Massacre Read online

  In July 1870, under great French pressure, Prince Leopold withdrew his candidacy for the Spanish throne. Napoleon III demanded that King William I of Prussia formally apologise to France and promise that a member of the Hohenzollern royal family would never again be a candidate for the throne of Spain. The French ambassador to Prussia, Count Vincent Bénédetti, aggressively and rudely put forward this insistence to the Prussian king in the spa town of Bad Ems. Bismarck responded with a telegram, later released to the press, that became known as the Ems Dispatch, forcefully embellishing what had occurred. Bismarck, whose father was a Prussian noble (Junker), had entered the Prussian bureaucracy after completing law school, where he had been more prominent for duelling scars than for academic success. As prime minister of Prussia, he mastered domestic and international politics with his brand of ‘Realpolitik’, the pursuit of national self-interest based on a shrewd assessment of all possibilities. The use of the Ems Dispatch was a calculated manoeuvre to prime his country for war. Bismarck rejected the French demand. The ‘Iron Chancellor’ of Prussia was now confident that a victorious war against France would lead to the unification of the German states under Prussian leadership.2

  The story quickly spread in Prussia and other German states that the French ambassador had arrogantly insulted the king. In both Prussia and France, the mood was bellicose. Many ordinary Parisians, too, seemed to want war, including some republicans. Crowds sang the Marseillaise, which had been forbidden in imperial France because it was identified with republicanism and the French Revolution. The popular mood and the expectation of victory were reflected by one publisher’s decision to produce a French–German Dictionary for the Use of the French in Berlin.3 Egged on by the Foreign Minister, the Duc de Gramont and the Empress Eugénie, as well as a segment of the public, Napoleon III declared war on 19 July 1870.

  The German states of Wurttemberg, Hesse, Baden and Bavaria joined the Prussian side. France went to war without allies. Bismarck revealed to the British the document in which Napoleon III had demanded the annexation of Belgium and Luxembourg, an attempted power grab that Bismarck knew would anger the British and ensure their neutrality. Newly unified – at least in principle – Italy had not forgiven France for the absorption of Nice in 1860 following a plebiscite and was unwilling to come to their aid now. Gramont foolishly assumed that Austria would join France against its former enemy once French armies had moved into the Prussian Rhineland and Palatinate in south-western Germany, but Austria stayed out of the fray.

  Although it would face the Prussians alone, the French army seemed confident of victory. In addition to their victories in the Crimean War and in the war against Austria in 1859, French troops had expanded imperial interests in South-East Asia, giving the officer corps more experience in battle. The debacle in Mexico three years earlier, the army hoped, could be conveniently forgotten.

  But military complacency had set in and traditional routines took over. The officer corps was ridden by cliques, intensified by tensions between aristocratic officers and men of ordinary social origins and expectations – lower-middle-class, workers and paysans. Experience garnered in one-sided military campaigns in north Africa and South-East Asia could not be easily applied in European warfare.4

  To make matters worse, French mobilisation for war was nothing short of chaotic. Regiments stationed all over France were carried by trains to often distant mobilisation points, a disorganised, inefficient, and painfully slow process. Reservists had to be summoned from their homes and transported to regimental depots. The army of Alsace was notably short of supplies and funds, and some troops openly hostile to their officers. Even proper topographical maps were unavailable or hard to locate. Commanders had only two-thirds of the number of soldiers anticipated and lacked the massive reserves available to Prussia and its allies.

  Prussian mobilisation plans, on the other hand, were well in place. Prussia’s railways, public and private, had been placed under military control and modernised with particular attention to wartime needs. In contrast, the French high command had given little consideration to the crucial role of railways so necessary for the rapid and efficient mobilisation of troops. French troop trains moved on a single track, and thus could only be used for transport in one direction at a time. Fifty Prussian trains each day pushed along double tracks towards the front each day on five main lines, as opposed to twelve trains for the French.

