La guerre de France

The War of France

The Milliet Family

IX. The War of France and the First Siege of Paris (1870–1871)

Note. — This cahier must be read as a true journal of the siege of Paris. We have continued to set in seven-point — that is, in small type — the texts proper, the letters and the daily notebook. We have left in eight-point — that is, in ordinary type — everything that may be considered as the body, as the very fabric of the narrative itself. But this whole narrative, with the reflections and considerations contained in it, must be taken as a siege diary and a ship’s log.

I

1870

WAR OF FRANCE

Beginnings of the war. — Niederbronn. — Buzancy. — Sedan. — The 4th of September.

1

As we have seen, the clerical party bears before history the responsibility for the Mexican expedition: an army of forty thousand men fighting for five years outside our country, the millions of our treasury swallowed up to no purpose, our former military prestige effaced, the sympathy of the European nations and the goodwill of the United States alienated for a long time to come, the impossibility of bringing aid to Austria and Italy, the only powers which, on the day of danger, might have come to our help — such are the consequences of that fault.

The military burdens had become so heavy that a reduction of the contingent was called for from one end of France to the other. It was not only the “five” republicans of the opposition, but 938 official or semi-official candidates who, in their professions of faith, declared for partial disarmament, inviting the government to follow in this the example set by England, Austria and Italy. (1) If their wise counsel had been followed, war could not have been declared.

The Latin proverb is not always accurate; he who prepares for war is soon compelled to wage it.

Assuredly these same pacifist deputies who refused credits intended for an unjust conquest would have given without reckoning the riches of the country and their own fortune, had they been able to foresee the imminent invasion. But honest men have difficulty in divining treacheries. Bismarck had bought the silence of the press while he prepared in the greatest secrecy formidable armaments; then, as soon as he was ready, he suppressed the subsidies to the bought newspapers, knowing well that they would at once preach war: To Berlin! to Berlin! There are people who admire that disloyalty. Bismarck moreover found a precious auxiliary in the unheard-of incompetence of the imperial government. The pacifists are accused today; is it their fault if our arsenals and our war-magazines listed in their inventories munitions that did not exist? Who then had the duty of exercising control? Who then should have ascertained the respective strength of the armies that were about to come to blows?

Marshal Niel had made praiseworthy efforts to reorganize our army, but he had just been replaced at the Ministry of War by Marshal Lebœuf. Warnings were not lacking to this improvident fop; he would listen neither to Ducrot, nor to Bénédetti, nor to Stoffel, who insistently pointed out the danger to him. (1)

(1) “In the elections of 1869, of 960 candidates, only 22 of us did not call for a notable reduction of the contingents.” — Doncet de la Fayconnerie. (Écho de Paris)

(1) In the margin of the latter’s reports he wrote: Exaggeration!?

We know on what trifling pretext was joined that struggle which the Empress Eugénie called “my war.” The crown of Spain offered to a Hohenzollern, then, after the withdrawal, Bismarck snared French pride by means of a falsified dispatch.

On the 30th of June, at the tribune, Émile Ollivier, President of the Council, had said: “At no time has the maintenance of peace in Europe seemed more assured.” War declared, he added with the self-assurance of stupidity: “Gentlemen, it will be a military stroll.”

The press was no more perspicacious: on the 5th of July, the naïve John Lemoinne wrote in the Journal des Débats: “The black eagle has become the bête noire of our dreams, and M. de Bismarck the scapegoat of all our discontents. Well, to speak frankly, we see M. de Bismarck as neither so brooding nor so clumsy. We should not be astonished if he were quite a stranger to any new Spanish project.”

Yet the nation was at once aware of the gravity of the situation. A dark foreboding seized with anguish all minds that could divine the future.

Madame Pape wrote to Madame Milliet (then at the Colony):

Paris, 23 July 1870.

Dear lady and friend, — I miss you greatly at this moment. We live in continual emotion. Paris is a spectacle happily rare: there is much singing — but in what a voice! There is also much weeping. On the boulevards flags are paraded which claim to represent war, and even more branches of any sort of tree, which claim to represent peace. What wasted strength, O my God! The Regnault boy has gone; young Bureau has gone; an adopted son of Madame Piekart is already on the road — but which one? And your son? and your brother, where are they?… Tell us!

While I am writing to you, the rue des Bernardins is on fire, and the wind beats the smoke down over the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain, which is suffocating in it. The blaze broke out in an immense yard of wood and coal. The neighboring houses are caught; people are throwing everything out of the windows. It is a foretaste. — Ah, dear lady, what a torture is helplessness in the face of such disasters!

Paul to his brother Fernand

July ‘70.

… They say Spain wants to treat herself to a German prince. Much good may it do her! Why should we not let her satisfy her ridiculous fancy? Did Spain, Italy, or Germany ever for one moment claim to prevent the French from choosing a Bonaparte for emperor? Yet certain memories of the uncle should have made them foresee that the nephew was lying when he said: “The Empire is peace.”

The chauvinist movement which the government is striving to create is wholly factitious. It is by order that actors are singing the Marseillaise in public squares, but the French people have a horror of war, above all of a war of conquest, of an unjustifiable war. I was not the only one, I assure you, to shrug my shoulders when yesterday, on the great boulevards, I saw a troop of supernumeraries go by, disguised as workmen in white smocks, bawling without conviction: To Berlin! To Berlin!

— By what right should we go and attack our neighbors? And if we managed to steal a province from them, to what end?… (1)

(1) Citizens sometimes tried to shout: “Long live peace!” They were immediately surrounded, insulted, even struck.

To understand to what degree of moral degradation the empire had reduced our country, one must remember what happened at Hautefaye, in the Dordogne; a young man, M. de Moneys, was burned alive by peasants who accused him of having shouted: Down with the emperor!

It was in August, in broad daylight on a fair-day; this man was beaten down, half-killed with stones and clubs, then carried onto a heap of fagots and set on fire. Peasants leapt around the pyre shouting: Long live the emperor! (2)

One of the executioners imagined that he was going to be decorated.

(2) Jules Claretie. Histoire de la Révolution de 1870-71, page 124.

2

Colonel de Tucé to his sister

Niederbronn, 25 July ‘70.

My dear friend, we left on Monday the 19th at 10:30 in the morning and arrived the next day at 3 o’clock at Niederbronn, where we are bivouacking in the streets with the 6th hussars.

I have had a most unhappy start. I have lost my four horses. The wagon in which they were collapsed under their weight and they fell through. It was noticed at Sarremine; just in time, for they might have derailed the train. They were got out with great difficulty and left there. They arrived to me only yesterday evening. There is less damage than one might have feared. The big mare is out of service. The big sorrel mare is rather badly hurt, but I think she will get over it quickly; the two others will be fit to be ridden within a few days. I shall try to find another horse here.

We are guarding the frontier with posts set at various points. It is probable that we shall soon make some movement forward.

One is not badly off at Niederbronn; it is a very pretty little watering-place. There were many foreigners; naturally everyone has left.

Colonel de Tucé’s letters agree with the general picture drawn by Zola:

“The seven army corps imprudently scattered along the frontier, (1) the effectives everywhere incomplete, the four hundred and thirty thousand men reduced to two hundred and thirty thousand at most, the generals jealous of one another, each firmly resolved to win his marshal’s baton without bringing aid to his neighbor, (2) the most frightful improvidence; the sick emperor incapable of a prompt resolution.”

(1) The 5th corps stretched over a front of 50 kilometers, between Sarreguemines and Niederbronn. (2) Except for the engagement at Niederbronn, the 5th corps remained motionless, even on the 6th of August (battle of Forbach and Frœschwiller), and beat a retreat on the 7th without having fought.

A few official dispatches show that these reproaches are in no way exaggerated.

Intendant general to War, Paris

Metz, 2 July 1870.

There is at Metz neither sugar, nor coffee, nor rice, nor brandy, nor salt, little bacon and biscuit. Send urgently at least a million rations to Thionville.

General commanding 2nd corps to War, Paris

Saint-Avold, 21 July 1870.

The depot sends enormous packets of maps useless for the moment; we have not a single map of the frontier of France.

General Michel to War, Paris

Belfort, 21 July 1870.

Have arrived at Belfort; have not found my brigade; have not found the divisional general. What am I to do? Do not know where my regiments are.

Intendant 3rd corps to War, Paris

Metz, 25 July 1870.

The 3rd corps leaves Metz tomorrow. I have neither stretcher-bearers, nor administrative workmen, nor ambulance caissons, nor field ovens, nor train.

Major general to War, Paris

Metz, 27 July 1870.

The detachments rejoining the army continue to arrive without cartridges and without camp equipment.

Monarchist historians will tell you it is the republicans’ fault.

Paul M. to his brother Fernand

7 August 1870.

The situation has greatly changed since my last letter, and humanitarian theories are no longer in season. The ridiculous bluster of the chauvinists has given way to graver preoccupations: the Germans have crossed the frontier; it is no longer a question of going to Berlin, but of defending our invaded country. I did not wait to be called to the colors; I immediately enlisted in the Auxiliary Engineers. Our battalions are formed by the workmen who ordinarily carry out the works of the City of Paris. The municipal architects, MM. Davioud, Bruyerre, Delbrouck, Demimuid, are our officers. Viollet-le-Duc is our lieutenant-colonel. — They equipped us at once as best they could; they put on my shoulder, not a light chassepot, but a heavy snuff-box rifle, a shovel, a pick, and off I went with my pack on my back. The first days, the work of a simple sapper seemed to me a little hard, but I shall get used to it quickly…

Madame Pape to Madame Milliet (at the Colony)

Paris, 8 August 1870.

Dear lady and friend, — It is impossible for me to leave Paris in the grave circumstances in which we find ourselves. At every hour we anxiously await news. What has become of your brother? I think you will return without delay. Now M. Paul is taken too, and now it is no longer to go to the frontier, but for our hearths that we must fight. Yours with a heart broken.

Marie Pape-Carpentier.

Here is marine infantry passing, coming from Brest to occupy our fortifications, so it seems.

On 18 August 1870 Madame Pape wrote to one of her friends from Le Mans:

If events betrayed us, would you consent to keep my daughters during the siege of Paris? A word only. If it is no, I shall know it is impossible for you. My heart is gripped as in a vice… We are going to become an ambulance; the beds are ready. We shall have, the day after tomorrow, twenty wounded, French and Prussian. Little does it matter to me. The unfortunate are men; only sovereigns are not.

The friend was absent from Le Mans. Madame Pape took refuge with her daughters at Angers:

Our house, she writes, unfit to serve as an ambulance, serves as a refuge for former pupils, for poor people driven from the military zone, who had only the street paving on which to sleep… What horrors! And all that, because one man and two or three Germans willed it!

How is it that in our age the worth of life is still not enough felt, and that men are still so enslaved by self-esteem and prejudice that such butcheries, disavowed by all, are consented to by all?

3

M. de Tucé to his sister

Petite-Pierre, Sunday. (Note postmarked Nancy, 9 August 1870.)

You doubtless know the unhappy outcome of the battle that took place yesterday (1) and you are anxious as to the part I took in it. I was not present; I arrived only at the beginning of the rout. It is a most sorrowful spectacle. The 5th corps, of which I am part, is retreating on Saverne or Phalsbourg, where we shall probably be tomorrow. Farewell, your brother and friend.

(1) Battle of Frœschwiller-Reichshoffen, 6 August.

Mirecourt, 14 August.

My dear friend, did you receive the letter I wrote you the day after the battle of Reichshoffen? They say they have been destroyed; it would be an infamy. We have not suffered from the enemy, but from long marches and fatigue. I do not really know where we are going. We form the rearguard of the 5th corps, which is to reform I do not know where. (1)

Morale and health leave nothing to be desired. Farewell, I embrace you all.

We have lost all our baggage at Bitche, money, linen, clothing, etc… We have nothing left but what we have on our backs.

(1) This reconcentration took place at Châlons, whence the 1st, 5th, 7th, and 12th corps set out again on 23 August in the direction of Sedan.

BUZANCY

“On 27 August 1870, the French 5th corps marched on Buzancy. The 12th chasseurs à cheval, Colonel de Tucé, formed the extreme advance-guard and arrived before this village at half past seven in the morning… Overwhelmed by numbers, our chasseurs were forced to fall back, despite a desperate resistance. Lieutenant-Colonel de La Porte had his horse killed under him; he wanted still to fight, but, surrounded by a body of Saxons, he received three wounds and was taken prisoner. Captain d’Oilone and two other officers were wounded; Captain de Bounrazel and Sub-Lieutenant Sarrailh were dismounted and taken prisoner.

“At this moment Colonel de Tucé came galloping out of Buzancy at the head of the 5th squadron and attacked the German cavalry with irresistible vigor: the latter was taken in flank, overturned, knocked over.

“Captain de Bounrazel and Sub-Lieutenant Sarrailh, who had been taken prisoner, were freed and delivered.

“Pursued for the third time, the German horsemen broke up, leaving the ground strewn with their dead, and went to reform behind General Goltz’s corps.

“Our chasseurs then halted the pursuit and counted themselves. Sixty-two had received wounds; only two of them had been killed on the spot.

“The enemy left on the ground 55 to 60 corpses, not counting the wounded, as well as a dozen fully harnessed horses.” (1)

(1) This account was reproduced for an anniversary by the Petit Parisien of 29 August 1890.

4

SEDAN (2)

1st September 1870.

On the eve of the battle, Marshal de Mac-Mahon understood the situation so little that he signed for the next day this disconcerting order: “Today, rest for the entire army”; then, when the enemy cannons rumbled on the heights of Bazeilles, he calmly continued his lunch, saying: “It is our own artillery.”

(2) To tell of this great disaster, I draw on the very fine account given by MM. P. and V. Marguerite.

The fusillade begins before daylight. Von der Thann sets Bazeilles on fire. The Prince of Saxony rains a hail of shells on Ducrot’s regiments. Then the Crown Prince, emerging from a defile, advances the third army, which is to give its hand to the second. 650 cannons are going to crush the French troops in an impassable circle.

Mac-Mahon arrives at a gallop before La Moncelle, but, wounded by a shell fragment, he designates Ducrot to replace him as commander-in-chief.

Unfortunately Palikao has given Wimpffen a letter of command. The blindness of this leader is such that he says to Lebrun: “You will have the honors of the day.”

Meanwhile at Bazeilles the whole village is blazing, methodically set on fire, an enormous furnace where the savage victor cuts throats pell-mell, grills inhabitants and soldiers together. A horrible smell “of burned onions” spreads, as Bismarck pleasantly put it that evening.

From every quarter of the horizon, grape-shot converges on the narrow plateau, and the army of Châlons struggles, caught in the trap. A storm of shells turns and turns again in the blue sky. The emperor, like a sleepwalker, wanders in this torment and lingers at length, looking without seeing. Pale, without saying a word; he returns to Sedan, where already thirty thousand fugitives are jostling. Meanwhile, on the heights of La Marfée, as from a theater box, a gilded group, motionless, contemplated all this: it was, in the front of a staff of princes, the old William and his counselors Bismarck, Moltke, Roon, who, opera glasses leveled, watched the kill with joy.

To Ducrot, who asks him to charge again, General de Galliffet replies: “As much as you wish, my general, as long as one of us is left.” And on the spur of La Marfée, William cries out, faced with the useless and glorious cavalcade: “Oh, the brave fellows!”

All is over. The white flag flies over Sedan. Napoleon III surrenders his sword, which he sends to William, and the cannon falls silent. (1)

“Prussians, Bavarians and Saxons shake hands, gravely strike up lieder. They had to mourn only 460 officers and 8,500 soldiers.”

(1) The emperor sent his aide-de-camp bearing this mendacious letter: “Not having been able to die at the head of my troops, I lay my sword at Your Majesty’s feet.” He telegraphed to the Ministry of War: “The army is defeated and captive; I myself am a prisoner.”

The next day, 2 September, Wimpffen signed the capitulation. We lost 124,000 men, of whom 21,000 taken in the battle and 3,000 disarmed in Belgium.

The same day, M. de Tucé wrote to his sister:

Friday, 2, Aubenton (Aisne).

I wrote to you from Fleigneux near Sedan; that was before the battle (letter lost).

It is a great disaster. The army is withdrawing toward Paris. I have not been wounded; the regiment suffered little. We are somewhat scattered and it is difficult for me to know our losses. As for me, I have finished losing what I had left; my three horses are in Sedan, with my coat and changes of clothing; it is unlikely I shall ever see them again.

In a note requested by the Minister of War, M. de Tucé, with his habitual modesty, thinks only of recounting the fine conduct of his chiefs:

I was part of the 5th corps. The cavalry division, maneuvering under the orders of General Brahaut, really consisted only of the 12th chasseurs and the 5th lancers, with the two generals de Bernis and de la Mortière.

