The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (51 page)

If there was relative calm on the streets of Paris, it was by no means reflected inside the captured Hôtel de Ville, where a widely diverse collection of ‘revolutionaries’ and dissidents of all hues was debating the circumstances that had been thrust upon them. All were astonished by it, some were appalled, most were overawed. Although later it became widely believed that March 18th had all been a carefully prepared plot engineered by that sinister and shadowy group, the International, no one was more surprised than its leaders, including Karl Marx. Everything that had happened that day bore the keynote of spontaneity, and—as has already been seen—it was only on the initiative of junior commanders like Brunel that the abandoned Government offices had been occupied at all. The Comité Central of the National Guard had organized nothing, planned nothing; with the result that it was now caught critically off balance. What course of action should be adopted? Who or what should fill the vacuum created by the departure of the Government?

Vigorously, and often chaotically, the argument raged. Brunel wanted to march on Versailles at once and arrest the Government, while Louise Michel was heard fiercely urging those who would listen to expedite the assassination of Thiers. One member of the Comité
Central declared: ‘As for France, we do not presume to dictate laws to her—we have suffered too much under hers—but we do not wish any longer to submit to rural plebiscites.’ This outraged the veteran Socialist, Louis Blanc, who in his later years had become imbued with a sense of the sanctity of the State; he protested, ‘You are insurgents against an Assembly most freely elected!’
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About all that emerged from the meetings was the ascendancy of the Comité Central as the only body capable of governing Paris. Under the chairmanship of an ineffective member of the International called Adolphe-Alphonse Assi, who had a passion for delicate embroidery and had helped mount the big Le Creusot strikes early in 1870, the Comité Central now took over the reins.

No single issue was debated more heatedly in those first sessions at the Hôtel de Ville than the killing of the two generals. Neither the Comité Central nor any individual Red leader bore responsibility for this spontaneous act of mob frenzy. Yet could they repudiate it?
Le Rappel
expressed its profound grief, while pointing out that National Guards on the spot did attempt to hold back the mob, and even some of the most extreme left-wingers were deeply shocked. André Gill the cartoonist gloomily predicted ‘
La Commune est foutue!
’ and Babick, a Polish revolutionary on the Comité Central, protested against the killings and urged that the Comité should dissociate itself. But he was shouted down by another who cried, ‘Beware of disavowing the people, lest in their turn they disavow you!’ By and large, the feeling was—recalling ’93—that such regrettable occurrences were unavoidable in revolutions. Great indignation, however, was provoked by the reading out of an editorial in the
Journal Officiel
of that morning; ‘That frightful crime’, it said, ‘accomplished under the eyes of the Comité Central, gave the measure of the horrors with which Paris would be menaced if the savage agitators, who troubled the city and dishonoured France, should triumph.’ It was decided that ‘these calumnies’ would have to be stopped at source, so that one of the first actions of the new regime was to dispatch emissaries to take over the publication. Reappearing under its new management the following day, the
Journal Officiel
promptly absolved the Comité of any responsibility for what it described as the ‘executions’ of ‘two men who had made themselves unpopular by acts that as from today we rate iniquitous’. In its second issue, the
Journal
went further and spoke of the two generals as having been executed ‘according to the laws of war’.

