The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (59 page)

Although the repeated rumours that the Government forces were about to force a re-entry into Paris continued to end in disappointment for the beleaguered bourgeoisie, as April moved to its close Thiers and MacMahon had in fact decided upon a formula under which to deploy the full weight of the troops they had been husbanding. Possibly better than any soldier, Thiers knew the strength—and weaknesses—of the Paris defences; it was he who had been the Minister responsible for their construction during the reign of Louis-Philippe. He had long been aware that the potential Achilles’ heel of the system lay at the Point-du-Jour, the extreme south-western pinnacle of the city, close to where the Seine flows out towards Sèvres. It was here that his army would try to break in. But first they would have to capture Fort Issy, the imposing fortress controlling the approaches just across the river.

On April 25th, Thiers acceded to the Commune request for an armistice at Neuilly, in order to allow the evacuation of the wretched, half-starved inhabitants. There was by now hardly a house standing in the village, and many of its residents almost lacked the strength to leave their cellars. Under cover of the twelve-hour truce, Thiers now disengaged the weight of his artillery from the Neuilly sector and transferred it to that facing Issy-les-Moulineaux. No less than 53 batteries of guns, supported by powerful infantry contingents, were mustered there under the command of General Cissey. The next day Thiers announced the opening of ‘active operations’, and after a particularly intense bombardment captured the village of Les Moulineaux that evening. On the 27th, Cissey’s troops succeeded in pushing a parallel to within 300 yards of Fort Issy, which was all the time being deluged with heavy fire. According to Lissagaray, the Commune chronicler, Issy—already badly battered by Moltke’s artillery in January—was soon ‘no longer a fort, hardly even a fortified position; a litter of shell-lashed earth and rubble. Through the smashed-in casements the countryside could be seen, and the powder magazines were exposed; half of Bastion No. 3 lay in the moat; one could have driven a carriage through the breach….’ The fort’s commandant, a workman called Mégy who had killed a policeman come to arrest him the previous year, sent pleas to Cluseret for
heavy reinforcements, but none came. By the 30th Cissey’s men had sapped forward to the very foot of the fort glacis, and Mégy could no longer restrain the panic that had broken out among the garrison. Ordering the guns to be spiked, he now evacuated the fort.

It was the worst military blow yet to befall the Commune. At the Ministry of War, Cluseret at once realized the significance of the evacuation of Fort Issy, both to the defence of Paris, and to himself. Although there had been no major shocks since April 4th and his reforms had begun to return some dividend, his star had been steadily waning. Anger at the drowning of a large number of National Guardsmen when a bridge of boats had broken—apparently by mismanagement—on April 17th, had been directed against Cluseret, and his undisguised contempt for the National Guards’ military attributes had caused growing resentment in Commune circles. Tact was not his strongest point, and the Executive Commission found itself constantly having to water down some of his more searing pronouncements; there was, for instance, one in which he had condemned the profligate expenditure of ammunition as a ‘stupid and entirely Monarchist practice’. These were words that cut to the quick, and Cluseret came under constant fire at the Hôtel de Ville. In a heated session on April 20th, Vermorel had declared that ‘for the past month we have been sleeping, we have had no organization’, to which Delescluze responded with the lukewarm defence, ‘We took Cluseret because we could find no other soldier’. Bitter rivalry had sprung up between the Comité Central and the Commune for control over the National Guard; the former was disinclined to subordinate its earlier powers. Thus every effort for reform made by Cluseret, never the most energetic of men, had been attacked by one side or the other, and much of his time had been wasted in playing one off against the other. A leader worth his salt would have seen the necessity to limit strictly the Comité’s powers of interference in the conduct of war; but Cluseret, the eternal conspirator, could not help but exacerbate divisions between the two rival bodies.

