The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (46 page)

But gradually the food supplies began to reach Paris. On the morning of February 4th a British correspondent recorded being awakened by drums heralding the arrival of the first convoy; on the 7th, delegates from the Lord Mayor’s Relief Fund arrived and the trickle of food became a torrent. Two brothers called Lyon, coming to collect notes for lectures they intended to give in England in aid of the hungry, passed on the outskirts of the city ‘a long train of provisions; each waggon labelled in large letters “The Gift of the British Government”. We felt proud of our country and went into Paris a couple of inches taller on that account.’ For a nation not over given to such demonstrativeness, there were immediate responses of gratitude; Jules Ferry telegraphed the Lord Mayor, declaring that ‘In the extremity of its misfortunes, the voice of the English people has been the first that has been heard by it from outside with an expression of sympathy. The citizens of Paris will never forget….’ Much of the resentment felt towards Britain because of her ‘splendid isolation’ during the war vanished. The food had come only just in time; the unloading of the first of the British food waggons at Les Halles provoked an uncontrollable riot, accompanied with pillage and leading to a deplorable wastage of the precious victuals. Eggs, vegetables, butter, and chickens were trampled underfoot, while for seven hours the police seemed powerless to intervene.

The plight of the foreign communities in Paris, many of whom now had no resources left with which to buy the relief foodstuffs, was every bit as bad as that of the Parisians, and once again the generous Richard Wallace came to the aid of his indignant British, adding to the many thousands of pounds he had already given away during the Siege. Blount also dug deep into his own pocket, and as acting Chargé d’Affaires was inundated with pleas; while his first communication from the still absent British Ambassador, Lord Lyons, included a request for him to ‘look after’ the Ambassador’s niece at the Carmelite Convent, adding—with a touch of pomposity—‘I am sure you will
not begrudge the labour which you will add to your many good works.’ Many of the British also had their own private sources of relief; a kind friend of O’Shea’s rode in from Versailles with a leg of mutton concealed in his saddle-bag, while William Brown, the commercial traveller who had written his wife on January 18th explicitly requesting her to order from Crosse and Blackwell ‘the day communication is open… 2 good-sized hams, 1 dozen concentrated milk, 1 dozen two-pound tins of boiled beef, 1 dozen kippered herring, 1 dozen assorted jams, 1 dozen half-pound packets of Apps’s cocoa’, did not receive the parcel until February 23rd. Dr. Alan Herbert’s family seem to have been particularly solicitous for his welfare. In the last days of the Siege his brother, the Earl of Carnarvon, had received from Versailles a touching letter from a former servant, one Martin Harper, now courier to Russell of
The Times
, saying that he had ‘bespoken two legs of mutton, four chickens, one goose’, etc., to take in to Alan Herbert, and that ‘My Lord need not feel yourself at all under my obligation, for I always did like Mr. Herbert’. The Earl meanwhile had dispatched his own ration-bearing emissary, Louis Gleissner, from London; but both were beaten to it by another brother, Auberon Herbert, M.P., who, carrying a piece of beef in his satchel, mysteriously infiltrated into Paris immediately after the cease-fire and seems to have been one of the first foreigners to enter. Others hastened at the first opportunity to Versailles, to find—like Tommy Bowles—a square meal of ‘omelette,
sole au vin blanc
, and a
Chateaubriand
’; while on February 5th Edwin Child records how he and his friend Albert ‘couldn’t resist’ buying a fowl and some fresh butter that had just arrived from Versailles. They ‘had it cooked by our concierge and ate it with the family of the latter. It seemed as if happy times were again in store, may it prove so. Lovely day.’

By the second week in February, revictualling had had its effect. With it a remarkable change could be detected in the physiognomy of Paris. One of the
Daily News
correspondents commenting on the ‘incredulity’ of visitors to Paris remarked ‘these visitors go into the restaurants and see plenty of food there, which they can eat with pleasure, and they conclude that there has been no great suffering….’ But once again, as during the Siege, there had been grave inequalities in the distribution of food; so the poor often remained acutely, and resentfully, hungry. On January 31st Auberon Herbert had written to Odo Russell of the Foreign Office: ‘There does not seem in Paris real distress except among the poorer classes; there it exists, and is likely to increase.’ His prediction was correct, and three weeks later Dr. Alan Herbert wrote his brother, Carnarvon: ‘though fresh meat is to be had, the price is out of the means of the poor, and work is but
slowly beginning…. I have seen more scurvy since the capitulation than I did during the siege.’

