The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (58 page)

Sherman Monument
(with
Victory
) at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City at the entrance to Central Park.

The conduct of Mr. Washburne during the war, and especially during the siege of Paris [wrote the
New York Tribune
] was marked by such discretion, such courage and energy that it gained the respect and esteem of the French and the German people. … We do not recall an instance in our diplomacy of a more brilliant and successful performance of duty in circumstances of such gravity and delicacy.

From Secretary of State Fish came a personal expression of gratitude. “No Minister … ever discharged a difficult and trying duty with more tact and ability and skill than you have. …”

Washburne longed only for peace and rest. He hoped he had done his duty, he told a friend, but feared too much praise. “It is always perilous to be too popular. …”

As soon as he saw his way clear, he was off to Brussels for a few days with Adele and the children.

The German army marched into Paris and down the Champs-Élysées on Wednesday, March 1. The city looked as if closed for a funeral. By general “understanding,” shops and restaurants along the path were shut tight. No omnibuses or carriages were to be seen. No newspapers were published, no placards posted.

The first of the conquerors appeared at nine in the morning, three blue-uniformed German cavalrymen advancing slowly down the avenue, their horses at a walk, their carbines cocked, their fingers on the triggers. More of the advance guard followed, both cavalry and infantry.

The day had started out cloudy and grey, but after noon the sun appeared bright and warm. By half past one, the Royal Guards of Prussia, with glittering bayonets, surrounded the Arc de Triomphe. Then came the main body of the army marching by for two hours.

Washburne, who watched much of it from the balcony of a friend’s apartment on the Champs-Élysées, wrote that a good many people were on the sidewalks on both sides of the avenue.

At first the troops were met with hisses, cat-calls and all sorts of insulting cries, but as they poured in thicker and thicker … the crowd seemed to be awed into silence, and no other sound was heard but the tramp of the soldiery and the occasional word of command.

That evening no crowds appeared on the boulevards. Not a restaurant opened its doors, except for two on the Champs-Élysées that the Germans had ordered to stay open. “Paris seemed literally to have died out,” Washburne wrote.

The gas was not yet lighted, and the streets presented a sinister and somber aspect. … It is just to say that the people of Paris bore themselves during all that cruel experience with a great degree of dignity and forbearance which did them infinite credit.

Trying to see as much as possible, he had been, he reported to Adele, “about on foot all day and at night was used up, feet blistered, etc.”

On the morning of March 3, after an occupation of little more than forty-eight hours, the conquerors marched away. Stores, restaurants, and hotels threw open their doors. The Champs-Élysées was scrubbed clean. Fountains in the Place de la Concorde began to spout again. “At 3 o’clock in the afternoon (the day was splendid) … people looked happier than I had seen them for many long months.”

Gaslights burned once more. A sum of 200,000 francs was received from the city of New Orleans in aid of the French wounded. Work began to repair the damages done to the Tuileries Garden and the Bois de Boulogne. Some of the galleries at the Louvre reopened. People who had fled the city were pouring back by the thousands.

But any thought that things might go smoothly into spring was soon dashed. On March 17, Washburne mentioned in a dispatch to Washington that units of the National Guard had seized more than a hundred cannon and fortified themselves on the heights of Montmartre. As he later
said, he had no premonition of what followed early the next day, Saturday, March 18, 1871.

In a surprise move the government sent a force of army regulars to recover the cannon, and almost instantaneously the National Guard soldiers on Montmartre were joined by a huge angry crowd in which many were armed. At the moment of confrontation a regiment of regulars suddenly held their rifle butts in the air and joined in shouting down the government.

A general in command of the regulars, Claude Lecomte, was pulled from his horse, and with another general, Jacques Clément-Thomas, who had been taken captive irrespective of the fact that he was in civilian clothes, marched away to a nearby house on the rue des Rosiers with the mob following after and shouting for their death. General Thomas, an elderly man known for his Republican sympathies, had been doing no more than watching from the sidelines, but he had been long despised for his part in crushing the Revolution of 1848.

In an improvised mock trial, by a show of hands, the two captives were found guilty, then taken into the garden, tied together against a wall and shot, after which, reportedly, a number of the women from the crowd urinated on the bodies.

The violence on Montmartre marked the start of the insurrection that became known as the Paris Commune.

The Commune, as often mistakenly assumed later, had nothing to do with communism. The word
commune
, meaning something communal or shared, was used for a town or city government as a mark of regional autonomy. Thus the Paris Commune was now in charge of Paris and, ideally, devoted to politics more representative of the will of the people of Paris.

Washburne, who had gone to the country that Saturday with his friends the Moultons, did not learn of what happened on Montmartre until the following day, and by then, Sunday, March 19, the Central Committee
of the National Guard had taken over at the Hôtel de Ville and the government, led by Adolphe Thiers, had fled to Versailles. Placards posted everywhere proclaimed a
comité
now in charge. As no one needed to be told, the National Guard in the city numbered 50,000 troops, all still armed. No less than 20,000 were now encamped outside the Hôtel de Ville with forty to fifty cannon drawn up.

