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  Thiers might have been identified with the Parisian bourgeoisie, but, born out of wedlock in Marseille in 1797, he remained Provençal in some ways. His father Louis, a hustler who had compromised the family status and wealth, had disappeared. With the help of a partial scholarship, Thiers entered the lycée in Marseille in 1809. Absorbed by liberal politics, in November 1815 he began law school in Aix-en-Provence.

  When he was offered a position with Le Constitutionnel, a moderate royalist newspaper critical of the Bourbon monarchy, Thiers moved to Paris. A contract to write a history of the Revolution earned him money and he made useful salon contacts in the capital. Thiers was relatively small at five feet two inches, and anything but handsome. He had little patience for anyone else. The poet Lamartine recalled, ‘He speaks first, he speaks last, he doesn’t pay much attention to any reply.’ Thoroughly from the Midi, he spoke quickly and in colourful language, with a Marseillais accent leaning on the last syllable, accompanied by rapid gestures for emphasis. He had a solemn voice as orator, and seemed to an admirer ‘graced with an almost divine authority’. Ambitious and hard-working, he had a reputation for garrulousness and cutting retorts. Here perhaps was a Napoleonic complex, if there is indeed such a thing. Even a friend noted that Thiers reacted to anyone who ‘refused him blind confidence’ with outrage and verbal violence.37

  The election of a National Assembly dominated by monarchists and led by Thiers, whom many people on the Left had reason not to trust, increased tension and galvanised revolutionaries in Paris. On 15 February a crowd of working-class Parisians stormed into the archbishop’s palace. Archbishop Georges Darboy asked what the people intended, telling them that, if they were eyeing the furniture, it all belonged to the state. As for the books, he pointed out that they were precious to him, but not to them. All that remained would be his life. The Parisians left him alone.38

  On 20 February, three days after the National Assembly granted Thiers executive powers, André Léo left Paris to try to convince the paysans that they too would suffer because of a monarchist-dominated National Assembly. Within Paris, the Left began to unite in opposition to the National Assembly. The Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements and members of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association found much on which to agree. For his part, Rigault also reached out to moderates, aiming to build a coalition capable of seizing power. A Revolutionary Socialist Party, based in radical clubs and the arrondissement vigilance committees, emerged during those heady days, its adherents expressing determination to achieve social equality in Paris. A Declaration of Principles announced that it sought ‘by all possible means the suppression of the privileges of the bourgeoisie, its downfall as the directing class, and the political advent of workers – in a word, social equality’.39

  Of course, German troops still surrounded much of the capital, their cannons stretching beyond the northern and eastern walls of Paris. Not enough stood between them and entry into Paris, should signs of resistance to the armistice materialise. Republicans in Paris were wary of Prussian troops, and not simply because they posed a military threat. Parisian republicans also feared that they could well help restore the monarchy.

  Radical republicans were right to question the future of republicanism under Thiers. He had earlier indicated that he supported a restoration of the monarchy, although he did not say which one: Bourbon (supported by the ‘Legitimists’) or Orléanist, a son of Louis-Philippe, overthrown in 1848. This explains why the National Assembly, dominated by monarchists, elected him ‘head of the executive authority of the Republic’ when they convened in Bordeaux in February 1871. But Thiers also enjoyed increasing support from conservative republicans. In 1850, he had expressed his belief that ‘the Republic is the regime that divides us the least’. This now seemed particularly true given the mistrust between Legitimists and Orléanists. Legitimists would accept a restoration on their terms, insisting that the white flag of the Bourbons be maintained. With the heir to the Bourbon throne, the Count of Chambord, childless, one solution could be that upon his death the throne would pass to the Orléanists, with the tricolour flag. The Bourbon pretender refused. Amid the tension between the two families, Thiers tried to assure moderate republicans that he was not ‘the instrument of a plot formed in the National Assembly to abolish the republic’.40 Yet most Parisians suspected Thiers of intending to do just that, even if the government established by Thiers did not reflect monarchist domination of the National Assembly. Moreover, three commanders of the army – Joseph Vinoy, Patrice de MacMahon, and Gaston Galliffet – were conservatives, Bonapartists to be sure, but who would prefer without question a monarchy to a republic.41