Beyond the ranks of the revolutionaries, the news of the lynching of the two old generals had widely disgusted Frenchmen; Goncourt
said he experienced ‘a sensation of weariness at being French’. Disastrously, the Comité Central through its utterances in the
Journal Officiel
now became identified with the outrage. At Versailles, anger surged through the officer’s messes of the regular Army, and with it went a grim determination to avenge Lecomte and Thomas. What little prospect there now existed of conciliation between the Government and the insurgents was made clear by Jules Favre when he declared, in tougher language than he had ever been known to use about the Prussians during the Siege: ‘one does not negotiate with assassins’. Yet at this juncture it was difficult to see, if negotiation were excluded, just how Thiers was going to implement his intentions of emulating Windischgrätz’s reconquest of Vienna, and of taming Paris once and for all. He had already twice gravely under-estimated the situation. In the first place, although Marxists later claimed he had deliberately provoked a revolution, it is in fact quite clear that he had never anticipated that Vinoy’s operation on March 18th would lead to open insurrection. Like most of the new Assembly, he had minimized the determination of the Parisian left wing. And now he had dangerously under-estimated the potential military power of the hostile National Guard, relative to his own. On the march out to Versailles during the evening of the 18th, the regulars had revealed the shakiness of their morale by insulting the loyal police and gendarmes who marched at their side. Once at Versailles, they went about refusing to salute their officers and openly declaring that they would not fight against their brethren in Paris. Lord Lyons reckoned that probably the only troops on whom Thiers could depend were the Papal Zouaves, and this view was supported by Captain Patry who, after spending three days ‘reconnoitring’ in Paris in civilian clothes, departed for Versailles to discover that all that remained of his company was one sergeant and three officers. All the rest had melted away. Moreover, owing to the exodus of the bourgeois during the armistice, the ‘reliable’ units of the National Guard in Paris, which under the Siege had once numbered between fifty and sixty battalions, could now be reckoned at little more than twenty; compared with some three hundred dissident battalions, now liberally equipped with cannon. It was with the greatest difficulty that Vinoy had established posts between Versailles and Paris, and the dawning of each day brought renewed and genuine fears of a descent by the insurgents in overwhelming force, before ever Thiers had a chance to build up his counter-offensive.

This was what Brunel and others had urged upon the Comité Central from the start, and Thiers was in fact saved only by the paralysis that confusion bred in the Hôtel de Ville, which ultimately
would, cause the ruin of all Red dreams. Just, as, in the state of euphoria which existed outside on the streets, there was no hint that a bloody civil war might be about to break out at any moment, so in the dazed revolutionary councils was there no sense of urgency, no suggestion that a rebellion had been launched that any legitimate Government would be bound eventually to suppress with force. Most of the discussions turned on the essentially parochial political issue of Parisian autonomy, on the election of a municipal council—the famous ‘Commune’—and on the social issue of repealing the inequitable laws on debts and rents. Militarily, the first action of the Comité had been to place an unknown figure called Lullier in command of the National Guard, instead of the more obvious choice of Brunel. Lullier was an ex-naval officer discharged for bad conduct, and later described by a fellow Communard as ‘an alcoholic fool without morals or talent’, who on one occasion had had to be guarded by his colleagues to prevent him throwing himself out of the window. He seems to have been obsessed by fears of a surprise Government attack reoccupying the Hôtel de Ville by means of the subterranean passages which had already played so significant a role on recent occasions. Three were located and sealed off, but others believed to exist could not be traced. Thus a vast force was kept at the ready in the immediate area, and inside the building
mitrailleuses
appeared at the windows, mounted on tables and desks, and the windows themselves were stuffed with sandbags and feather beds. But apart from taking these quite unnecessary defensive precautions, Lullier did nothing. Worst of all, he made no effort to occupy Mont-Valérien, which had so effectively dominated the city’s western approaches throughout the Siege. On the evening of the 18th, Thiers had ordered its garrison to withdraw and for nearly three days the huge fortress, key to both Paris and Versailles, remained untenanted. Then, reluctantly and under pressure from General Vinoy, Thiers sent some of his few regulars to resume occupation. The insurgents had lost the initiative and Versailles began to regain its badly shaken confidence.

For the rest, in those first days the Comité Central carried out none of the actions normally associated with revolutionary rule. Lord Lyons was agreeably surprised. To the Foreign Secretary he wrote on March 21st that its various proclamations in the
Journal Officiel
‘seem to me to be in form much more calm, dignified and sensible than the proclamations of the Government of National Defence used to be. In substance they are not specimens of political knowledge and wisdom. It is to be hoped that the Assembly will not make matters worse by violent and ill-considered resolutions.’ He closed on a note of personal pessimism: ‘Anyway, I should not be at all surprised if
the Assembly transferred itself to some dismal French provincial town.’ The next day, just as Dr. Alan Herbert returned, Lord Lyons received orders once more to leave Paris with his staff, and betake himself to Versailles. Once again, the British residents found themselves without an Ambassador. But, for the time being, there seemed little to worry about. On the 21st, the Rev. Gibson was writing: ‘Paris is much quieter today… and the omnibuses are for the most part running as usual. Still there are groups of people talking most earnestly at the corners of the streets, and there is much excitement and but little business.’ The next day he visited the scene where it had all begun, Montmartre, but there too ‘all was quiet’. For several days Edwin Child had also been making the same observation, and took the opportunity to get out of hock forty watch-chains his employer had pawned during the Siege; but he thought there was something ‘minous’ about the unusual ‘silence and quietness’ on the boulevards. The calm, however, led all talk around to the possibility of conciliation and, according to rumours which reached the Rev. Gibson, ‘the Assembly at Versailles will not deal with the insurrection with a high hand, but will come to terms with the leaders of the National Guard’.