On Wednesday 31 August, the division had spent the night in a hamlet called Loubert, above Mouzon; it set out at 4 o’clock in the morning and arrived to bivouac at 5 o’clock in the evening at Fleigneux, a village situated north of Sedan. The brigade general had grand-guards placed in the direction of the northwest. Cannon was heard during part of the road and of the evening.

The next day, the first of September, the division was ready to mount at 4 o’clock in the morning. The grand-guards were withdrawn and we mounted at 7 o’clock.

… Toward 3 o’clock, the division was backed against a wood. The Prussian investment movement seemed completed, and shells were beginning to fall on us, when General de Bernis asked for orders from General Brahaut, who directed us to pass through the wood. He remained in person until the last man had passed, warning the horsemen of a ditch that was rather difficult to cross. — This wood was a dense coppice ending in a very steep ravine.

After this passage, I rallied the regiment. It was then that General de la Mortière, who was arriving with the 5th lancers, ordered me to join him and march under his command. M. Brahaut had been taken prisoner during the crossing of the coppice.

The column made for Mézières, encroaching for about 5 kilometers on Belgian territory, and arrived at night at Renevez. From there it took the direction of Saint-Quentin, where it embarked on the railway for Versailles.

5

THE 4TH OF SEPTEMBER

My friend Léon C…, a very young lad who was preparing to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, wrote to Madame Pape, his adoptive mother, then at Angers:

What changes since we parted! Could you have suspected that, having left everywhere under the empire, we should come back under the Republic? It happened so quickly and so well that we cannot get over it.

On Saturday evening, 3 September, rumors of defeat were circulating: Mac-Mahon had been completely beaten; the same was said of Bazaine. Others were saying that Mac-Mahon had been killed, that he had been betrayed. The Republic alone could save us. Faced with a few small demonstrations, M. Piétri’s agents set about charging and wounded several persons; I was there. I went home, my heart heavy, going over in my head everything I had heard said. There had been treason, that was well proven. I could not sleep. My night was spent making more or less absurd campaign plans. I employed the cavalry above all; I cut off right wings, left wings, and finally I was victorious.

The next day, the news of the capitulation of Sedan was confirmed. The Place de la Concorde was full of excited people. Gendarmes barred the bridge; they drew their sabers, then, disconcerted, put them back in their scabbards. At once the crowd rushed forward and entered the hall of the Assembly. M. Delbroucke, with his daughter, was in the first rank. As the people wanted to enter the empty galleries, a guard opposed: “I have orders to let no one in.” — And M. Delbroucke answered: “The lackeys of the empire have no more orders to give under the Republic.” They were about to throw the guard down the stairs; he turned pale and stammered: “Go in then! I served twenty years and I know only my orders.”

The newspapers must have informed you of the rest of the events.

Some deputies of the right making as if to protest, one of them muttered half aloud: “Forfeiture, yes, but the Republic, no.” They fell upon him, jostling him. “Yes,” cried M. Delbroucke, “we want the Republic, and woe to those who would try to oppose it!” — The poor deputy, quite taken aback, humbly resumed: “But I too want the Republic.”

Thereupon he was released. You see on which side is courage and on which platitude. (He would soon recognize it.) (1)

(1) Already in 1848, on the 15th of May, when the crowd had just invaded the Chamber of Deputies, and when furious men were looking for Armand Barbès to lynch him, Delbroucke stepped forward: “Here I am,” he said, taking advantage of a vague resemblance to the man being pursued. He was taken for Barbès, to whom he thus gave time to escape; he was struck, made prisoner, and gave himself “the joy he ceaselessly dreams of, to suffer for another.” (Émile Tazlay)

Then the crowd divided; some went to the Hôtel de Ville and proclaimed the Republic. A portrait of Napoleon III was pierced with a bayonet thrust, his marble bust was broken; but in all this, not a theft, not a drop of blood. All embraced, shook hands, and forgot for an instant the mourning of France to sing the Marseillaise.

I followed the flood that went under Trochu’s windows. He at once mounted his horse and made for the Chamber, in the midst of a dense crowd that pressed him. On the way, he met Jules Ferry, who announced to him the proclamation of the Republic. We then went back down to the Tuileries; at the emperor’s pavilion, a keeper opened the doors for us; they removed the flag left in place to make people believe the empress was still there, although she had already departed several hours earlier.

The national guards form a hedge, so that the Mobiles may prevent marauders from entering the apartments. Everywhere, perfect order; everywhere one sees written: “Death to thieves, long live the Republic!” (1) A few sergents de ville have been disarmed, even thrashed, their three-cornered hats trampled or thrown into the Seine, their swords twisted; some are laid at the foot of the statue of Strasbourg.

Every evening this statue is illuminated, crowned with laurels; it holds a flag in its hand, the folds of its robe are covered with flowers. Alas, the honors paid to the heroic city will not deliver her.

(1) The apartments of the Empress Eugénie revealed the secret of the extravagances and contradictions of her intelligence. In her library, the works of Proudhon, which certainly she did not understand, jostled little playful novels drawn from the library of Marie-Antoinette, or mystical works. Pictures of saints, relics were displayed on the walls; below the ceilings cupids fluttered, in the taste of Boucher. (Claretie, page 264)

Everything that recalls the empire is broken; the heads are cut from the eagles on our monuments, the N’s and the word “imperial” are effaced on every theater. Shopkeepers remove their medals and titles of “purveyor by appointment.” On Sunday, in the churches, they did not sing the Domine salvum.

They say the Prussians are going to arrive in Paris by forced marches. But France cannot accept a shameful peace; she will not treat. Let us still hope. Paris is not taken, and with the aid of our dear Republic we shall triumph.

The imperial government was not overthrown, it collapsed. I was with my friend the sculptor Alfred Lenoir before the Chamber of Deputies, at the moment when the crowd had just invaded the session hall. The right fled amid jeers, and Gambetta proclaimed the Republic in the midst of enthusiastic acclamations: “Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his family have forever ceased to reign over France.”

Ministry, Senate, all vanished in the twinkling of an eye. A radiant sun lit up the city in festival; hope filled every heart; we followed the people’s flood as far as the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, where the anxious crowd was packed. Rochefort, the witty pamphleteer, whose Lanterne had contributed so much to the fall of the empire, was carried in triumph. Soon we witnessed a strange spectacle: from the upper windows of the Hôtel de Ville they were throwing down a rain of little papers bearing the list of the members of the provisional government. — Who had named them? No one knew. But at such moments one passes over legality. The list bore the names of the deputies of Paris, to which had been added those of a few firm republicans; it answered the wishes of the Parisians, and these knew well that they were in agreement with the majority of the French. (1)

(1) The crowd was however asking that the names of Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo, Delescluze, and Ledru-Rollin be added.

Madame Pape to Madame Milliet

Angers, 11 Sept. 1870.

What events, dear lady and friend! What joy and what mourning! No, never did our poor France more harshly expiate the forgetting of herself. Let us now guard our Republic well! Let us still be French, but let us become serious and modest! What shame must today be felt by those idiots who naïvely maintained that we should march to victory. They said Prussia; it was Germany they should have said.

Yesterday evening at 8:30, it was 55 years that I had come into the world, in the midst of invasion. Three days afterward, the Prussians left the little town where I was born. May it be the same for my 55th birthday.

Where are you, dear friend? Where are all of you, and what are you doing? Is M. Paul called up? Yes, no doubt. And your brother? Have you news of him? Receive, dear friend, the assurance of our very sincere friendship.

6

Thiers addressed a report to our ambassadors, and his judgment on the second empire has remained that of posterity:

“The government which has just plunged France into the abysses of a war decided upon with folly and conducted with absurdity, has forever ended its fatal existence and remains in the French nation only as a shameful and painful memory… It now belongs to the neutral powers to judge whether sufficient attention has been given to their counsel. We make them judges between the two belligerent powers. For my part, I thank them for the support they gave me in my efforts to restore to my country the benefits of peace, of the peace it has lost, not through its fault, but through that of a government whose existence was the sole error of France.”

Few examples in history show as clearly how distinct morality is from religion. Here are Bismarck and the king of Prussia, men superior by intelligence and education, sincerely pious, religious to the point of mysticism, and yet moral sense seems to have been wanting in them. When Bismarck dared to say: “Force takes precedence over right,” it was no mere flourish, no bravado; it was the very depth of his vile soul that he displayed with the cynicism of unconsciousness. He was moreover approved by his king. As an Eastern proverb says: “It is at the head that the fish rots.” These imprudent ambitious men did not see the consequences others will soon draw from their maxim, the negation of all civilization and of all social order. They have for a long time lowered the level of souls, but their caste will pay for it. When the ruling classes teach such principles, they forget that the plebs have number and force on their side and are beginning to perceive it. It is in the name of this fine doctrine that they will seize the powers and the goods which the privileged unjustly hold.

Here are some passages from the circular addressed as early as 6 September by Jules Favre to our diplomatic agents:

… We have energetically defended the policy of peace. We persevere in it with an ever deeper conviction… Our heart breaks at the spectacle of these massacres of human beings in which the flower of both nations disappears, who, with a little common sense and much liberty, would have been preserved from these frightful catastrophes.

We have loudly condemned war, and, while professing our respect for the right of peoples, we have asked that Germany be left mistress of her destinies. We were convinced that moral forces would ensure the maintenance of peace. But, as sanction, we demanded a weapon for every citizen, a civic organization, elected chiefs; then we should have remained impregnable on our soil.

The imperial government, which had long since separated its interests from those of the country, rejected this policy. We resume it in the hope that, instructed by experience, France will have the wisdom to practice it.

For his part, the king of Prussia has declared that he was waging war, not against France, but against the imperial dynasty. The dynasty is laid low. Free France rises.

Does the king of Prussia wish to continue an impious struggle which will be at least as fatal to him as to us? Does he wish to give the nineteenth-century world this cruel spectacle of two nations destroying each other, and which, forgetful of humanity, of reason, of science, accumulate ruins and corpses? Let him be free; let him assume that responsibility before the world and before history! If it is a challenge, we accept it.

We shall yield neither an inch of our territory, nor a stone of our fortresses. A shameful peace would be a war of extermination at short term. We shall treat only for a lasting peace.

We have a resolute army, well-supplied forts, a well-established enceinte, but above all the breasts of three hundred thousand combatants determined to hold to the last.

After the forts, the ramparts; after the ramparts, the barricades. Paris can hold three months and conquer; should she succumb, France, standing at her call, would avenge her: she would continue the struggle and the aggressor would perish in it.

The sentiments expressed by Jules Favre were those of the inhabitants of Paris. His illusions were ours.

The socialists then launched this appeal to the German people: (1)

(1) In the name of the workers’ societies and the French sections of the International Working Men’s Association: Ch. Beslay, Briosne, Barberel, Cambrelat, Chassin, Chemalé, Dupas, Hervé, Laudeck, Leverdays, Longuet, Marchand, Perrachon, Tolain, Vaillant.

You are making war only on the emperor, and not on the French nation, your government has said and repeated. The man who unleashed this fratricidal struggle, who did not know how to die and whom you hold in your hands, no longer exists for us.

Republican France invites you, in the name of justice, to withdraw your armies. Cross back over the Rhine.

On the two banks of the disputed river, Germany and France, let us hold out our hands. Let us forget the military crimes that despots have made us commit against one another.

Let us proclaim the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity of peoples.

By our alliance let us found the United States of Europe. Long live the universal Republic!

Let practical men smile at our naïveté. We supposed, it is true, in our enemies a respect for justice that surpassed their savages’ mentality. That error we have paid for with our billions and our blood. The circular of Jules Favre and the appeal of the socialists none the less manifest our moral superiority. Before posterity, in the midst of our ruins, this honor remains to us: right was on our side. The sympathy of generous hearts is also a force with which one must reckon, and the cowardly bombarders of Paris will perhaps learn one day that public contempt is a heavy burden.

7

M. de Tucé to his sister

Clermont-Ferrand, 17 Sept. ‘70.

My dear friend, I do not know whether my letter will reach you, for they say the railways of Lyon and Orléans are cut. — Here we are pulling ourselves together. I think we shall need another ten days or so to be fully in order. (1)

(1) Note by M. de Tucé: “Arrived on the 10th at Clermont-Ferrand, the regiment left again on the 26th for Rouen, where its mission was to form outposts in the valley of the Andelle and the forest of Lyons. It was while I commanded that service that, on 19 October, I was named Brigadier General provisionally commanding the division of Rouen. I remained there until 26 November, when I was sent to the army of the Loire to take command of the first brigade of light Cavalry. I took part in all the operations of the army of the Loire until the disbandment, which took place on 13 March.”

It is sad to see the enormous resources of our country so badly employed: an immense number of men are being put on foot; as for us, we have many more than we shall be able to use. Part of them are directed to various nearby depots, where they will receive faster instruction; but all that will not make soldiers, and will have hardly any consistency. We need solider cadres and the habit of discipline. If all these men had been levied as soon as we wished to wage war, we should not be reduced to where we are.

I have no news of my baggage or of my horses. I do not hope for any and resign myself to their loss, as well as that of my money. It is a little hard, but what is to be done?

I am bored enough at Clermont. Give me news of Paul. Probably they will no longer take them far from Paris. — I do not believe the Prussians will attack Paris directly; they will limit themselves to cutting its communications and blockading it at a distance of some ten leagues. They will let the Parisians do as they please, fully counting that we shall be called back to restore order. (1)

Farewell, all this is very sad.

(1) Like most professional soldiers, M. de Tucé had confidence only in a regular army.

Vinoy, by a skillfully conducted retreat, succeeded in bringing back into Paris ten thousand men who had escaped from Sedan. Ducrot, taken prisoner, found a way to escape.

After his brilliant triumph, a generous and skillful enemy would have loyally held out a hand to the vanquished and proposed an honorable peace. But the French campaign, long and learnedly prepared, was for Germany a work of jealousy, of cupidity and of hatred.

II

1870

THE INVESTMENT

ABANDONMENT OF THE OUTER POSITIONS. — THE DEFENSE. — THE AUXILIARY ENGINEERS. — VIOLLET-LE-DUC, DELBROUCK. — CHÂTILLON. — LE BOURGET. — THE 31ST OF OCTOBER.

1

In a remarkable memoir, (1) Viollet-le-Duc has recounted what was done for the defense of Paris, and, without ever recriminating, he nevertheless thought it his duty to say what might have been done. We must remember our faults, “point them out with the rigor of the surgeon who plunges his iron into the gangrened wound, know the causes which made these faults be committed, in order to suppress them forever if it is possible.”

(1) Mémoire sur la Défense de Paris. — A. Morel, publisher, 1871. I shall complete the Siege Journal with some information drawn from the book of Admiral La Roncière le Noury, La Marine au Siège de Paris, Plon, publisher, 1872.

From the first days of September, the inhabitants of the environs of Paris took precipitate refuge in the city. Vehicles of every kind, drawn by horses or by hand, carts full of bags of wheat, of vegetables, of furniture, of women, of children, of sick people, found themselves halted at the city gates by herds of pigs, of cows and of sheep. The congestion was indescribable and pitiful. Hospitality was generously offered to these unhappy fugitives.

One regrets that, in their excessive haste, they burned before departing supplies which might have prolonged the resistance of besieged Paris.

When one has a precise aim and the firm will to attain it, one does not let oneself be stopped by obstacles, however great. The Prussians, having resolved to take Paris, did not hesitate to bring up heavy naval pieces. If Trochu had wished to prevent the investment, he could have.

The well-known axiom: “Every city invested and besieged is taken if it is not relieved,” was it applicable to Paris? Yes, certainly, if the defenders shut themselves up within its enceinte and its forts; no, perhaps, if they had not shut themselves up there. (1)

(1) Viollet-le-Duc.

The most vulgar common sense indicated that the Germans were going to try to narrow the circle of investment; the French were to make every effort to widen it.

But the Governor of Paris saw only the difficulties of the situation:

“The place is poorly armed, it lacks supplies, powder, munitions, projectiles… (1) A few outer works were indeed undertaken in the city’s environs, but I had so much to do from the political and military point of view that I was unable to attend to these works. Most of these works were neglected, some even abandoned.”

(1) All that was not exact; Clément Duvernois had already brought in 72,000 tons of flour, 68,000 head of cattle, etc…

Yet the army was numerous enough to occupy Le Raincy, Avron, Villiers, Montmesly, Choisy, Le Moulin Saquet, Les Hautes-Bruyères, Sceaux, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Clamart, Le Plessis-Piquet, Vélizy, Meudon, Sèvres, Garches, etc… Never could the German army have completely invested the place thus enlarged.

