The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (76 page)

Another exile in Britain of rather a different kind was the ex-Emperor, Louis-Napoleon, who—on being liberated from Germany—spent the last two unhappy, painful years of his life at Chislehurst, Kent. His Empress, Eugénie, was to survive him by many years, until 1920; long after the last hope of the dynasty, the young Prince Impérial, had perished by a Zulu assegai in South Africa. Louis-Napoleon’s
marshal at Sedan, and later the conqueror of Paris, MacMahon succeeded Monsieur Thiers as President of the Third Republic. Ducrot soldiered on, but in 1878 was dismissed from command for expressing ‘anti-Republican’ views and died four years later. Trochu, having refused both a marshal’s baton offered by Thiers as well as the Légion d’Honneur for his services during the first Siege, disappeared—as he had always promised—into total obscurity, to write two verbose volumes of memoirs. In contrast, Victor Hugo managed to remain in the limelight during his declining years; having made Brussels too hot with his noisy intercessions on behalf of the exiled Communards, he retired to Vianden in Luxembourg with a new, eighteen-year-old mistress, Marie Mercier, who is said to have inspired his great work on the Commune,
L’Année Terrible
. Léon Gambetta continued to be the scourge of the right wing, as well as the voice of true Republicanism, in French politics until a bullet fired by a jealous woman put an end to a brilliant but mercurial temperament on New Year’s Eve, 1882. Soon after his return to France, the stormy Rochefort had to flee once again, following the Boulangist attempt to establish a military dictatorship. Back in France at the end of the century, he was to be found telling Queen Victoria, after the Franco-British dispute over Fashoda, not to make her annual visit to Nice, and he lived almost to the eve of the Great War. Goncourt went on writing his
Journal
until twelve days before he died (in 1896), publishing it in instalments—to the dismay of his contemporaries, friends and foes alike. The dreaded Marquis de Gallifet became Minister of war in the regime under which the Dreyfus case exploded.

Of the Britons and Americans who had lived in Paris during
L’Année Terrible
, Richard Wallace—given a baronetcy for his services in the Siege—was as disillusioned by Thiers’s new administration as he had been disgusted by the Commune, and began preparations for moving his incomparable collection of paintings to London; an immeasurable benefit for Britain. On leaving Paris he gave another million francs for the relief of the poor and for the erection of drinking fountains—which still bear his name. In 1890 he died, crippled with rheumatism. Dr. Alan Herbert continued to live in Paris, and was buried in the Clichy Cemetery in 1907; but his pet hen, Una, who survived the first Siege, travelled to England, where she lived to a venerated old age at Thornbury Castle. Edwin Child married four years after the Commune, returned to London to manage a watch shop in London, and eventually came to Stockport in Lancashire as representative of an Amiens hat firm, owned by his friend Johnson with whom he had spent
la semaine sanglante
in refuge. He died, aged eighty-five, the
year Hitler came to power. Elihu Washburne remained another six years as American Minister in Paris. Labouchere, the ‘Besieged Resident’, returned—as noted earlier—to British politics. It was observed by his friends that the Siege had markedly aged him, giving him a somewhat more reverend appearance; and perhaps as a result of what he had seen in Paris, he retained a loathing for jingoism all his life. Like his fellow correspondent, Tommy Bowles also entered politics. Thirty years later, as a veteran Member of Parliament, he cosseted and prompted a nervous young M.P., who had also once been a war correspondent, about to make his maiden speech in the Commons; his name was Winston Churchill.

Once Paris had recovered, France herself was not far behind. After sketching dead Communards at the barricades, Manet was back at Boulogne painting
La Partie de Croquet
. Renoir and Degas came back to find studios in Paris; Monet and Pissarro returned from refuge in London. Suddenly, as if in reaction against the grim drabness and the horrors of the Siege and the Commune, the Impressionists burst forth into a new, passionate, glorious blaze of colour, redolent with the love of simple, ordinary existence. France had come back to life again. Her industry blossomed forth in a new renaissance; this time based on firmer foundations than those that had existed under the Second Empire. To the astonishment of the world, the first demi-milliard of the five milliard francs in reparations that France was to pay Germany were handed over just one month after the collapse of the Commune. The rest followed with a rapidity no European banker would have predicted; by September 1873 the crushing bill had been paid off, and the last German soldier removed from French soil. In 1872 the French Assembly passed the first of the laws designed to restore the efficiency of her humiliated Army; and with it went a new spirit. Already by June 15th, 1871, the Rev. Gibson was writing with gloomy foresight:

