Children of the Revolution Read online

  The armistice agreed on 28 January might have restored France to peace and order. France was to pay Germany an indemnity of 5,000 million francs for starting the war, to disarm its regular army and to forfeit Alsace and Lorraine. German forces still encircled Paris, although people and supplies could now cross the lines. Elections to a National Assembly, to meet in Bordeaux, were held forthwith in order to endorse the armistice. The elections of 8 February 1871 restored the country as a political unit and the conservative countryside and small towns swamped the radicalism of Paris and the large cities. Of 768 deputies, 400 were royalists, including two sons of Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Aumale and the Prince de Joinville. This did not mean that a restoration of the monarchy was imminent: the vote was for peace and order against war and disorder. The Legitimist Comte de Falloux, now re-elected, had no wish for a monarchy restored by a foreign power, as in 1814 and 1815, and was prepared to wait for the Republic to destroy itself.28 In Paris the International put up forty-three candidates for the forty-three seats on offer but failed to have any of them elected. Those elected for Paris included Gambetta, Henri Rochefort, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc and Edmond Adam; Juliette was delighted to leave Paris for Bordeaux, where the Assembly met on 11 February. The Assembly elected Adolphe Thiers head of the executive power, inevitably, some said, as a longtime opponent of the Empire but also of the war, having warned Ollivier against it on 15 July 1870. Thiers, an Orleanist by nature, added the words ‘of the Republic’ to his title: as in 1850 he thought the Republic was the regime that divided French people least, permitting the reconstitution of a ‘party of order’ of royalists and moderate republicans, and isolating the revolutionaries.

  To ensure that the armistice was indeed ratified, German troops marched into Paris on 1 March, paraded in the Bois de Boulogne and were reviewed by the German emperor on the Champs-Élysées; when terms were duly ratified, they withdrew on 3 March. In protest against the surrender of their provinces the deputies of Alsace-Lorraine together with Gambetta, Rochefort and Victor Hugo walked out of the Assembly, but this was not the moment for thoughts of revanche. The obstacle to the armistice was not the Assembly but Paris. The revolutionary movement had fought for months against what Blanqui called ‘the alliance of reaction with Bismarck’ and was not prepared to stop now.29 It had a particular hatred of Thiers, the quintessential bourgeois held responsible for the massacre in the rue Transnonain in 1834 and declared enemy of the ‘vile multitude’, the ‘dressing-gowned Cavaignac of the Third Republic’ (after the general who put down the insurrection of June 1848), in the opinion of journalist Jules Vallès.30

  Thiers, however, could not regain control of Paris, where 300,000 armed national guardsmen were still at large. On 18 March 20,000 regular troops were sent into the city to seize artillery and to disarm the National Guard. A confrontation between the government and the people of Paris threatened, as in the June Days of 1848, but this time the people were armed and organized, and also keen to exact vengeance. General Clément Thomas, despatched to Montmartre to remove cannon, was remembered as ‘having behaved with incredible ferocity towards the defeated insurgents’ in June 1848, and was murdered along with another general, Lecomte, by an angry crowd.31 Georges Clemenceau, mayor of Montmartre since November 1870, tried to intervene, but was too late. This was the signal for a general insurrection, orchestrated by the Central Committee of the National Guard with the support of the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements. Jules Ferry tried to hold on to the Hôtel de Ville, but there was no question of negotiation, as on 31 October. His October ‘fix’ was now seen to be a trick, with Blanqui and Flourens, promised amnesty, now under sentence of death, and during the siege he had gained a reputation as ‘famine Ferry’. Rejected by the Paris electorate on 8 February, he was instead elected deputy of his native Vosges and represented the desire of the provinces to smother the capital. Ferry was forced to abandon the Hôtel de Ville at 10 p.m. on 18 March and tried briefly to rally the mayors of the bourgeois arrondissements in the town hall of the 1st arrondissement. However crowds outside were crying ‘Mort à Ferry!’ and he escaped through the church of Saint-Germain L’Auxerrois to reach Versailles, where the government and Assembly were now located, the next day.

