacquard
were spotted from the Lizard lighthouse, disappearing out into the Atlantic. His dispatches were picked up from the sea, but not Prince, and his death is today marked by a small commemorative plaque in the Gare d’Orléans. Altogether some 65 manned balloons left Paris during the Siege. They carried 164 passengers, 381 pigeons, 5 dogs, and nearly 11 tons of official dispatches, including approximately two and a half million letters. Six landed in Belgium, four in Holland, two in Germany, one in Norway, two were lost at sea, but only five fell into enemy
hands. The news they exported of Paris’s continued resistance did much to stimulate sympathy abroad for the French cause, as well as kindling hope in the provinces. But above all, the knowledge that the city was not entirely cut off from the outside world, the ability to communicate, however haphazardly, with relatives there, and to learn that other French forces were still resisting the enemy somewhere in the provinces, went far towards countering that deadly ailment,
l’ennui
, and towards restoring Parisian morale.

Although it was by far the most practical, the balloon was by no means the only scientific development to occupy fertile Parisian minds during the Siege. Inventions and ideas of all kinds poured into the Government by the hundred, so that even before the investment it was forced to set up a
Comité Scientifique
to deal with this flood of ingenuity. One of the first serious propositions placed before it had been the mining of Versailles and St.-Cloud; the mines to be fired electrically from Paris so as to prevent the Prussians setting up gun batteries there. Fortunately—although some forbears of ‘Dr. Strangelove’ on the Committee seem to have regretted it—this proposal was turned down.
¹
But most of the ideas reaching the Committee formed a fascinating catalogue of science fiction and sheer fantasy. One suggested the poisoning of the river Seine where it left Paris; another the ‘decomposition’ of the air surrounding the Prussians; and a third the loosing of all the more ferocious beasts from the zoo—so that the enemy would be poisoned, asphyxiated, or devoured. There was a considerable vogue for adaptations of ‘Greek fire’ that would consume him by fire in various ways, and someone proposed a ‘musical
mitrailleuse
’ that Siren-like would lure the
Kultur
-lovers by playing Wagner and Schubert, and then scythe them down. Another ambitious soul suggested hitching a sledge-hammer worthy of Vulcan, weighing ten million tons and encompassing fifteen miles, to a series of balloons and cutting the ropes over Moltke’s H.Q. One less murderous, but equally disagreeable, idea came from a doctor who suggested replenishing Parisian fuel supplies with gas distilled from human corpses.

Some of the ‘inventions’, though almost nonsensically futuristic in 1870, are not unfamiliar now. There was the ‘mobile rampart’, a precursor of the tank;
²
there were shells that would emit ‘suffocating
like fire
¹
. One diabolical scientist proposed bombarding the Prussian lines with bottles containing smallpox germs, and a suggestion to ‘use balloons filled with explosive as ‘flying bombs’ was prudently dropped on the grounds that Prussian reprisals against Paris would be infinitely more lethal. Parisian scientists were constantly preoccupied by the quest for a ‘super-explosive’ with which to erase the besiegers, and one employed on this project was the inventor of the Orsini bombs, which had come so close to extinguishing Louis-Napoleon. Labouchere, who met him, expressed fears of his being ‘hoist with his own petard’ and indeed experiments resulted in several fearful accidents. Among them was one involving the inventor of the best hand-grenade produced during the Siege, who inconveniently blew himself to pieces in his laboratory.

In advocating their wares, the inventors could be most persuasive; even so sceptical an observer as Tommy Bowles appears to have been impressed by the ‘frock-coated, keen-eyed little chemist, who has within his knowledge more effectual and terrible methods of warfare than all the cocked-hats in Europe ever covered’. He assured Bowles that he had invented a devastating explosive which he claimed could ‘blow the Prussian Army off the face of the earth’, as well as a ‘means of decomposing water itself, and turning it into consuming flames’. (The encounter prompted Bowles to prophesy, a little optimistically, that ‘when war becomes a mere duel of skill between chemists its glory is gone, and, when the risk of it is so enormously increased, its attractions will disappear as well’). The Paris Press was particularly susceptible to the most Laputan projects, and a great clamour was aroused in the papers when the Scientific Committee declined the ‘invention’ that would have decomposed the air around the stricken Prussians.

As noted in another chapter, many of these—such as the ‘sympathetic snails’, a design for a ‘hot-water rifle’, and the unleashing of the lions from the zoo—originated from the fetid atmosphere of the Red Clubs, and as often as not received the ardent support of Pyat’s
Le Combat
. But none was more exotic than Jules Allix’s
‘doigts prussiques’
: pins dipped (appropriately) in prussic acid, with which the women of Paris could defend their virtue. These were to be ancillary to a remarkable corps created by Félix Belly, called the ‘Amazons of the Seine’.
²
In October, the British correspondents had all been intrigued
by recruiting placards that had sprung up on walls throughout Paris. The redoubtable ladies were to be dressed in black pantaloons with orange stripes, a black hooded blouse, a black képi with an orange band, and a cartridge pouch slung across the shoulder. Armed with a rifle, their intended role was ‘to defend the ramparts and the barricades, and to afford to the troops in the ranks of which they will be distributed all the domestic and fraternal services compatible with moral order and military discipline’. Ten battalions were to be raised, and their expenses were to be met by a ‘sacrifice’ on the part of the ‘Amazons’’ richer sisters of bracelets and jewellery. Enrolments would be accepted at 36 Rue Turbigo, said the proclamations, which were signed ‘
Le Chef Provisoire du premier bataillon
,
FÉLIX BELLY
.’ The Amazons were quickly wedded by Allix to his
‘doigt prussique
’, which he reasoned was a more feminine weapon than a rifle, describing its usage as follows: ‘The Prussian advances towards you—you put forth your hand, you prick him—he is dead, and you are pure and tranquil’. Alas, although Belly claimed 15,000 applications, this fearful secret weapon never materialized. The Government, less concerned by the implications of the ‘fraternal services’ which the Amazons were to perform at the front than by the fact that Belly was apparently collecting enrolment ‘fees’, intervened. For a while, however, Paris at least had something to laugh about; Belly disappeared from sight; Allix later represented the 8th
arrondissement
in the Commune and ended up in a lunatic asylum.

