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  THE FALL OF PARIS

  Sir Alistair Home was born in London in 1925, and has spent much of his life abroad, including periods at schools in the United States and Switzerland. He served with the R.A.F. in Canada in 1943 and ended his war service with the rank of Captain in the Coldstream Guards attached to MI5 in the Middle East. He then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature and played international ice-hockey. After leaving Cambridge, Sir Alistair concentrated on writing: he spent three years in Germany as correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and speaks fluent French and German. His books include Back into Power (1955); The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Hawthornden Prize, 1963); The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (1965); To Lose A Battle: France 1940 (1969); Small Earthquake in Chile (1972, paperback reissued 1999); A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62 won both the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize and the Wolfson History Award in 1978 (revised paperback edition 2006). His other publications include The French Army and Politics 1870–1970 (1984), which was awarded the Enid Macleod Prize in 1985, Harold Macmillan, Volumes I and II (1988–91), A Bundle from Britain (1993), a memoir about the USA and World War II; The Lonely Leader: Monty 1944–1945 (1996); Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City (2003); Friend or Foe: A History of France (2004) and The Age of Napoleon (2004). In 1969 he founded a Research Fellowship for young historians at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992 he was awarded the CBE; in 1993 he received the French Légion d’Honneur for his work on French history and his Litt.D. from Cambridge University. He was knighted in 2003. He is currently working on an authorised biography of Henry Kissinger, as well as a second volume of his own memoirs.

  ALISTAIR HORNE

  THE FALL OF PARIS

  THE SIEGE AND THE COMMUNE 1870–71

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Macmillan 1965

  Revised edition first published by Papermac 1990

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  3

  Copyright © Alistair Horne, 1965, 1990

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193917-9

  For CAMILLA

  ‘… Paris goes her own way. France, irritated, is forced to follow; later she calms down and applauds; it is one of the forms of our national life. A coach passes flying a flag; it comes from Paris. The flag is no longer a flag, it is a flame, and the whole trail of human gunpowder catches fire behind it.

  To will always, this is the fact about Paris. You think she sleeps, no, she wills. The permanent will of Paris—it is of this that transitory governments are not enough aware. Paris is always in a state of premeditation…. The clouds pass across her gaze. One fine day, there it is. Paris decrees an event. France, abruptly summoned, obeys….

  This smouldering between Paris the centre and France the orbit, this struggle which resembles a swaying of the forces of gravity, this alternating between resistance and adherence, these bursts of temper of the nation against the city followed by acquiescence, all indicate clearly that Paris, this head, is more than the head of a people. The movement is French, the impulsion is Parisian….’

  From the Introduction by Victor Hugo to the Paris Guide, 1867.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Foreword

  Preface

  PART ONE

  THE SIEGE

  CHAPTER

  1 The Greatest Show on Earth

  2 Empire in Decline

  3 The Disastrous Six Weeks

  4 Paris Prepares

  5 The Investment

  6 Trouble on the Left

  7 The Triple Disaster

  8 A Touch of Verne

  9 ‘Le Plan’

  10 The Great Sortie

  11 The Outsiders Within

  12 Hunger

  13 Over the Hill

  14 Paris Bombarded

  15 Breaking-Point

  PART TWO

  THE COMMUNE

  16 The Uneasy Interlude

  17 Guns of Montmartre

  18 The Commune Takes Over

  19 The Red Spectre

  20 Monsieur Thiers Declares War

  21 Besieged Again

  22 Return of the Jacobins

  23 ‘Floreal 79’

  24 ‘La Semaine Sanglante’—I

  25 ‘La Semaine Sanglante’—II

  26 ‘Let us kill no more’

  27 Aftermath

  Bibliography

  Reference Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Louis-Napoleon, 1871; General Trochu; General Ducrot; Léon Gambetta

  Cattle and sheep on the Bois de Boulogne just before the Siege; The Crown Prince of Prussia views Paris from the heights of Châtillon

  ‘How one could have used the balloons to surprise the enemy’; ‘My passport? Here it is!’

  Félix Pyat; Victor Hugo; Gustave Flourens; Henri de Rochefort

  ‘Garde nationale sédentaire’; ‘National Guard Officer and cantinière’; ‘No news!’

