The World That Never Was (18 page)

Across the Channel, the Commune struck many commentators as a fascinating social experiment. With Samuel Butler delivering
Erewhon
to his publisher on 1 May, and
The Coming Race
by the bestselling Edward Bulwer-Lytton evoking an extraordinary future world in which genetic difference had replaced class divisions as the defining feature of society, the theme of Utopias – and their dystopian flip sides – was in the air. On the Commune’s espousal of federalism, British opinion was divided over whether it offered a taste of the future or retreat into the past.
The Times
considered curious the Commune’s ‘wish to imitate the small Italian republics or the French communes, at the moment when other nations are grouping together and condensing in order to club their forces and their interests’, while the positivist philosopher Frederick Harrison argued that ‘the idea of the gradual dissolution of nations into more similar aggregates and truer political union is the idea of the future.’ In light of the Commune’s social achievements, however, the educationalist and social critic Matthew Arnold felt bound to concede ‘that all the seriousness, clear-mindedness and settled purpose is hitherto on the side of the Reds.’

The Commune’s proclamation of 19 April that ‘The Communal Revolution … inaugurates a new political era, experimental, positive, scientific’ chimed too with the insistence of the English biologist Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, that the Pope’s latest syllabus of acceptable knowledge was meaningless, since power was now vested in science. But the arts too were accorded a privileged role in the Commune’s vision of society, with a central committee of forty-seven practitioners appointed, some without their permission or approval, to promote the cultural life of Paris. The salon was re-established and museums thrown open to the public, while Elisée Reclus’ brother Elie, who unlike his sibling had avoided capture during the Flourens sortie, took over the supervision of libraries. ‘Paris is a true paradise!’ the painter Courbet swooned on 30 April, ‘no nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. If only it could stay like this forever. In short it is a beautiful dream!’ Distracted by their ideals, however, the Communards were sleepwalking to disaster.

The portents were already unsettling. Four days before Courbet recorded his sense of wonderment, a long procession of Freemasons had marched out to the Paris ramparts, wearing their secret insignia in public for the first time, and carrying a white banner that bore the legend ‘Love One Another’. The leadership of both the Commune and the Versailles government counted Masons among their number, but Thiers had repeatedly responded with scorn to attempts by the Paris Lodges to act as disinterested peace-brokers. Ever since the French Revolution, Catholics had been expressly forbidden to join Masonic lodges, and Masons had been placed next to communists in the list of those held to be anathema; by his attitude, Thiers had aligned himself with their paranoid vision of a French society steeped in conspiracy and polarised beyond repair. Standing braced against the wind along the ramparts, their aprons and pennants flying, the Masons had bravely presented Versailles with a final challenge to respect their neutrality, but sharpshooters picked them off like the fairground ducks on which Louise Michel had practised her marksmanship.

Wistfulness was a recurring sentiment in letters and diaries of the time, while the strains of ‘Le Temps de Cerises’ that drifted out of clubs and cafés, or were whistled by workers on their awestruck promenades through the city, provided the mood music. ‘I will always love cherry-blossom time, and the love that I keep in my heart’ went its nostalgic refrain, its story that of a beautiful woman won and lost, set to a melody
that tugged the heartstrings. It had been a strange anthem for a springtime filled with hope and elation, but as the days lengthened towards summer, it assumed a bittersweet relevance. For whilst not consciously despairing or defeatist, it began to seem as though those Communards who persisted in laying the foundations for an ideal society were, in reality, storing up happy memories for the hard times which, they secretly suspected, lay ahead.

As the last hopes of reconciliation ebbed away, so did the Commune’s more moderate leadership. Its original leaders were ground down by physical and nervous exhaustion after weeks of catching naps on hard benches as they worked through endless nights, struggling to change the world by mere strength of will. Military and political leaders had been drafted in and then dismissed, or had resigned in short order, having tried and failed to assert control over a society for whom the abandonment of deference and rejection of all authority was an article of faith. Now, with a dangerous power vacuum developing, the most extreme Jacobin elements were only too eager to step into the breach.

