Seven Ages of Paris (45 page)

That June, the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, gazed out with satisfaction on the world scene and claimed—with reason—that he could not discern “a cloud in the sky.” In all his experience he had never known “so great a lull in foreign affairs.” In Paris, Emperor Napoleon III’s Prime Minister, Emile Ollivier, echoed Granville by declaring that “at no period has the maintenance of peace seemed better assured.” Then, at the beginning of July 1870, a small cloud passed across the sun. For the previous two years the throne of Spain had been vacant, since the deposing of the unsatisfactory Queen Isabella. One of the possible candidates was a German princeling, Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. The idea of the Hohenzollern Candidacy had originated in Spain, but when Bismarck took it up Paris became alarmed. It was the thought of having German princes on the Pyrenees frontier as well as on the Rhine—though historians could have reminded French statesmen that, by filling the Spanish throne with a Bourbon prince less than two centuries previously, this kind of hegemony was almost exactly what Louis XIV had sought to impose on Europe.

So hostile was the response in France, egged on by inflammatory articles in the Paris press, that the Hohenzollern Candidacy was rapidly withdrawn. A relieved Lord Granville admonished the French government for the fierceness of its reaction, and the British press returned to such themes as Queen Victoria handing out prizes in Windsor Park. But in Paris hotheads were clamouring for a political success, and none was pushing harder than the Empress. Meanwhile, France’s heavy-handed Foreign Secretary, the Duc de Gramont, began to goad the Prussians. It was not enough that the Hohenzollern Candidacy had been withdrawn, Prussia had to be put in her place. Accordingly, Gramont sent the French Ambassador in Berlin, Count Vincent Benedetti, to badger the King at Bad Ems, where he was taking the waters. Benedetti was received with the greatest courtesy by King Wilhelm, who had no desire (any more than his fellow German rulers) for war, observing that the unification of Germany would be “the task of my grandson,” not his.

This was not, however, the view of Bismarck, who was not at all prepared to wait two generations, and who judged that a war against France would help him to bond together the existing rather loose structure of the German federation into a unified nation—dominated, of course, by his native Prussia. But the casus belli would have to be chosen with the greatest care, so as to cast France in an unfavourable light among the other nations of Europe, and also with Prussia’s own German allies. With the French now bent on pressing for diplomatic victories, Bismarck saw his chance. Irked by Benedetti’s importuning at Bad Ems, the benign old King refused to give a guarantee that the Hohenzollern Candidacy would not be revived, and declined a request for a further audience. A telegram reporting on his interview was duly sent to Bismarck in Berlin. Without actually doctoring the text, as he has often been accused of doing, Bismarck sharpened the emphasis of the despatch before passing it to the Berlin press—and the world.

Even with Bismarck’s editing, the famous Ems Telegram hardly seemed to constitute a casus belli. But the Chancellor had his ear well tuned to the prevailing tone in Paris. Frenzied crowds surged through the streets shouting “A Berlin!” Simultaneously Zola’s tragic courtesan Nana was depicted as dying of her terrible disease, which to Zola personified the whole of Louis Napoleon’s world: “Venus was decomposing … the room was empty. An enormous wave of desperation rose from the boulevard and made the curtain billow: ‘To Berlin! To Berlin! To Berlin!’ ” In one of the rashest claims in all military history, the French commander, Marshal Leboeuf, encouraged the hawks with his foolish declaration that the army was “ready down to the last gaiter-button.” Now, with the publication of Bismarck’s telegram, urged on by his Empress and Gramont, and fired by the ever shriller Paris press, Napoleon III took the plunge.

On 15 July, France declared war—in a state of exhilaration, recalling Napoleon I’s resounding successes beyond the Rhine, and expecting a repeat performance in 1870. But, through Bismarck’s cunning, she found herself at once branded a frivolous aggressor with neither friend nor ally. As the Illustrated London News declared, “The Liberal Empire goes to war on a mere point of etiquette.” Within eighteen days of mobilization, Bismarck and his German allies were able to field an unheard-of force of 1,183,000 men. The German organization man, scourge of Europe over the next seventy-five years, had arrived. The laughter prompted by General Boum and the Grand Duchess of Gérolstein at the Great Exposition now seemed an awful misreading as Herr Krupp’s terrifying great cannon, which he had exhibited in Paris just three years previously, moved to centre stage. In sharp contrast, scenes of dismal chaos accompanied French mobilization. “Have arrived at Belfort,” telegraphed one desperate general. “Can’t find my brigade. Can’t find the divisional commander. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are.” Over the first six weeks of war in the frontier provinces, disaster followed military disaster in swiftest succession.

