The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (8 page)

The last of these three requirements, organization—something virtually unknown to workers in the past—was growing apace, feeding upon at the same time as it nourished their resentments. Louis-Napoleon’s attitude towards it was disastrously ambiguous and contradictory. At first he granted the workers the right to strike (which they used to the full), but forbade them the right to affiliate. Gradually, half-heartedly—partly as a manœuvre to play the workers off against the growing power of the Orleanist bourgeoisie—he permitted the workers to form unions under close police supervision. But below the surface things were already seething. In 1863 French representatives attended the first meeting of the International Working Men’s Association, organized by Karl Marx whose new and more violent teachings were beginning to replace, in France, those of the venerated Socialist, Proudhon. In 1867, the year of the Great Exhibition, the International held its second Congress;
Das Kapital
was published, and Marx’s supporters staged their first successful demonstrations in Paris. Though still in its infancy, with its receipts for 1867 totalling only £67 and Marx himself regarding most of its 70,000 members as ‘ragamuffins’, by 1870 the French branch of the International was capable of organizing a big strike at Creusot; more important, it had established itself as a centre for revolutionary propaganda and conspiracy.

The opponents of Louis-Napoleon were, however, by no means confined to those who wore blue smocks. Undoubtedly the façade of
the Second Empire owed much of its frivolous brilliance to the fact that the mass of the bourgeoisie turned to the pursuit of pleasure as an outlet for energies that would otherwise have been channelled into political activities, were these not so heavily restricted under the Empire. At the same time this façade successfully, but treacherously, concealed the mounting resentments below, which are normally to be found when the lid is placed on French liberty. In the early days of the regime, the Corps Législatif had been so shorn of its powers that it could do little more than place a parliamentary stamp upon projects already packaged by the Imperial Cabinet. Political meetings were virtually banned, and censorship of the Press was complete. There was onlyone organ of the ‘official Opposition’,
Le Siècle
, and this was by no means unfettered. Heavy-footed police inspectors also breathed down the necks of writers and artists. As Gautier grumbled to the Goncourts (who, together with Baudelaire and Flaubert, had all suffered petty persecutions): ‘What can you do when they won’t have any sex in a novel?… Now I’m reduced to writing a conscientious description of a wall; and even so, I’m not allowed to describe what may be drawn on it, a phallus for instance.’ Once even a famous actor was nearly arrested when seen blowing his nose upon a handkerchief which bore an effigy of Napoleon I.

Following Orsini’s assassination attempt of 1858, there had been a further tightening-up of the dictatorship with the passage of a law providing summary powers of expulsion without trial. On Louis-Napoleon’s coming to power a large number of Socialist deputies had been proscribed and expelled from France. With them went Victor Hugo and many extreme Republicans, such as Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Félix Pyat, and Charles Delescluze, who would later come back into the public eye with some force. From their place of exile they kept up a barrage of violently hostile propaganda upon the regime. Among the poorer classes the absent Victor Hugo became a legendary figure, and his worshippers included the young illegitimate daughter of a
châtelain
and his chambermaid, who was later to make her mark in the Commune: Louise Michel, the ‘Red Virgin’. Inside France a steady clientele of journalists filled the Sainte-Pélagie gaol, which—by no means disagreeable as nineteenth century prisons went—they turned into a veritable club for sedition.

At the more ‘respectable’ end of the Opposition spectrum stood the Legitimists, who favoured a return of the Bourbon claimant, the exiled Comte de Chambord, and at their side the Orleanists who regretted the departure of the good old Louis-Philippe. Even the Emperor’s own cousin, Princesse Mathilde, whose influential salon the Goncourts frequently attended, made little secret of her Orleanist
sympathies. Then came varying shades of Republicans, ranging from the ‘moderates’ to the downright revolutionaries. The salon of the talented Madame Juliette Adam was a rendezvous where such ‘moderates’ as the veteran Adolphe Thier’s and Jules Favre, the lawyer, could often be found; as well as another younger and more flamboyant advocate, Léon Gambetta, who, regarded as an ‘intransigent’ or ‘radical’, stood a shade further towards the more violent-hued end of the spectrum. Still further down came extreme Republicans like Henri de Rochefort, a rebel against an aristocratic lineage, who with his angular figure, quixotic quiff of hair, and the most vitriolic pen of the age was to become a deadly landmark in the last days of the Empire. Finally, tinted with the most burning shades of red came a hotchpotch of revolutionaries: Jacobins, Blanquists, Proudhonists, Anarchists, and later Internationalists. They included old hands like Blanqui, who had first taken up arms against the government of France at the age of twenty-two, in 1827, and who flitted mysterious and ghost-like about Paris usually only one leap ahead of the police; and irreconcilables reminiscent of Robespierre, such as Delescluze. Both men in their early sixties, by the end of the Empire they had spent forty-seven years of their combined lives in various prisons and penal colonies.