  The insurrection of 18 March 1871 was revenge for June 1848. It was also a re-run of 10 August 1792, when the monarchy was toppled and an insurrectionary Commune was formed in Paris which for nearly two years dictated the pace of revolution to the Convention parliament elected the following September. The revival of their own city government, instead of the dictatorship of the prefect of the Seine and the prefect of police, ending the division of power between what Le Grand Colère du Père Duchesne called ‘a heap of mayor-of-arrondissement buggers’, was what the people of Paris demanded.32 There was one attempt at negotiation, on 19 March. Clemenceau and some of the twenty mayors obtained the authority of the Central Committee of the National Guard, now sitting in the Hôtel de Ville, to request permission from the National Assembly, now sitting in Versailles, to elect a unitary city government, the Commune. This was refused by Versailles, so the central committee unilaterally called elections to the Commune on 22 March. Much of the bourgeois population had left Paris after the siege and many others did not vote: the abstention rate was 52 per cent, higher in the richer arrondissements. The mayors put together a moderate list but it took only fifteen out of ninety-two seats and these members soon resigned in the face of the overwhelming presence of revolutionaries. Seventeen of those elected, including Eugène Varlin, Benoît Malon, Édouard Vaillant and Charles Beslay, were members of the Paris section of the International, professing federalist and Proudhonian ideas, and most of these had come up through the vigilance committees. In their general orbit were the like of the journalist Vallès and the painter Courbet. About thirty were Jacobins, such as Gustave Flourens and Charles Delescluze, a veteran of 1848 and in many ways the Robespierre of the Commune. A dozen were Blanquists (although Blanqui himself had been arrested just before the insurrection), including Émile Eudes, Théophile Ferré, Raoul Rigault and Gustave Tridon, historian of the Hébertistes who had dominated the Commune of 1792–4.

  Marx called the Commune a proletarian government, the first example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Others have pointed out that many members of the Commune were not authentically working class but middle-class déclassés such as Vaillant, a notary’s son who had studied at Heidelberg university, or Flourens, a young professor at the Collège de France with a private income of 30,000 francs. But the members of the Commune had made their reputation in the direct democracy of the sections and unions of the International, in the radical clubs and press, in the municipal vigilance committees and battalions of the National Guard, so that they were in the truest sense representatives of the people. Many measures were taken by the Commune of a socialist nature: night-work in bakeries was abolished, valuable objects were returned from pawnshops and abandoned workshops were handed over to workers’ co-operatives. Some hotheads complained that the deserted apartments of the rich had not been requisitioned for slum-dwellers, although Thiers’ house was pulled down on 11 May, and Beslay stood guard over the vaults of the Banque de France, to ensure that the National Guard would be paid. It was nevertheless clear to Edmond de Goncourt, one of the few bourgeois who remained in the city, that ‘what is happening is very simply the conquest of France by the workers and the enslavement under their despotism of the nobles, the middle class and the peasants’.33

  The Paris Commune did its best to trigger other communes across the country. Unlike in 1793, it promised in its address to the French people on 19 April that it would not seek to impose a red dictatorship on France. It called for the autonomy and self-government of all communes, towns and villages, free of the grip and interference of the central administration, and for them to show solidarity with the Paris Commune in its struggle against the militarism, clericalism, bureaucracy and exploitation incarnated by Versailles. Communes were proclai
med in sympathy on 23 March at Lyon and Marseille, on the 24th in the industrial towns of Le Creusot and Saint-Étienne and at Narbonne, with Toulouse following on the 25th, but attempts to declare communes at Limoges and Bordeaux failed. While some towns and cities wished to regain their municipal liberties, the inauguration of the Republic was felt to be enough to guarantee that autonomy. In Lyon, mayor Hénon and his deputy Désiré Barodet were able to convince extremists that to all intents and purposes Lyon already had a commune, and a rising in the working-class suburb of La Guillotière on 30 April was easily put down. In Marseille power was again seized at the prefecture by Gaston Crémieux, and three representatives of the Paris Commune arrived on 28 March, but Crémieux was opposed by Bory’s municipality which was able to rely on the National Guard and regular forces under General Espivant to restore order on 3 April. Thiers was determined to make an example of Crémieux, who was tried and shot on 30 November.

