Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

The general cry on the part of the Communal leaders was now to march upon Versailles and “crush the Assembly.” The first encounter, however, with regular troops undeceived the National Guard as to the kind of reception they would encounter. They had expected fraternisation, but met only with defeat. Their first repulse, however, had little effect but to encourage the Communal Government to renewed efforts; and on the day following the first check nearly 90,000 men, divided into three columns, were sent towards Versailles. The centre column, under Bergeret, an American, was to advance in the direction of Meudon, covered by the southern forts in possession of the Commune; the left, under Eudes, was to approach Versailles by way of Vaugirard, Montrouge, and Chàtillon, while the right, under Duval, was to pass directly under the guns of Mont-Valérien, which was believed to be evacuated, and advance upon Nanterre and Rueil. Neither column, however, had marched very far before it encountered disaster. Bergeret was met by a division of regulars at Meudon, and at once driven back; the left, under Eudes, was stopped by a corps of sailors and marines and, after a fierce encounter, compelled to retreat. The worst fate of all was reserved for Duval’s column, which, on approaching Mont-Valérien, was surprised at close quarters by a terrible discharge of artillery from the fort believed to be abandoned. The middle part of the column was annihilated, and the leading regiments, equally with the rear, took to flight. Duval himself was captured and shot.

Bergeret’s place in the army was now taken by a Pole, Ladislas Dombrowski, who was also made Commandant of Paris. Another reign of terror seemed at hand. Requisitions were made upon public institutions of various kinds, including churches; and several rich men, accused of disloyalty to the Commune, had their property seized and confiscated. Numbers of Communist prisoners taken in action had been shot, and it was now declared that in putting to death unarmed soldiers the Versailles authorities had transgressed the rules of civilised warfare. The Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy, with other ecclesiastics and civilians of eminence, were seized as hostages; and it was announced that for every Communist prisoner put to death three hostages would be executed. Monseigneur Darboy was one of the first victims under this decree. Tragic, indeed, has been the fate of three archbishops of Paris in succession: Monseigneur Affre, who perished on the barricades in the days of June, 1848, as he was seeking to pacify the insurgents; Monseigneur Sibour, assassinated by a fanatical priest; Monseigneur Darboy, shot in cold blood by the Communists.

M. Thiers, who had erected the forts of Paris partly against foreign invasion, partly, it was thought, against a possible insurrection in Paris itself, enjoyed within a few months the opportunity of testing their utility in both characters. As a protection against assault from the outside they had proved ineffective, though they need not have done so had Paris been approached within a reasonable time by a relieving army strong enough to break through the lines of investment. Against the forces of the Commune they were found very serviceable; and, when the final advance was made from Versailles, the forts played an important part in covering the attack. The Versailles troops were under the command of Marshal MacMahon, who retained his popularity with the French by reason of his being, as a matter of fact, the only prominent French leader who had not signed a capitulation or in any way capitulated; though, had he not been severely wounded on the morning of the battle of Sedan, he would have had no choice but to surrender on the terms which his successor in command, General de Wimpffen, was compelled to accept. Nevertheless, while General de Wimpffen, Marshal Bazaine, and General Uhrich, Commandant of Strasburg, were stigmatised, with all the commandants of the numerous fortified towns which surrendered under severe bombardment, as unworthy of the trust reposed in them, Marshal MacMahon, by the mere accident of his having been incapacitated at the beginning of the most critical battle of the whole war, was regarded as a hero without fear and without reproach.

To return to Versailles – the regular troops occupied point after point, until at last they were prepared for a final advance. Rossel, an artillery officer of considerable talent, had now replaced Cluseret as “delegate for war.” Dombrowski retained the chief command. But the Commune was greatly in want of leaders, and numbers of battalions were without chiefs, On the 10th of May M. Thiers’ private house was demolished, and on May 16th the Vendôme column was overthrown. The insurgents, under the pressure of the Versailles troops, became almost as frantic as were the revolutionists of the Reign of Terror when they feared the invasion of all Europe. The most bitter hatred was expressed against the Versailles Government by popular orators haranguing crowds in the streets and in the great republican clubs. Bands of women, as during the revolution of 1789, marched through the public thoroughfares, carrying arms and exciting the people against the “assassins of Versailles.”