Trochu seems to have been unaware of the strategic importance of these positions. More energetic and more intelligent, General Ducrot saw clearly that it was necessary at all costs to find a means of maintaining oneself there.

On 13 September, fifty Uhlans are reported at Claye, others toward the woods of Bondy, of Le Raincy, and of Avron.

Arrived before Paris, the Germans had not an instant of hesitation. The position each troop was to occupy was marked in advance. The most favorable positions had been chosen; making use of a fold in the terrain, of abandoned quarries forming a natural defense and permitting them to protect each battery with a small number of men. Screens of trees or boundary walls rendered the parapets invisible to our forts.

On our side, Ducrot acknowledges it, (2) most of the works undertaken were sufficiently advanced at the moment of the Prussians’ arrival to have been put promptly in a state of defense.

(2) La Défense de Paris (Dentu 1875).

The forts of Issy, of Vanves, of Montrouge, and of Bicêtre are, it is true, much too close to the enceinte, and the redoubt of Châtillon, not being linked to the forts, could be turned. It was abandoned at the first offensive demonstration, and this was a grave fault.

On 18 September Trochu wrote to Ducrot:

If we obstinately keep the position you hold, I shall have to think of securing your right, and I shall be obliged to move the rest of the 13th corps to Meudon and Montretout. We should then have nearly 60,000 men in line, and all of us would be served, as the saying goes, in the same basket.

Did Trochu not know that he could already dispose of more than 300,000 men? He saw what should be done, but he did not do it. (1)

(1) See further on page 47, note 4.

The letter continues:

It does not seem to me that we can claim to hold indefinitely a position against which the enemy, after his concentration at Versailles, could bring considerable masses.

This letter is characteristic. The Governor, instead of defending until the last moment these important positions, abandons them, on the pretext that he will not be able to keep them indefinitely.

The same day, at noon, our last telegraphic wires were cut. “No more communications, no more letters, no more dispatches, no more news. The great city was invested.”

On 19 September, at the moment when the 17th regiment was advancing against the Garenne of Villacoulbay, young zouaves, volunteer enlistees who were seeing fire for the first time, were seized with panic. General Ducrot arrives at a gallop, throws himself in the midst of the fugitives, calls to them, threatens them; his staff officers run after these men packed together like a flock of sheep… The road is barred to them, they are brought back… but at the sight of new shells, one of which wounds five of them, they flee in terror through the woods. Most return to Paris, crying that they have been betrayed.

I saw them come back, trying to keep a brave face, amid an indignant crowd that insulted them. This unhappy combat of Châtillon had disastrous consequences; the chief one was to confirm Trochu in his distrust of our young soldiers. He was mistaken. A few days sufficed to harden them; we shall soon see these same zouaves bear themselves valiantly at La Malmaison and at Villiers.

Trochu did not know how to divine the very rational plan of the Germans. He had arranged everything for a succession of combats against an enemy who would have forced the rampart and would seek to penetrate into the city. The entire surface of Paris had been divided into nine triangular sectors, whose summits met at the Place Vendôme, their bases ending at the enceinte, and each of them forming a particular battlefield. Now, all these useless dispositions became harmful.

On 20 September, General Trochu ordered all the troops to withdraw inside Paris.

From this first, enormous fault derive all our disasters. “It was necessary to dispute foot by foot the positions that defend Paris at a distance of two thousand to four thousand meters, it was necessary to fortify them by a series of batteries and redoubts mutually supporting one another and linked by trenches; it was necessary to act fast and according to an overall plan.” (1)

(1) Viollet-le-Duc.

2

On 18 September, Jules Favre asked Bismarck for an interview, in the hope of obtaining an honorable settlement that would put an end to the war. His role was very fine on this occasion and will earn him in history the esteem of those who are not blind worshippers of success. Louis Veuillot, the virulent Catholic pamphleteer, kept enough sense of justice to grant, this once, his approval to a political adversary. He wrote after the interview at Ferrières:

“In the conception of the step, in the brave resolution to carry it out without submitting it to the uncertainties of the Council, in the manner of recounting it, in the art of exploiting it against the enemy, there is the honest man, the man of heart, the man of talent and the statesman… So upright and vigorous an action, so simple a word, so loyal an art of bringing into evidence the majesty of truth, a tenderness so communicative — could one expect so much from such an old revolutionary politician, academician and lawyer?… The king of Prussia could in no way favor us more than by the display of his brutality. He had defeated us, that was the fortune of arms; he wanted to give himself the pleasure of slapping us. Let him write to his queen whatever he likes; he will never make us believe that God had charged him with this task, and the slap will be returned to him.” (1)

(1) L. Veuillot. Paris pendant les deux sièges. L. Vives, publisher.

On 22 September, the enemy occupies Villejuif. At seven in the evening, the Maudhuy division leaves Paris to retake Les Hautes-Bruyères. Another column occupies Le Moulin-Saquet without striking a blow. (2)

(2) La Roncière.

People began to recognize the importance of the positions Trochu had so unfortunately abandoned.

At the beginning of the siege, the cordon of investment stretching over a line of more than twenty leagues was very thin, (3) and Paris had three armies: (4)

(3) It was formed of 120,000 infantry, 36,363 cavalry, and 600 cannons. It was only toward the end of October that the German army numbered about 250,000 men. (4) Ducrot with the 13th army corps and 15,000 mobiles; Clément Thomas with 55,000 national guards; a number of war battalions raised to 300,000. Finally, as reserve, Admiral La Roncière le Noury with the marine infantry and 15,000 elite sailors.

It was necessary to take advantage of this numerical superiority. The German field artillery was insufficient to attack our forts. The besiegers should not have been allowed to install quietly their large-caliber pieces on the heights from which they were soon to bombard us.

Meanwhile Trochu kept repeating that the defense of Paris was only a “heroic folly.” Persuaded that we should not resist a fortnight, he remained inactive. His duty would have been to hand the command over to a more resolute leader. One of the first, Flourens understood it; it was not enough to stimulate this discouraged chief, he had to be replaced.

Another fault, incredible in Frenchmen, contributed greatly to the failure of all our attempts, both in Paris and in the army of the Loire: slowness.

Some of our generals were perhaps weakened by age. (1) “Everything always came too late: orders, measures, decisions, movements.” The army lost confidence in chiefs evidently incapable. It marched only with “the certainty of not resisting.” (2)

(1) “They have stuck at our head all the gouty old men in the directory. They accepted responsibility while having their horses pulled out from under them in terror, and perished by their own impotence far more than by the skill of their adversaries.” Rossat, Papiers posthumes, page 71. (2) Viollet-le-Duc.

The national guard, it is true, lacked discipline; it was insufficiently drilled, but it asked only to march against the enemy. Trochu’s great wrong was to disdain these improvised troops, which a bolder chief would have known how to use to advantage.

He acknowledges it however, the zeal was extreme. “Everywhere, by day, by night, drill was going on.” More than 50,000 men mounted guard on the ramparts, leaving the generals free disposal of the troops of the active army, posted outside the enceinte.

It was to answer the wishes unanimously expressed by the national guard that war companies were organized (266 battalions).

The Auxiliary Engineers legion, in which I had enlisted, was composed of intelligent and courageous workmen, long brigaded for the ordinary works of the City of Paris: masons, locksmiths, carpenters, joiners, roofers, etc… This elite troop was strongly framed by architects of great talent and high moral worth, having under their orders young men full of ardor, mostly from the École des Beaux-Arts.

Instead of having us mount guard in barracks, ought we not, from the very first day, to have been set to work outside Paris? We chafed with impatience in the inactivity in which Trochu systematically left us, and I was simply the spokesman of my comrades when I drew up a petition asking that we be sent to the outposts. This petition was signed by the officers and non-commissioned officers of the Engineers, but it was only in the last days of November that they finally consented to grant our request.

The Engineers legion worked on the defense of Paris under the orders of Viollet-le-Duc, lieutenant-colonel. (1)

(1) Alphand, our colonel, hardly concerned himself with anything but administration.

This learned architect, historian of genius, whose Dictionnaire remains the finest monument raised to Gothic art, was a most remarkable military chief. Always the first in danger, gifted with a great sureness of eye, he gave the necessary orders with promptness and precision. We loved him much, because we felt in him a high intelligence put at the service of an ardent love for our country.

I shall have more than once occasion to cite his Mémoire sur la défense de Paris. Immediately after the war, he carefully recorded our humble ant-work and also the works of our adversaries.

I find but one fault in this book: the author’s excessive modesty. Systematically he gives no name; he never speaks of himself, and does not even let one suspect the important and sometimes glorious part he took in military operations.

The Germans took great care not to attack, but they blockaded Paris ever more closely, hoping to reduce it by famine. Trochu’s famous plan consisted in letting them do so.

With the trees felled in the Bois de Boulogne, our architects built first, at the Point du Jour, casemates, armored shelters where soldiers were to find refuge from the bombardment. These picturesque sheds answered their purpose only imperfectly. They would have had to be sunk into the ground and covered with enormous masses of earth, in which shells could have burst without doing great damage. No chief seems to have suspected then the power of the engines employed by modern artillery.

Beside us worked police agents and sergents de ville; this proximity led to continual quarrels and brawls. Recruited almost exclusively in Corsica, the policemen of the empire were detested by the Paris population, whom they had so often brutally mistreated. Our officers tried in vain to calm these angers. Only Captain Delbrouck managed to make himself heard. His advanced opinions, the extreme care he took of the men placed under his orders, his kindness, his justice, his courage, had made him the idol of the soldiers. One day, I saw him advance into the thick of a brawl; he managed to gather his company’s men into a circle and, before speaking, listened to their grievances expressed with fury: “You are right,” he said, “to detest these policemen of the empire,” and he treated them very harshly, thus winning over men’s minds; then, by a magnificent burst of eloquence, pointing to the horizon, on the neighboring heights, the enemy building those batteries that were going to grind our houses to powder, massacre our women and our children: “There is what one must look at; forget all the rest.” His voice, weak though it was, had such an accent of conviction, such force of sympathy, that anger fell as though by enchantment. Marvelous effect of eloquence! The orator had brought his hearers to think as he did.

3

The Barricades Commission obstructed in the most vexing manner the thoroughfares by which our troops were to pass: “To oppose barricades to an enemy who sends you 18-centimeter shells from a distance of 7,500 meters, that would be laughable, if in this dismal story there were any place for a smile.” (1)

(1) Viollet-le-Duc.

Throughout the duration of the siege, the sailors were employed with us at the Engineers’ works; we were able to appreciate their discipline and their courage. Six of our forts — Romainville, Noisy, Rosny, Ivry, Bicêtre, Montrouge — and the two batteries of Saint-Ouen and of Montmartre were from the outset exclusively entrusted to the navy. (1)

(1) 183 cannons of 0 m. 16 and 35 of 0 m. 19 had been brought from the ports; their ranges go up to 6,500 and 7,000 meters.

Built long ago, our fortifications could not resist the power of the new cannons. To strengthen them, sandbags were placed on them to a thickness of three meters. A hundred thousand large bags had been bought in England before the investment. Four armored wagons, each carrying two cannons, were manned by sailors.

A flotilla, originally intended to operate on the Rhine, was sent to Paris as soon as Counter-Admiral Exelmans found himself blockaded in Strasbourg.

7 October. — At half past eleven in the morning, Gambetta, accompanied by Spuller, leaves Paris by the balloon Armand Barbès. He arrives at Tours the day after the next.

9 October. — Vice-Admiral La Roncière congratulates the troops who carried out, the day before, an operation on Bondy. He expresses his confidence in the success of the enterprises designed to widen the circle of our action. The line of the eastern forts is today linked by covered ways as far as beyond the fort of Nogent. “M. Viollet-le-Duc, at the head of auxiliary workmen of the Engineers, has contributed very effectively to these works.”

11 October. — Every day the enemy renews his espionage attempts. Today, at Auteuil, a fireman’s post stopped during the night a man disguised as an old beggar-woman. This man poisoned himself on arriving at the headquarters post. Doctor Tardien confirmed the poisoning.

13 October. — Bagneux is taken by our mobiles, who establish themselves solidly there. “Toward eleven o’clock, the struggle was everywhere to our advantage, when the order to break off the combat was brought.” (1)

(1) Ducrot, page 339.

The Governor, in an order of the day, congratulated the troops, who had all behaved with the greatest spirit.

Why were the conquered positions abandoned? Much better than the Germans, we could send constantly new reinforcements to our exhausted soldiers.

On 16 October, Trochu affirmed that the enceinte of Paris had become unapproachable; he paid homage to the ardor of the citizens who were demanding combat, but he added with regrettable pride: “Inspired by the duties and responsibilities that no one shares with me, I shall follow to the end the plan I have traced for myself, without revealing it.”

It was only to give apparent satisfaction to public opinion that an aimless sortie was attempted on 21 October. The dash of our soldiers was such that there was a moment of panic at Versailles. William himself avows it in a dispatch to Queen Augusta. Why were our troops not supported? Why did we receive the order to fall back?

4

FIRST AFFAIR OF LE BOURGET

We had succeeded in retaking Le Bourget, a position whose importance the Germans well understood, since they made great efforts to seize it. Our mobiles were exhausted with fatigue and hunger; Trochu abandoned them; discouraged, they withdrew, and two pieces of cannon that were about to fall into the enemy’s hands were taken away without orders. Yet, despite all, a troop of about 1,600 men resisted heroically.

During the night, the Engineers began to link Le Bourget to Drancy by a shelter-trench.

“Why,” writes Viollet-le-Duc, “having succeeded in seizing Le Bourget, did we not try to maintain ourselves there and to attack Le Raincy? Enigmas, all that. On the 30th we were driven out of Le Bourget from the morning on, abandoning to the enemy artillery and prisoners.”

An inaccurate account was sent by Trochu to the Journal officiel:

The village of Le Bourget was no part of our general system of defense; its occupation was of very secondary importance… The painful incident, occurring because a troop which, after surprising the enemy, was absolutely lacking in vigilance and allowed itself in turn to be surprised, has vividly affected opinion.

Indeed, opinion was profoundly irritated, and here is what it answered: “Either Le Bourget is an important strategic point, and, having taken it, we should have striven to keep it; or this position was worthless, and we should not have sacrificed our soldiers to seize it.”

5

RIOT OF 31 OCTOBER

As early as 5 October, Major Flourens, at the head of ten battalions from Belleville, had asked the Government: 1° to have sorties carried out by the national guard; 2° to arm his battalions with chassepots; 3° to change the reactionary personnel in the public administrations; 4° to proceed to municipal elections.

These demands were legitimate, and the Government of National Defense, itself the offspring of a revolution, could not be astonished at this revolutionary way of bringing a petition. Blockaded Paris wanted to elect its chiefs legally. It had the right to hope it would find more energetic men, more devoted to the Republic.

8 October. — Four thousand armed national guards again descend from Charonne, Belleville, Ménilmontant and invade the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville.

We could not forget that the members of the Government of National Defense had all formerly sworn an oath to the empire, and the irregularity of their election damaged their authority. On 8 October, the central committee of the twenty arrondissements of Paris demanded by a poster the legal nomination of a Commune. This demand having been refused, a peaceful demonstration took place on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. All was confined to a few cries of: Long live the Commune! Trochu and Tamisier reviewed the battalions of the national guard. For his part, Jules Favre, by a clever speech, succeeded in calming spirits.

All of us, he said, would have been happy to give to the municipal powers the regular foundation of a free election. But all of us have understood, too, that when the Prussians threaten the city, its inhabitants think only of the ramparts… At the moment when I speak to you, do you hear the supreme appeal that interrupts me? It is the voice of the cannon that thunders and that tells us all where duty lies.

The members of the Government were protected this time by the Breton mobiles and by some battalions of the national guard.

On 28 October, in a great public meeting, Ledru-Rollin cried out:

“It is the great Commune that saved from the foreigner the sacred soil of the Fatherland… Lyon has already instituted it… Will you stay behind Lyon, you Parisians, who have always marched at the head of the Revolution?”

The day before, Félix Pyat wrote in Le Combat:

“A fact true, sure, and certain, which the Government of National Defense keeps to itself as a state secret, and which we denounce to the indignation of France as a crime of high treason:

“Marshal Bazaine sent a colonel to the camp of the king of Prussia to treat for the surrender of Metz and for peace, in the name of H.M. the Emperor Napoleon III.”

Flourens, informed by Rochefort, had not thought it his duty to hide the truth; he hoped that Paris would at last understand the insufficiency of these leaders whose temporizing was ruining us.