  ‘The queue for the rat meat’; Alan Herbert’s hen, ‘Una’ Edwin Child in National Guard uniform; Child’s ‘identity card’; Child’s bread ration card

  The lynching of Vincenzoni, February 1871; The revictualling of Paris: distribution of the English food

  Elihu Wasburne; Adolphe Thiers; Edmond de Goncourt; Raoul Rigualt

  Charles Delescluze; Louis Rossel; Théophile Ferré; Louise Michel

  Communard proclamation announcing the Versaillais entry into Paris

  ‘La Semaine Sanglante’

  ‘The Follies of the Commune’

  ‘Execution of the trumpeter, during the Commune’;

  ‘In all his glory’

  The Tuileries Palace, before the war; The Tuileries Palace June 1871; The Hôtel de Ville June 1871

  ‘Appalled by her legacy’

  List of Maps

  MAP

  1 The Great Sortie

  2 Paris: south-west

  3 Paris: north-west

  4 Paris: south-east

  5 Paris: north-west

  Foreword

  DURIN
G the crisis of June 1940, the French Government led by Paul Reynaud, having abandoned Paris and making its uneasy way towards Tours and Bordeaux, left strict instructions with the Prefect of Police in Paris, Roger Langeron: he was to stay in the city, along with his whole force of agents de ville, in order to forestall the possibility of a Communist coup in the absence of the Government. They were to await the arrival of the German military command so as to ensure that no barricades went up in Clichy, Belleville, and the eastern and south-eastern suburbs. Of course there was no hint of a coup, and, at the time, the French Communist Party was largely leaderless and in full disarray. Monsieur Langeron contacted the German authorities as soon as they arrived, assuring them that the Paris police force of 15,000 was at their disposal. Order was preserved

  Of course M. Langeron and his superiors had learnt from past experience and were well aware of the terrible weight of history, the compelling pull of historical memory and precedent in the apparently endless conflict of Paris versus France, in that order. May 1795, the collapse of the Prairial Days and the occupation of the Fauborg Saint-Antoine by the Army had looked after Paris for a time: thirty-five years, something of a record, as it would turn out. The switch-overs of 1814 and 1815 had been effected painlessly, thanks to the good sense of the Provisional Government in insisting on the rapid deployment within the city of the Allied troops. Paris had remained quiet. Louis XVIII had even set up his Court within a city in which his brother had been murdered: both a measure of his own confidence, reinforced, it should be added, by the presence of a substantial Royal Guard, and a striking example of his desire to reign as le Roi de la Concorde and the King of Forgiveness. He had been remarkably successful in both objectives. But he had been old and ill, and his foolish successor had not appeared to have forgotten or forgiven anything.

  And so, after a blessed pause of thirty-five years, the whole obscene business had started up again in the murderous July Days of 1830, with some hundreds of victims later commemorated by name on the July Column. In order to avoid further bloodshed, Charles X had left Saint-Cloud for Rambouillet and had made his leisurely way to the coast, embarking for England. At the same time, the incurably silly, posturing Lafayette had made a second appearance, indeed a Second Coming, on the balcony of the old Hôtel-de-Ville, where he was able to persuade the usurper, Louis-Philippe, to drape himself in the tricolor flag, a gesture that did the trick, at least for the time being.

  But, so it was said, the July Monarchy had turned out, almost from the start, to be unglamorous and therefore boring, the greatest crime that any modern French regime could commit. The King of the French himself, it was alleged, was a crashing bore, who talked too much, especially to gathered firemen, and who carried a green umbrella. Guizot, too, his sensible minister, had gone on too long (only eight years in fact), so he too had had to go, along with Le Roi Bourgeois. Of Lamartine it had been said at the time: ‘M. de Lamartine était de ceux qui étaient devenus révolutionnaires pour se désennuyer.’ And there had been many more like him at the time (as, indeed, there still are). This had brought a new round of killing in February 1848. Louis-Philippe, like his predecessor Charles X, had had the decency to go off quietly, landing at Newhaven, and heading first of all for Eastbourne before settling in Surrey.

  The elections of that year had given an enormous majority to moderate provincial royalists; they had also been seen, as they were meant to have been seen, as a massive vote against Paris. The June Days had followed, accompanied by much of the usual silliness: Marchons sur Varsovie (a very long march indeed) and exploding in a new topography of barricades in the east central districts of the city. The fighting between the insurgents on the one side, and the Army and the National Guards, who had been brought in from the western districts or from the provinces, had been savage; there had been atrocities on both sides, hostages had been summarily despatched, including the Archbishop of Paris. The repression that had followed had been ferocious; many insurgents had been shot, many others had been deported to Algeria; and there had thus been created a new generation of Parisian avengers, especially among the widows or the female companions of the victims.

  Haussmanisation had, if anything, made matters rather worse, by accentuating the class contrasts between one quarter and another, and by thus creating artisan ghettoes in the east and the north-east of Paris. The Butte des Moulins had been levelled, displacing an unruly population eastwards and rendering the Palais-Royal harmless from then on. But it had also made the wealthy western districts wealthier, the exclusive domain of middle-class families and their numerous servants, and the area had been further extended westwards by the taking in within the city’s boundaries of Neuilly, Chaillot, Passy and Boulogne.