Scattered through the spectrum and confined to no particular layer of it were most intellectuals, some Academicians, and especially the writers, who hated the regime passionately for its interference in their work. The artists in opposition were also activated by motives of varying altruism and self-interest; they included the veteran and unquenchable crusader Daumier as well as young painters like Manet and Pissarro and Renoir, for whom the Establishment principally represented the philistine
nouveaux riches
of the bourgeoisie who refused to buy, or take seriously, their ‘new’ art; above all, there was Courbet, who with some ostentation flung back the Légion d’Honneur offered him in 1870. Much less easy to define in their resentment towards the Second Empire were the various malcontents, the inevitable angry young men and the elder
déclassés
of whom Taine said: ‘In the attics of students, in the garrets of Bohemia, and the deserted offices of doctors without patients and of lawyers without clients there are Brissots, Dantons, Marats, Robespierres and Saint-Justs in bud.’ Out of the typical background of Left Bank studentry came a young man called Raoul Rigault, who spent most of his spare time in the Bibliothèque Nationale inflaming his thoughts through perusal of Hébert’s scurrilous
Père Duchesne
of 1790. Sentenced to prison three times before the age of twenty-four, during one of his flights from justice, starving and desperate, he ran into Renoir in the middle of the
Forest of Fontainebleau. Renoir equipped him with a painter’s smock and palette, and concealed him for some weeks. It was a chance encounter that was later to save Renoir from becoming known to posterity merely as a talented young painter whose promise had been cut short by Communard bullets.

Superimposed upon all these diverse groups there was the inescapable perversity that traditionally makes government in France a hazardous occupation; ‘France’, explained Prévost-Paradol, ‘is republican when she is under the Monarchy, and she becomes royalist again when her Constitution is republican’.

All things considered, it was perhaps hardly surprising that Louis-Napoleon was forced to distract France by recourse to
‘la gloire’,
that hardy panacea for Gallic ailments. ‘The Empire is Peace’, he promised as he came to power, but within two years Frenchmen were dying on the Alma. Though it makes even less sense than it did then, the Crimean War was possibly the only one of his foreign adventures to bring Louis-Napoleon benefits, ephemeral as these might prove to be. At last the wounds in Anglo-French amity that were left over from the era of the first Bonaparte seemed to be healed; Louis-Napoleon danced with Queen Victoria in the Waterloo Room of Windsor Castle, and on her return visit she stood before the tomb of wicked ‘Boney’ as the organ at the Invalides played ‘God Save the Queen’. From then on things became progressively worse for Louis-Napoleon abroad. Much of the trouble stemmed from the blind pursuit of his belief in the sovereignty of peoples; like many of his ideals that were noble in theory, this ‘Principle of Nationalities’ was well in advance of his era and still more in excess of his powers. The wily Cavour soon spotted how this, plus the urge for
la gloire
, would make Louis-Napoleon an admirable champion of Italian nationalism, and so—with the aid of Castiglione’s irresistible person—seduced him for his own ends. Embroilment in Italy at first brought France glorious—but costly—victories at Magenta and Solferino against the never very martial Austrians in 1859. It also, of course, lost her Austria’s friendship, and by grabbing Nice and Savoy from Piedmont as part of his ‘fee’, Louis-Napoleon greatly impaired Italian affections. Later, through the logic of his Principle of Nationalities, Louis-Napoleon found himself pledged to protect the Pope to the extent of mowing down the popular Garibaldians at Mentana, thereby sacrificing most of the remaining goodwill he had accrued among Italians. At the same time the ‘Principle’ led him to show sympathy for Polish aspirations of independence—which cost him mighty Russia’s friendship, while not benefiting the unhappy Poles; most dangerous of all, the example that he had set in the unification
of Italy morally forced him not to interfere with Bismarck’s scheme to unite the German principalities under Prussia, which eventually was to cause his downfall.