It was at first thought a calumny, and copies of Le Combat were burned in public. The Journal officiel praised “our glorious Bazaine” and denied the painful news. (1) On 30 October, Thiers, arrived in Paris, confirmed it: “Bazaine and his army are prisoners of war.”

(1) It was almost to make oneself an accomplice of the traitor. D’Aurelle was also indignant when Gambetta dared tell the soldiers that a chief had betrayed them. There are always people who are afraid of the truth.

As discouraged as Trochu, Thiers was already thinking of surrendering. He claimed that the republican form was little sympathetic to the monarchies of Europe, and, under the name of armistice, proposed a capitulation. Was it not senseless to ask Bismarck for a truce of fifteen days with revictualing?

At the Council, when Thiers spoke of surrendering:

“We have no right to do so,” answered Ducrot; “we have provisions, arms, munitions; we must defend Paris as long as possible, to allow the country to form new armies. A great nation always recovers from its material ruins; it never recovers from its moral ruins. Our children will benefit from the honor we shall have saved.”

Thus Paris learned at once of the recapture of Le Bourget by the Germans, the surrender of Metz, and the premature negotiations of Thiers.

An indescribable anger took hold of the entire population. By an excessive but very excusable generalization, Bazaine’s treason splashed with its shame the incompetent chiefs to whom we had imprudently entrusted the defense of the fatherland.

Trochu remained inactive, at prayer, awaiting miraculous help from on high. (1) This mystical theoretician possessed, it is true, one of the Christian virtues: Prudence; assuredly he had neither Hope nor Faith. His indecisions and slownesses must be counted among the principal causes of our defeats. The shuddering people cried out: The Government has shown incompetence; it must urgently be replaced.

(1) “Be at ease,” he said, “my wife is making a novena to Sainte-Geneviève.” His colleagues prevented him from publishing a ridiculous proclamation. (See Armand Dayot, l’Invasion, page 388)

Trochu himself had just written in a proclamation: “When a general has compromised his command, it is taken from him. When a government has by its faults endangered the salvation of the Fatherland, it is dismissed.”

Moderate men, such as the mayor of the 6th arrondissement, took up the general indignation by posting this proclamation:

People of France!

While Châteaudun is being crushed, Bazaine capitulates! This final shame must open our eyes. We summon the Government of National Defense: 1° to declare outlaws Bonaparte and the men who supported his system; 2° to dismiss and imprison the generals who, by incompetence or treason, have caused our latest disasters (1); 3° absolutely to reject every proposal of armistice and to raise within two days the entire male population of Paris. — That, if the Government refuses to take the revolutionary measures the situation demands, it tender its mass resignation for Thursday 3 November next. — Victory or death! Long live the Republic!

The Revolutionary Committee of the 6th arrondissement.

Approved: ROBINET, mayor. André ROUSSELLE, deputy.

(1) All the chiefs of the army were declared enemies of the Republic.

On 31 October, the riot rumbled around the Hôtel de Ville. The angry people pressed onto the great square with cries of: No armistice! Death to cowards! The Commune! The mass levy!

Étienne Arago, Floquet, Clamageran made vain efforts to calm this surging crowd. At last Trochu appeared and obtained a little silence:

Citizens, he said, what do you ask? When we came to the Government, the state of Paris was such that the enemy could have made himself master of it within forty-eight hours. At this hour we can say it with certainty, Paris is impregnable.

And as the speaker is interrupted by cries: “Down with Trochu! The mass sortie!”

No one more than I, he continues, is devoted to the common salvation, and no one wants more than I a war without quarter, a war to the death.

He was no longer believed. Jules Simon wants in his turn to speak, but is not listened to.

The mayors of the twenty arrondissements were already assembled at the Hôtel de Ville. All are in agreement: it is a necessity to have at last in Paris a regularly elected government. The Commune will immediately organize companies of march composed of all able-bodied men. Étienne Arago, mayor of Paris, brings these wishes to the members of the Government assembled in a neighboring room. These proposals are accepted. Rochefort is charged with announcing to the people that municipal elections will be held the very next day.

— No! No! No municipal elections! The Commune!

— But citizens, answers Rochefort with a shrug of the shoulders, it is the same thing!

He was mistaken. Words change meaning according to circumstances. At this moment, in the mind of Parisians, the Commune was a new government that would give a more vigorous impulse to military operations.

Soon various lists are spread, designating the members of a Committee of Public Safety. A single name unites all suffrages, that of Dorian, the energetic minister of Public Works, who has succeeded in rapidly casting the new 7-pounders. Long live Dorian! Down with Trochu!

The members of the Government assemble in the Hall of Deliberations; for their protection they have only three companies of mobiles from the Indre under the orders of Commander Dauvergne. Trochu asks General Tamisier for reinforcements. But where to find defenders of the Government? Most of the national guards are demanding new elections and indignantly reject the idea of an armistice.

Suddenly, on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, the great gate opens halfway to give passage to a menacing battalion. Saber bared, Commander Dauvergne is about to give the order to fire on the people. The rifles are leveled; the crowd recoils, it is a save-himself-who-can; women and children let out cries of terror.

At this moment, Captain Delbrouck, (1) alone, his arms outstretched, advances toward the soldiers: “Stop!” he cries, “what are you going to do?” And with his hand, by a gesture nearly as fine as that of Winkelried, he raises the rifle barrels.

(1) Lieutenant de Vesly, Léon C. and I accompanied our captain; his daughter was beside him.

Seized by the collar, Commander Dauvergne has been dragged under the archway; his soldiers fall upon the rioters with rifle-butt blows and free him. Trochu gives the mobiles the order to return into the Hôtel de Ville. (1)

(1) A little later, they cut a passage for themselves with the bayonet as far as the Napoléon barracks.

Soon, a few revolver shots having been fired by some mobiles, the crowd comes back exasperated, rushes against the door; it is opened from the inside — these are Tibaldi’s soldiers, who have climbed in through a window; the City Hall is invaded.

“Resign!” cries the people, penetrating into the Hall of Deliberations. “Resign!”

The members of the Government stand, very moved, but holding their own against the storm.

“I shall never resign my powers into the hands of a minority,” cries Jules Favre, “never! never! never!”

Schœlcher, — Étienne Arago promise upcoming elections, but this is too vague, time presses.

The fiery Flourens has come in and, at the head of his Belleville sharpshooters, standing on the table, demands the forfeiture of the Government.

“Never!” answers Jules Favre once again.

The tumult is indescribable. If Flourens is to be believed, (1) Jules Ferry, standing, was speaking of union and concord; Jules Favre, seated, was holding a pen to give himself a countenance; Jules Simon was searching in his philosophy for remedies to this adventure and finding none. Trochu, commending his soul to God, was putting his decoration into his pocket. Old Garnier-Pagès was struggling like one possessed. Tamisier, quite stupefied, understood nothing.

(1) Paris livré, page 141.

Meanwhile, the soldiers of the 106th battalion have noticed a little old man of frail appearance but energetic gaze, with venerable white hair: “There is Blanqui!” cried one of them. At once all rush cowardly upon this unarmed old man, overwhelm him with blows, tear out his hair. Flourens, informed, sends sharpshooters who free him; he arrives, drinks a glass of water, and sets to work at once. Blanqui, who has been called the theoretician of the riot, “man of ardent will and pure conscience,” sends orders to the prefecture of police, to the ministry of Finances, to the commanders of the forts. Then the chiefs of the insurrection come to an agreement with Dorian. All rally to the idea of holding elections the very next day.

One after another, the battalions of the national guard filed past on the square; their delegates crossed the Hôtel de Ville and went out on the Lobau barracks side crying: Long live the Commune!

Meanwhile, Ernest Picard, who had managed to escape, was making arrangements to deliver his colleagues, and toward six o’clock, the 106th battalion of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was marching on the Hôtel de Ville. (1) As it was impossible to distinguish those who wanted to free the Government from those who held it prisoner, some men of the 106th, having cried: Long live the Commune!, slipped into the hall where Flourens was haranguing the crowd. Commander Ibos went up beside him. A dispute broke out between the two speakers, when half the table tipped over and both fell.

(1) At the head of a battalion advanced Colonel Ferry-Pisani, Commander Ibos, and Captain Charles Ferry, brother of the prefect of the Seine.

Taking advantage of the tumult, a few national guards have surrounded Trochu; a tall man wraps him in his greatcoat, puts a plain guard’s kepi on his head, conceals the general’s braided kepi, and leads him with Jules Ferry toward the stairway.

In the meantime, an aide-de-camp was preparing to telegraph General Ducrot to invite him to enter Paris with his troops. But Trochu, understanding the clumsiness of such an intervention, had the dispatch stopped. He knew and often repeated that one must beware of using violence against the Paris population. “The day moral force should no longer suffice, all would be lost.”

Around 7:30 p.m., at the porte Maillot, Ducrot was finishing dining with his staff when Commander Franchetti entered the room; he approached the general and said low in his ear: “The members of the Government of National Defense are prisoners at the Hôtel de Ville, kept under watch by rogues capable of anything…”

The general rose at once, saying: “Gentlemen, to horse; we are entering Paris. Warn the troops.” (1)

(1) Ducrot, page 55.

But the Governor again stopped this movement; he insisted that the national guard alone be employed to suppress the riot.

General Tamisier, head of the national guard, was prisoner at the Hôtel de Ville. Trochu clumsily chose for the interim a monarchist wholly devoted to the family of Orléans, Roger (du Nord). But Jules Ferry, understanding that so unpopular a chief would not be obeyed, did not hesitate to assume the command himself. He was a member of the Government and Prefect of the Seine. Roger (du Nord) bowed.

“It was half past ten in the evening; Jules Favre was dying of hunger. There was rivalry as to who would offer him drink and food. He swallowed a piece of coarse bread and a slice of horse, then leaned against the wall of the embrasure and fell asleep. The heat, become stifling, woke him; he opened the window to breathe; at the same instant, two gunshots rang out; he quickly closed the casement, after seeing the quay garnished with national guards who, having thought one was going to fire on them, had hastily forestalled it.” (2)

(2) Cited by Ducrot.

When Picard had wanted to march the troops to deliver his colleagues, General Schmidt, obeying Trochu, opposed it; and Picard cried: “If he does not feel equal to the situation, let him resign and leave us to act.”

Meanwhile, at half past eleven, to second a movement of the national guards loyal to the Government, the battalions of mobiles from the Indre and from Finistère drew up in battle order in front of the Lobau barracks, from the quay to the rue de Rivoli. But how to cross that square wholly covered with battalions of the most diverse opinions? It was impossible to distinguish friends from adversaries.

Around midnight, de Legge, commander of the Breton mobiles, had the idea of taking advantage of an underground passage linking the barracks to the Hôtel de Ville: “Penetrate into the place,” he said, “and throw all that rabble out the windows.”

Captain Mauduit, coming out first with a few men near the kitchen door, was received with cries of: “Long live the Mobile! Rifles in the air! We are all brothers!” The Bretons pretended not to understand French, and indeed understood nothing of the situation; they continued to advance. But while Commander de Legge stayed in the underground passage, where he had made prisoners of four insurgent officers, the door was shut and barricaded by some national guards; the Bretons found themselves in their turn imprisoned.

Captain Mauduit, with only twenty-five men, had climbed to the first floor; his position was critical, in the midst of “three or four thousand national guards.” He came back down, making his men march backwards, bayonets forward, “like a porcupine.” The national guard officer guarding the entrance to the underground passage was seized, disarmed, and made prisoner; the door was opened to the Bretons, who turned out to be about two hundred and thirty men. Dorian and General Le Flô, escorted by Flourens’s scouts, were sent to them as parliamentaries. Captain Mauduit recounts this episode thus: (1)

(1) In De La Rochethulon, Du rôle de la garde nationale, Paris, Techener, 1872.

“The general (Le Flô) asks for me; I throw my arms around his neck and bring him into the ranks of the mobiles. He tries to calm our excitement by saying: ‘If you have the misfortune to fire a single shot, the members of the Government will be massacred.’

— Étienne Arago, who was coming down the kitchen staircase, finds himself face to face with a lieutenant of the 4th company from Finistère, who arrests him despite his protests.”

General Le Flô has a door of the Hôtel de Ville opened; through it enter Jules Ferry, Commander Ibos, and the national guards of the 106th battalion. They enter the session hall and free the members of the Government; Ferry succeeds in coming to an understanding with Delescluze. Before releasing their prisoners, the insurgents require the promise that they will not be molested, and the Government of National Defense engages on its honor to let the elections of the Commune be held the next day. In the midst of this throng stirred by the most violent and most opposed feelings, the chiefs of the insurrection go out arm in arm with the members of the Government. The men of the two parties were compelled to protect one another. It was a curious sight to see General Tamisier giving his arm to old Blanqui.

After this night of emotions, the members of the Government were undone, livid, their hair stuck to their temples. From the session hall to the porte Lobau, they filed past between the mobiles who formed the hedge; the bugles sounded the march and the drums beat the field. It was two o’clock in the morning.

For his part, Trochu had mounted his horse. “He could receive a pistol-shot, but there are circumstances when one must brave such chances.” (1)

(1 and 2) Ducrot.

Followed by his aide-de-camp, Commander Bibesco, and surrounded by his staff, the Governor set out with General Ducrot. The crowd was so dense it was difficult to advance. The national guards vociferated; some acclaimed Trochu and held out their arms to him, others threatened him with their fists and cried: “Long live the Commune!” (2)

Toward half past three in the morning, the Governor returned to the Louvre, and General Ducrot insistently demanded that prompt justice be done on the rioters: “The mobiles,” he said, “have taken a certain number of these wretches; the courts-martial give us the means to have them tried; tomorrow some must be put to the sword.”

But on the order of Jules Ferry and Edmond Adam, most of the arrested men were set free. Dorian and other members of the Government had made formal promises; Ducrot was astonished that they considered themselves bound by their given word. (1)

(1) Tibaldi, Vesinier, Vermorel, Lefrançais, however, were dragged from prison to prison; they waited long months to be tried and acquitted. Flourens was incarcerated at Mazas. Faced with this breach of faith, Floquet and several delegates to the town halls sent in their resignations. Rochefort had already given his. A council of war sentenced Jules Vallès to six months in prison, Doctor Goupil to two years of the same penalty; Blanqui, Flourens, Levault, Cyrille were sentenced to death.

“Sterile escapade, sad spectacle offered to the enemy!” say the historians. — Perhaps. (2)

(2) Many people consider that, had this movement succeeded, the defense of Paris would have been conducted with greater vigor. This riot at least compelled Trochu to organize the march battalions of the national guard.

The Government had promised the immediate election of a municipal council. Victorious, it slipped out of its engagement. On 3 November, the electors were indeed convoked, but only to answer this question: Does the population of Paris maintain, yes or no, the powers of the Government of National Defense?

This Government had lost the people’s confidence. Yet, by fear of the unknown, we made the mistake of confirming powers in it which it did not know how to use effectively. The plebiscite gave 560,000 yeses and 60,000 noes.

It seems regrettable that the chiefs of the army did not realize their insufficiency. Confounding the Republic with anarchy, they prayed for any monarch whatever to reestablish order. Persuaded that this Paris, which they unjustly despised and detested, would not resist a fortnight, they had acted and continued to act accordingly. Their improvidence and their contagious discouragement paralyzed the defense. Why was no real republican army chief there?

The next day, the first of November, our friend Madame André-Léo, Delescluze’s collaborator, wrote in Le Réveil:

“Two long months — two centuries in the extreme circumstances in which we are — have superabundantly proved the incompetence of the men who took the direction of public affairs. They have left France in the hands of the Bonapartists. The mayors, the commissioners, all the shameful magistrates who under the empire led astray and chained the populations, have remained in possession of their powers. Strasbourg has not been relieved; Metz has not been relieved. While they sent old servants of the courts to beg the pity of kings, they restrained the dash of Paris; they poured water instead of fire, tears instead of blood. — Monarchical supplies have been preserved; all the living forces have been paralyzed; the initiative of citizens, their efforts in favor of an energetic resistance, have been stubbornly hindered. Today as yesterday, our soldiers are decimated, starving, led to the enemy in small bands and without artillery. Imbecility? Treason? The result is the same.