On the 14th of May several forts were captured from the Communists; and on the 21st everything seemed ready for a general attack. Proclamations were posted on the walls of Paris calling upon citizens to fight to the last; and officers rode through the streets inciting all they met to determined resistance. These appeals proved ineffective in the richer quarters of Paris, where the arrival of the Versailles troops was looked forward to with joy. But they met with the fullest response in the workmen’s districts, where even women and children fought at the barricades. Begun on Sunday, May 21st, the operations of the Versailles army were continued on Monday and Tuesday. The troops had been divided into five columns, which were to form a cordon round the city, and, attacking vigorously at certain points in the circumference, were gradually to concentrate so as to hem in the insurgents on all sides – the plan, in short, of the battle of Sedan applied by Frenchmen to other Frenchmen. On Tuesday morning, May 23rd, the attack was begun. The Versailles troops were successful at all points; but one of the columns met with a desperate resistance on the plateau of Montmartre, which was not taken until after severe fighting. Close to Montmartre the Place Pigalle, where Dombrowski had his headquarters, still held out. It was surrounded by a barricade, which was defended with the utmost energy for two hours, until the Communist leader fell mortally wounded. Then the resistance did not cease; but before night the important stronghold was in possession of the Versailles troops.

There was desperate fighting, too, in the Place Vendôme, which was at last taken by an overwhelming assault made at the same time from the Rue de la Paix on the one side and the Rue de Castiglione on the other. The Place de l’Opéra was also the scene of a sanguinary struggle. It was not until Wednesday morning that the Bourse was taken, and the only important points left unoccupied were now the Hôtel de Ville and the Château d’Eau.

Meanwhile the insurgents, gradually falling back, had, in their powerlessness, gratified their rage by the most barbarous means. Organised incendiarism had been resorted to, and fires now broke out in every part of Paris. Fires which might possibly have been caused by shells had been noticed on the Tuesday, and now, on Wednesday, the Tuileries was in flames. Soon the Palais Royal, a whole side of the Rue Royale, and then, in an easterly direction, the Hotel de Ville, were found to be burning. A panic spread through the city, among the Versailles troops as well as the people. It was repeated from mouth to mouth that the Communists had sworn to burn all Paris by fire kindled with petroleum; and a series of arrests and executions was now begun, which soon amounted to the indiscriminate slaughter of all who chanced to fall under the slightest suspicion. “It was only necessary,” says an American writer, Dr. Edward L. Burlingame, “that a man or woman should be pointed at as pétroleur or pétroleuse; they were shot down without inquiry or mercy. Houses were searched, and those hidden in them were brought into the streets and killed. Many entirely innocent shared the fate of the leaders, like Vermorel and Rigault, both of whom fell by these summary executions. A court-martial was established in the centre of the city, but even for those brought before it there was in most cases only a hurried form of trial. New fires were continually lighted, either by concealed incendiaries – of whom many were taken with the implements for their work in their hands – or by petroleum bombs from the barricades and the districts still in possession of the Communists. During this week of conflagrations there were consumed or partially burned, besides a great number of private houses, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police, the Palace of the Legion of Honour, the Porte St. Martin Theatre, the Grenier d’Abondance, several churches, many mercantile establishments and minor public buildings: all this, besides the more formidable conflagrations at the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries and the Louvre.”

During the whole of Wednesday, in spite of the distraction caused by the fires, the troops had steadily continued the manœuvres by which they were gradually closing about the last insurgent strongholds. Around the burning hotel the Communists contested every step of advance with desperate bravery. It was late on Wednesday night before the building, then in flames in four places, was at last abandoned. On the left bank of the Seine the resistance was still more obstinate, and it was only on Thursday afternoon that the Versailles troops succeeded in driving the insurgents from their last strong position on the Buttes-aux-Cailles, after the bloodiest contest since their entry into the city. Still fighting, the Communists fell back to the manufactory of the Gobelins, which they set on fire. Here was their last desperate defence on this side of the river. Prisoners in their hands were forced to man the barricades, and afterwards were shot down after freedom had been scoffingly promised them. After a violent struggle the Versailles troops gained possession of the whole district, and with it of the last contested spot on the left bank.

