The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (49 page)

The true mood of Paris should have been revealed by a savagely nasty incident that took place on the Place de la Bastille on February 26th. Already, two days previously, units of the National Guard had begun demonstrating there against suspected Government intents to disembody and disarm them, coupled with protests against the German triumphal entry (it also happened to be the anniversary of the creation of the Second Republic in 1848). On the 25th, the demonstration had turned into a veritable left-wing pilgrimage, and by evening the plinth of the July Column was heaped high with wreaths and oriflammes; and on the 26th (the day Thiers signed the Peace Treaty) it became a mass march past of the National Guard, lasting from 10 a.m. in the morning until 6 p.m. at night. Though none bore arms, each battalion marched with its own band and its colours draped in black. Some 300,000 Parisians took part, and many—like Louis Péguret—found it a particularly exalting, and even ‘majestic’, occasion. From the monument, leaders of the National Guard wearing red sashes across their chests made inflammatory speeches to any who could hear them. One regular Army officer heard a representative of the 238th Battalion of the National Guard declare—amid menacing references to 1793, 1830, and 1848—that ‘the exploiters of monopoly
seem to believe that the people are always in tutelage. They seem to forget that they sometimes wake up suddenly….’

The temper of the crowd was ugly; it needed little to create an incident. Abruptly the speeches were interrupted by shouts of ‘A spy! A spy! Arrest him!’, and a man was dragged forth, beaten and kicked. His name appears to have been Vincenzoni, but just what his offence was remains vague; the Lyon brothers who witnessed the episode recounted that he had merely been recognized as a former Imperial police official, but left-wing sympathizers claimed that he was a Government spy noting down the numbers of units taking part in the demonstration. Whatever the truth, the mob was lusting for blood and the wretched man was dragged to the bank of the Seine, accompanied by yells of ‘Beat him! Knock him on the head! Drown him!’ According to the subsequent inquiry, he begged to be allowed to shoot himself, but the mob refused him this clemency, howling: ‘Into the Seine with him, into the Seine!’ He was then bound hand and foot and carried, ‘like a parcel’, across a line of moored barges, and thrown well out into the Seine. But the current kept bringing the unfortunate man back into shore, where ‘some wretches, pushing ferocity to its ultimate limits, stoned him….’ These horrible scenes lasted not less than two hours, until the victim was finally drowned—under the eyes of several thousand unprotesting Parisian men and women.

That same day, insurgents forced their way into the Ste.-Pélagie prison to release, among others, a prisoner detained for his part in the January disturbances: one Lieutenant Paul-Antoine Brunel, who was to play a key role in subsequent events. Brunel, a determined disciple of
résistance à outrance
during the Siege, had been arrested by Vinoy shortly before the capitulation, on charges of having ordered his men of the 107th Battalion of the National Guard to seize the magazines and telegraphs, and to forestall any attempt of the Government of National Defence to leave Paris by balloon. At the same time as Brunel was released, other National Guards boldly descended on artillery parks in various parts of the city which the Germans were to occupy and removed some two hundred cannon. Most of these bore National Guard numbers, and had been ‘bought’ by public subscription during the Siege. In all honesty, the Guard felt that these guns were ‘their’ property, and its motives seem to have been activated purely out of determination to prevent them shamefully falling into German hands. Exasperated by defeat and all the further humiliation that they felt the new Assembly had piled upon it, the die-hard ‘popular’ elements of the National Guard now took it upon themselves to salvage what little remained of Parisian pride; and much of
the rest of Paris was with them. Chanting the Marseillaise, with prodigious physical efforts they hauled the two hundred cannon up to Montmartre. Still only partially built up, with but one access road to it, Montmartre lay in ‘friendly’ territory and provided a redoubt difficult to approach. The removal of the guns was to have immense consequences, but—although the agitations of February 26th spread fairly widely across the city—as there had been no actual clash between the National Guard and the regular Army, the event passed by relatively unmarked.