Sooner or later the foodstuffs pouring into Paris would restore the bodies of the besieged, but it could do little to repair the insidious damage wreaked upon the minds and souls of Parisians. Psychologically, they were in anything but a fit state to face the humiliation of an unprecedented defeat, or of the crushing peace terms that lay ahead. The sheer drabness of the city which, with most of the fine trees on its boulevards felled and many houses gaping from shell damage, bore little enough resemblance to the sparkling Paris of 1867, was in itself hardly a tonic to morale. It was true that the sense of humiliation was something shared by all Frenchmen, but only Paris was afflicted with the additional burden of a neurosis loosely diagnosed as ‘obsidional fever’. Like the workings of an invisible parasite, the neurosis had gnawed away progressively during the Siege and only now was the full extent of the canker’s inroads revealed. Boredom, malnutrition, the anxiety and uncertainty of what tomorrow would bring, the unbalancing effects upon a habitually highly-strung population of cycles of excessive optimism followed by blackest disappointment, these were among the causes that had produced the canker. But above all others there had been the soul-destroying sense of isolation from the rest of humanity. Many Parisians agreed with Saint-Edmé, the secretary of the Scientific Committee, that by far the worst privation of the Siege—even worse than the lack of food—had been the lack of news from outside. Even Washburne, better off than almost anyone else in this respect, recorded in the last fortnight of the Siege: ‘It seems to me as if I had been buried alive.’

In a pathological study of the Siege, one French doctor analysed the symptoms of ‘obsidional fever’ as including such phenomena as spy-mania, mistrust and defiance of authority, the resplendent but hollow verbosity stemming from a need for self-assurance, and fear-created persecution complexes that pointed accusing fingers at the usual variety of ‘enemies’—Freemasons, Jews, and Jesuits. With unprecedented fickleness even for France, the neurosis transformed heroes of one day into traitors of the next. Nowhere was this more graphically displayed than in the abrupt reversal of attitudes towards the legendary Sergeant Hoff. In the early days Hoff with his daring nocturnal forays had been the darling of Paris. Then he had disappeared on the field of battle at Champigny and the whole city had mourned. But by the beginning of January rumours were circulating that he was in fact a Prussian spy; which, of course, explained why he had been able to obtain helmets and other enemy trophies with such facility. There was, declared one paper,
‘a woman in the affair… she had received 7,000 francs from Sergeant Hoff over a matter of weeks. Seven thousand francs from a simple sergeant, that sounds fishy….!’ But no more solid evidence was ever produced to substantiate this calumny against poor Hoff.

The effect that obsidional fever had upon people’s minds was far from being illusory. Early in January Julliette Lambert recorded a series of terrible nightmares she had suffered; ‘For six days it seems as if all the centipedes in the world having traversed my brain attached themselves to it, and had to be torn off one by one, each time opening the seams of my mind.’ Nerves badly scarred by the Siege now had to cope with the deadly vacuum created by the capitulation. At one point in November, Goncourt had noticed that there was one aspect of Siege life that ‘almost made you love it’. It was the excitement of living in the ‘continual flutter of a war that surrounds you, that almost touches you, of being brushed by danger, of one’s heart always beating a little fast; this has a certain sweetness’. Now all that was over, and as Goncourt had presciently foreseen, ‘this feverish pleasure will be succeeded by boredom that is very empty, very empty, very empty’. Boredom,
l’ennui
, once more that deadliest of Gallic ailments. Now Paris was a city of men shuffling aimlessly about, staring without purpose into shop windows; regular troops and
Mobiles
waiting to be sent back to their homes, National Guards with no employment,
petits bourgeois
with no trade. To the innocent bystander, after all these months of war and privation, the scene might seem peaceful enough. But not very far beneath the suface, in the vacuum left by the capitulation, a dangerous ferment was bubbling up. Apart from anything else, for the past four months the civil population had been educated to kill Prussians; and the vast majority had been given no opportunity of an outlet for these deliberately fostered, violent urges. They remained unquenched; and in the debasement of such a defeat many Parisians, like frustrated children, were ready to kick any object at hand.

To cope with the maladies of Paris would have required leaders profoundly versed in the art of psychology; but, alas, the new Government of France was to prove itself as deficient in this respect as its predecessor had been in the conduct of war.