With the withdrawal of the Government, the last vestiges of legal authority left in Paris were embodied in the Mayors of the twenty
arrondissements
. As early as the 19th, Thiers had instructed them to mediate with the insurgents; although his motives were rather to stall for time, which he so badly needed, than to attempt any genuine conciliation. The Mayors themselves were as mixed, politically, as the various districts they represented. They ranged from Tirard, the conservative Mayor of the 2nd, the
arrondissement
of the banks and businesses, who was essentially Thiers’s man, to Mottu of the 9th and Ranvier of the 20th, who were supporters of Delescluze. Most, however, were left of centre; while even the right-wingers resented the Assembly’s ‘decapitalization’ of Paris, and wanted to restore her ascendancy by gaining some degree of municipal autonomy. All were anxious to avert any possibility of the situation heading towards civil war. The most important of them was the radical Mayor of Montmartre, Clemenceau, who was also a Deputy and who had attempted as early as March 8th to mediate between the Government and the National Guard over the disputed cannon. Under his lead, a series of meetings between the Mayors and members of the Comité Central had begun on the 19th, opening at 2 p.m. in the Bonvalet Restaurant. To the insurgents, Clemenceau pointed out the illegality of their position; ‘Paris has no right to revolt against France and must recognize absolutely the authority of the Assembly. The Comité has only one
means of getting out of this impasse: give way to the Deputies and Mayors who are resolved to obtain from the Assembly the concessions demanded by Paris.’ Varlin responded by giving a surprisingly moderate list of demands: ‘We want not merely an elected Municipal Council, but genuine municipal liberties, the suppression of the Prefecture of Police, the right of the National Guard to appoint its leaders and to reorganize itself; the proclamation of the Republic as the legitimate Government, the postponement, pure and simple, of payment of rent arrears, a fair law on maturities….’ The demands were by no means unreasonable.

Until 4 a.m. on the 20th the talks dragged on. When the appellation ‘rebels’ fell from Mayor Tirard’s lips, tempers rose. Jourde, a fiery Auvergnat, was roused to mention the deadly words ‘civil war’, and went on to prophesy ‘it will be ignited not only in Paris, but throughout France, and it will be bloody, I warn you… if we are conquered we shall burn Paris, and we shall turn France into a second Poland’. But to the voices of conciliation was added the influential one of old Louis Blanc, just returned from his long exile in England. At last, an agreement was reached whereby the Mayors would strive to get the terms of the Comité accepted by the Assembly; the Comité would postpone the municipal elections it was planning to hold on the 22nd until the Assembly should vote a municipal law for Paris; and it would hand the Hôtel de Ville over to the Mayors. But the next day the Comité Central came under heavy fire from the Vigilance Committees of the Twenty
Arrondissements
,
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comprised of the more ardent revolutionaries, for having been too weak and compliant in their dealings with the Mayors. They had heard the fiercely uncompromising speeches being made at Versailles by Favre and others, and there was nothing to assure them that in fact the Assembly would yield to the Mayor’s intercession. They could not rid their minds of instinctive distrust of the bourgeois ‘Establishment’, recalling how in every previous revolution it had somehow contrived to swindle the proletariat out of its presumptive birthright. Now, for the first time since the Great Revolution, the revolutionaries possessed temporary superiority in arms—a situation they had awaited throughout the century. But time was clearly not on their side—so could they afford to waste it on protracted negotiations?