As a teenager Raoul Rigault had spied on the Prefecture of Police through a telescope, imagining what he might achieve were he prefect. Two days after the abortive seizure of the guns, still aged only twenty-five, he had achieved his ambition. His rule since then had been ruthless. In the ten days following his installation, over 400 men and women had been arrested as suspected traitors and whilst more than half were soon released, rumours circulated of arbitrary punishments meted out to ideological opponents and of a certain lasciviousness in his treatment of women in custody. But it was his imprisonment of the Archbishop of Paris and other religious figures that had cemented his reputation. Held hostage both against any repeat of the Versaillais’ brutality following their defeat of Flourens’ army, and as a bargaining chip for the release of Auguste Blanqui, their lives had so far been spared. But as Henri Rochefort remarked of Rigault, ‘He was exactly the sort of fellow to say, “I’m very fond of you, but circumstances unfortunately compel me to have you shot. I am, therefore, going to do so!”’

On 27 April, Rigault was promoted to
procureur
of a newly instituted Revolutionary Tribunal. With the announcement of a committee of public safety the following day, the Jacobins were in the ascendant, and grim memories of 1793 and the reign of Revolutionary Terror came flooding back. The Paris guillotine had been destroyed by crowds on 6 April, but no one doubted that there were now even more efficacious means available for the state to rid itself of its enemies, and it was feared that the
‘new political era, experimental, positive, scientific’ might produce a new form of terrorism all its own.

In a further echo of the glorious days of the French Revolution, anti-clericalism ran rife. Across the city, churches and nunneries were raided, floors dug up and walls pulled down in search of evidence of crimes and moral corruption. In the convent at Picpus, three aristocratic madwomen were discovered in a shed, where they had spent the last nine years locked away to save their families from shame in a clear case of abuse, while magistrates were summoned to investigate infanticide after bones found in the crypt of Saint-Lazare were thought to belong to the illegitimate children of the nuns. A naturalist who ventured that they were more likely animal bones, mixed with the mortar for structural strengthening, barely escaped a lynching. Under the guise of rationalism, the flight of reason became increasingly widespread.

Though generally supportive of the Commune, Rochefort had maintained a careful journalistic detachment from its politics. Now, though, he wrote vehemently against Prefect Rigault, referring especially to the nauseating glee with which the clerks referred to the hostages as his ‘private prisoners’, arguing the need for a dictator to counterbalance the Jacobin’s growing concentration of power. His preferred candidate, a year younger even than Rigault, was General Rossel, who had recently been elevated to commander-in-chief of the Commune’s forces, following the dismissal of his predecessor for casting doubt on their chances of victory against the Versaillais. ‘These people have good reason for fighting; they fight that their children may be less puny, less scrofulous, and less full of failings’ Rossel announced; but only 6,000 men of the 200 regiments of the National Guard responded to his summons to defend the city from imminent attack, and on 8 May he resigned and went into hiding.

Rigault and his friends, among them Louise Michel, seized their opportunity and appointed Charles Delescluze, the much-imprisoned veteran of ’48, to lead the coming battle. ‘Enough of militarism!’ he declared, ‘No more general staffs with badges of rank and gold braid at every seam! Make way for the people, for the fighters with bare arms! The hour of revolutionary warfare has struck!’ Dressed like a remnant of a bygone age, his health ruined by consumption, Delescluze was an oddly fitting figurehead for what the Commune had become as its moment of destiny approached.

Fifty dawns had come and gone since Louise Michel had raised the alarm in Montmartre, but none can yet have seemed more ominous than that
which broke over the fortress of Issy on 5 May. Visiting as a journalist for the Commune’s
Journal officiel
, Clemenceau described the scenes of ruined masonry, smashed by German Krupps guns and now blasted by ten Versaillais shells a minute, and noted the bodies of the 500 soldiers killed by their own countrymen, stored in a makeshift morgue in the cellars. The focus of his piece, though, was his friend Michel, ambulance woman turned virago, who four days earlier had rallied the troops to retake the key salient at the Clamart rail station, and was now keeping watch alone as the enemy earthworks came ever closer. ‘In order not to be killed herself, she killed others and I have never seen her to be more calm’ reported Clemenceau. ‘How she escaped being killed a hundred times over before my eyes, I’ll never know. And I only watched her for an hour.’ It was morale-boosting stuff, but if the propaganda exaggerated her courage, then Michel was more than happy to live the lie.