  Yet the French army had a new breech-loading rifle, the chassepot, which was superior to Prussian rifles because soldiers could carry many more of its smaller-calibre bullets. French troops also had an early version of the machine gun (mitrailleuse), rather like the Gatling gun in the US Civil War. It had thirty-seven barrels or ‘gun tubes’ fired in rapid succession by a soldier quickly turning a hand crank. It soon picked up the nickname of the ‘coffee grinder’.

  French commanders had little idea of the cohesive and organised Prussian general staff relentlessly overseen since 1857 by Helmuth von Moltke. In sharp contrast, incredibly, France had no head of the general staff. In principle the Emperor commanded the army; he assumed that the fact that he was Napoleon’s nephew was enough. Napoleon III, unlike von Moltke, appears to have had no specific plan for waging the war against Prussia.

  Within eighteen days of the declaration of war, Prussia and its south German allies had nearly 1.2 million troops at or near the border. One French general reported in panic by telegraph: ‘Have arrived at Belfort. Can’t find my brigade. Can’t find the divisional commander. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are.’ Demoralised French troops, many of whom were unwilling conscripts ill at ease among professional soldiers who had seen it all, seemed apathetic, playing cards and drinking heavily to bolster their spirits amid food shortages. Commanders were notoriously uninterested in the conditions of their soldiers. Recently recalled reservists lacked sufficient training, and sometimes commitment.5

  Prussian tactics, developed in the war against Austria four years earlier, emphasised the quick and coordinated movement of units towards enemy positions, thus extending the field of battle. French commanders believed that sturdy lines, armed with chassepots and machine guns, supported by artillery fire, would carry the day over the Prussian ‘needle-gun’ with inferior range. They seemed to have been oblivious to the fact that the sturdy steel Prussian cannons, produced by the Krupp factories, were more powerful and accurate than the older French artillery pieces of bronze and could be fired more rapidly. Moreover, Von Moltke had made his batteries more mobile and thus responsive to changes in the enemy’s positions. He had also gone to great lengths to modernise the cavalry, purging incompetent officers, despite their credentials as Prussian nobles. In contrast, aristocrats retained their privileged place in the French officer corps, no matter their incompetence.6

  The Emperor left Paris for Metz on 28 July, appointing Empress Eugénie to serve as regent in his absence. On 31 July, the French Army of the Rhine moved forward in a pre-emptive strike. French troops crossed the border and captured Saarbrücken, which was virtually undefended because Prussian armies commanded by von Moltke had bigger fish to fry. This was the last French victory of any consequence. Two Prussian armies then moved into northern Lorraine and a third into northern Alsace. Prussian forces won hard-fought victories at Wissembourg on 4 August, and at Spicheren near the Vosges mountains the following day, while Marshal Achille Bazaine’s regiments were camped but nine miles away, and then at Woerth the following day.

  The French defeats were not overwhelming and their enemy suffered many casualties, but nonetheless forced the armies of France back. Prussian cannons thundered shell after shell upon the French, with Prussian soldiers well out of range of French machine-guns. Marshal Patrice de MacMahon retreated to Châlons-sur-Marne and Bazaine, now named commander-in-chief, to the fortress of Metz. Chaotic and sometimes ill-informed French orders flew back and forth. Bazaine moved his army in the direction of Verdun, but found the route cut off by von Moltke.7


  On 18 August, the Prussian army, 188,000 strong, moved against French forces two-thirds their size under the command of Bazaine. In the Battle of Gravelotte, fought just west of Metz, the Prussians inflicted 20,000 casualties (against 12,000 on the German side). Demoralisation and acrimony followed the French armies after such defeats. In Saverne, tipsy soldiers insulted officers whom they found sitting comfortably in a café. Yet another loss made matters worse. Bazaine’s army retreated to Metz and the Prussian army besieged the city, defeating the army commanded by MacMahon, who was trying to relieve Bazaine. There, some senior officers had become so disenchanted with Bazaine that they planned, without the marshal’s approval, to organise an attempt to break out from Metz and engage the Prussians in battle. But the French commander got word of the plan and it collapsed. For republicans, the incident took on a political tone because Bazaine, as other French commanders, had reached high military office through blatant imperial patronage.