  ‘Thank God the civil war has begun,’ wrote Edmond de Goncourt on 2 April, as the army directed from Versailles began to bombard Paris.34 A desperate attempt to reach a compromise between the Paris Commune and Versailles was made on 29 April by a body of freemasons, who went to parley with a freemason general of the Versailles army, Leclerc, on the bridge at Courbevoie, but to no avail. Within Paris the Commune divided over whether to set up a committee of public safety with supreme authority. The Jacobins and Blanquists were in favour and won the vote on 1 May, the anti-Jacobin Internationalists were against, and lost. The Internationalist minority resigned from the Commune on 15 May, although not from the fight. Delescluze, appointed war delegate on 10 May, declared that ‘if your breasts are exposed to bullets and shells of the Versaillais it is for the prize that you have promised yourselves, the liberation of France and the world, the safety of your home and the lives of your wives and children. Long live the universal Republic! Long live the Commune!’35

  The Versailles forces closed in, taking the outlying forts of Issy on 8 May and Vanves on the 14th. The finalization of the peace treaty, following on from the armistice, by Jules Favre at Frankfurt on 10 May enabled French prisoners of war to be released and returned to reinforce the Versailles army, which numbered 55,000 in April but 120,000 towards the end of May. Thiers, scoffed Marx, ‘hounds on the prisoners of Sedan and Metz by special permission of Bismarck’.36 These were pumped up with extra pay, double drink rations and propaganda to the effect that the rebels were the criminals, pimps, spies and alcoholics of the classes dangereuses in order to steel them for the work of repression.37

  Versailles forces broke into Paris proper through the Porte de Saint-Cloud on Sunday 21 May, and the week that followed became known as the Semaine Sanglante. ‘The hour of revolutionary war has struck,’ announced Delescluze. ‘To arms, citizens, to arms!’38 Some lukewarm revolutionaries like Henri Rochefort slipped away before things became too hot, while women organized in the Union des Femmes and the Légion des Fédérées of the 12th arrondissement took up arms to replace them, defending their own barricade on place Blanche on 23 May.39 The participation of women in the defence of Paris was later caricatured as the use of petrol-bombs to set fire to the city, while they were attacked as ‘unworthy creatures who have taken it upon themselves to become an opprobrium to their sex’.40 Hostages were taken and executed on both sides. The Communards arrested the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Darboy, in order to barter him for Blanqui, held by the Versaillais under sentence of death. When no exchange was forthcoming, they shot him together with a batch of Dominican monks. The Church did not forgive the Communards for this act, but was also keen to make religious capital out of it. ‘God is victorious,’ wrote Veuillot, who himself remained in Paris editing L’Univers until 12 May. ‘He has taken martyrs, we will have miracles, we are saved!’41

  The Commune was forced to abandon the Hôtel de Ville on 24 May and took refuge in the town hall of the 11th arrondissement. Delescluze donned his scarf of office and climbed on to the barricade at the place du Château d’Eau to meet a hail of bullets. Last stands were made on the Buttes Chaumont and in the Père Lachaise cemetery on 27 May, where captured fighters were machine-gunned and rolled into an open ditch. Belleville gave out on 28 May and Varlin was captured and shot in rue des Rosiers. Perhaps 10,000 Parisians died in the fighting and another 10,000, seized with weapons in their hands, were taken to barracks in various parts of the city and summarily executed en masse. Edmond de Goncourt observed columns being taken into the Lobau barracks near the Hôtel de Ville.