Had Louis-Napoleon succeeded in his pursuit of ‘
la gloire
’, the dynasty might have been assured a much longer life in France, whatever the forces arrayed against him at home, and the Commune would never have happened. As things turned out, it constantly eluded his grasp, and his awareness of this forced him out on to still more dangerous quicksands in its quest. In 1866 Prussia flattened Austria, after a lightning campaign of unsurpassed brilliance which ended at Sadowa. The largest obstacle to German unification was eliminated and overnight Prussia appeared as a new and deadly challenge to France’s traditional status in Europe. Moreover, to Louis-Napoleon who had placed his money on Austria, Bismarck’s triumph came as a personal slight. To repair his ruffled pride he ill-advisedly demanded ‘compensations’, as a reward for his neutrality. These would principally have been at the expense of little Luxembourg, but they also included claims to German territory on the left bank of the Rhine. The over-all result was that Britain now took fright that France had dishonest intentions towards her protégé, Belgium; Germans of both North and South were united in their resentment of French demands; and Bismarck squared up to the fact that sooner or later France would have to be fought before German ambitions could be realized. Louis-Napoleon received no ‘tip’ (this was how Bismarck contemptuously termed his policy of ‘compensations’) for his services, and once again ‘
la gloire
’ proved elusive. Next, Louis-Napoleon’s craziest adventure of all—the creation of a Latin-Catholic Empire in Mexico into which he had been pushed by his Spanish Empress—collapsed in ruins. The French forces, commanded by an ill-starred general called Bazaine, were forced to evacuate, leaving Louis-Napoleon’s puppet ‘Emperor’, Maximilian, to be shot by Mexican nationalists; and here the only net gain was American hostility.

The year of the Great Exhibition and the calamity in Mexico, 1867, marked the turning-point of the reign. As the fateful year of 1870 approached and all Louis-Napoleon’s foreign designs were seen to have ended in disaster, his subjects grew more and more restless. As the Government relinquished its electoral manipulations of the early days, at each successive election the Republicans showed themselves to be increasingly powerful, until in 1869 they had captured Paris and most of the big cities. All else having failed, Louis-Napoleon turned in despair to reform at home. He would convert the regime into a ‘Liberal Empire’, himself into a constitutional monarch. But
it was too late. When the new Law on the Press was passed, repealing the tough laws of 1852 and lifting censorship, it was like the genie released from the bottle. The ‘yellow’ Republican Press began to insult the ruling family in a way that had never before been seen outside a time of revolution. The attack was spearheaded by Rochefort’s
La Lanterne
with its brick-red cover; a kind of
Private Eye
of the times, but an infinitely more deadly scourge. For three months it provided Paris with its greatest amusement since
La Grande Duchesse
.
¹
Then Rochefort was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. He chose instead to flee to Brussels (later he was amnestied and returned in triumph to Paris). But the damage was done; a mortal blow had been struck at the respect of the Empire, and the irreverence was contagious. With the Law on Assemblies relaxed, the ‘Red’ Clubs of the extreme Republicans once again began to meet, now in an atmosphere of impassioned hatred against the regime far exceeding anything known in the revolutionary year of 1848. ‘Moderation is Death’ became the slogan, and worship of the ancestors of 1793 one of the most popular themes. Meanwhile the Government stood aside, quoting to itself as comfort the parable of the cats of Kilkenny, and hoping that the Clubs too would eventually wipe each other out.

Typical of the new, inflammatory atmosphere was the ‘Baudin Trial’. Baudin was an obscure revolutionary who had found a fleeting moment of glory in the uprising against Louis-Napoleon in 1851, when he had leaped on top of a barricade crying ‘I’ll show you how one dies for 25 sous a day’, and was promptly shot. On All Soul’s Day, 1868, his name was ‘rediscovered’ on a neglected tombstone. There were demonstrations and cries of ‘
Vive la République!
’, and Delescluze opened in his paper
Le Réveil
a fund to provide the martyr with a more suitable memorial. The Government foolishly rose to the fly, and brought Delescluze to court. Delescluze was defended by young Gambetta, who astutely turned the trial into a devastating indictment of the Empire. The Government was made to look ridiculous (something inexcusable in France), and Gambetta and Delescluze became idols in their respective spheres.