  The collective memory of previous revolutions remained powerful in Paris, and the next demonstration against the National Assembly occurred on an important date. On the anniversary of the Revolution of 24 February 1848, a huge crowd formed at the place de la Bastille, surrounding the Victory Column that had been erected following the July Revolution of 1830. Two days later, passers-by saw an undercover policeman observing them near the Seine. They grabbed him and – egged on by shouts of ‘Into the water! Into the water!‘ – tied his arms and legs and threw him into the river from quai Henri IV. When he bobbed to the surface they pushed him under until he drowned. Many Parisians hated the police, and attacks on policemen had occurred from time to time.42 This time, however, the attack took on political significance. That evening, a crowd of Parisians outnumbered soldiers guarding national guard cannons at place Wagram and hauled the guns up to the heights of Montmartre. Meanwhile, crowds rushed the prison of Saint-Pélegie to free political prisoners. To put down the rioting crowds, General Vinoy, the commander of the Paris region, called out what he considered reliable units of the National Guard, most of whom openly opposed the new government. Few men responded.

  The Parisian National Guard was not a professional military force, instead consisting of ordinary men proud to defend their city and the quartiers from which they had been mobilised. Indeed it seemed that during the Franco-Prussian War what was left of the empire feared the largely plebeian National Guard more than the Prussian army. The abolition of France’s professional army, which had disappointed all of France with its defeat in the war, was essential in the Commune’s vision of the new Paris. In this vision, the National Guard would ensure the defence of the capital.

  The new Central Committee of the National Guard had emerged as a revolutionary authority in the weeks after the armistice. It demanded that the National Guard retain its weapons, including, above all, its cannons, some of which had been purchased by the units themselves, and many of which now stood on Montmartre or in Belleville. A member insisted that the National Guard represented ‘an inexorable barrier erected against any attempt to reverse the Republic’.43 Clearly, given its composition, the provisional government of Thiers could not count on the National Guard to be an effective repressive force in the face of mounting popular political anger and mobilisation. Of 260 National Guard battalions in Paris, only about sixty could be counted to defend ‘order’ as Thiers defined it.44

  Parisians who had seethed at the stunning French military defeat and the humiliating terms of the armistice were reminded of it yet again when German troops entered Paris on 27 February. Four days later Parisians who happened to be near the Arc de Triomphe watched in anger as several French officers getting out of carriages had German ladies on their arms. Republican Paris radicalised, furious at the seeming cowardice if not duplicity of Thiers and the Government of National Defence for having capitulated. Paris seemed to be moving in a very different direction from much of the rest of France.45

  Demonstrations occurred almost daily at the place de la Bastille, as Parisians prepared for the departure of German troops following their triumphant march down the Champs-Elysées on 3 March. The resources of Paris were also stretched by the presence of tens of thousands of French troops, many undisciplined and eagerly awaiting demobilisation. Many officers were young,
recently promoted. Like the men under their command, their loyalty to Thiers and the National Assembly could not be assured. Political allegiances mattered little when French soldiers were distracted by poverty and hunger. One observer witnessed ‘the most lamentable of spectacles. Soldiers wandering about … their uniforms sullied, dishevelled, without weapons, some of them stopping passers-by asking for some money.’46

  Soon after the Prussian troops departed, the new government passed laws that seemed a blatant affront to struggling Parisians. On 7 March, the National Assembly ended the moratorium that had been declared by the Government of National Defence on items deposited at the Municipal Pawnshop. Goods deposited there could now be sold if not reclaimed. But reclaimed with what? Most Parisians had no money. The London Times reported that ‘2,300 poor wretches had pawned their mattresses, and starving seamstresses had pawned 1,500 pairs of scissors … How many necessities to existence were stored away in these cruel galleries? … the gaunt secret frowning on us from every loaded shelf … starvation!’ The Assembly also ended the moratorium on the payment of bills of exchange (promissory notes which required that funds owed be paid), adding that holders must redeem them with interest during the next four months. This move had devastating consequences for Parisian businessmen of modest means. At least 150,000 Parisians immediately defaulted on bills they owed. Worse, the Assembly ended the moratorium on the payment of rent – families that could not pay up could be expelled. This hit ordinary Parisians hard – the vast majority of the population rented their lodgings. Not satisfied with these moves against the poor, the Assembly ended the daily stipend of 1.50 francs for national guardsmen, leaving tens of thousands of families without enough money to buy food and fuel.47