On 1 September, a sick and defeated Napoleon III surrendered to King Wilhelm of Prussia at the head of his army in Sedan.

FIFTEEN

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L’Année Terrible

It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities. Paris is the city of men. There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and now there is a Paris … Is the nineteenth century to witness this frightful phenomenon? A nation fallen from polity, to barbarism, abolishing the city of nations; Germans extinguishing Paris … Can you give this spectacle to the world?

VICTOR HUGO, APPEAL TO THE PRUSSIANS, 9 SEPTEMBER 1870

THE NEW REPUBLIC

On 3 September 1870 a stunned Paris received the news of the Emperor’s capitulation in Sedan with horror. “What a sight,” recorded Edmond Goncourt:*

the news of MacMahon’s† defeat and the capture of the Emperor spreading from group to group! Who can describe the consternation written on every face, the sound of aimless steps pacing the streets at random, the anxious conversations of shopkeepers and concierges on their doorsteps …

Then there is the menacing roar of the crowd, in which stupefaction had begun to give place to anger.

Almost immediately there followed a measure of delight—even in some bourgeois quartiers. Louis Napoleon and his Second Empire were gone for good. Like her two predecessors in the Tuileries, Empress Eugénie fled to England—from a side-door in the Palace, helped by her dentist. Thereupon the mob invaded the Tuileries Palace, where they found pathetic signs of an unplanned departure: a toy sword half drawn on a bed, empty jewel-cases scattered on the floor, and on a table some pieces of bread and a half-devoured egg. As now seemed traditional in French revolutions, the mob quickly began obliterating all trace of the fallen regime. Just as at the outset of the Hundred Days the fleurs-de-lys had been scratched from the Tuileries carpets and replaced with Napoleonic bees, so now all the Ns and imperial eagles were hacked away from the public buildings, and busts of the humbled Emperor rapturously flung into the Seine. At the main entrance of the Tuileries, late in the afternoon of 4 September, Goncourt saw scribbled in chalk the words “Property of the People,” while a young soldier held out his shako to the crowd and cried, “For the army’s wounded!”

With the sun shining and not a drop of blood shed, all Paris took to the streets to celebrate its most gratifying revolution. George Sand, now aged sixty-six, was jubilant: “This is the third awakening; and it is beautiful beyond fancy … Hail to thee, Republic! Thou art in worthy hands, and a great people will march under thy banner after a bloody expiation.” Standing by the Pont de la Concorde, Juliette Lambert observed a young worker in a red fez who had been singing the Marseillaise without a break for three hours while hanging on to one of the candelabra. Everyone seemed united by an irrational optimism, driven by the feeling that what had gone wrong before had all been the fault of the Emperor and his comprehensive mediocrity.

Meanwhile, the last vestiges of imperial society made their way to Brussels where they passed en route that most famous of all returning exiles, Victor Hugo, and his ménage. As he encountered the beaten remnants of the Sedan army, Hugo wept and remarked to his companions, “I should have preferred never to return rather than see France so humiliated, to see France reduced to what she was under Louis XVIII!” In Paris, the end of the Empire was officially proclaimed, and a new Republic formed in the Hôtel de Ville—that symbol of Republicanism where the revolutionary municipal government of Paris had been created in 1789. It was assumed on the street that—now the Emperor and his bellicose regime were gone—the victorious Prussians would return home and leave France alone. Paris felt sure that Bismarck would promptly fall in with the bombastic appeal launched by Victor Hugo on 9 September:

It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities. Paris is the city of men. There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and now there is a Paris … Is the nineteenth century to witness this frightful phenomenon? A nation fallen from polity, to barbarism, abolishing the city of nations; Germans extinguishing Paris … Can you give this spectacle to the world?

