The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (69 page)

It is a glorious day, but I am feeling low. We are surrounded. The Versailles people have not advanced as much as I expected, but they are gaining ground; after all there is a good deal of ground to get over. We have a battery of guns of the Reds at the end of Rue de la Paix, in the Boulevard 300 yards from the hotel which makes the windows rattle. The musketry has been very continuous and very heavy. Many of the National Guards are slipping away… I fear no letters will get out today.

(5 p.m.) For the last three quarters of an hour there has been an awful fire. The Reds have run past the Rue de la Paix in quantities with the greatest trouble…. It is a very grand sight, but the firing is of course a most pitiful one and also the cowardice of the people. We shall soon have the
red legs
in the streets, and they I shall not dare to bully as I do the Reds.

(5.30 p.m.) The barricade at the end of the street, which twenty minutes ago had been vacated by the Reds, has been taken by the Line and they have occupied a house and are firing down the street, making a most fearful noise. They are returning the fire near the Vendôme….

Beyond the Place Vendôme, Stanley spotted National Guards ‘flying across the Rue de Rivoli and St. Honoré, and their grand battery in Rue Castiglione is taken in reverse and is of course useless and empty’. Then, at 8 p.m., the Colonel recorded:

After forty minutes firing the Reds left the Place Vendôme. A quarter of an hour afterwards six men came back and have been firing ever since. The noise on both sides is awful, for those six men (it sounds like a joke), with their
tabatière
rifles, made as much noise as if they fired 6 pounders. I only observed two men wounded. It is getting dark… and the aim of course gets worse….

An hour later the
Versaillais
, ‘sick of the nonsense’, brought up some guns, and fired five rapid rounds into the gathering dusk. The effect, continued Stanley,
was wonderful, instant silence. The poor street is awfully cut up, glass and lamps have fallen all along;… I have chased away the maid who, like a little fool, would look out.

By 10 p.m. Stanley could hear people beginning to move about down in the street; ‘Poor Street of Peace. I imagine it is in an awful state’. An hour later he made his last entry for the 23rd:

Well, this eventful day is closing quietly. The spent balls whistle through the still air, and can be heard at a great distance…. I have been looking at my English flag which sticks out of my window. It has several bullet holes in it.

Away in the distance he saw the red glow of a great fire, which he thought might possibly be the Tuileries Palace burning.

* * *

All through that day Brunel and his men had continued to hold out with the utmost tenacity at the barricades in the Rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde, and at the immensely strong one at the bottom of the Rue St.-Florentin which guarded the Rue de Rivoli, the street pointing so straight at the Hôtel de Ville and the very heart of the Commune. Douay had brought no less than sixty guns to bear on Brunel’s position, against a meagre twelve. Their concentrated fire reduced the barricades to a shambles, killing scores of the defenders, whose flank all the time was becoming increasingly threatened by the turning movements from the direction of the Opéra. After the vital bulwark in the Place de la Madeleine fell, a new menace—that which had dispersed the Communards outside the Opéra—threatened them; deadly rifle-fire from sharp-shooters ensconced in the tops of the high buildings along the Rue Royale, which plunged down upon the defenders exposed behind their barricades. But Brunel was a soldier ruthless and resourceful enough to meet this kind of threat. Already during the first Siege he had acquired the nickname ‘Brunel the Burner’ on destroying a house that obstructed his field of fire, and now he swiftly ordered the firing of any houses capable of jeopardizing his defence. With alarming speed the flames spread up the famous street, consuming expensive
bijouteries
and elegant cafés alike.

The burning of Paris had begun; it was to become as integral a part of the legend of the Commune as the rats and balloons of the first Siege. For Brunel, however, the conflagration could only postpone the inevitable. His men (as Colonel Stanley spotted from his hotel) began to take flight in small packets down the Rue de Rivoli, and on
the fall of the Place Vendôme his position became hopeless. An American friend of Wickham Hoffman, with an apartment overlooking the Concorde, witnessed what must have been the last minutes of ‘the Burner’s’ stand there. At the great, sixteen-foot-high St.-Florentin barricade, in a scene that might have been painted by Delacroix, he saw

a young and apparently good-looking woman spring upon the barricade, a red flag in her hand, and wave it defiantly at the troops. She was instantly shot dead….