  On 10 March, the National Assembly made the decision to meet in Versailles, formerly the capital of kings. The fort of Mont-Valérien stood nearby to offer protection. In Thiers’s provocative words, ‘Honesty would not allow me to promise the Assembly complete safety in Paris.’48 Thiers immediately met with mayors or municipal council members from Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and other major cities. Thiers blamed Paris for revolutionary activity, while assuring the other cities’ leaders of his support for a republic as a way of undercutting their possible support for insurgent Paris.49

  When Thiers and his government arrived to set up shop in Versailles, the Germans had only recently departed the former capital of the Bourbon monarchs. Versailles in some ways resembled, in the conservative republican Jules Simon’s words, a city of ‘German taverns, and the smell of tobacco, beer and leather’. The orderly Prussians had destroyed nothing, leaving a few signs in German at the railway station and on the walls of the barracks.50

  Versailles opened its arms to Thiers, the National Assembly, and the wealthy beau monde fleeing an increasingly turbulent Paris. Viscount Camille de Meaux was struck by the contrast between the grim-faced newly arrived and fancy folk ‘heated up’ by good meals. Government officials, deputies, diplomats, military officers, journalists, and people seeking posts swarmed through boulevards that had been practically deserted since 1789. The Château of Versailles became a sort of ‘ministerial beehive’ that took over vast rooms of marble and superb salons decorated with renowned paintings and complete with magnificent ceilings.51

  Despite the wealth of most of those arriving in Versailles, the population of which jumped from 40,000 to about 250,000, it became difficult to find suitable lodgings. Newcomers complained of poorly furnished rooms with hard beds, but the restaurants of the capital of the Bourbons welcomed diners with stomachs empty and wallets full. During the first week of the Commune, the railway stations of Paris were encumbered by people trying to leave – it seemed like le grand départ in the summer months in normal times.

  Exiled Parisians found in Versailles ‘their newspapers, their restaurants, their clubs, their gentlemanly relations, and even their bankers’. Charles Laffitte ran into a friend from Paris’s exclusive Jockey Club now dressed in relative ‘tatters’. High finance turned up in the salons of Versailles, including Baron Rothschild. Hector Pessard, editor-in-chief of Le Soir, described ‘The artillery of Veuve Clicquot firing popping [champagne] corks against restaurant ceilings.’ However, at the beginning he found only ‘a mob … uniquely preoccupied with particular interests’. More troops arrived every day in Versailles and France’s elite bought them drinks and cigars. On Easter Sunday, the abbé du Marhallac’h, deputy from Morbihan, said Mass before a huge throng on the plateau de Satory, raising the host on an altar complete with military trappings, ‘a truly grand spectacle … under a radiant sky, around a priest who blesses and who prays’.52

  Paris, just a few months earlier the home of France’s government and its wealthiest families, now seemed to be under the control of ordinary people who demanded municipal rights and social reform. France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had brought about an end to Napoleon III’s regime, and the long siege of Paris that followed Napoleon’s surrender only angered Parisians who had long been critical of the Emperor. Radicalised by the war, working-class Parisians and republican and socialist intellectuals alike were no longer willing to stand for centralised government oppression. When Thiers and the National Assembly, dominated by monarchist and conservative members, seemed ready to reinstate a monarchy, Parisian republicans – supported by potentially revolutionary National Guard units – were prepared to run the city themselves.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Birth of the Commune

  WITH THIERS’S GOVERNMENT CONVENING IN THE GRAND CHTEAU OF the Bourbon monarchy, republicans had even more reason to worry about a possible monarchist restoration. The government’s move to Versailles, for centuries identified with the close alliance of the Bourbon monarchy and the Catholic Church, further inflamed popular opinion. Thiers had once asserted, ‘I want to make the clergy’s influence all-powerful, because I am counting on it to propagate that good philosophy that teaches man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy that tells man the opposite: take pleasure.’1

  On 11 March 1871 the Versailles government banned six newspapers of the Left. This news reached Paris after word came that a court-martial had condemned to death in absentia Auguste Blanqui and another popular revolutionary, Gustave Flourens, for their roles in the attempted insurrection of 31 October during the Prussian siege.