‘It’s not heroism, I assure you,’ she wrote to Victor Hugo, ‘I just love danger! Perhaps that’s the savage in me.’ The role of Enjolras, in which Hugo had cast her in their playful communications, now fitted like a glove, and Michel seemed ubiquitous. From service on the front line as a member of the National Guard she rushed to chair meetings of the revolutionary clubs and vigilance committees, then on to a hospital to tend the wounded. Nothing could sap her ‘exalted’ spirit so long as new schools such as one that would teach industrial arts to girls continued to be opened, or whilst she could play her part in redistributive justice, levying a tax on the convent of St Bernard to help pay for the care of the injured. But while she soldiered on, others sought distraction from their impending doom.

When the shells had begun to fall on 1 May, softening up the city for the assault, public performances continued to draw audiences. There was even an appetite for operas with what seemed like morale-sapping themes, though the success of
Le Prophète
, Meyerbeer’s dramatic account of the crushing of the Anabaptist insurrection in sixteenth-century Munster, might simply have been due to the ice ballet choreographed with dancers on roller skates that was introduced to lighten the tone. ‘This grandeur, this tranquillity, this blindness in an assembly of men already menaced by 100,000
chassepots
, is one of the most stupefying facts ever given to a historian to record’ wrote the twenty-one-year-old Gaston Da Costa, Rigault’s secretary from the Prefecture of Police.

Da Costa’s reaction to the complacency was to climb on to the roof of Thiers’ town house, urging on the crowd that accompanied him to loot its contents and burn it to the ground. The next day, 16 May, it was
the Vendôme Column that was targeted, crowds filling the square to witness the demolition of the great monument that Napoleon had erected in celebration of his victory in the Battle of Austerlitz. ‘We wanted it all’ remarked Courbet, who as head of the arts commission would be blamed for inciting the vandalism. For three hours that afternoon they hacked and sawed and pulled on ropes until the column toppled. Laid out on manure straw, its verdigris mass provided a spectacular backdrop for photographs, in which Communards arranged themselves in formal rows, as though attending some bourgeois festivity. Few there would live long enough to have their picture taken again. ‘This colossal symbol of the Grand Army – how fragile it was, how empty and miserable! It seemed to have been devoured from the middle by a multitude of rats, like France itself, their glory tarnished’ was how one survivor remembered the grand act of destruction.

For the previous week, the enemy from Versailles had been advancing, overwhelming the forts and fighting their way across the Bois de Boulogne. The Communards may have disparaged the enemy troops as lackeys of the rich and powerful, but the release by Bismarck of over 200,000 prisoners of war had made them a formidable opponent. The failings in military discipline were all on the Commune’s side, where too many of those who had revelled in their new freedoms now spurned Delescluze’s rallying call to ‘save the country, though possibly now only behind the barricades’ in favour of further symbolic gestures of retribution.

As the Versaillais pressed forward, the Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais de Justice and the prefecture all went up in flames, along with dozens of other public buildings. In the case of the Tuileries, the central dome of the Salle des Maréchaux was blown up with gunpowder less than forty-eight hours after the last Sunday concert in the gardens had attracted an audience of 1,500. The Communards’ explanation, that the arson was strategically necessary to slow the advance of the Versaillais, was plausible only in rare instances.

Day after day the enemy pressed on, fighting from street to street, flanking the barricades thrown up in their path, charging through alleys and courtyards, or sledgehammering their way through the internal walls of apartment blocks to emerge and shoot down their defenders from behind. It was a bewildering battlefield even for veterans, let alone those experiencing war for the first time. National Guard reinforcements would arrive to find themselves in the eerie stillness of a killing ground from which the battle had moved on, their dead comrades left propped against the walls under a drifting pall of gunpowder smoke. And when saboteurs
were blamed for the explosion of the avenue Rapp arsenal that cost 200 lives, fear spread in Communard Paris that the enemy was already in their midst.