At the end of January, after the shooting incident of the 22nd and the capitulation, the left-wing battalions of the National Guard with ‘common interests’ had gradually become grouped together under an executive organ calling itself the
Comité Central de la Garde Nationale
. By the beginning of March, after additional units, disaffected by the Assembly’s unpopular measures, had drifted into its orbit, and after many ‘bourgeois’ battalions had been disbanded owing to the mass exodus from Paris of their members, the Comité Central wielded huge potential powers. It, and not d’Aurelle, the newly appointed chief, commanded the National Guard. Moreover, because of Favre’s disastrous compromise at Versailles whereby (despite Bismarck’s warning) the regular Army had been reduced to only one division while the National Guard retained its arms, the latter was now by far the most powerful armed force in France; and, as of February 26th, it had two hundred cannon at its disposal. On March 3rd, General d’Aurelle de Paladines arrived in Paris. He hardly enhanced his popularity by promptly proclaiming his ‘firm intention to repress with energy all that could impair tranquillity’. When he summoned a meeting of battalion commanders of the National Guard, only some thirty out of two hundred and sixty turned up. The Government now suddenly became aware of the strength of the ‘dissident’ National Guard (who had given themselves the title of ‘
Fédérés
’), this Frankenstein it had created during the Siege. On March 5th, Blumenthal noted down in his journal doubts as to whether Vinoy, commander of the Paris garrison, would be master of the situation ‘even with 40,000 men’.

Thus suddenly, literally overnight, had the balance of power in Paris—and, indeed, France herself—changed. To Thiers, the potential threat appeared too grave to leave unchallenged. On March 8th the regular Army was ordered to recover the purloined guns. Vinoy himself, as well as most of his officers, was burning with anger at the long chain of insults the ‘rabble in arms’ had offered his forces; ill-feeling between the regulars and the National Guard was at its peak, the provincial
Mobiles
in particular still recalling with contempt the
performance of the latter during the Siege. But on the day Vinoy’s men put up only the feeblest of performances. A new toughness seemed to have entered into the National Guard, and, confronted with a resolute refusal to hand over the cannon, the regulars backed away. Later that day, Duval, one of the members of the Comité Central, followed up this display of weakness by burning down an Army barracks on the Rue de Grenelle. Vinoy spluttered with impotent rage. Thiers, reaching Paris on the 17th,
¹
realized that a full-scale military demonstration would have to be made to cow the National Guard into handing over the guns. A force of some 3,000 gendarmes and police, plus the 12,000 to 15,000 regulars at Vinoy’s disposal, he reckoned, would be sufficient to impress a militia which Trochu had hesitated to send into action. The guns would be removed from Montmartre the next morning. ‘Evilly-disposed men, under the pretext of resisting the Prussians, have taken control of a part of the city’, Thiers proclaimed to the Parisians; ‘You will approve our recourse to force, for it is necessary, at all cost… that order, the very basis of your well-being, should be reborn.’ But he had misjudged the temper of both Paris and the National Guard as badly as he had gauged the morale of the defeated French regulars.

On the morning of the 18th, Minister Washburne set off to spend the day with some American friends, Mr. and Mrs. Moulton, at Petit-Val, some twelve miles from Paris. Before starting he called in at the Foreign Office, where he had detected some unspecified agitation; otherwise ‘there was no excitement in the streets, and there appeared to be nothing unusual going on….’ Mr. Moulton mentioned hearing rumours of a collision at Montmartre, and that two generals had been killed, but after four months of siege Washburne no longer paid much attention to Parisian
canards
. When he returned that night he was to find the Thiers Government had fled Paris and the Commune had begun.

Vinoy’s operation to disarm the National Guard comprised four separate movements; one body of troops was sent under General Faron to occupy the hotbeds of Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont, where some of the cannon had also been dragged; General Wolff with a second column moved on the Bastille area; while a third under General Hanrion covered the Hôtel de Ville. The main effort of recovering the Montmartre guns fell to General Susbielle’s division, consisting of two brigades commanded by Generals Paturel and Lecomte. It was, in fact, a far less impressive force than it sounded; Lecomte’s brigade, for instance, to which the principal burden was
allotted, consisted largely of green and inexperienced young troops of the 88th Regiment. There was little enthusiasm as the regulars reached their objectives under a glacial rain, before dawn that Saturday morning; a Captain Patry, sent with his regiment to the Bastille, recalled being disgusted equally at the thought of anyone plunging the ruined country into a civil war, and himself being called out ‘to bring back the House of Orléans to the Tuileries’. Yet, like so many of the disastrous battles during the Siege, the operation began auspiciously enough. Although today’s Montmartre would not yet have gone to bed, by being in position at 3 a.m. Susbielle’s division had caught the village fast asleep. Those sentries of the National Guard who were awake, standing watch over the sacred cannon, fled in terror; one alone, Guardsman Turpin, who was whiling away the time by greasing his bayonet, was wounded with a
chassepot
bullet. The guard-post in the Rue des Rosiers was captured and locked up in the cellars of the Tour Solférino restaurant, close to where Gambetta had climbed aboard his balloon. By 4 a.m. it was all over at Montmartre; the regulars had recaptured the guns.