  As a Prussian siege of Paris now seemed inevitable, General Louis Trochu had suggested to Napoleon III’s war council that Bazaine’s army should be withdrawn to the outskirts of Paris, beyond its fortifications, to hold off the Prussians. Six days later, the Emperor arrived in Châlons-sur-Marne to preside over a military meeting to determine whether to follow Trochu’s plan. There he found confirmation of just how dire the army’s situation had become: seemingly beaten soldiers lounged about, ‘vegetating rather than living’, as one of their officers put it, ‘scarcely moving even if you kicked them, grumbling at being disturbed in their sleep’.8 Napoleon III’s army seemed resigned to defeat.

  In Paris, anxiety about a looming Prussian siege mixed with anger at the French military’s miserable defeats, an atmosphere that presented an opportunity to the political left. On 14 August, a group of ‘Blanquists’ stood ready for revolution. Now, led by a young student, Émile Eudes, a group of Blanquists forced their way into a fire station at La Villette in northern Paris. Their attempt to spark an insurrection came to nothing when the firemen held on to their weapons and workers did not step forward to assist them. The insurgents rapidly retreated to their peripheral bastion of Belleville.9

  On 17 August, the Emperor named Trochu military governor-general of the Paris region. The conservative’s nomination seemed to most Parisians to be sheer provocation. Napoleon III had rejected Trochu’s idea that Bazaine’s forces return to defend Paris, believing that such a move would suggest near-defeat and could endanger his empire. Instead of attempting to defend Paris from a Prussian siege, it seemed, the Emperor was more concerned about checking civil unrest, a move that only angered an already anxious populace. Nonetheless, Trochu immediately returned to Paris with 15,000 Parisian Mobile Guards (Gardes Mobile), newly created companies of reservists, to ensure security in the capital.

  French morale continued to falter. The arrival of Mobile Guards near the front increased tensions, in part because they had little military experience. They lounged around Châlons-sur-Marne and other camps in their shiny new uniforms, in contrast with the increasingly tattered apparel of regular soldiers. Moreover, a number of senior officers with strong ties to the empire were now in a mood for peace, in part because of concern about their careers should more defeats follow. The ongoing French military catastrophe accentuated political tensions that had increased in the late 1860s between Bonapartist loyalists and republicans.10

  After sending Trochu to Paris, the Emperor then ordered MacMahon to move his army from Châlons-sur-Marne to Reims, before changing the destination to Montmédy, on the Belgian border. Napoleon III accompanied MacMahon, intending to organise a new army and march on Metz to relieve Bazaine’s besieged forces. No French troops now stood between the Prussian armies and Paris; and Trochu, upon his arrival in Paris, found that almost no preparations had been made to defend the capital.

  Napoleon III’s plan was quickly derailed. On 30 August, von Moltke’s army attacked, inflicting heavy casualties and forcing the army of 100,000 men to retreat to the fortress town of Sedan, near the Belgian border. The French army was surrounded. Napoleon III was so weakened by illness that he could barely stay on his horse. On 1 September, the French army tried to break out of Sedan, but were badly defeated by the Prussians, losing more than 17,000 killed and wounded, with another 20,000 captured. The next day, the Emperor and 100,000 of his soldiers surrendered.

  As imperial armies floundered, the political truce between the empire and the republican opposition brought on by the war quickly evaporated. In Paris, revolution already appeared a distinct possibility, not least because the city’s National Guard had grown in strength during the war and had become an increasingly organised and militant republican force. As of 12 September, national guardsmen received 1.50 francs per day – trente sous; later 75 centimes was added for a spouse and 25 centimes for each child. Poorer families depended on this paltry sum in order to be able to purchase food. National guardsmen elected their company officers, who in turn elected battalion commanders, workers and lower middle-class men largely unknown outside of their neighbourhoods.11

  The Left considered the National Guard, which had grown to 134 battalions during the Franco-Prussian War, incorporating 170,000–200,000 men, perhaps even more, as a balance against the professional army, used before the war by the imperial regime to repress strikers. The majority of the units were drawn from the ranks of working-class Parisians, although fancy quartiers boasted elite units. The National Guard may not have had access to many chassepots, which were held by the regular army, but they were armed and had cannons.