Hugo was wasting his breath. Bismarck was not a man to be deterred by such a “spectacle”—he had his own agenda. What the Parisians could not see in this hour of extraordinary rejoicing was the solid German phalanxes advancing ever closer, nor could they hear the German press at home shrieking for the destruction of “the modern Babylon.” A bitter four months’ siege now lay ahead, waged on the Parisian side with varying degrees of incompetence until late January 1871. At the Hôtel de Ville, the new government consisted of moderate Republicans—men like Favre, Ferry, Gambetta, Picard, Crémieux and Arago. Thiers declined office, but remained a powerful influence, while the post of president was handed to General Trochu, the lethargic and uninspiring Governor of Paris. Just as they had proved a thorny opposition to the left of Louis Napoleon, so now they found on their own left an explosive combination of revolutionaries. Here were sons and grandsons of those who had fought and died on the barricades of 1830, 1848 and 1851, such as Blanqui and Delescluze (professional revolutionaries who between them had spent many years in imperial jails), and Pyat and Flourens, supported by the embittered thousands who had been pushed into ghettos by Haussmann. Fulminating in the Red “clubs” and gaining a powerful military presence by their participation in the National Guard militia, while proving a constant threat to the organized government, these revolutionaries were to press it to the end to fight the war à outrance. Under this pressure, with some reluctance Trochu and his team decided to continue the war. With an extraordinary degree of traditional arrogant self-assurance, Paris did so virtually without consulting the rest of France; once again she had decided on the country’s behalf. It would be almost the last time.

As Paris settled down to resist the siege, a frenzy of activity engulfed the city. Troops that had survived the disasters of the first six weeks of war were encamped (while being reorganized by Generals Vinoy and Ducrot) on the Champ-de-Mars, where that now faraway memory, the Great Exposition of three years previously, had once stood. Reinforced by territorial mobiles from the provinces, they totalled some 170,000. On top of this came the National Guard, expanded with indecent rapidity from 24,000 men at the outbreak of war eventually to number some 350,000; but it was to prove a liability—and a most dangerous one—in the course of the siege. In the centre of Paris, the Tuileries stables and gardens had been transformed into a vast artillery park. The Champ-de-Mars became a seething mass of troops—among whom Edmond Goncourt spotted pedlars selling paper and pencils for the poor devils to write out their wills. Meanwhile up at Montmartre, with grim prescience, common graves were dug to avert the spread of disease.

Nevertheless, the surest defence Paris had against the enemy swiftly closing in was the ring of forts constructed (with foresight?) by Thiers in 1840, against an invader who must then have seemed notional. The enceinte wall was ten metres high and divided into ninety-three bastions behind which ran a circular railway ferrying troops to the ramparts. It was a Maginot Line of its time, the principal defect being its age—which made it no longer proof against the plunging fire of which the monster cannons of Herr Krupp were now capable. On the other hand, its great advantage was its considerable circumference of some sixty kilometres. This would not only give the city room to breathe, and space to store essential supplies of food, fuel and ammunition, but it also meant that any investing army would be forced to occupy a contiguous front of approximately eighty kilometres against a possible break-out—which might require every spare soldier of the Prussian General von Moltke’s enormous army. Meanwhile some 12,000 labourers set to work on reinforcing weak spots with improvised earthworks and laying land mines.

As in the days of Henri IV’s siege, foodstuffs from the surrounding countryside streamed into Paris. Louis Napoleon’s precious Bois de Boulogne became a sort of pastoral idyll. “As far as ever the eye can reach,” wrote the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “over every open space, down the long, long avenue all the way to Longchamp itself, nothing but sheep, sheep, sheep! The South Downs themselves could not exhibit such a sea of wool.” In this Bois alone, there were herded an estimated 250,000 sheep, as well as 40,000 oxen, while an army of foresters now began cutting down the fine old trees in the Bois for fuel in the winter ahead. It seemed that, this time, in contrast to 1590, there was no way Paris could be starved into submission.

On 20 September, Uhlan cavalry from the two Prussian armies linked arms near Versailles, which surrendered without a shot. Paris was now effectively severed from the rest of France. For the first time since Henri IV’s investment of Paris the city was encircled; in fact, it was the first time in modern history that a capital would be forced to endure a full-scale siege by a powerful and relentless enemy. The Crown Prince of Prussia positioned himself on a height overlooking the city and gazed down on the glittering gilt dome that held the remains of Prussia’s one-time conqueror and arch-enemy. How close it must all have seemed! In the meantime, however, out in the provinces, taking their orders from the provisional government in Tours, new French armies were preparing for the day when, with the Paris garrison breaking out of the city, they could seize the occupying Prussians in a deadly vice. Now that Paris was menaced by the enemy, there was a new, tough mood of resistance at large in France. The question was, who was going to control and channel this will to fight; and how were operations to be co-ordinated between Paris and Tours now that the capital was totally cut off?