  Almost at that instant there is an explosion like a violent sound enclosed behind doors and walls, a fusillade having something of the mechanical regularity of a machine-gun. There is a first, a second, third, fourth, a fifth murderous rrarra – then a long interval – and then a sixth, and still two more volleys, one after the other.42

  Less than two weeks later, on 10 June, Goncourt had lunch with Gustave Flaubert, who had come up to Paris to do more work on his Temptation of St Anthony. Flaubert’s house at Croisset had been occupied by the Prussians in the autumn, but they had done no damage, and left his study untouched. He wrote to George Sand:

  The smell of bodies disgusts me less than the miasmas of egoism breathed from every mouth. The sight of ruins is nothing compared to the immense Parisian stupidity. One half of the population wants to strangle the other, and the other has the same desire. You can read it in the eyes of passers-by.43

  Paris was calm, but France was in a state of dislocation and shock. It had been defeated and humiliated, toppled from its great-power status, no longer certain of the superiority of its civilization. Revolutionary violence had broken out again, stirring up painful memories of 1793 and June 1848, and that in a modern democracy where universal suffrage was supposed to replace violent by peaceful change. The national territory had broken up: the government had been driven out of Paris, Alsace and Lorraine were lost, provincial cities and departments had attempted to reclaim their independence. A society that preached careers open to talent and held together by ambition had fallen victim to class war. The long march of rechris-tianization undertaken since the Concordat in 1802 faltered as priests, including another archbishop of Paris, were murdered and churches desecrated. Women, who were supposed to impart religious teaching from one generation to another, were now throwing petrol-bombs into Paris apartments. Perhaps only literature, Goncourt and Flaubert might have reflected as they lunched on 10 June, had survived the descent into anarchy, but their literature was of no interest to the mass public that was now emerging. Much work was required if France was to regain political stability, national consensus and great-power status.

  9

  Consensus Found:

  French Politics, 1870–1914

  Few in 1871 would have predicted that the Republic proclaimed on 4 September that year would still be in place in 1914, let alone last until 1940. Its legitimacy was contested both by Bonapartist apologists of the Empire, who as late as May 1870 had claimed the endorsement of 7.3 million votes, and by both species of monarchist, Legitimists faithful to the Bourbons of 1814 and Orleanists faithful to the July Monarchy of 1830. Yet beneath the quarrels over regimes seethed another issue: fear of popular revolution manifest in 1793, the June Days of 1848 and now in the Paris Commune. There was an underlying pressure on the political class to sink its ideological differences and rally behind the regime most likely to defend the supremacy of the propertied and educated. ‘The masses, sheer numbers, are always stupid,’ wrote Flaubert to George Sand; ‘what we need above all is a natural and therefore legitimate aristocracy.’ ‘Let us cure ourselves of democracy,’ said Renan. ‘Civilization began as an aristocratic creation, the work of a small number of nobles and priests… and its preservation is an aristocratic task too.’1

  A REPUBLIC FOR REPUBLICANS

  Although France was a republic in 1871 the National Assembly elected in February that year was dominated by a ‘party of order’ of royalists and conservative republicans very like the one which had cont
rolled the Legislative Assembly of 1849. Many of those elected in 1871 had indeed served in that of 1849. Unlike in 1849, however, there was no president of the Republic elected by universal suffrage who might threaten to dissolve it. The Assembly elected Adolphe Thiers president of the executive power, a tribute to his opposition to the authoritarian and bellicose Empire in the name of ‘necessary liberties’. Having vanquished the Commune he was promoted president of the Republic by the Assembly on 31 August 1871, but made responsible to it for his actions and therefore always liable to be overturned by the Assembly.

  Thiers was in fact threatened from three different quarters: republican, Bonapartist and royalist. Gambetta, leader of the republicans, who had stormed out of the Assembly over the abandonment of Alsace-Lorraine and went briefly into exile in Spain, was returned to the Assembly in a by-election in July 1871 and began a long campaign to dissociate the republicans from their violent image. Like the republicans of 1848 he put his faith in the power of universal suffrage which, although it had been manipulated for eighteen years by the Empire, playing on the ignorance of the peasantry, was ‘the strength of numbers and power enlightened by reason’. In a tireless tour of French towns Gambetta argued that the republicans would complete the work of the French Revolution, which was characterized not by violence but by the delivery of political and civil equality, private property, universal education and freedom of conscience.2