I regret to find that the determination to seek to take their revenge sooner or later on Prussia is again manifesting itself among the Parisians… Alas for France, and alas for the hope of the peace of Europe!… Germany, when within the next few years she again encounters France in arms, will find her a very different foe from the France of 1870; and who knows but that before the end of this century there may be a similar triumph in Paris to that which is now being celebrated in Berlin? I vainly hoped that France would feel herself fairly beaten and be willing to accept her inferior position….

Throughout the next forty-three years Frenchmen would ponder in silence Edgar Quinet’s remark at the time of the debate on Bismarck’s peace terms:

The cession of Alsace-Lorraine, it is war to perpetuity under the mask of peace!

For a nation like France could not possibly accept an ‘inferior position’ in Europe; nor, in the long run, would it prove acceptable to Europe.

* * *

Together and separately, each in its different way, the Siege and the Commune had left the structure of the old world fundamentally altered. Nothing would ever be quite the same. The Franco-Prussian War, of which the Siege of Paris was both its central and climactic feature, upset the whole balance of power as it had existed in Europe since the downfall of the first Napoleon. Englishmen, basking in the late noon sunlight of Victorian splendour and introvertively preoccupied with liberal experiments, and Americans, still recovering from their own Civil War and about to plunge into the era of Big Business, little reckoned that one day they would both be called in—twice—to redress the balance which Louis-Napoleon and Bismarck had upturned. Because of the chronic and endemic weakness of post-1871 France in relation to her former enemy, the new resurgent Germany was bound sooner or later to be enticed on to further ideas of grandeur; which would ineluctably bring her into conflict with the world’s greatest remaining force, British sea-power. On the other hand, France clearly would never herself have the capacity to restore the balance until the powerful industrial areas of Alsace and Lorraine were once more back in her hands; and she could never regain them without calling upon the help of others.

Materially, France herself would recover from the after-effects of war and civil war with astonishing speed. Even the amputation of Alsace-Lorraine might not prove mortal; perhaps, who could tell, there might even come a day when the lost territories would be restored by negotiation? But far more serious for so proud a nation were the unseen wounds; the shame, the outrageous reversal of fortune, the slur on her virility. The deep insult of the German Emperor being crowned in the palace dedicated ‘
à toutes les gloires de la France
’ while Paris was in her death throes was something no people could forget. Soon a new generation would grow up in France; a generation to whom defeat would be unthinkable, and who in the unspeakable mire of Verdun would turn Gambetta’s slogan ‘
résistance à outrance
’ into a terrible reality. With uncanny accuracy, the
Illustrated London
News had predicted in December 1870, ‘… it may be that young officers who are now watching the strife will come to the front and renew the race of Marshals’. There was Ferdinand
Foch who would always remember as a teenager the spectacle of Louis-Napoleon dragging himself sick and defeated through Metz; Pétain, then a schoolboy, already dedicating himself to a military career; and Joffre, an apprentice gunner on the fortifications of Paris… all would be brought up with but one idea; to expunge the shame, to repurchase the lost glory—whatever the cost. ‘Everything was rotten in France.’ Thiers had told officers during the war, ‘only the army remained clean and honourable’ [quoted Horne,
The French Army and Politics
, op cit, p. 14]. Hence what better starting point for a spiritual spring-cleaning than the army? Hand in hand with a wave of piety in the nation, a new mood of dedication ran through the whole army; there followed far-reaching reforms, a new code of discipline—modelled on German success—and new plans to meet the menace of a fresh war against those triumphant Germans. Foch, Pétain and Joffre, they would be old men before the shame was purged, inside that same Hall of Mirrors where the German nobility had huzzahed their Emperor; and the price paid, not just for France but for the whole world, would have been well-nigh unbearable.