When the barricade, stretching across what is now one of the busiest thoroughfares in Paris, was finally carried, Hoffman’s friend watched while ‘an old woman was led out to be shot. She was placed with her back to the wall of the Tuileries Gardens, and, as the firing party levelled their pieces, she put her fingers to her nose and worked them after the manner of the defiant in all ages….’ Some forty or fifty dead Communards were collected at the barricade, and thrown into the deep ditch from which the materials for its construction had been excavated. Quicklime was added and the ditch filled in, so that Douay’s troops could without delay push their guns forward over it.

Up the vital Rue de Rivoli Brunel and his survivors now fell back towards the Hôtel de Ville in desperate haste. As they passed the Rue Castiglione they were caught in enfilading fire by regulars advancing from the Place Vendôme, who nearly succeeded in cutting off their line of retreat. Brunel escaped, although he and his men were silhouetted by an immense fire that had burst out behind them, the fire that Colonel Stanley had noted. Jules Bergeret, the Commune’s earliest military commander, now released from prison and to some extent rehabilitated, had carried out a desperate action, actuated, apparently, more by vengeful motives than by tactical necessity; an action that might easily have led to perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole civil war—the burning-down of the Louvre. Inside the
Salle des Maréchaux
of the Tuileries Palace, where only so recently the last of the famous concerts had taken place, Bergeret had piled barrel after barrel of gunpowder. The resplendent hangings in the great halls that had witnessed so many of the triumphs of the Second Empire in its hours of pride he smeared indiscriminately with tar and petroleum, and then withdrew. Shortly after 10 p.m. flames burst out all along the length of the palace. With a tremendous roar the central dome housing the
Salle des Maréchaux
disappeared. While Douay’s men looked on impotently, fascination mingled with horror at this display of pyrotechnics dwarfing anything mounted by the
former Emperor to divert his royal guests at the Great Exhibition, Bergeret scribbled a brief note to the Committee of Public Safety:

‘The last relics of Royalty have just vanished.’

Even if this had so far eluded its grasp, the Commune was now certainly beginning to leave a permanent mark on the face of France. But at the Hôtel de Ville late on Tuesday night the signs of imminent defeat were multiplying. How remote seemed that halcyon day when the Commune had been proclaimed outside this same Hôtel de Ville; when it had seemed to so many of the oppressed and dissatisfied of Paris that Utopia was at last within their grasp! Could that day of splendour and sublime confidence really have been a bare two months ago? Now the flames rising high above the Tuileries cast a diabolic glow on the Hôtel de Ville’s medieval façade, at the same time as it imparted an unnatural colour to the frightened faces of National Guards scurrying in and out of the building. The sounds of musketry were coming appreciably closer. Inside, the corridors were cluttered with wounded, groaning for water; the walls flecked with their blood. In men’s eyes a real fear was betrayed, something beyond the transient panics of the past. The realization that, despite the slowing-down in the rate of the
Versaillais
advance, the 23rd had been—militarily—
the
decisive day was not restricted to the leaders of the Commune. That night most who visited the Hôtel de Ville became aware of being faced with a choice of death or flight. Some, like the vanished Pyat, had already chosen. So had Dombrowski, now lying in state in a blue satin bed in the Hôtel de Ville. Even in the Commune’s last hours the irrelevant, as always, was to be found jostling the immediate; alongside Dombrowski a National Guard was occupied sketching the dead general’s features.

Outside Delescluze’s temporary office, a vigilant guard kept at bay the hordes of would-be suppliants. Within, a curiously unusual calm and quietness prevailed. According to Lissagaray’s description, ‘Delescluze is signing orders, pale, mute like a spectre. The agonies of the past days have drained what remained of his life. His voice is nothing but a croak. His gaze and his heart alone still live.’ Again according to the usually reliable Lissagaray, at about 3 o’clock that same night a staff officer presented himself to the Committee of Public Safety, having come post-haste from Notre-Dame Cathedral. There, he reported, he had found a detachment of National Guards busily engaged in buidling up a large ‘brasier’ out of chairs and pews; but, the staff officer warned, there were some eight hundred Communard sick and wounded in the adjacent Hôtel Dieu hospital, to which the
flames would almost certainly spread if the cathedral were incendiarized. The Committee hastily dispatched him with orders for Notre-Dame to be evacuated and left strictly alone. By so slender a margin was one of the world’s most famous monuments preserved.