“Let these honest people return to private life, leaving to younger, more energetic men a task that surpasses their powers. Let men of heart arise; let all run to the enemy! Women, old men, even children, will remain to guard the ramparts, and we shall all rediscover the great revolutionary soul that knew how to conquer in other times, and that will make us conquer still.” (1)

(1) I owe to the kindness of Madame Aristide Rey, executrix of André-Léo, the following information:

Léonie Béra, born in 1829 at Lusignan (Vienne), was enthused by the generous ideas put forth in various publications by a disciple of Fourier, M. Champseix. From this there ensued a correspondence which ended in an engagement, before the young woman had even seen the writer. He was an invalid, which did not prevent the marriage. From this union were born twins, André and Léo, whose joined names became their mother’s literary signature, a touching pseudonym indicating the importance these children had in her life. André-Léo is the author of numerous and remarkable novels which had a lively success and were translated into several languages. We shall only cite: Un Mariage scandaleux (her masterpiece). — Les Deux Filles de Monsieur Plichon. — Pradifes. — La Commune de Malenpis (a small political pamphlet), etc. She also published some volumes intended for children, among which: Un Momoli qui ne peut la bête. — Les Aventures d’Édouard, later published under this fine title: La Justice des choses. During the two sieges of Paris, Madame André-Léo took an active and passionate part in events; she then wrote in various newspapers. It was in 1873 that she married Benoît Malon. She died in 1900.

To breach the line of investment, to rejoin the army of the Loire, then to throw all our united forces against the enemy, and, if we did not succeed in making him raise the siege, to try at least to revictual Paris — such was the goal one could set oneself. Whoever examines the respective strength of the armies in presence will recognize that this plan was not unrealizable.

III

1870

THE IRON CIRCLE

INCOHERENCE OF THE COMMAND. — 9 NOVEMBER, VICTORY OF COULMIERS. — 30 NOVEMBER, THE SORTIE. — ATTACK ON ÉPINAY. — THE PLATEAU OF VILLIERS. — 1ST DECEMBER, SUSPENSION OF ARMS. — 2 DECEMBER, CHAMPIGNY. — THE RELIEF ARMY, 1ST DECEMBER, VILLEPION. — 3 DECEMBER, LOIGNY. — 4 DECEMBER, PATAY. — TAKING OF ORLÉANS. — RETREAT INTO PARIS.

1

As long as there are in France two educations, there will be two opposed parties, two nations that cannot understand one another: on the left, those who speak the truth; on the right, those who think they must hide it.

At the news of the capitulation of Metz, Gambetta had issued this proclamation:

Soldiers,

… You have been betrayed, but not dishonored… Rid of chiefs unworthy of you and of France, are you ready, under the conduct of chiefs who deserve your confidence, to wash in the blood of the invaders the outrage inflicted on the old French name?…

You no longer fight for the interest and caprices of a despot; you fight for the very salvation of the fatherland…

Unworthy citizens have dared say that the army is in solidarity with its chief. Shame on those slanderers who, faithful to Bonaparte’s system, seek to separate the army from the people, the soldiers from the Republic.

No, no! I have branded, as I had to, the capitulation of Sedan and the treason of Metz, and I call upon you to avenge your own honor, which is that of France. Forward!… You are the French youth, the hope of the fatherland; you will conquer!

D’Aurelle is indignant at such audacity: to denounce to the soldiers the treason of their chiefs! “Discipline,” he says, “was severely shaken by such a denunciation. Non-commissioned officers and soldiers deliberated whether they should not free themselves from obedience to chiefs who were betraying them.”

“Raise your souls and your resolutions to the height of the frightful perils that fall upon the fatherland,” wrote Gambetta, and, on 2 November, he called to the colors all single men from twenty-one to forty years old. His activity, his energy, worked wonders and managed to rouse the provinces a little from their torpor.

But, at the head of the army, d’Aurelle hesitates; he sees difficulties everywhere; everything seems impossible to him; and when he decides to march, it is reluctantly.

The movements of the French army were incoherent because there was never any unity, either in the command or in the goal pursued. D’Aurelle obstinately insisted on shutting himself in Orléans, (1) Gambetta and Freycinet ordered him to go relieve Paris. Chanzy had under his orders only part of the army; no one dared take the initiative of a general plan.

(1) Ducrot (page 112) expresses himself thus on d’Aurelle’s plan: “First of all, was Orléans necessary to us?… This city is situated entirely on the right bank of the Loire, without any fortification. In case of retreat, our army, obliged under the enemy’s fire to cross again the wide river, ran the risk of being taken or destroyed. Lastly, the occupation of Orléans almost forcibly compelled our armies to march directly on Paris through the plateau of the Beauce… Was there nothing irrational in pushing improvised battalions over those immense bare and open fields, where the solid and skillful German armies could deploy their formidable means of action?”

Gambetta to Jules Favre

Tours, 13 November 1870.

The Prussians are massing between Chartres and Pithiviers enormous forces to bar our road to Paris. Perhaps you will judge it opportune to bring out of Paris, henceforth impregnable, two hundred thousand men who, by holding the open country, would counter-balance the forces Prince Frederick-Charles is bringing from Metz.

If Bazaine had held the German army back a few more days before Metz, the outcome of the war would have been quite otherwise.

2

VICTORY OF COULMIERS (2)

(2) I do little more than summarize the accounts of Generals d’Aurelle and Chanzy.

Napoleon I knew how to choose his battlefield and found means of imposing his will on the enemy. Our generals, on the contrary, “heavily underwent the initiative of the adversary.” (1) We waited until the German army had entrenched itself in the villages, châteaux, and farms it had loopholed and whose approaches it defended by works of provisional fortification. Instead of attacking these positions, it was necessary to try to turn them and to clear a path while avoiding them.

(1) General Zurlinden. La Guerre de 1870-1871. Hachette, publisher, 1904.

9 November. — The weather is cold and somber; at daybreak the fog begins to lift. The regiments make for the positions assigned them. A solemn silence reigns everywhere in these fields where the cannon’s roar will soon resound.

In the first rank, scouting at a distance for the very cavalry, advance the francs-tireurs of Paris, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Lipowski.

The 16th corps has before it the positions defended by the troops of General de Thann.

The skirmishers of the 33rd mobiles march resolutely in the open on Baccon, where the Bavarians are ambushed. They reach the village, supported by artillery whose balls first bring down some sections of wall; (2) they penetrate it and begin hand-to-hand combat.

(2) That is what improvident chiefs failed to do at Buzenval.

“It was at this moment an imposing spectacle, that of this young army of the Loire, fighting on every point with admirable ardor.” (3)

(3) D’Aurelle. La première armée de la Loire. II. Plon, publisher, 1872.

Meanwhile General Reyan, who commanded the cavalry, had orders to cut off the enemy’s retreat on the road to Paris. By an inconceivable error he took Lipowski’s francs-tireurs for Prussians and beat a retreat, warning Chanzy that his flank was threatened.

On the right, the march of the Barry division had been slow, but at noon Coulmiers was vigorously attacked.

Toward two o’clock, the skirmishers of the first division of the 16th corps (1) seize the gardens surrounding Coulmiers; the village offers them stubborn resistance. General Barry having ordered a frontal attack, our soldiers are met by a very lively fusillade and grape-shot fire. There was a moment of hesitation.

(1) Where General de Tucé commanded.

Then the general, dismounting, places himself at the head of his troops and carries them away with the cry: Forward, the mobiles! Long live France! The struggle continues in the burning village; the enemy gives way; at five o’clock his defeat was complete. One of his columns marched all night along the Patay road in the greatest disorder. Two thousand five hundred prisoners fell into our hands.

Chanzy saw only after the fact what should then have been done:

“To turn to account the enthusiasm of victory, to finish beating General de Thann’s army before it could be reinforced by that of the Grand Duke, on which one would then have advanced; to take the Germans thus piecemeal before the arrival of the reinforcements that Prince Charles, having set out from Metz, was bringing with the greatest swiftness.” (1)

(1) The march of the two German armies took place from 27 October to 12 November.

“For eleven days General d’Aurelle had not advanced a league. Instead of the 50 or 50 thousand men the French army had before it a fortnight earlier, there were now more than 120,000 men and nearly 400 mouths of fire.” (2)

(2) Claretie, page 500.

D’Aurelle acknowledges it: “Our mobiles, who were seeing fire for the first time, had been admirable in courage and dash. The artillery had maneuvered under a hail of projectiles, with remarkable precision and intrepidity. The cavalry had been no less brilliant.”

Historians have wondered why d’Aurelle did not pursue the enemy; here is his answer, which seems weak:

“An icy rain mixed with snow was beginning to fall. The night was so dark that it was only the next morning that one noticed the enemy had retreated.

“The commander-in-chief was opposed to every kind of night operation. The next day, it was too late. ‘The Germans make very long marches; they had twelve hours’ lead and were drawing nearer to their base of operations, the circle of investment of Paris.’”

Thus, the road to Paris was free. D’Aurelle shut himself up in Orléans. “Paris waited for d’Aurelle; d’Aurelle did not budge! Is it not enough to leap with anger?” (3)

(3) Robert Kemp.

Chanzy could scarcely contain his impatience. He writes to the commander-in-chief and strives to convince him of the necessity of a forward movement. D’Aurelle replies: “It would have been more in accord with our true interests to await in our fortified lines the attack of the German army than to provoke it.”

And this same d’Aurelle, who has just so handsomely praised the courage of our troops, is already beginning to denigrate them: “These masses of men without organization, without military instruction, without cadres, badly equipped, badly clothed, badly armed, etc…” inspire no confidence in him.

Freycinet writes to him: “We cannot remain eternally at Orléans. Paris is hungry and calls us.” (1) He is offered a new army to place under his command; he refuses. As for studying a plan to manage to give the hand to Trochu, “it would be necessary that I be aware of what is happening in Paris and of the intentions of that general officer.”

(1) On 15 November, the meat ration was reduced to one hundred grams.

Gambetta points out to him that operations could very well be prepared with Paris as objective, without prior knowledge of Trochu’s projects.

3

Simple and vulgar common sense is sometimes nearer practical truth than learned combinations. People have made much fun of the Parisians who demanded loudly the mass sortie. The Parisians were right. A besieged army much too numerous found itself facing a thin cordon of investment. The Germans were taking great care not to risk the assault of our forts, and they could not resist a sortie except by concentrating their troops on a determined point. We had to employ this concentration and to take advantage of our numerical superiority to immobilize the enemy on every point of the circle at once.

I shall not recount all the peripeties of the struggle waged around Paris, but only a few episodes of which I was a witness. They will suffice, I believe, to demonstrate at once the mad bravery of our chiefs and their guilty improvidence.

The victory of Coulmiers, won on 9 November, was known in Paris only on the 14th. It was at last decided to attempt a sortie, but a fortnight was spent preparing it and… nothing was ready.

On 28 November, the proclamation of General Ducrot, all vibrating with avenging energy, transported us with enthusiasm. The powerful breath of a collective soul inspired this heroic page; it is indeed the voice of the entire people of Paris expressing its sullen anger, its patriotic exaltation, and its courageous hopes.

Soldiers of the second army of Paris,

The moment has come to break the iron circle that has held us in too long and threatens to stifle us in a slow and painful agony. To you falls the honor of attempting this great enterprise; you will show yourselves worthy of it, I am convinced. No doubt, your beginnings will be difficult; we shall have serious obstacles to surmount; we must envisage them with calm and resolution, without exaggeration as without weakness.

To prepare our action, the foresight of him who commands you in chief has accumulated more than 500 mouths of fire, of which at least two-thirds of the greatest caliber; no material obstacle can resist them; and to rush through this breach, you will be more than 150,000, all well armed, well equipped, abundantly provided with munitions, and, I hope, all animated with an irresistible ardor.

Victorious in this first period of the struggle, your success is assured, for the enemy has sent to the banks of the Loire his most numerous and best soldiers; the heroic and happy efforts of your brothers will retain them there.

Courage then, and confidence! Think that, in this supreme struggle, we fight for our honor, for our liberty, for the salvation of our dear and unhappy fatherland, and if this motive is not sufficient to inflame your hearts, think of your devastated fields, of your ruined families, of your sisters, your wives, your desolate mothers! (1)

(1) Ducrot had written: “outrages.” Trochu pointed out to him that nothing in the conduct of our enemies authorized this accusation.

May this thought make you share the thirst for vengeance, the smoldering rage that animate me, and inspire in you contempt for danger!

For myself, I am firmly resolved, I swear it before you, before the entire nation: I shall not return to Paris except dead or victorious; you may see me fall, but you shall not see me retreat. Then do not stop, but avenge me.

Forward, then, forward! And may God protect us!

The reading of this proclamation had made a profound impression. “Those who passed through Paris in this terrible time will find it hard to forget the night of 28 to 29 November 1870 and the poignant emotion with which we awaited the break of day and the first sounds of combat.” (1)

(1) Chaper (cited by Ducrot).

30 November. — The Governor telegraphs to Counter-Admiral Saisset: “Everything is being set in motion for the great enterprise. Let us together ask the God of armies to protect it after so many cruel trials.”

4

ÉPINAY

At the very moment when Ducrot’s army was advancing toward the South, Vice-Admiral La Roncière, to make a diversion to the North, set out from Saint-Denis and carried without striking a blow Drancy, the Groslay farm, and Épinay. An experienced soldier, for three days he had had Épinay shelled. The moment come, he gave General Hanrion the order to launch the assault columns. Then our brave sailors scale the walls of the park; a violent combat begins in the streets and houses of the village, from which our troops drive the Prussians. (2)

(2) Informed of this success, the delegation of Tours confused Épinay-sur-Seine with Épinay-sur-Orge, near Longjumeau. But this error had no effect other than to hasten the forward march of the army of the Loire. There is some bad faith in attributing fatal consequences to it.

At four o’clock, an aide-de-camp of the Governor brought the order to return to Saint-Denis before nightfall. (1)

(1) The German redoubts established on the surrounding heights did not permit one to hold Épinay. Perhaps our troops might have attacked these redoubts or, better, tried to clear a path toward Normandy by way of the Havre road.

Admiral La Roncière had at least succeeded in keeping some German forces away from the action being waged the same day on the other side of Paris.

How many faults in the interminable preparations for the sortie of 30 November! The Paris troops mass on the 29th on the maneuver field of Vincennes, but the pontoon bridges that should have been thrown across the Marne are not ready. The Germans, henceforth knowing the precise point at which they are going to be attacked, have time to prepare their defense, and the next day the obstacles have become almost insurmountable.

5

VILLIERS

On 30 November, in the morning, the weather was clear; the bridge of Joinville had been repaired as best could be for the passage of the infantry. (2)

(2) Viollet-le-Duc.

The park of Villiers was the key to the battlefield.

A first, irreparable fault was to let the Germans install themselves there entirely at their ease. They had made of it a position almost impregnable. The wall 400 meters long stretching to the west was loopholed. In front, trenches formed a first line of defense; behind, other trenches gave two tiers of fire. In the middle of the park, on a platform, an armored piece commanded the whole plateau with its circular fire. Finally, on an eminence, rose the château, loopholed, barricaded, constituting a formidable redoubt. (1)

(1) However, this redoubt was open to the east and the north.

Artillery alone could have allowed us to attack these entrenchments with any chance of success. The forts of Rosny, of Nogent, the batteries of the Avron plateau should have prepared the assault on the park of Villiers by a prolonged bombardment. (2)

(2) By an inconceivable negligence, the Avron plateau was only occupied on 28 November, and it was only the day after the battle (1 December) that we thought of sending a long-range naval piece there. Colonel Stoffel had however already 24-pounder batteries and 62-pounder batteries. What did they do? (See La Roncière, page 129)

Our left wing, commanded by General d’Exea, was to move from daybreak on Noisy-le-Grand. Ducrot has claimed that it had orders to take the redoubt from the rear. (3) The defense works which existed only on the western side could be turned. A simultaneous action would have succeeded.

(3) What is certain is that it did not attempt to do so.

The attack begun at ten o’clock by the skirmishers of the Maussion division was an absurd and useless butchery. Three batteries were then brought forward; but, placed in low ground, they neither managed to breach the wall nor to dislodge the Württembergers from their loopholes.

Toward eleven o’clock, General d’Exea had still not begun the river crossing. Irritated and blinded by impatience, Ducrot launched his troops anyway against that impregnable wall.

Arriving within range, our soldiers are met by a rolling fire of musketry. A moment of confusion occurs. The officers carry their men away, who fall upon the enemy. The Germans bend, but as they fall back they unmask the long wall from which comes a murderous fusillade. Our soldiers lie down, leap up a second time, and gain ground by successive bounds.

“Over this open space, all the enemy’s shots tell and numerous victims fall again… The Germans, debouching from the park, dash out shouting their hurrahs,… our men turn around, fire a volley, and rush headlong with the bayonet. Three times they return to the charge, and, thanks to these offensive returns, we can retake our first positions.” (1)

(1) Ducrot, II, 206.

It is only at two o’clock that General d’Exea finally carries out the river crossing and gives the Bellemare division the order to move forward.