By a piece of almost unbelievable incompetence, typical of that professional ineptitude which had lost France the war, Susbielle’s division now discovered that it had come without the teams of horses needed to tow the guns away. It was Champigny, Le Bourget, and Buzenval all over again. (Said Thiers of the operation, in a superlative piece of understatement, ‘It lacked the ardent vigilance which makes affairs of war succeed’.) There the regulars sat, with the guns they had recaptured, unable to move. In the meantime, Louise Michel—the Red Virgin—who had been assisting a National Guard
cantinière
to staunch Turpin’s wounds at No. 6 Rue des Rosiers, somehow managed to escape. Down the hill she ran, with a rifle on her shoulder, crying ‘Treason!’ Quickly the Montmartre ‘Vigilance Committee’ mustered its supporters. As the sun came up and the horses had still not arrived, the denizens of Montmartre, realizing the stalemate, recovered their nerve. All over Paris the sinister tocsin was heard, alerting the National Guard. Everywhere immense, hostile crowds composed of National Guardsmen and the inevitable admixture of Parisian
canaille
sprang up around the regulars. Their aspect reminded one correspondent of
The Times
of pictures of Girondist revolutionaries, and he was terrified ‘to see arms in the hands of such men’. Closer and closer they surged up to the regulars, whose officers were either too inexperienced or too dispirited to keep the mob at a distance. Down at the Bastille, Captain Patry claimed, ‘I had never been more embarrassed in my life. My orders were to disperse any assemblages, and the streets were nothing but one vast assemblage in
which my company was positively drowned. I myself had the greatest difficulty in moving.’ Under such conditions it was impossible for the regulars to retain any initiative.

Up at Montmartre things became even worse. By 7.45 a.m., Lecomte’s troops were virtually submerged by the mob, who fraternized with them, pouring every kind of seditious argument into their young ears. Suddenly, some of the 88th Regiment of the Line were seen to reverse their rifles, raising the butts in the air, accompanied by cries of ‘Long live the Line! Down with Vinoy! Down with Thiers!’ At approximately this moment, the twenty-nine-year-old Mayor of Montmartre, Dr. Georges Clemenceau, appeared on the scene requesting to remove Turpin to hospital. Clemenceau also warned Lecomte to get the guns away quickly, otherwise there would be serious trouble. Lecomte refused to allow Turpin to be moved; a decision which roused the mob—goaded on by the tempestuous Louise—to a new fury. Lecomte rashly gave the order to fire on the mob, but realizing he would no longer be obeyed, countermanded it and instead ordered his men to defend themselves with their bayonets. One order was as unrealistic as the other, and Lecomte, isolated by the defection of the troops of the 88th, was dragged from his horse.

What follows now bears the confusion of such events, depending as it did largely on the testimony of witnesses who were subsequently sentenced to death or to imprisonment for their participation. Beaten and insulted, General Lecomte—whom at one point the mob appears to have mistaken for Vinoy himself—was conducted to a National Guard post established in the ‘Château-Rouge’, a dance-hall similar to the famous ‘Moulin de la Galette’. The post was commanded by Captain Simon Mayer, who promptly went to Clemenceau to report that he held Lecomte prisoner. Clemenceau instructed Mayer to be responsible for the general’s safety, but on his return Mayer received a fresh set of orders from the ‘Vigilance Committee of the 18th
Arrondissement
’, composed of left-wing-extremists such as Clemenceau’s Deputy Mayor, a bearded Red fanatic called Théophile Ferré. Fearing that Clemenceau’s intentions were to have Lecomte released, the ‘Vigilance Committee’ ordered that he should be transferred to another National Guard post in the Rue des Rosiers. Mayer obeyed.