Belly, if the allegations were true, was not alone in utilizing the inventive craze as a means of personal aggrandisement. One resourceful Parisian made handsome profits through a factory manufacturing false ‘trophies’ of war, where he produced Prussian
Pickelhauben
and sabres by the score, as well as forging ‘next-of-kin’ letters that were certified to have been removed from a Prussian corpse; and O’Shea remembered an ‘ingenious rascal with a bandaged head who paraded a pair of human ears in a jar of spirits of wine on the boulevards, and brought down a flush of coppers by making believe that they were his own, sliced off by the Barbarous Prussians’.

As the orators of the Clubs produced one fantastical invention after another, so the great intellects of France in the various Academies occupied their time with equal irrelevancies. Carrying on its usual curriculum of discussions on medieval grammar and Coptic characters, the nearest the Academy of Inscriptions and Letters came to contemporary affairs was a lecture in November on ‘The Provisioning of Besieged Towns in Antiquity’; while the Academy of Science busied itself with such topics as differential equations and the eclipse of the sun.

By and large, apart from the balloon and pigeon post, the inventors of Paris gave birth to little that was of practical use during the Siege. There were perhaps no more than three such developments: a primitive armoured train, powerful electrical searchlights which were employed to protect the Paris forts against surprise attack by night, and an unpalatable synthetic foodstuff called
osseine
derived from bone and gelatine. In fact, the greatest achievements lay in the production of more conventional weapons, such as cannon,
mitrailleuses
, and rifles, during the Siege, and for this the credit belongs to one man: Dorian, the Minister of Works. In more ways than one, Dorian—a peacetime industrialist—proved himself to be
the
outstanding member of the Trochu Government, and as an organizer he was unexcelled. Under him, every available workshop and factory in Paris was set to producing munitions; the
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers
became a vast cannon plant; and even along the smart Rue de Rivoli the sound of hammering came from basement windows where weapons were being forged. Great ingenuity was used to circumvent grave shortages in raw materials; steel was replaced by alloys of bronze and tin, there was even talk of using that new rare metal, aluminium, and somehow saltpetre for gunpowder was recovered from old plaster. Even the bells of St.-Denis Cathedral were melted down. By the end of September, Dorian’s workshops were already turning out 300,000 cartridges a day, and when the Siege ended no less than 400 cannon and a large number of
mitrailleuses
had been manufactured in Paris. Haste and carelessness led to a series of disastrous accidents in powder-mills (one apparently caused by a plumber soldering on the roof), and it was later claimed that many of the breech-loading guns were unsafe; but—since most of the arms plants had been shifted to the provinces before September, and equipment had to be improvised—it is perhaps remarkable that anything was produced at all. No less remarkable was the means of financing the cannon, some two hundred of which were subsidized through popular subscription, launched by Victor Hugo. The inhabitants of the poorer, ‘Red’,
arrondissements
considered that many of these had actually been ‘bought’ by them, and their pride in the results of their sacrifices was justifiably immense. In mid-December a National Guardsman wrote to his sister in the provinces that these cannon were now being delivered at a rate of twenty-one a day: ‘you know that’s really something, every five days, a hundred guns….’ It was also to become one of the immediate causes of the outbreak of Civil War when the Siege ended.

Wounded in the Théâtre-français

9. ‘Le Plan’

W
ITH
the ‘Red’ leaders in gaol, awaiting a possible death sentence, the greatest danger confronting Trochu’s conduct of the war—that of a revolution inside Paris—seemed to have been averted. Belleville was sullenly in check; but for how long? Yet, as November arrived and the Siege approached the end of its second month, neutrals inside Paris sensed a distinct plunge in morale. On November 6th, Labouchere reported: ‘I never remember to have witnessed a day of such general gloom since the commencement of the Siege. The feeling of despair is, I hear, still stronger in the army.’ Gloom had thoroughly infected Labouchere himself; should a peace be signed on the latest Prussian terms, wrenching Alsace-Lorraine away from France, he predicted: ‘within ten years we shall infallibly be dragged into a Continental war’. Only in the date did he err. On November 12th, Washburne wrote despondently: ‘I might as well stop my
diary, for there is absolutely nothing to put down. There are now no military, nor even political movements, the streets are becoming more and more vacant and the people more and more sober…’ To maintain morale, the Paris Press had to fall back as a surrogate for more striking events on the doings of one Sergeant Ignatius Hoff of the 107th of the Line. Hoff was a shadowy figure who, employing Mohican tactics, specialized—like a latter-day commando—in the nocturnal throat-slitting of German sentries. Each night he returned with a collection of
Pickelhauben
, and by November his alleged tally had reached twenty-seven. He was swiftly built up into an almost legendary hero; much as air aces like the great Guynemer were singled out for beatification from the amorphous carnage of the First World War.