  Parisians mobilised against the provisional government sending out decrees from Versailles, and government troops spent much of late February and early March reacting to riotous crowds. General Joseph Vinoy’s forces, limited by the armistice with the Prussians to 12,000 troops and 3,000 gendarmes, had already dispersed several demonstrations. Vinoy, who had left a seminary to enter the army as a young man and whose temperament was as chilly as the Alps of his native Dauphiné, believed Paris was being taken over by ‘ring-leaders’, ‘the lowest of the low’, and ‘guilty agitators’, intent on ‘pillage’ and sowing ‘disorder’. The US Ambassador, E.B. Washburne, realised that the government was losing control of Paris: on 16 March he sent a dispatch to Washington relating that ‘the insurrectionists of Paris are gaining in power and strength every hour’.2

  On 17 March, Thiers decided to move against the Parisian militants. He would send troops early the next morning to capture the National Guard cannons, most of which had been moved to Montmartre (171 cannons) or Belleville (74 cannons), both quartiers populaires – predominantly neighbourhoods of workers – from which they could dominate the city. Thiers made his decision for economic reasons as well as political ones. He explained, ‘Businessmen were going around constantly repeating that the financial operations would never be started until all those wretches were finished off and their cannons taken away. An end had to be put to all this, and then one could get back to business.’ A crowd thwarted Thiers’s troops’ first attempt on Montmartre on 12 March. To the citizens of that quartier, the National Guard’s cannons represented the right of Paris to arm itself. They would stop at nothing to keep the guns fr
om government troops. Thiers’s officers, meanwhile, hurriedly prepared a plan to occupy Paris.3

  On Montmartre, the cannons still stood in two rows on the heights and on a plateau further down the Butte. Four days later, soldiers under Thiers’s orders tried again to retrieve some of the guns, but were countered by National Guardsmen. The next day Thiers decided to have the cannons brought down early the following day, in order to ‘disarm Paris’ and its ‘revolutionary party’. The task at hand was exceedingly difficult, requiring soldiers to seize the cannons and haul them down the steep, narrow cobblestone streets through hostile neighbourhoods.

  On the evening of 17 March, General Louis d’Aurelle de Paladines, an old Bonapartist now suspected of having changed his allegiance to the Bourbons, whom Thiers had named head of the National Guard of Paris, convoked commanders of about thirty or forty conservative national guard units. He ordered them to have their men ready the next morning. At about 4.30 a.m. on 18 March, troops under Vinoy were in place to begin bringing down the National Guard cannons from Montmartre. Soldiers commanded by General Claude Lecomte also went up to Montmartre from the north. A column of about 4,000 men under the command of General Bernard de Susbielle was to set up a command post at place Pigalle. Another column was to take control of Belleville, while a division was to remain below and assure control of the neighbourhoods between the Hôtel de Ville and the place de la Bastille.4

  Very early in the morning, as women in these neighbourhoods went out to buy bread, they found themselves face to face with soldiers clad in the red trousers, blue tunics, and red and blue caps of the regular army. Georges Clemenceau, mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, was surprised and angered to see soldiers when he left his apartment at about 6.00 a.m. He expressed his ‘extreme surprise and disappointment’ with the military operation to one of the commanders. Thiers had ordered the military operation without notifying the arrondissement mayors, who had tried to achieve the peaceful surrender of the cannons. Clemenceau had hoped that the guns could be returned without a show of force by Thiers’s provisional government. But, for the moment, all was calm, and some residents of Montmartre chatted amiably with troops in a light Parisian rain.5