By April 30th, after only four weeks of office, Cluseret was exhausted—worn out by the intrigues and the wrangling. Yet on hearing Mégy’s report he summoned up a rare burst of energy, and marched out himself at the head of less than two hundred men, in pouring rain, to see what could be retrieved from the situation at Issy. Arriving at the fort, he found to his considerable surprise that it was still as Mégy had left it, unoccupied
¹
—with the exception of ‘an urchin of
sixteen or seventeen, weeping quietly upon a barrel of gunpowder, placed on a wheelbarrow under the entrance. He had a match with which to ignite the barrel and was thus intending to blow up the fort and himself when the enemy entered. I flew to him and embraced him, weeping myself.’ Clad in civilian clothes and the kind of slouch hat Ulysses Grant might have worn before Richmond, unmoved by the shots that whistled through the riddled fort, Cluseret at once ordered its reoccupation. The guns (which had only been ineptly spiked in the first instance) were unspiked, and fresh reinforcements hastened up. By a miracle he had saved Fort Issy; but the miracle was not enough to save Cluseret. In his absence, rumours of the fall of Issy had reached Paris and there had been manifestations outside the Hôtel de Ville alarmingly familiar to the Commune leaders inside who had themselves taken part in the events of October 31st and January 22nd. Returning to the Hôtel de Ville, to report his success Cluseret fell into what he described as ‘an ambush’. At the door of the Commune Council Chamber, he was met by a sad-faced Pindy and a picket of the Commune’s special guard. ‘
Mon cher ami
, I have a very melancholy mission to perform’, said Pindy, ‘I am forced to arrest you.’

Nuns interrogated by Communards

22. The Return of the Jacobins

T
HE
news of Cluseret’s arrest was revealed in a public announcement the following day, Monday, May 1st. It provoked—according to Washburne—a great deal of excitement. The official reason was ‘incapacity’, but rumours swiftly buzzed through Paris that Cluseret had been apprehended plotting to overthrow the Commune; that he had sold himself to Versailles; or that, more specifically, he was an Orleanist agent. It was a measure of the new nervousness within the city.

To replace Cluseret, his former Chief of Staff, Louis Rossel, was designated ‘provisional’ Delegate of War. Completely apolitical, Rossel was one of the more unusual adherents to the Commune, and his attachment testified to how the bitterness felt by so many loyal Frenchmen at the shameful capitulation of the Government of National Defence had led up to the March insurrection and gained it such powerful initial support. At this distance in time, he, Varlin, and Delescluze strike one as being—in their different ways—the Commune’s three most appealing figures; but Rossel was also by far its most efficient soldier. Had he been in charge in March, subsequent history might well have been different; had he survived, it seems
almost certain that he would have left a mark of genius somewhere. Rossel was born in Brittany of a French father with military and Huguenot antecedents, and a Scottish mother. He had made a career as an engineer in the regular Army, graduating second in his class at the Polytechnique. At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war Rossel held the rank of captain in Bazaine’s Army, and from the first was disgusted at the ineptitude of the French High Command. Walled up in Metz, he seems early on in the siege to have toyed with the idea of ‘deposing’ Bazaine. He tried once to escape from the city, but was caught and led back by Prussian sentries; just as the capitulation was being arranged, he did succeed in getting away, disguised as a peasant, which would almost certainly have resulted in his being shot by the Prussians had he been discovered. He eventually reached Gambetta’s forces, whose slovenliness shocked him, and when asked by Freycinet what job he wanted replied unhesitatingly: ‘if all the places were to be distributed, I should choose the sole direction of operations’. Gambetta, at once recognizing genius in this strange, fierce young man with a straggly black moustache and penetrating eyes, promoted him colonel and sent him off to be Chief Engineer at Nevers. Rossel was then just twenty-six.

When news of the armistice reached him in Nevers, Rossel was appalled. In his
Posthumous Papers
he wrote: ‘We are wanting in patience; we conclude peace as rashly as we went to war’, adding with biting irony: ‘as a general rule, a defence until death can never do harm to a people’. On March 19th, the day after the insurrection in Paris, he wrote to General Le Flô, the Minister of War:

Mon Général
,

I have the honour to inform you that I am about to proceed to Paris, to place myself at the disposal of the Government forces which are being organized there. Having learnt by a Versailles despatch, published this day, that two parties are struggling for mastery in the country,
I do not hesitate to join the side which has not concluded peace, and which does not include in its ranks generals guilty of capitulation….