But there was no one to check Raoul Rigault, then about to commit an atrocity he had long been planning. Without any authority and without consulting his colleagues, Rigault arrived at the Ste.-Pélagie Prison claiming to have orders for the immediate execution of Gustave Chaudey, one of the hostages who, as Jules Ferry’s deputy, had ordered the
Mobiles
to fire on the mob demonstrating outside the Hôtel de Ville on January 22nd. Rigault informed Chaudey, ‘You killed my friend Sapia; you have five minutes to live.’ Chaudey pointed out that he had been merely carrying out his duty; that, in the absence of any authenticated orders, Rigault would be responsible for murder and not an execution. Rigault brushed all this aside and, to a final objurgation by Chaudey that he had a wife and child, he replied icily: ‘The Commune will take better care of them than you.’ A reluctant firing-squad was hastily formed, of which Rigault personally took charge, but on its first volley only succeeded in wounding Chaudey in one arm. Displaying admirable courage, Chaudey stood there waving the other arm and crying ‘
Vive la République
!’ until prison warders finished off the job with their revolvers.

Not satisfied with his night’s work, Rigault now ordered out three of the lesser category of hostages, ordinary gendarmes seized on March 18th. His firing-squad, quite unnerved by the execution of Chaudey, demanded some kind of formal authorization. Compliantly, Rigault dictated a farcical indictment in mock legal terms covering all four men; ‘Whereas’, it read, ‘the
Versaillais
are firing at us from the windows, and whereas it is time to put an end to these events; in consequence thereof they have been executed in the court of this building.’ A hideous ritual then ensued. Only one of the gendarmes was killed outright by the half-hearted firing-squad; another tried to escape, hiding like some hunted rodent in the shadows of the courtyard until dragged out and shot. The episode shocked even Rigault’s aide and admirer, da Costa, who considered the killing of Chaudey both the ‘most fatally vengeful as well as the most justifiable’.

On May 24th, an Englishwoman living out at St.-Germain-en-Laye noted in her journal that it was Queen Victoria’s fifty-second birthday. She added, ‘God save the Queen, and long may she reign over us. Paris is
burning
.’ This last fact, so succinctly stated, was the one which above all others stuck in people’s memories for that day. Edwin Child, still in Communard territory in the Marais district where he continued to while away the time playing cards with his
friend Johnson, at first thought the news that the Tuileries were burning ‘incredible’. But on the 24th ‘it seemed literally as if the whole town was on fire and as if all the powers of hell were let loose upon the town’. From a distance the spectacle was almost more terrifying. The Rev. Gibson had returned from Chantilly as far as St.-Denis, to ascertain whether it was yet safe to re-enter the city, and from this vantage-point he saw ‘a sight such as we shall never forget. Fires have been seen in various parts of the city throughout the whole day; but in the evening, towards nine o’clock, the heavens in the direction of the ill-fated city were completely lighted up.’ Into his mind immediately came the passage in the Book of Revelations recounting the fall of Babylon:

Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off.

And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What city is like unto this great city!’

Biblical parallels also captured Dr. Powell’s imagination, though he was reminded more of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Goncourt, who had returned to Auteuil to find his house still standing with only a hole in the roof and a shell-hole in the garden, could see behind him ‘a cloud of smoke over Paris like that which crowns a gasworks. And all around us fall from the skies, like black rain, little fragments of burnt paper; the records and the accounts of France.’ It reminded him of the ashes which had buried Pompeii, and that night the image recurred when he described the fire over Paris as resembling ‘those Neapolitan
gouaches
of an eruption of Vesuvius done on black paper’. In a different vein, another Frenchman recalled dining at the chic Pavilion Henri VI on the Terrasse de St.-Germain, and his party pointing with detached cynicism at the various buildings that appeared to be alight. When someone declared that the Louvre was among those burning, ‘a large lady exclaimed—“let’s hope he doesn’t mean the department store!” ’