The echoes set up by the Commune were of a different kind, and, in terms of historical significance, they have resounded more powerfully even than the long-range effects of the first Siege and of France’s defeat at Prussian hands. The social achievements of the Commune during its two brief, turbulent months of existence were minimal; one of its leading reformers, Frankel, rated the ending of night-work in the Paris bakeries as the Commune’s single most important contribution. Yet for all the ephemeral, and so often foolish, content of its acts, the image of the Commune would linger long, and potently.

There was one person above all others who was determined that the image of the Commune should not fade. When it first broke out, Karl Marx had had misgivings—in that, as a revolution, it was unlikely to succeed—and these were misgivings to which he returned later in life. But he had swiftly perceived that the real importance of the Commune lay elsewhere; as early as April 17th, when Thiers had just begun to hammer on the doors of Paris, he prophesied to his friend Kugelmann:

The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.

Out of the fabric of the Commune Marx was to weave social and revolutionary myths of immense portent. Within a matter of days, he had written
The Civil War in France
. Next to the
Communist Manifesto
, it was probably the most powerful tract Marx ever wrote, as well as being a remarkable
tour de force
of up-to-the-minute journalism. From his listening-post on Haverstock Hill, he got most of the events of the Commune right—plus the reasons for its failure—then distorted the facts for his dialectic purposes. ‘After Whit Sunday, 1871’, concluded Marx,

… there can be neither peace nor truce possible between the working men of France and the appropriators of their produce… the battle must break out again and again in ever-growing dimensions…. And the French working class is only the advance guard of the modern proletariat.

‘Working-men’s Paris, with its Commune’, he predicted, ‘will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.’

The Civil War in France
attracted immediate attention. ‘It is making the devil of a noise’, Marx wrote to Kugelmann on June 18th, ‘and I have the honour to be the best calumniated man in London. That really does one good after a tedious twenty years’ idyll in my den.’ Marx’s whole-hearted support for the Commune split the
International
movement down the centre. On one side the split led indirectly to the birth of the moderate British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats; on the other, to Lenin’s extremist Bolshevik party. Overnight Marx ceased to be a still somewhat obscure German-Jewish professor, and achieved universal notoriety as the ‘Red Terrorist Doctor’. But he had succeeded in creating a heroic, Socialist legend. He was right about the Commune’s ‘martyrs’. Still to this day, the
Mur des Fédérés
where the 147 Communard survivors were shot down at Père-Lachaise is a Mecca for mass left-wing pilgrimages every May 28th. Despite the rift caused in the
International
by Marx’s pamphlet, the numbers of its branches began to multiply, its strength to grow.

In France, although the defeat of the Commune meant the death also of the ‘sacred cause’, the independence of Paris, the struggle had achieved one result; there would now be no question of France taking the risk of replacing the Republic by any kind of monarchist restoration. With some justification, the surviving Communards could claim to have ‘saved’ the Republic. With equal justification, Thiers could say that he had saved France from anarchy. He also claimed, ‘we have got rid of Socialism’. He was, of course, totally wrong: history was to prove that the death of the Commune, with all the mythology it left behind, fanned by Marx, was far more important than its life. A deep
trench had been dug between the French bourgeoisie and the masses, between the professional army and the Left, so much more profound than that left by the conflict of 1848, and which would stretch on into the far distance, suddenly yawning open to bedevil France at various critical moments in the years ahead.
¹
Although the process of social reform and of emancipating the workers was seriously slowed down over the next twenty years (certainly in comparison to developments in Britain and Germany), in fact the crushing of the Commune only postponed the ‘arrival’ of Socialism in France. When it did arrive, it was to assume a more virulent form than in perhaps any other Western country. For ‘Bloody Week’ and its martyrs whose memory Marx would not permit to fade injected into French politics rifts not yet bridged today, accompanied by bitterness never paralleled in Britain or the U.S.A. As Colonel Stanley remarked on his last day in Paris, May 25th, 1871: ‘What provokes me is that there seems no middle opinion ever expressed.’ Nearly a hundred years later, it is still hard to find a ‘middle opinion’ about the Commune in France. From the ‘secession’ of the proletariat after May 1871 stemmed the receptiveness, later, of many a French Socialist to conversion to Marxist Communism. From the bitter hostilities engendered in 1871 was to spring the
Front Populaire
, the Socialist—Communist alliance of the 1930’s, which so devitalized France; leaving her once again an easy prey to a new German menace—this time in 1940.