The letter must have been a delight to its recipient. Rossel now set forth for Paris, in the apparently genuine belief that—with the guns available in Paris and a revolutionary and fighting party in power it would be possible somehow ‘to snatch back victory’ from the Prussians. Socialism, Proudhon, Blanqui, and Marx meant nothing to him; ‘I did not know who the insurgents were, but I knew against whom they were rebelling and that was sufficient.’ During a kind of ideological selection board to which he was submitted on taking up his new post, he admitted: ‘I shall not tell you that I have profoundly studied social reforms, but I have a horror of this society which has
just sold France with such cowardice….’ What he saw of the Commune soon shocked him even more than had Gambetta’s levies, and he was about to quit Paris when Cluseret begged him, on April 3rd, to become his Chief of Staff; although, to the end, he maintained that ‘the Parisian revolutionary party was, in my eyes, the lesser evil’.

Rossel had a self-confident manner, a deliberate and thoughtful way of speaking that reminded a
Daily News
interviewer more of an American or an Englishman, and—like Cluseret—he would have wished to introduce some Yankee efficiency into the National Guard. With an energy Cluseret never revealed, Rossel—well aware that time was now hopelessly against him—set to work to reorganize the Paris defences. On the very day of his appointment in succession to Cluseret he ordered the immediate construction of a ring of barricades behind the ramparts, as a second line of defence in the event of MacMahon breaking through the perimeter. There was much his engineering expertise could achieve here; on April 27th, Colonel Stanley noted critically, ‘The embrasure in the barricade at the end of the Rue de Rivoli is so stupidly made, that it does not command half the Place de la Concorde’. Further within the city, three last-ditch ‘citadels’ were to be erected at the Trocadéro, Montmartre, and the Panthéon on the Left Bank. The whole of this southern side of Paris Rossel entrusted to another courageous and competent Pole, thirty-four-year-old Walery Wroblewski, while Dombrowksi was placed in direct control of the Right Bank. Eudes was sent, reluctantly, to Fort Issy, from which hot-spot he spent most of his time finding a pretext to return. For the first time, Rossel attempted to concentrate and centralize the Commune’s powerful artillery; there were some 1,100 pieces which had hitherto been scattered uselessly about, many rusting in the compounds, their breech-blocks stored elsewhere, while the beleaguered gunners on the ramparts had for the most part only light 7- and 12-pounders with which to reply to Versailles’s heavy naval guns.

Strategically, Rossel also appreciated that a purely passive defence would be powerless to prevent the eventual fall of the fortifications’ and with this in mind he drew up a plan to create ‘combat groups’, each of five battalions, commanded by a colonel and supported by 40 guns, with the aim of seizing the initiative wherever possible before Paris. But his scheme was confronted with a serious, and growing, shortage of numbers; the 200 battalions parading in such triumph on March 28th had soon melted.
¹
Levied on a parochial
basis, the National Guardsmen showed a curious reluctance to serve in quarters other than where their own homes lay, as well as being fundamentally part-time militiamen; so that by the time of his take-over, Rossel could probably count on little more than 30,000 regularly available fighting troops, as against the 130,000 that Thiers and MacMahon had now mustered.

This was by no means Rossel’s only headache. To raise the effectiveness of what troops he did have, he, like Cluseret, wanted to apply the disciplinary measures of a regular army. He wanted to bring those who had defaulted in the face of the enemy before a court martial, but the Executive Commission complained of his excessive severity: while Karl Marx’s future son-in-law, Charles Longuet, accused Rossel of not showing the right ‘political spirit’. When the sentence of death on one battalion commander found guilty of refusing to march on the enemy was commuted to imprisonment for the duration of the war, Rossel was driven to despair and fury. Just like Cluseret he too discovered his hands bound by the rival Communard bodies; Maxime Vuillaume, one of the Commune chroniclers, recalls a visit to the Ministry of War, when Rossel ‘went to the window, pointed to a group of the Comité’s officers gesticulating and arguing loudly below, and, turning to us, cold-eyed; muttered between his teeth: “If I were to have them shot, now, down there in the yard….” ’ With the departure of Cluseret, the Comité Central had redoubled its efforts to gain control over military operations. Friction with the Commune Executive Commission grew worse, and when Rossel pleaded against any such transfer of responsibility, the Blanquists spread suspicion that he was scheming to set himself up as a military dictator. And, one day after his appointment, yet another new headache arrived in the form of the creation of a Committee of Public Safety; which, despite its dread connotations of absolutism, in fact—initially—only meant still further dissipations of the Commune’s executive power, and graver rifts within it.