Most of those who could now hastened to escape from what had been their prison over the past four months, and from the fetid atmosphere prevailing in Paris. At first, it was not easy, as permits had to be obtained from both the French and Prussian authorities; but Labouchere, who was himself shortly to seek re-election to Parliament, was amused to note that some 23,000 Parisians applied to leave the city on the pretext that they were standing as provincial candidates
for the new Assembly. Then as controls were relaxed, they began to leave in such numbers that one Parisian believed many Frenchmen were intending to emigrate from the country for good. Degas departed for Château Ménil-Hubert, and Manet went to recuperate at Arcachon, both having served in the Paris National Guard; Berthe Morisot was taken by her parents to stay with Puvis de Chavannes; Monet and Pissarro remained in England where they had fled during the war; while Renoir was among the few who returned to Paris. At least 100,000 people are estimated to have left Paris during the armistice weeks alone; and most of these came from the middle-class bourgeoisie who could afford to leave, or who had somewhere to go. On the road they passed the poorer denizens of the suburbs, returning from evacuation in the provinces to what the war had left of their homes, accompanied by truck-loads of furniture and provisions. There were also the richer, more prosperous Parisians, who, having left the city before the investment, were now coming back to check on their property or to collect their rents. But many of them too would leave Paris again as soon as their objectives were achieved. These were regarded by the proletarian segments of Paris, bound ineluctably to the capital by the economic facts of life, with even less favour than the members of the bourgeoisie who were now leaving. There was also another aspect of the exodus which did not escape the attention of the disgruntled Red leaders, still seething with rage at the killings of January 22nd; it meant the substantial reduction in the number of bourgeois battalions of the National Guard on which the Government had relied to keep order in Paris in the past. Here was an ominous factor in what was to come.

With the armistice, many of the principal personalities of the Siege also left Paris and thus disappear from this story. Most of the British correspondents like Bowles, O’Shea, and Labouchere (now covered in fame as the ‘Besieged Resident’ that would help him gain popular support for re-election to the House of Commons) hastened home, emaciated and not a little disgusted by all they had seen; of the other British and Americans who had seen the Siege through, Richard Wallace, Dr. Alan Herbert, Minister Washburne, and his assistant, Wickham Hoffman, all remained in Paris after brief sorties outside. In a state of ecstasy, Edwin Child reached home by mid-February, but a few days later he found himself falling asleep in the middle of a Covent Garden pantomine, and by March 3rd he was on his way back to Paris. General Ducrot faded into a disgruntled semi-retirement, while Trochu withdrew to the oblivion that he had always promised would be his destination once he had completed his wartime role. Into his place now steps a toughly resilient little figure, who for over a
generation had already played a variety of roles both on and off the political stage of France: Adolphe Thiers.

On February 8th, France went to the polls to elect a new Government, which, as stipulated by the armistice conventions, would assume the responsibility of accepting or rejecting the permanent peace terms offered by Germany. The auspices for holding elections could hardly have been less promising. For an acceptable basis, the sponsors had to reach back beyond the Second Empire, as far as the Electoral Law established by the Second Republic in 1849. This decreed universal suffrage, with the voters of each
département
selecting their deputy from a long list, rather than voting for two or three candidates put up by the individual parties. The name on each list receiving the highest number of votes was elected; candidates were allowed to have their name placed on a plurality of lists, and could thus in fact be elected for more than one
département
.
¹
When this duplication occurred, by-elections had to be held subsequently. There were only eight days for electioneering, and in the forty-three
départements
occupied by the Germans it was actually forbidden. By comparison, in neurotic Paris the brief campaign was accompanied with great heat and confusion. There an impressive multiplicity of platforms was to be found—Labouchere heard one candidate open his address with ‘
Citoyens, je suis le représentant du go-ahead!
’—but in the country at large the contenders fell into two principal groups, the ‘list for peace’ and the list for continuation of the war. If the latter comprised principally the left-wing firebrands of Paris, those standing on the ‘list for peace’ were essentially conservatives from rural France. Most of the old familiar names—Favre, Simon, Garnier-Pagès, Glais-Bizoin—appeared on the lists; to the disgust of many like Goncourt, who was outraged that they should ‘have the presumption, these men, to present themselves for election!’ On polling day, there also arrived a feeble reminder from an almost forgotten voice; Louis-Napoleon, still a captive in Germany. In a proclamation beginning with a curiously familiar ring, the late Emperor declared that he had been ‘betrayed by fortune’, and reminded France that he was still its ‘real representative’, while any other Government was ‘illegitimate’.