  On 3 September, Empress Eugénie received a terse message from Napoleon III: ‘The army has been defeated and surrendered. I myself am a prisoner.’ Her situation was not much better. Shouts against the empire already echoed in the streets, although many Parisians were unaware of what had transpired of the defeat at Sedan. Eugénie offered provisional authority to Adolphe Thiers, who had served as prime minister from 1830 to 1840 under the Orléanist July Monarchy, but he refused, saying that there was nothing left that could be done for the empire.12

  Late on 3 September, deputies of the imperial Legislative Body (Corps Législatif) meeting in the Palais Bourbon could hear shouts outside for the proclamation of a republic. In a general tumult, the moderate republican Jules Favre proclaimed the end of the empire well after midnight. Twenty-six deputies named a ‘government commission’, whose members were yet to be determined, while maintaining Trochu as governor-general of Paris.

  On the morning of 4 September, a crowd moved from place de la Concorde across the Seine to Palais Bourbon. A count described the people he watched with condescension as belonging to ‘the most diverse classes’, including women, ‘who, as always, were noteworthy for their enthusiastic, violent, and hysterical performances’.13

  Sutter-Laumann, an eighteen-year-old republican, went down from Montmartre to the boulevards, where he found people in a state of noisy agitation. Not long before, he had been arrested and beaten after giving a speech in a public gathering in an old dance hall on boulevard Clichy. Now the word ‘treason!’ was in the air. Upon hearing that the Emperor had been taken prisoner at Sedan, he walked to place de la Concorde and sat on the pavement to reflect. ‘A triumphant clamour’ moved towards him, the people shouting for a republic. The young man described his emotions as reflecting ‘a triple drunkenness: that of patriotism, that of wine, and that of love’.14

  At Palais Bourbon, troops and the crowd warily eyed each other. Conservative national guardsmen drawn from nearby neighbourhoods were also there, their bayonets glistening in the sun. Then, as late-arriving deputies appeared, someone opened the gates. Parisians stormed into the Palais Bourbon. There, the debate went on: Favre’s early-morning proclamation of the end of the empire competed with proposals put forth by the government and by Thiers, which called for the nomination of a ‘commission of the government and of national defence’. Léon Gambetta, a radical anti-imperial activist, proclaimed a republic. Crowds then crossed t
he Seine, moving towards the Hôtel de Ville, that ‘superb Louvre of revolutions’ that had come to symbolise revolutionary Paris. A number of prominent radical Jacobin republicans and socialists were already there, including the old quarante-huitards (forty-eighters, veterans of the 1848 Revolution).15 Jacobins were an amorphous group of nationalist republicans, inspired by the French Revolution and the role that Paris played in it, who espoused direct democracy and believed that the centralised state ought to look out for the welfare of citizens.

  Later, on 4 September, Gambetta proclaimed the Republic for a second time, cheered by the throngs below. The crowd had forced the release from prison of Henri Rochefort, a strident but erratic opponent of the imperial regime. The republican crowd saluted him in triumph. Gambetta proclaimed himself minister of the interior and Favre took on the role of minister of foreign affairs. Rochefort joined the list as the only member of the left. Two days after Napoleon III’s defeat at Sedan, his Second Empire had collapsed and the Third Republic had been established.

  With Prussian armies moving toward Paris, challenges plagued the new Republic from the start. Serious divisions between moderates and radicals became immediately apparent, as Paris assumed the right to speak for the rest of the country, much of which was much more conservative than the capital. Blanquists present were particularly outraged by the extremely moderate political composition of the provisional Government of National Defence, but their voices could barely be heard in the chaos.16