It seemed the “culmination of every horror” to Washburne, whose family arrived from Brussels late that same day.

On March 21, several thousand citizens calling themselves the “Friends of Order” staged a protest, parading down the rue de la Paix to the Hôtel de Ville unarmed and without incident. But when, the day after, thousands more of Les Amis de l’Ordre marched down the same route to the cheers of spectators, a contingent of the National Guard stood ready at the Place Vendôme to stop them. Someone opened fire. From which side was never determined. Instantly the street was filled with gunfire and screaming, and a dozen of the Amis and at least one guardsman lay dead.

Through the week that followed, Washburne sent off one letter or dispatch to Washington after another in an effort to describe what was happening. With the official government now at Versailles, and little chance of its return to Paris anytime soon, he was obliged to travel back and forth by carriage almost daily to Versailles, twenty miles round-trip. He was gravely worried, concerned about the safety of his family, exhausted, and feeling ill much of the time.

The situation, he wrote, was already worse by far than during the siege. In a city of 2 million people there was “no law, no protection, no authority except that of an unorganized mob.” In the first days of the Communards, he had spoken in their defense among friends, saying they were acting in good faith, but by now he was “utterly disgusted” by them.

True to form, he had no more intention of leaving Paris than he had had on the eve of the siege. And again he was the only chief of mission of a major country who chose to stay. The rest had moved to Versailles, where he set up a temporary office with Wickham Hoffman in charge, but where he refused to reside himself so long as other Americans remained in Paris.

On March 28, with great to-do, the Commune officially installed itself
at the Hôtel de Ville. Military bands played. Officers of the Guard and members of the Comité Central wore red scarves. Red flags flew everywhere and the crowd, Washburne reported to Secretary of State Fish, exceeded 100,000 people. In response to every speech by members of the Comité, great cheers went up, and shouts of “
Vive la Commune!
”

At the same time, as Washburne also reported, the Paris journal
Nouvelle République
, a semiofficial organ of the Commune, announced that the deliberations of all representative bodies would no longer be public, and there would be no further reports of the sessions. Only decrees would be issued.

Newly printed placards posted in the streets of Montmartre announced the appointment of certain citizens who would henceforth receive any “denunciations” of anyone suspected of being in “complicity” with the government at Versailles.

Elsewhere, in several other parts of the city, houses were being searched and arrests made—more than four hundred arrests in a matter of days—on the orders of the new chief of police, Raoul Rigault, a former journalist in his twenties.

Such a system of “denunciation,” Washburne assured Secretary Fish, would very soon fill the prisons of Paris. His private secretary, a young man named James McKean, had been to the Prefecture of Police and found an enormous crowd gathered, all looking for friends who had been arrested and “spirited away.”

Washburne was not only disgusted with the Communards, but had come to think of pronouncements from the government at Versailles as mostly “rubbish.” “Imbecility and indecision rule … at Versailles,” he wrote privately. Adolphe Thiers, whom he admired, told him it would take at least two weeks for Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, the government’s commander, to gather a sufficient force to attack the insurgents in Paris. Jules Favre, on the other hand, thought that once such a force was in place the insurgents would immediately cave in. “He is mistaken,” Washburne wrote in his diary.

“The Commune is looming up and means business. Everything has a more sinister look,” he recorded on March 31. “There never was such a hell upon this earth as this very Paris.”

He kept trying every way he knew to find out what was happening. But to get to “the truth of matters” in such wild excitement seemed impossible. He was not frightened for himself, as frightening as things were, but he worried about his staff, worried constantly about his family and getting them safely away before it was too late.

The morning of that same day, March 31, Lillie Moulton, the beautiful daughter-in-law of his friends known for her exquisite singing voice, went to the office of the new chief of police, Rigault, to obtain a passport to leave Paris. The Prefecture of Police, a prison on the Île-de-la-Cité by the Palais de Justice, was enough to strike fear in anyone. Washburne described it as “a horrid place,” even in the best of times. “What mysteries within these walls, what stories of suffering, torture and crime …”

Raoul Rigault, as he himself made plain, was the epitome of the impassioned Left Bank radical, half journalist, half student, bent on destroying all established privilege and authority, and at the moment he held more power than any other man in Paris. He despised nearly every social convention, the upper class, the middle class, and the church and its clergy most of all. “I want sexual promiscuity. Concubinage is a social dogma,” he had earlier proclaimed.

Lillie Moulton described him later as “short, thick-set, with … a bushy black beard, a sensuous mouth, and a cynical smile.” Extremely nearsighted, he wore heavy tortoiseshell glasses, but even these, she said, “could not hide the wicked expression of his cunning eyes.” Washburne, with reason, was to call Rigault one of the most “hideous” figures in history, “strange and sinister … [with] the heart of a tiger.”