On the right bank the troops were operating towards the Faubourg St. Antoine, and especially the Place de la Bastille, which was taken on Friday, when the insurgents retired to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. The quarter of Belleville, inhabited almost exclusively by workmen, resisted with the greatest ferocity, and on Friday night it was still unconquered by the Versailles troops, who now formed a semicircle around it. On Saturday, May 27th, there were still barricades to take in the Faubourg du Temple; and the Communists had yet to be dislodged from the cemetery of Père Lachaise. A fire, too, was kept up by a battery on the Buttes Chaumont. On the evening of Saturday, May 27th, General Vinoy took the cemetery by storm. The last defence of the Communists was made at a barricade in the Faubourg du Temple, which, in spite of constant attacks, held out until Sunday at noon. At five o’clock on Sunday afternoon the firing had ceased throughout the city, and a notice from Marshal MacMahon was posted on the walls announcing that the civil war was at an end. The dead were scattered through half the streets of Paris, the hospitals were crowded with the wounded on both sides, and nearly twenty thousand prisoners were in the hands of the Government. The great majority of the ordinary prisoners were set at liberty; but a considerable number were shot on the plain of Satory, near Versailles. Many more were transported to penal colonies.

Versailles now lost its military importance as headquarters for the army. But the Assembly continued to sit there, and did not until some time afterwards hold its deliberations within the walls of Paris.

“In five or ten years, as soon as you are strong enough,” said Count Bismarck to General de Wimpffen, during the negotiations which followed the battle and preceded the surrender of Sedan, “you will attack us again, and we must be prepared for you.” This prediction, happily, has not been fulfilled. The words “as soon as you are strong enough” are somewhat oracular in character; but, as a matter of fact, France has remained at peace far longer than was thought probable either by her friends or by her enemies. The peace of 1815 lasted only fifteen years, and it was first broken by the French themselves. The peace which followed the Franco-German War has already endured for twenty-three years.

Paris seemed to have escaped from the murderous grip of its foe only to commit suicide. But the deeds of the Commune, however shocking, were not altogether without precedent in the history of France; and, were it now worth while to seek them, excuses might almost be found for the desperation of those days.

The “pyromania” by which the fanatical incendiaries of the Commune may well be said to have been inspired had shown itself before in French history; so, too, had the panic by which the pyromania of 1871 was naturally followed. In the sixteenth century, on the 23rd of May, 1524, the town of Troyes was burnt down; men in disguise had, it was said, excited children to kindle the flames. As soon as the news reached Paris, people lost their heads. Some terrible plot was supposed to have been formed, the object of which was to destroy the whole of Paris. Accordingly, just as happened three centuries and a half later under the Commune, the citizens came out to guard their own houses, and began by stopping up the holes opening into their cellars. Under the Commune it was said that slowly burning sulphur matches were thrown into all the cellars, and every woman who was seen carrying a basket or a milk-can was called a pétroleuse. In 1524 it was forbidden by public proclamation to light the customary bonfires on the feast of St. John; and during the Commune it was imprudent for several days to light a lucifer in the streets.

During the reign of Louis XIV., an English traveller remarked that no people were more industrious than the Parisians, nor gave less money, because he said they hastened to spend all they earned in food, drink and clothes. The vanity of dress, the love of ornaments, and, above all, of decorations in the official sense of the word, has always tormented the Parisians. The passion for equality still shows itself in France by everyone wishing to wear a gold stripe on his trousers or a feather in his cap. No such brilliant display of fantastic uniforms was ever seen as during the Commune. The officers of Dombrowski’s and Bergeret’s staff, bumping on their horses as they pranced along the boulevards, did credit to the imagination of the costumiers; and after the suppression of the Commune, one of the first orders issued by Marshal MacMahon dealt with this strange abuse – indulgence in unauthorised uniforms – which were condemned collectively as fancy dresses, costumes de fantaisie. At the beginning of the First Revolution the same phenomenon had been seen.

The women were no less ridiculous than the men, as they preceded or followed the battalions in military jackets laden with the most grotesque ornaments. These viragoes were the lineal descendants of the “tricoteuses” of the First Revolution, and of Théroigne de Méricourt. “The wife of a colonel walks about with a red cap on her head,” writes the author of a book on the events of the Reign of Terror, entitled “Un Témoin de la Révolution.” “She carries pistols in her belt, and boasts publicly of the number of persons she killed during the massacres of August and September.” There was apparent novelty in the permission given by the Commune to tenants not to pay their rent; but this eminently popular measure had been anticipated by the Council of Union in the days of the League.