  So the principal theme of Alistair Horne’s remarkable book, and one eloquently proclaimed by its title, The Fall of Paris, is the decisive crushing of the place, as it would be, once and for all. So it might be seen as a hopeful theme, albeit one realised at extraordinary bitter human cost: many, many more victims than those of the Terror of 1793–4. Adolphe Thiers, the man who, more than any other, had decided to settle accounts with the violent and dangerous city, with its strident claims to revolutionary universalism, has suffered much at the hands of historians, at least until the recent reassessment by Patrick Bury and Robert Tombs in their well-documented biography. It is clear from the present book that in suddenly removing his Government to Versailles, and in thus handing over the city to the bewildered, directionless Commune, he not only acted with decision, but that there could not have been an alternative line of action open to him. He (and his ministers) had got out, had succeeded where the unfortunate Louis XVI had failed. At different times, by a variety of advisers, none of whom had taken the trouble to study the ground or to take a look at maps, Louis had been counselled to head for Rouen or for Bourges. Thiers had at least managed to get his hastily packed Government, as well as a clutter of Generals, to the relative safety of Versailles. The surprised leaders of the Commune had done the rest, by failing to pursue him there at a time when they still had the advantage of numbers. So it could be said, in view of what finally happened, at the cost of an appalling bloodbath on a scale unequalled in the nineteenth century, that the little man had saved France from its capital. And for this he deserves considerable credit. Of course, the conflict was not just one between the Provisional Government on the one side, and the quarrelsome leaders of the Commune, supported by the inhabitants of the eastern and north-eastern districts on the other. There were the Prussians to be considered as well. The author is rightly concerned at all times to keep them in the picture throughout. As it turned out, their presence somewhat facilitated the task of the Thiers Government by sealing off most of the northern exits from the Capital.

  As in any chronicle of events, dramatic or banal (in this case the former), there is the usual assortment of villains, sillies, the sensible, the victims and the pathetic, and the uncommitted, mere witnesses, in this case most of them American and English. The villains are readily identifiable: the apostles of hate: Rochefort, Pyat, Rigault, Ferré. There is a whole army of sillies, led, from behind, by France’s National Bore, her Pompier National, Victor Hugo, in full trumpeting bombast and Parisian Universalism, the City of Light. Here he is, as quoted by Mr Home, calling the peaceable cities of France to rise up in defence of their cordially (and rightly) hated capital: ‘Lyons,’ he enjoins it, familiarly, ‘take thy gun; Bordeaux, take thy carbine; Rouen, draw thy sword’ (this addressed to the most pacific and prudent of French cities), ‘and thou, Marseilles, sing thy song, and become terrible.’ One is glad to note that none responded to such declamatory appeals. There is more Hugolian bombast later on: ‘Paris’, he announces, ‘is resolved to let itself be buried under its own ruins rather than surrender,’ (he got the ruins). Later the old fool berates us, the English, for standing aside while the Capital of Civilisation is under siege. So it is with satisfaction that we hear of an English chronicler describing one of Hugo’s speeches as
‘of unexampled silliness’. He survives the Commune, of course, goes into exile, makes himself a nuisance in Brussels, so that the Belgian authorities sensibly move him on, and he ends up for a bit in Luxembourg. There are plenty of other sillies, though none on the Hugolian scale: they include the posturing Gambetta, the intolerable Louise Michel, the trying Elizabeth Dimitrieff, and the exhibitionist Bergeret.

  Of the sensible, one would give first place to the patient Jules Favre. But Gladstone and his Foreign Minister, Granville, deserve more than a mention. They both expressed sympathy at the plight of France, and resolutely refused to get involved. Some might accuse them of smugness, I think they were just showing remarkable good sense.

  The victims of these terrible events are innumerable, 22,000 or more, many of them are nameless, though many could be identified through the courts-martial documents in Vincennes. Two notable victims at once come to mind: the obstinate, honourable Louis Rossel, a regular Army officer, the son of a French Protestant and of a Scotswoman, who eventually joined the Commune out of patriotism and who attempted to bring a minimum of discipline into fédéré ranks. The other is the Archbishop of France, Mgr Darboy.

  What adds to the horror of this chronicle of war and violence is a topography that one associates with the early pictures of Sisley: the valleys of the Seine, the Marne, the rivers often in flood, the riverside villages under snow, a reassuring list of place names, many within walking distance of Paris; and which is evocative of week-ends and happy leisure: Villiers, Champigny, Joinville, Epinay-sur-Orge, Bougival, Rueil, Gennevilliers, Issy, Le Point-du-Jour. Comfortable houses in ochre-coloured stone, with green shutters, are revealed unroofed and with gaping holes in their walls, there are uneven lines of broken poplars, and war has come to a peaceful, previously banal, rather pretty countryside.

  There is little place for humour in this account of war and revolution, revolt and repression. But I would single out the ‘lamb offered to one British correspondent [that] ironically turned out to be a wolf.’ And here is La Semaine Sanglante, with Paris burning, as seen from the fashionable Pavilion Henri IV, on the Terrasse de Saint-Germain, high up above the great bend of the Seine: a number of buildings appear to be alight, one of them seems to be the Louvre, ‘a large lady exclaimed: “Let’s hope he doesn’t mean the department store!”’ She seems to have got her priorities right.