But Ducrot, whom he should have seconded, is no longer there. He has just learned that the first army corps was falling back, abandoning all its advanced positions, Champigny and Le Four-à-Chaux.

At the news of this incredible incident, the general, in a first movement of well-deserved indignation, cried out: “Go say everywhere that, under penalty of death, I forbid the abandonment of any position.”

Nothing could warrant this retreat, and yet the Faron division was already falling back toward the Marne, evacuating Champigny.

This retrograde movement was halted; the troops reoccupied their positions, without the enemy attempting to oppose it. The attack on the park, which should have been carried out simultaneously by the two army corps, was resumed separately by the third corps alone. (1)

(1) Three thousand mobilized national guards were in front of the fort of Rosny, under the orders of General d’Hugues; they could have turned the obstacle by Noisy-le-Grand. The German works at Le Raincy were barely begun.

Toward half past three, General de Bellemare assembled his troops and ordered the assault. But, once again, it is frontally that he goes to attack madly.

The 4th zouaves enters a sunken road and scales the slopes at a run. The wall is still intact. A rolling fire knocks down half our men in a few minutes: all the officers are hit; the commander has his horse killed. The remnants of the two brave companies rally behind the crest, and, scarcely reformed, the battalion moves forward again.

The young zouaves, who had already so valiantly behaved at La Malmaison, want, by a brilliant feat, to efface all memory of what had happened at Châtillon. Heads down, they rush onto the plateau…

“From loopholes, from shelters bursts a terrible fire; most fall, the others march on, run through a hail of bullets… but, arrived a hundred meters from the park, they are mown down at point-blank range. 16 officers out of 18, and 311 men out of 600 are out of combat. Yet these brave men did not shed their blood in vain; they bring back the two pieces of cannon left on the plateau for lack of teams.

“It was very late… After this last setback, there was nothing more to attempt. The bulk of the troops is brought back behind the crest, on which we leave only outposts. Orders are given along the whole line that the night be employed to remove the wounded, bury the dead, and renew munitions.” (1)

(1) Ducrot, pages 194 to 261. The attack on the Villiers plateau sums up well enough the cockchafer strategy that was that of our generals throughout this campaign.

All night the Auxiliary Engineers, thanks to the intelligent and courageous initiative of Viollet-le-Duc, were occupied digging trenches at the outposts.

General Ducrot was an excellent colonel; he had much dash, but he lacked overall views, foresight, and tenacity. From the evening of 30 November, the operation seemed to him failed, and this discouragement was quite premature.

Moreover, even supposing — which is very debatable — that it was not possible to pierce the lines of investment, was that a reason for not widening the circle? Our troops were tired, it is true. Could they not be replaced by fresh troops? We had a reserve of three hundred thousand men; what has been done with them?

The temperature had become glacial, and our chiefs had foreseen nothing: “We had brought neither tents nor blankets; the march packs contained only food and munitions; the officers were likewise without baggage. The whole line of outposts was a few steps from the enemy; one could not light fires. Chiefs and soldiers, overcome with fatigue, remained exposed to the very sharp cold of a long winter night.” (1)

(1) Ducrot, II, page 296. All this does not indicate the firm resolution to make a breach.

6

The next day, the first of December, what was happening around Champigny?

Suspension of arms! All the forts fall silent. The troops remain in bivouac. “Complete and very baleful immobility; for it is certain that if the enemy did not attack us in our relatively weak positions, it was because he did not believe himself strong enough, or that he was short of munitions.” (2)

(2) Viollet-le-Duc.

2 December. — On waking, the enemy, spread over the heights, attacks us briskly. The night had been clear (ten degrees below zero). The army had fallen asleep in a nightmare slumber, in boundless prostration, when the cannon woke it. The Saxons were marching on Bry and the Württembergers attacking Champigny. Our surprised outposts fell back. Civilian workmen, who were unarmed, fled in disorder and threw panic into the main street of Champigny.

We were about to lose this village, and the German counter-offensive could have disastrous consequences “if this beginning of rout had not been arrested by some brave men.” (1)

(1 and 2) Viollet-le-Duc.

Thanks to the works that Viollet-le-Duc had had us dig the night before and perfect during the day of the first of December, we arrested all the efforts of the enemy troops until two o’clock. “At that moment, the arrival of a division allowed us to take the offensive, and our line could be carried 500 meters farther forward.” (2)

The same day, Viollet-le-Duc’s son, charged with a mission to Paris, kindly carried the following letter, which I quickly wrote in pencil:

Le Tremblay, 2 Dec. 1:30.

We are all in good health, though very tired. This morning, M. Viollet-le-Duc had us stop the rout by barring the way to the fugitives. We forced them to turn back, bayonet at their backs. We were all indignant at seeing those cowards fleeing. Our sappers treated them roughly with club blows (shovel or pick handles) and with fists. — We are fortifying the Tremblay farm. We are told all is going well. — Our troops have just been reviewed in a vast meadow by General Trochu, who made us a fine speech: “Gentlemen,” he said in a disdainful tone. He should have said: “Soldiers,” or “Citizens.” We were not pleased; so we all cried: “Long live General Ducrot!” That one at least shows a little energy and marches against the enemy.

The night before last, we did works to install a 50-meter-long battery at the outposts (between Champigny and the Villiers plateau), in a spot that had been taken and retaken three times during the day from the Prussians. The earth was wet with blood. (1) We did not get back to camp until the end of the night.

(1) Our men, exhausted by fatigue and hunger, refused to work. I took up the pick to give them the example, and I tried to raise their spirits: “On our work tonight,” I said, “may depend the success of tomorrow’s battle.”

We sleep on the great square, before the château of Vincennes. Our shelter-tents are very low and we did not know how to plant them well. This morning we got up all covered with frost. (2)

(2) Poor Pickart, ill, was sleeping with his head wholly buried under the snow. He was so pale we thought him dead. Léon C… and I took him to the ambulance, but Major Pouchet sent him rudely away, condemning him with the 4 stretcher-bearers. “This poor child, having enlisted as a volunteer at the age of 17, died of a chest disease.”

The food leaves much to be desired, especially in quantity, but we take all that cheerfully; what does it matter, provided France be saved.

Be without any worry; we have just gained ground. The morale of our company is excellent.

7

In the afternoon of 1 December, a balloon, the Jules-Favre, brought to Tours the so impatiently awaited news of the sortie. At once Freycinet transmitted it to the commander-in-chief:

Tours, 1 December 1870, 5:30 in the evening.

Paris yesterday made a sublime effort. The lines of investment were broken, overturned… This heroism traces our duty. Fly to the aid of Ducrot, without losing an hour, by the routes we combined yesterday. Redouble in speed and energy… Continue your operations with the same prudence, only execute them with thunderous rapidity.

But this heroic faith of which Garibaldi showed so well the power, d’Aurelle possessed no more than Trochu. These disillusioned chiefs were vanquished in advance. It is they who arrested the march toward Paris because they judged it rash. Yes, rash, but possible for energetic and resolute men. (1)

(1) Enemy of the Republic and of the civil government that France had given herself, d’Aurelle, in writing the account of this campaign, had but one aim: to throw on Gambetta and Freycinet the responsibility for our defeats.

At the same date, Prince Frederick-Charles issued this proclamation, whose brutal cynicism history will brand:

Soldiers! Deploy all your activity; let us march to share this impious land. We must exterminate this band of brigands who call themselves the French army. The world cannot remain at rest as long as there exists a French people.

VILLEPION

The army of the Loire, scattered along a line of 70 kilometers without depth, ran the risk of being beaten piecemeal. The minister of war entrusted to General d’Aurelle the command-in-chief, with orders to effect a concentration and to march on Paris.

On 1 December, writes Chanzy, the 16th corps begins its movement at ten in the morning, the infantry across the fields, the artillery on the roads. Admiral Jauréguiberry rapidly sets up his pieces… Meanwhile General Michel was tracing his turning movement on the left. The village of Gommiers was vigorously attacked frontally by the chasseurs à pied, and carried.

General Michel, with the Tucé brigade on the left, advanced on Villepion. This bold demonstration, carried out under shells at a distance of 600 meters, but fast enough to avoid heavy losses, determined the retreat of the enemy battery of Villepion…

The day was waning. The commander of the first division, gathering the troops left to him and placing himself at their head, moved at a run on the park, the central point of resistance, which was carried by assault. 50 prisoners were taken, including two officers of the Bavarian guard.

The enemy, abandoning in the château his ambulance and numerous wounded, fell back on Loigny. The Jauréguiberry division slept on the conquered positions; its headquarters was at the château of Villepion. The cavalry, which fatigue unfortunately prevented from pursuing the enemy, fell back on its morning bivouac, and the Tucé brigade west of the Patay road.

The combat of Villepion was a brilliant success for the 16th corps. It had had to fight against 20,000 Bavarians whom it had completely beaten.

8

LOIGNY-POURPRY (1)

(1) The battle of Loigny has been recounted in detail by d’Aurelle, Chanzy, and B. Morel.

On the side of Orléans, the night of 1 to 2 December had been no less cold than at Paris. Our troops bivouacked not far from the enemy army. “Contrary to their habits, the Germans had not taken the trouble to conceal their fires, which our soldiers distinctly saw.”

Bare and treeless, the vast plains of the Beauce are sown here and there with isolated farms, villages, and châteaux, which alone can serve as points of resistance. A splendid sun was rising on the horizon. Our soldiers were full of ardor, persuaded that they were soon to give their hand to the Parisian army.

The Germans had taken position on a line of hills, from La Maladrerie to the château of Goury. The French line developed from Villours to Morale. On the extreme left, the 3rd cavalry brigade (de Tucé) was to support Lipowski’s francs-tireurs.

“Like many other battles of this unhappy war, the battle of Loigny-Pourpry was disconnected; each division engaged on its own, some too soon, others too late, without ensemble in their movements. Higher direction was wanting. (2)

(2) General Niox, page 68.

From morning on, General Barry enters Loigny, which is occupied only by a few Bavarian detachments, and moves at once on Goury. His dash is such that he neglects to have the attack prepared by the artillery. The enemy, who has first fallen back into the park, is not slow to take the offensive again. The Barry division retreats in disorder into an open plain where it finds no shelter; and General Michel falls back as far as Gommiers.

Then the Germans attack Loigny from the east. The Bourdillon brigade resists energetically. They fire at each other in the streets; each house has become a fortress that the enemy must besiege. The German artillery ceases fire so as not to hit its own men in this furious mêlée. In the end, the French are forced to withdraw. Only a few isolated men, forgotten in the cemetery of Loigny, get themselves killed uselessly. The order of retreat had not reached them. — Five hundred meters from Loigny, one of our batteries is surprised and carried off by two squadrons of German cavalry; it had not even had time to open fire.

The enemy batteries, forming a half-circle of about 2,000 meters radius, riddle with shells our exhausted soldiers seeking refuge around the château of Villepion.

At this moment, General de Sonis, with the 17th corps, arrests the rout. His cannons hold their own against the German batteries. In the hope of retaking Loigny, he calls up his reserve, eight hundred men commanded by Colonel Charrette. Volunteers of the West (former papal zouaves), mobiles of the Côtes-du-Nord, francs-tireurs of Tours and of Blidah, advance gallantly across the plain under a rain of fire. They are supported by the cavalry of General Michel and General de Tucé. The charge is sounded, and, without burning a primer, our mobiles carry the Villours farm.

But General de Sonis has fallen at the edge of the wood; his leg is shattered. Charrette has his horse killed under him; the whole staff is scattered. No reinforcement is sent to support the zouaves who are still pressing forward. Already they have taken by assault the first houses of Loigny, when General de Treskow hurls against this handful of men his numerous Prussian battalions. Our heroic soldiers fall back; the exhausted Germans do not try to pursue them.

The battle had lasted all day. Night had come. A deep obscurity reigned over the battlefield, where so many soldiers had found a glorious death or where so many wounded lay; it was lit only at rare intervals by the sinister reflections of the burning of Loigny. (1)

(1) Chanzy.

“We had beaten the enemy, but it was a sterile victory, without results: we had before us all the united forces of the Duke of Mecklenburg, of General de Thann and of Prince Frederick-Charles.”

Nonetheless, General d’Aurelle at last decided to make for Chevilly, on the road to Paris. His dispatch to the minister of war shows his bad humor: “Orléans is going to be found exposed. It is indispensable to send a general there. I have none to spare.” He keeps hope only in succor from on high, and it is to Monsignor Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, that he addresses himself for this:

“The army of the Loire is leaving today to march to meet the army of General Ducrot, which has broken the Prussian lines at Paris and is making for us.

“Pray, Monsignor, for the salvation of France.”

What is hard to explain is Chanzy’s letter to d’Aurelle and the discouragement it reveals:

“After a fine success yesterday, we left this morning the conquered positions. General de Sonis was wounded and his troops fell back. (1) Night coming on, we were obliged to retreat before a very vigorous effort by the enemy, and we have just arrived, the first division of the 16th corps and part of the 17th, at Terminiers. I dread an attack tonight or tomorrow. I shall do everything to take the offensive again, but help is indispensable to me. I believe we have before us all the enemy forces rushed up to crush us. The game will be played here.”

(1) Ordinarily a wounded general is immediately replaced by a colonel.

“On reading this letter,” adds d’Aurelle, “the commander-in-chief saw at once the perilous situation in which the army of the Loire found itself. There was no other resolution to take than to beat a retreat, so as not to be exposed the next day to a frightful disaster.”

It is permissible to contest that all the enemy forces had rushed up: an army of investment remained around Paris.

D’Aurelle had surrounded Orléans with fortified lines; distraught, he renounced defending them. His haste to flee was such that he had the cannons spiked and abandoned the city. It was no longer a retreat, but an immense rout of 200,000 men.

9

COMBAT OF PATAY. — TAKING OF ORLÉANS

“On 4 December, around eight in the morning, the cannonade began on the side of Patay. It was a Prussian column with artillery moving on this town, which twelve squadrons were trying to turn. General de Tucé, placing his infantry at the barricades, deployed his cavalry on the Lignerolles road and received the enemy, who was advancing with great dash, with a fire of skirmishers placed in the gardens and behind the boundary walls…

“Our troops had taken the offensive again under a rain of shells, which had already set several houses of Patay on fire, and had dislodged the enemy from the ambushes where he had sheltered around the town, after killing more than two hundred men and taking some forty prisoners, including four officers. (1)

“But while General de Tucé maintained himself thus at Patay, the Barry division had to fall back on Boulay.” (2)

(1 and 2) Chanzy, page 90.

The Germans arrived at six in the evening at the gates of Orléans. “General de Treskow at once negotiated with the French military authority the occupation of the city. At ten o’clock, a convention was concluded, and shortly after midnight, the Grand Duke entered Orléans.”

D’Aurelle had not found the time to blow up the bridge over the Loire; yet he still had an army of 200,000 men supplied with more than 500 mouths of fire, entrenched in a fortified camp, with long-range naval pieces.

“This battle, which had lasted two days, cost the Germans 1,700 men, while the French lost 20,000, including 1,800 prisoners. Their army was cut into three pieces.” (1)

(1) Von Moltke, Memoirs.

On 5 December, General von Moltke sent Trochu the following dispatch:

“It may be useful to inform Your Excellency that the army of the Loire was defeated yesterday near Orléans and that this city is reoccupied by the German troops.”

It was the end of our hopes.

10

For its part, did the army of Paris not renounce too easily crossing the Prussian lines? We have seen it: the night of 2 to 3 December was wholly occupied in entrenching ourselves in Champigny itself and in raising a battery before the conquered lines. Why abandon these positions? The Germans would have come back to attack them, but “the entire peninsula of Joinville and the maneuver field of Vincennes were full of our troops in good order and ready for combat.” (1)

(1) Viollet-le-Duc. This battery would have allowed our troops to take in reverse the redoubt of Villiers and to install ourselves there to widen the circle of investment.

At noon, General Ducrot gives the order to withdraw the two bridges of Brie onto the île de Beauté. Our army recrosses the Marne on the other bridges.

At half past seven in the evening, the backward movement is completed and our troops bivouac in the woods of Vincennes.

Trochu wrote: “The enemy attacked us at waking with reserves and fresh troops; we could oppose to him only the adversaries of the day before yesterday (Why?), tired, with incomplete equipment, and frozen by winter nights they had spent without blankets; for, to lighten ourselves, we had had to leave them in Paris.” Is the confession of improvidence complete enough?

This retreat, after two very honorable days, and which in Paris were regarded as victories, produced on the army as on the population the most vexing effect. (2)

(2) Viollet-le-Duc.

Certainly Ducrot had borne himself valiantly the first day; but, too quickly tired, he was returning to Paris, forgetting his imprudent word. What confidence will the French people henceforth be able to have in the promises of their chiefs?