If there was nothing new in the excesses of the Commune, neither is there in the accusations, often groundless, made against the luxury and immorality of the Parisians. Everything that has been said about the demoralisation of France under the Second Empire had been said about the demoralisation of France under Louis Philippe, not to speak of the 17th and 18th centuries, whose morals and manners are only too abundantly described in a whole series of memoirs.

“The industrial and commercial activity of this epoch, the stimulus it gave to all material appetites, brought about,” says M. Lavallée in his “History of Paris,” “a competition without limits, the most hideous speculation, a more shameless, more barefaced love of money than in the time of the Regency or of the Directory.” M. Lavallée, however, is here writing not of the Paris of Napoleon III., but of the Paris of Louis Philippe.

“The more civilisation is developed,” says M. Maxime Ducamp,8 “the more reproaches of this kind will be made, and apparently in all sincerity. The discovery of the precious metals, which have gradually become abundant, has given to the world excessive wealth; wealth has created wants, and some of these wants have become habitual. Every effort is made to satisfy them. To demand from a rich nation a life of abnegation and poverty, is to demand from the human being more than his nature permits. A man will without murmuring live on oatmeal and horseflesh when he is constrained to do so by necessity, but in the ordinary course of life he prefers wheaten bread and beef-steak. People are said to have been very virtuous at Sparta. But the Spartans honoured theft: a proof of extreme poverty or of inconceivable idleness.”

This wealth and this luxury which moralists, severe upon other people, condemn with violence, have not been without influence in softening manners, and they have brought about, to take only a hygienic view, a notable prolongation of human life. In lieu of rookeries in which whole families used to rot, in hovels without sun or air, Paris now possesses broad streets with healthy houses which are flooded with light and oxygen, to say nothing of an abundant water supply. This wealth does not afford immoral pleasures alone. It has trebled the productive power of Parisian workmen by substituting for their black bread of other days a substantial reinvigorating diet. The consumption of meat, unmistakable sign of general prosperity, increases every year. Charitable institutions provide attendance for indigent persons at their own homes, and vast hospitals, at which the first physicians of the day think it an honour to serve, receive the sick in numbers and under conditions never dreamed of in the good old time.

The general health of Paris cannot but profit by the intelligent and beneficent care of the indigent sick, and, were not Paris a wealthy city, the ameliorations introduced into her hospitals would have been impossible. Without the riches produced by so much solicitude for material interests, could the Prefecture of the Seine have assigned 30,000,000 francs for primary education in Paris?

There have never been fewer assassinations or fewer robberies in Paris than at present. The crimes committed to-day, in the midst of a population of some two millions, are only one-tenth as numerous as those which darkened the period when France counted no more than 600,000 inhabitants. Whether the moral character of the public has proportionately improved is another question. Police vigilance and preventives of all kinds serve doubtless as a check. The brilliant gas which has been substituted for flickering oil-lamps, the spacious thoroughfares which have replaced obscure lanes and alleys, have contributed enormously to the safety of the citizen. Each year in Paris the police effect thirty or forty thousand arrests – a fact which proves, not indeed that the metropolis has grown eminently moral, but at least that it is well protected. And it is in proportion as the wealth of the nation increases, that the protective organisation of the city can be maintained in greater perfection. In this sense the luxurious wealth which certain moralists so deeply lament, is an inestimable boon even to the poorest section of the community.

1

Nothing was wanting to his glory; he was wanting to ours.

2

The priests are not what a shallow people thinks them; our credulity is all their learning.

3

A literal prose translation reads somewhat baldly: – An unfortunate guest at life’s banquet I appeared for a day and now die; I die, and on the tomb to which I am slowly travelling none will come to shed a tear.

4

This is the sad lot of every book that is lent: often it is lost, always spoilt.

5

Literal Translation: – Sing; celebrate the upholder of Reason. Ah! of all men who are not slaves Voltaire is the fellow-citizen.

6

This may be literally translated: —

7

“Let’s go up and have a lark,

Let’s go up to the Barrier!”

8

“Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie.”