When Ducrot had read his proclamation to the Governor of Paris and to his chief of staff, Trochu requested the suppression of the famous phrase, and brought out what was rash in such an engagement. Ducrot replied: “In the game about to begin, the fate of Paris, of all France, is at stake. Each must be resolved to give his life against such a stake; for my own part, I am firmly resolved, and I must make this feeling pass into the hearts of my soldiers.” (1)

(1) “They alone,” he wrote, “who fought with us on the Villiers plateau can say that it depended on our will that our engagements not be fulfilled.” Ducrot had, in fact, pushed his horse toward the Germans and broken his sword in the breast of a Saxon soldier. His aide-de-camp, Captain Révertie, had died at his side.

Ducrot’s aim had been attained; he had set every courage aflame, and if for his personal glory one may regret words that took on the appearance of bravado, no one has ever doubted either his bravery or his sincerity.

On the other hand, Ducrot avows it, he did not know how to take advantage of the numerical inferiority of our enemies:

“Always fighting from behind entrenchments, walls, shelters, they escaped our blows, while we, on the contrary, constantly in the open, cannonaded, fusilladed on every side, came ceaselessly to break ourselves against material obstacles that our artillery could not damage.” (2)

(2) Ducrot, II, page 208.

Evidently our chiefs knew their trade less well than the German generals: they never had an overall plan; they hurled into open country young inexperienced troops; they took care neither to lodge nor to feed them; they demanded from them efforts surpassing human strength; they sent them to a certain death against enemies solidly entrenched behind walls, without even the precaution of breaching them and bombarding the garrison beforehand. When one reads attentively the clumsy books they wrote in their defense, one is forced to admit that there is no great exaggeration in the famous remark: “The French are lions led by donkeys.”

ANNEX TO CHAPTER III

War to General d’Aurelle

Tours, 6 December 1870.

The command-in-chief of the army of the Loire is suppressed. The 16th and 17th corps, forming the second army of the Loire, pass under the orders of General Chanzy.

Hand over the command immediately to General des Paillères. You are named to the command of the strategic lines of Cherbourg, and you will proceed at once to your destination.

General d’Aurelle to the Minister of War, at Tours

Salbris, 6 December 1870.

…… The command of the strategic lines of Cherbourg is not in proportion to the command-in-chief I have exercised. I owe it to my dignity not to diminish the position I have occupied, and I beg you not to require me to take possession of this command and to withdraw to my home. My health, moreover, is impaired and requires care that I can receive only at home.

IV

1870

THE AUXILIARY ENGINEERS

THE AVRON PLATEAU. — LE BOURGET. — THE GROSLAY FARM.

1

THE AVRON PLATEAU

In front of the fort of Rosny, the heights of Avron dominate the valley of the Marne. It was only when we attempted a sortie that we noticed the importance of this position. It should have been occupied and fortified from the very beginning of the siege. The Germans, who knew it well, tried more than once to seize it, but the projectiles from the fort of Rosny prevented them from holding it, so long as their works at Le Raincy were not finished — that is, until the end of December.

Our belated works were carried out in deplorable conditions. If the military incompetence of Trochu and his staff still needed to be demonstrated, one would find here a few precise proofs.

For instance, the marine infantry furnished each day six hundred men as fatigue parties to the Engineers for earthworks. “These battalions, save that of Bicêtre, lived constantly under canvas.” (1) Why?

(1) La Roncière.

Paul M. to his mother

Tuesday 13 December ‘70.

We are at present busy setting up a battery at the end of the Avron plateau. (2) We return to sleep in the village of Rosny, abandoned by its inhabitants and devastated by the mobiles. The houses have no more doors or windows.

(2) Less than 2,000 meters from the redoubt of Le Raincy.

You may give good news of M. Delbrouck. Although I am not in his company, I see him every day at work. We have gone together to Villemomble. The mobiles were playing the organ in the church. They pillage and destroy everything in an unworthy fashion. What would they do in an enemy country? (3)

(3) “The troops camped on the northern ramparts of this plateau and little watched spent their days, not in drilling, but in going to look for vegetables on the Villemomble side and pillaging that wretched village. One saw, all day long, files of these mobiles climbing back up to the plateau, laden with furniture of all kinds. What could one do with these in a warrior’s bivouac at Avron?” (Viollet-le-Duc)

Why did the chiefs not repress this pillaging, which was a cause of demoralization in the army? Mobiles, national guards, line soldiers, and francs-tireurs, all share the responsibility. Quartered in houses deserted by timorous owners, they broke everything, heating themselves with doors, window-frames, and carved furniture, pillaging the cellars, turning the soil to discover the hiding places where they hoped to find some precious objects. I saw the felt of a billiard-table cut up to be made into blankets. The troops thought neither to guard themselves nor to protect themselves against the enemy batteries, nor to prevent their construction.

Thursday 15 December. (1)

(1) Paul M.’s letters are here completed by some notes written day by day in a notebook.

By turns we have frost and thaw; we work all day, our feet in melting snow. Some of us, following a recipe given by an old trooper, have soaked their wool stockings in suet they had melted. It is a little disgusting, but one avoids in this way illnesses against which the greatest courage does not preserve us.

We distinctly make out the breastworks the Prussians are raising at Le Raincy, and we cannot understand why they are being allowed to do it. It would be so easy to harass them. (2)

(2) These breastworks were soon to receive large-caliber pieces. Our senior officers had no idea of the effect of these pieces.

Saturday 17. — Up at 4 in the morning; work until noon. — Departure for Noisy-le-Sec. — Beginning of installation, then hurried departure for Pantin. We have to throw out the soup before eating it.

Sunday 18. — The Avron plateau receives ten new pieces of 7. It is Colonel Stoffel who commands the artillery.

Monday 19. — On leave in Paris. Return at five o’clock. I bring Mademoiselle Marie Delbrouck back to her father. (3)

(3) In following her father to the outposts, this child of 14 gave a fine example of courage and filial piety.

Some soldiers of the marine infantry are returning from a small expedition. They have demolished the walls of the cemetery, which served as a shelter for the Prussians. The enemy outposts have fallen back; we take advantage of this to lay in vegetables.

Letters from my mother and my sisters have left by balloon, addressed to Fernand and to my uncle. Alix has also written to Euphémie Barbier, and Louise to Mademoiselle Madeleine Pape.

Balloons, manned by sailors or postal employees, set out at night to escape the German bullets. They carried away, with our letters, carrier pigeons, and these brought us back the replies in tiny tubes hidden under their wings. The dispatches were printed in microscopic characters on extremely light paper. For one franc, we had the right to four questions to which our relatives or friends in the provinces replied yes or no. On arrival, an electrical apparatus projected these dispatches enlarged, and they were immediately distributed. “These pigeons crossing the enemy lines, escaping as if by miracle the bullets of the Dreyse rifles and the talons of the Prussian falcons, trained to chase them; they cleft the icy air, fell half-dead on our roofs, and held out to us, under their torn feathers, the dispatches we awaited breathless.” (1)

(1) Jules Claretie.

The following year (28 Oct. ‘71) Madame Pape wrote to Madame Milliet: “We are in an abyss of profound peace… One likes to see again the places where one has greatly suffered, and we suffered mortally during the last campaign. We retrace in thought all the circumstances of the arrival of the dear little dispatch from your dear Louise, the first we received since the investment of Paris, the first that hope threw, by the courage and industry of the vanquished, to the corsair force of the odious victor. Believe me, what joy, what emotion one felt on opening that dear little note! Yes, sorrow opens and unfolds the soul, provided it be a generous sorrow!”

They say two of our carrier pigeons, which had been taken by the Prussians, came back to us bearing false dispatches.

Tuesday 20. — The Prussian batteries established at Le Raincy begin to send us some enormous shells. Our works are far too weak to resist. Some forty sailors are wounded.

2

LE BOURGET

Paul to his mother

Wednesday 21.

Our day yesterday was employed in the construction of two bridges over the Ourcq canal (between Pantin and Bondy). It was very picturesque and very interesting. In the evening, we had to continue by torchlight until one in the morning. Several men fell into the water; happily the canal is not deep just now.

At half past four in the morning we were relighting the torches to light the passage of the troops, (1) while our carpenters gave the work the last touches.

(1) “The roads, so unfortunately barred by abatis, had to be cleared. In the night of 20 to 21 December, around five in the morning, infantry and artillery began to move toward Le Bourget by the bridges; but the enemy being cautiously disposed to attack Drancy, on which he directed a lively cannonade, we limited ourselves, on our side, to occupying this point and defending it by works begun under fire.” (Viollet-le-Duc)

At half past seven the armored wagons give the signal, and the forts begin a vigorous cannonade. A quarter of an hour later, the assault columns rush forward.

Trochu is at the Sulferie with his staff. Some soldiers, having vainly struck against a loopholed wall, he orders the artillery to fire at that wall, without worrying about our troops, who hold firm in the village and whom this clumsiness compels to abandon it.

Thursday 22. — Yesterday afternoon, we set off with packs on our backs, arms and tools, for Drancy. But we had not yet arrived when we were ordered to turn about.

Night was coming on; the affair was already over and we did not know the outcome.

We came back amid an unheard-of congestion of carriages, artillery wagons, and troops; we took a step every ten minutes. It is a movement I still do not understand. Perhaps it was only a feigned attack. — At this moment the national guard and the artillery are retracing their steps.

We were not able to hold Le Bourget. It appears, however, that the day was not bad; we had gained ground and our losses are insignificant. I saw the ambulance carts come back empty. — Tomorrow a major affair is expected.

While the Germans slept tranquil, warmly lodged in our houses, our troops slept without shelter on the plain of Aubervilliers.

“What a cruel evening!” reports Ducrot, “what a cruel night! To make soup in that camp of cold, a few grains of rice, a few crumbs of biscuit, water painfully drawn by piercing the ice and which froze during transport. Night came at 4 o’clock, somber, sad; a north wind, sharp, tearing, lacerated the faces of the wretched men grouped around rare and meager fires of green wood… The earth was too hard to drive in tent pegs, they broke. Few slept that night… and among the sleepers, 900 cases of frostbite were noted the next day.” (1)

(1) Six hundred men of the marine infantry slept constantly under canvas. “At this hour they were freezing. Water and wine are frozen, and bread can only be cut with hatchet blows.” (La Roncière)

3

THE GROSLAY FARM

Saturday 24. — We are fortifying the Groslay farm. The Germans had come there on the 13th in reconnaissance, as attests a pencil inscription I read on a door, and copied.

Sunday 25. — We distinctly see the Prussian sentries. Some sailors and francs-tireurs have fired at them. The Prussians do not reply. — Sharp cold. — One of our sentries was found frozen. — Five others. — De Vesly (my lieutenant) has been wounded in the foot. He is taken to the ambulance organized at the École des Beaux-Arts by M. E. Guillaume. (2)

(2) He was nursed there by Madame Garnier, wife of the architect of the Opera, and by the Baroness d’Orthez. Another of our wounded was cared for in the foyer of the Théâtre-Français, also transformed into an ambulance.

Madame Milliet to her son Paul

26 Dec. ‘70.

… It is four days since you left, and I think you would have great need of rest. We are well, but we are greatly preoccupied about you. I received your note by Marie Delbrouck. The newspapers say absolutely nothing; one knows nothing. The cold is probably paralyzing the projected movements. The Seine yesterday carried ice floes and debris of bridges. It would be a great misfortune if it froze entirely. (3) I know that you are working on the approaches to Le Bourget, but how can one stir the earth in such a frost? I should much like to know if you go back to sleep at Pantin.

(3) The Prussian bridges, below Choisy, were carried away. The Ivry bridge halts all this debris; ice piles up there. The Seine is freezing. The flotilla boats observing Choisy are blocked in the lock. — In anticipation of an attack, it became necessary to provoke a break-up. Workmen, helped by the flotilla sailors, cut a channel in the ice, whose thickness sometimes exceeded a meter. — It was only after fifteen days of these hard labors that the flotilla could be unblocked. (La Roncière, page 426)

Yesterday Sunday, we went to hear a lecture by M. Legouvé; we had brought Marie Delbrouck with us. He spoke very well, but my mind was elsewhere. Good-bye, dear child. May God grant it be soon. I should like to see you in a good bed to warm you thoroughly. Take care not to let your feet freeze. We all embrace you tenderly. Your mother: L.

Monday 26. — Our new pieces of 7 easily reach the batteries the Prussians are building at Le Raincy. (1)

(1) “With a spyglass one could see the enemy artillerymen scatter outside their works.” (La Roncière)

Tuesday 27. — It is snowing. At half past seven in the morning, the Prussians begin to bombard the Avron plateau with unheard-of violence. (2)

(2) They fired up to 60 rounds per hour on the entire plateau.

At eleven o’clock, sent by M. Bruyerre (my captain), I run from Drancy to Groslay to ask orders of M. Viollet-le-Duc. He at once sends us to Bondy, which we put in a state of defense. As an enemy battery directly enfilades the main street, we pierce a passage through the walls of the houses and gardens.

Wednesday 28. — Trochu went to the Avron plateau; he realized that the position was no longer tenable and ordered it to be evacuated. (3)

(3) “The next day at five in the morning, the troops fall back and abandon their positions in silence.” (La Roncière)

True, we had on this point only 36 pieces to answer the fire of 60. Why did we not anticipate the enemy? It was assuredly more difficult for the Germans than for us to bring up large-caliber pieces before Paris. Had von Moltke had Trochu’s mentality, he would have declared the thing impossible. Why did we not, first, fire 120 rounds an hour on the batteries under construction? Not only would we have kept Avron, but we would have seized Le Raincy, and the iron circle would have been notably widened. It took General Le Flô a prodigious dose of foolishness to be astonished, at the Council of 28 December, that so much importance was attached to the possession of “this Avron plateau”!

Its loss was going to render impossible every later attack, whether on Villiers or on Le Bourget.

Thursday 29. — The sailors give proof of admirable devotion. They harness themselves to the heavy pieces and bring them back along a steep slope so covered with ice that the horses could not stand on it. They manage during the night to carry the projectiles on their backs as far as the fort of Rosny.

Paris has kept deep gratitude to these brave sailors. For his part, Admiral La Roncière, more equitable than his colleagues, has written: “Let Paris know it, let France know it, the seamen will never forget that, amid so many sorrows, in successes as in reverses, they saw handfuls of inexperienced children of the mobile, or their elders of the national guard, second them in these sterile struggles, accompany them in these fatigues ever renewed, and fight with them like men of heart, many like heroes.”

Six soldiers of the 113th of the line were found frozen the other night in the trench we had just finished at Groslay. One of them was dead.

Paul M. to his mother

Pantin, 29 Dec. ‘70.

Reassure yourself, dear mother, the life we lead is tiring, but I bear it very well so far… For some time we no longer work at night, that is a great point, for we need a little sleep.

The cold is very rigorous. Our poor soldiers have pitiful looks. One must have the courage not to remain still a minute, not to sit down, not to fall asleep. It is even better to avoid approaching the fire, for afterwards the cold seems even sharper.

We leave here each morning at daybreak, and do not come back until night to eat. We take during the day only a very small piece of bread and chocolate.

“We have put in a state of defense the Groslay farm — or rather the heaps of debris that remain of it. The shells have wrought frightful ravage; it is heart-breaking to see.

Last summer it was a charming spot, a country house with vast outbuildings. On two sides the farm is surrounded by a piece of water, with two rows of willows and magnificent poplars; we have cut them all down to make barricades.

The Prussians are there before us at 450 meters; we do not understand why they let us work in tranquillity. (1) We distinctly see their sentinels, who are relieved from time to time; they scarcely hide a little behind the trees. They occupy the whole length of the railway, and their posts are established in the small linemen’s houses. (2)

(1) They knew that their Le Raincy batteries would allow them to seize this post when they wished. (2) The Groslay farm is only a thousand meters from the Soissons railway.

A few sailors and francs-tireurs had the unfortunate idea of firing rifle shots at the advanced sentries, whom we see falling back. Pickart, with three other sappers, wanted to go look for vegetables on that side; they came under fire which happily hit no one.

Wednesday 28. — We continue our work at Drancy: it is a shelter-trench to link two new batteries which will be formidable.

An auxiliary artilleryman was killed this morning. The bullet went right through his head. I see him at this moment lying on a stretcher in the little cemetery of Drancy. A soldier is digging his grave. His captain was wounded in the thigh.

Paul M. to his mother

(Same date).

… Before us stretches an immense and bare plain, broken only by a few hedges behind which the enemy has set up his batteries. — Two shells have just been fired at us; they burst out of range. We hear the cannon roaring day and night.

I have no news. We only know what we see. I hope to obtain soon the permission to come and embrace you, but on what day shall I be free? That will depend on events. I have not had the chance to meet Henri. — Have you no news of Fernand or my uncle? — Until soon, courage and confidence. — I embrace you all with all my heart.

On 30 December I received from my sister Louise, aged 15, the following letter:

To Paul Milliet, sergeant. — Auxiliary Engineers Legion, 1st battalion, 1st march company, 1st platoon, 2nd section, at Pantin.

… We think of you continually and we are very worried and very sad to know you exposed not only to the Prussians’ blows but also to cold and fatigue; so we were happy to receive your letter, which reassured us a little. We shall pass a very sad New Year’s Day if you cannot come back to us. — Henri has come back ill after an eight-hour night sentry duty. His legs are swollen.

Marie Delbrouck has told us the peripeties of her campaign. We see her almost every day, so as to share news.

Farewell, my poor dear old fellow, try to come back to us soon safe and sound. Above all, do not let yourself freeze.

We have just seen Marie, who gives us hope of seeing you on Sunday. That would fill us with joy.

Trochu, so popular during the first months of the siege, continued to withdraw his troops as soon as a position had been conquered. People were speaking of replacing him.

General Vinoy proposed to push solid columns on various points, in the hope of clearing a passage. General Schmidt was not of the opinion of moving away from Paris, but, in agreement with General Le Flô, he thought a supreme effort must be attempted and a great battle delivered.

Jules Favre also asked that satisfaction be given to the population, which was demanding energetic action. A deputation of the members of the Institute had formulated the same wish.

V

1871

LAST COMBATS

BOMBARDMENT. — ILLUSIONS. — BUZENVAL. — CAPITULATION.

1

On 30 December, all the siege batteries being ready, the bombardment of the city began. Doctorally and pedantically, the Prussians said they had waited for the psychological moment — that is, the hour when hunger, illness, and a series of fruitless efforts would have begun to break courage. Then the Krupp cannons would come to deliver the coup de grâce and hasten capitulation.

Saturday 31. — We work between the forts of Noisy and Rosny. The German shells pass over our heads. One of them cut the telegraph wire, which fell on our company in march.

First of January. — On leave in Paris.

2 January. — Return to Pantin. Continuation of shelter-trenches under a rain of shells. (1)

(1) This bombardment was not always directed with enough precision to make our work impossible. Our sappers quickly grew used to the danger. One of them was charged with watching the enemy battery. As soon as he saw the smoke, he cried: “Down!” Our men at once crouched in the trench, waiting for the projectile to burst; they rarely had to wait more than a minute. “From 15 December to 5 January, 6,100 shells hit the forts of Rosny and Noisy and covered the plateau between the two redoubts. In 28 days, from 30 December to the signing of the armistice, there were about 12,000 shells. Each represents a value in money of 25 francs. This fire reached in a month the figure of one million seven hundred and twenty thousand francs.” (Viollet-le-Duc)

3 January. — We gave a warm welcome this morning to the Poullizac Scouts, who were returning from a night reconnaissance. They surprised the Prussian posts on the Soissons railway and bring back six prisoners. A seventh, who did not want to surrender, was killed on the spot. (2)

(2) On the same day, “one of our soldiers, taken at the moment when he was going over to the enemy, was tried before a court-martial and immediately shot.” (La Roncière)

5 January. — The shots succeed one another without interruption. — I learn that shells are falling on the Panthéon, rue Gay-Lussac, and in our neighborhood. I am anxious for my mother, my father, and my sister. — A child of seven has just been killed. It is hateful!

Without any prior warning being given to the besieged, the bombardment fell on the city from the Invalides as far as the Jardin des Plantes, killing women in the street, sick people in their beds, smashing libraries, the greenhouses of the Muséum, the Sorbonne, Saint-Sulpice; 4 bombs fell on the Observatory, 30 on the Pitié hospital.

“Instead of bringing discouragement, this savage bombardment, useless from a military point of view, and which will never be pardoned to Prussia by any civilized nation, only exasperated resistance.” (1)

(1) Viollet-le-Duc.

6 January. — Construction of a casemate between the fort of Rosny and the redoubt of La Boissière.

The Saxons, who long had at Le Raincy only the French pieces of 12 and 24, taken at Sedan and Metz, now have two new batteries; one directed at the fort of Rosny, the other at the Avron plateau. (2)

(2) These batteries were armed with Krupp cannons, rifled, of cast steel, which fire oblong projectiles of 58 kilograms. Their range is seven to eight thousand meters. The shell sinks 5.60 m before bursting. At a thousand meters, it pierces a wall 3.50 m thick.

In a meeting of the mayors, Delescluze energetically demanded: “the resignation of Generals Trochu, Clément-Thomas and Le Flô; the rejuvenation of the staffs; the referral to court-martial of generals and officers of every rank who preach discouragement in the army.”

A red poster, stuck on 6 January on the walls of Paris, bore the names of the delegates of the twenty arrondissements:

Has the government which on 4 September took on national defense fulfilled its mission? — No.

We are five hundred thousand combatants and two hundred thousand Prussians hold us in their grip! Whose responsibility, if not those who govern us? They have refused the mass levy. They decided to act at last against the Prussians only after two months, the day after 31 October. By their slowness, their indecision, their inertia, they have led us to the edge of the abyss: they have known neither how to administer nor how to fight… Aimless sorties, deadly struggles without result, repeated failures, Paris bombarded. The Government has given us its measure; it is killing us.

If the men of the Hôtel de Ville still have any patriotism, their duty is to withdraw, to leave the people of Paris to take in hand its own deliverance.

The municipality or the Commune — by whatever name it be called — is the people’s only salvation. The perpetuation of the present regime is capitulation, ruin, and shame! War indemnities crushing Paris — there is what improvidence or treason is preparing for us.

General requisitioning, Free rationing. — Mass attack. — Make way for the people, make way for the Commune!

It is to this poster that General Trochu replied with his famous proclamation:

At the moment when the enemy redoubles his efforts of intimidation, an attempt is being made to lead the citizens of Paris astray by deception and slander. Nothing will make the arms fall from our hands… Courage, confidence, patriotism! The Governor of Paris will not capitulate.

6 January 1871.

The Governor of Paris, General TROCHU.

On 8 January, Delescluze, mayor of the nineteenth arrondissement, and his deputies sent their resignations to the Government.

Le Monde Illustré, organ of the middle class, also began to criticize severely Trochu’s conduct: “The public is asking whether there is not something else to be done besides feigned attacks and diffuse proclamations.”

2

Louise M. to her brother

7 January ‘71.

You can reassure yourself about us. We slept, mamma and I, at Madame Huet’s, and we heard only M. César Franck’s piano, which much annoyed us. The bombs did not fall on our side. People think the famous Krupp cannon was dismounted by our sailors. However, they bombarded Vaugirard and the Cail factory, which, having the war, had employed many Germans.

We made a long tour with Alix to see the effects produced by the shells. It was magnificent weather and the loafers went to see all this damage as one goes to see a spectacle: demolished chimneys, holes in walls, broken windows, carried-away windows, torn-off balconies; we saw all that, but we could not pick up a shell fragment, to our great regret. — Three shells having fallen on the ambulance of the Closerie des Lilas, all the poor wounded were moved out. There were full five omnibuses of them; they had very suffering faces! Those who climbed up on the top had great trouble hauling themselves up; the others had to be carried.

One day, I happened to be for a few moments on leave, and I had just embraced my mother, happy to see me still alive, when my two sisters came back to the house, pale, panting, distraught. This is what they told us: as they were crossing the Seine, a dense crowd was pressing on the quay with cries of fury. They approached, and noticed a man who had just been thrown into the water. Rightly or wrongly, someone — a personal enemy perhaps — had accused him of being a spy. The wretch, after a plunge into the icy river, struggled desperately against death. He swam, and his convulsed head appeared at intervals above the water. Then the shouts redoubled and stones were thrown at him, until the unfortunate man disappeared a final time.

My sisters long kept present in memory the horrible vision of this scene of murder. (1)

(1) Can it be that long centuries of civilization have not sufficed to soften the hereditary instincts of the primitive brute, always ready to wake in some fold of the brain of our descendants? Not one of these blind murderers asked himself for an instant whether the accusation was founded; none had the simple idea of entrusting to justice the care of judging whether, if there was occasion, there was reason to punish the crime.

That there were Prussian spies in Paris is certain, (2) but we saw them everywhere. I do not know whether I was right or wrong to arrest a curious man who came to inspect our works and took notes in a pocket-book. Commander Davioud released him with a laugh, without even questioning him. In the evening, as soon as a lamp was seen at some high window, the crowd gathered, watching with uneasiness. One would say: “The light seems to go on and off at regular intervals”; another saw it change color. So many agreed signals! And inoffensive watchers were arrested.

(2) “Paris swarmed with Prussian spies, hardly any of whom were arrested, and not one of whom was shot.” (A. Arnould, I, page 63)

On the night of 8 to 9 January, the quarter of the Odéon and Saint-Sulpice received a shell every two minutes. “A school on the rue de Vaugirard had four children killed and five wounded by a single projectile. The brains of these little beings spurted against the wall. The Academy had appealed to the civilized world; the representatives of the neutral powers addressed a protest against these acts of war horrible in their uselessness.” (1)

(1 and 2) J. Claretie.

The inhabitants of the bombarded quarters took refuge in the cellars; others fled, and lodgings were opened to them by the municipalities.

Richard Wallace, moved with pity, organized a subscription in favor of these unfortunates, and generously inscribed himself for one hundred thousand francs. “Let this name of Richard Wallace be ever hailed by the poor and the suffering.” (2)

3

Madame Milliet to her son

9 January ‘71.

… The Prussians continue to fling many shells at us. Many have fallen in the Luxembourg garden, but as it was between 1 and 7 in the morning, they hurt no one. Some have fallen on the rue Saint-Placide, the rue du Four, the rue d’Ulm, and around the Panthéon. Very few accidents, but a deafening din. I thought I should find this morning all the houses on the boulevard Saint-Michel down, or at least caved in, and I saw only a hole at the corner of the rue Soufflot, at the bookseller’s; and another at a pastry-cook’s.

We sleep in the apartment Madame Huet has offered us. At first we found her room too muffled; we heard nothing; then we did not take long to find it too resonant. The bombs do not let us sleep. We have just promised Alix to go and sleep tomorrow at her place (rue Martel) if we continue not to sleep.

Be without anxiety on our account; it is easy not to go out at night, and I think we are well sheltered in the north room. Henri is still ill; he has a bronchitis that will not pass — quite the contrary.

Do the newspapers reach you? Today there is a dispatch from Gambetta, and the news is good. — The Prussians attempted the assault of the fort of Vanves, without success; they threw incendiary bombs.

Paul M. to his mother

Pantin, 9 January ‘71.

I am much worried to know that the bombardment is reaching your neighborhood, and I should like to know you in shelter.

We continue our works. None of us has been wounded these days. The fog favors us. Yesterday our sailors fired a few broadsides, seven or eight cannon shots at a time; it is a very fine effect: the shells leap forth together like a flight of birds. From the very first broadside, the piece that was firing most directly at us ceased fire. Our heavy naval pieces have not yet spoken. (1)

(1) The precision of this fire proves that we could have prevented the Prussians from setting up their batteries at Le Raincy.

M. Delbrouck’s company is working today with ours.

11 January. — One of our men killed; head carried away, horribly mutilated. — Five wounded. — We continue work. The other companies withdraw.

Louise M. to her brother

11 January ‘71.

Mamma is much better, and so is Henri. Doctor Duchanssoy has heard that the Prussians attempted an attack on the side of Rosny and that our artillery inflicted enormous losses on them. At Châtillon we blew up a powder-magazine on them. — They want to take revenge for all their defeats (!), and, before retreating, they hasten to use up all their shells.

Tonight one fell on our house. (1) The vibration broke all the windows in front; it was none too warm. But in Madame Huet’s apartment we are very well. If it should fall too heavily, we should go down to the cellar. Rosalie (the cook) picked up a big piece of shell still all hot and smelling very bad. We have put precious objects into trunks and taken them down to the cellar. Your cartons are in Madame Huet’s room.

(1) Boulevard Saint-Michel, no. 96.

These Prussian wretches! If they think to frighten us, beat us down, and discourage us, they are mistaken; they only stir up our indignation, our exasperation, and our rage against them. — Alix has no luck; in her rue Martel she hardly hears the shells. If she had not Henri to look after, she would have come here to hear them closer.

We hope to see you at the end of the week. Greetings and fraternity.

Paul M. to his mother

Pantin, 13 January ‘71.

I am very happy to know you safe and sound, but news reaches me so late that it is not enough to reassure me. I should like to know you at Alix’s; you would be safer there.

We continue to work amid a hail of shells, but we are by now so used to it that we hardly pay attention. The first days, some men lay down on the ground; that did not seem effective. M. Delbrouck, always unarmed, quietly reads his newspaper and watches over the works as he walks about in the most perilous spot. The example of courage is contagious.

Our sailors reply admirably to the Prussians. We have had veritable artillery combats. It is an appalling din which until now has not led to very great results.

13 January. — At Saint-Denis, M. Viollet-le-Duc begins works to protect the tombs of the kings, which are in the church. (1)

(1) Thanks to his shieldings of timbers covered with sandbags, these precious masterpieces could be preserved from the enemy shells.

Louise M. to her brother

14 January ‘71.

We continue to be bombarded, but, like you, we are getting used to it. Several motives have prevented us from going to settle at Alix’s: Papa is safe enough in his north room; if then we went, mamma and I, to sleep every evening at Alix’s, we should have to come back home in the morning, and the Prussians bombard by day as much as by night. The best is to go out as little as possible. We must however queue up to have our ration of horse and bread, which we cannot obtain elsewhere. Then no moving carriages are to be found. Moreover, it would much bother us to think that you might come on leave and not find us there.

Our quarter is not the only one to receive shells; they throw them everywhere, on the rue Mouffetard, the rue de Lourcine, and as far as the quays; but they aim by preference at the ambulances and hospitals; so Prussian wounded have been put at the Val-de-Grâce, since they obstinately fire at it; and now let them kill their soldiers if they will; (1) I really find that we let them do it very quietly and hardly trouble them.

(1) Eight hundred and eighty wounded were being treated in the wooden huts of the Luxembourg; rescue was at once organized by the national guard, before the eyes of the shells. The mattresses were placed on stretchers or on chairs; others had to be carried on shoulders as far as the Val-de-Grâce. There the German wounded were also brought, and von Moltke was informed of these decisions.

We have taken various things down to the cellar; we could go down ourselves if the danger became too great. Besides, we are not afraid and we do not lose our heads, that is the main thing. We are much more tormented for you; you are much more exposed than we, and you have no houses or cellars to shelter you.

These Prussian animals would much like to enter Paris, or to win some victory on 16 January, the festival day of their King William; for myself, if I could strangle him that day, I should be pleased.

The news from the provinces is good.

Try to come back to us, were it only for a day; we should like to see you.

Greetings and fraternity.

A shell has fallen in Madame Pape’s garden; so all the people in her house live in the cellar, and our lessons are suspended.

4

Provisions became more and more rare. The women showed a firmness and resignation that often sustained the courage of the men. Without complaining, they remained for hours at the door of the municipal butcher-shops, awaiting their turn.

“We have seen them, the poor mothers, muffled up in their capes, holding their little children by the hand, whom they could not leave alone at home; poor mites! Their faces disappeared under the folds of a thick woolen muffler knitted by the grandmother. We have seen them, the poor old people, a basket in hand, stamping their feet on the ground to keep from freezing. All shivering. — They came to seek some meager pittance: horse, salt meat, preserved Australian beef — and what portions!” (1)

(1) Francis Enne.

Children were dying by the thousand.

From twelve to thirteen hundred, the normal figure for Parisian deaths, mortality rose to four thousand five hundred. “All the black cortege of diseases born of long privations had fallen upon us; one saw only hearses making their way to the cemetery.” (2)

(2) Ducrot, III, 204.

Each arrondissement had appointed a republican Committee of Vigilance, and the central Committee was formed by the meeting of eighty citizens, chosen at the rate of four delegates per arrondissement. As early as 13 September, the central Committee proposed that all foodstuffs be requisitioned and stored by the Government. Supplies would have been distributed among all the inhabitants in proportion to the number of persons composing each family. These measures could have greatly prolonged the resistance. They would moreover have had this advantage of effacing for a time the distinctions between rich and poor. All citizens, having the same duties and undergoing the same privations, would have felt themselves equal before the common peril. — But abnegation is rare, and the rich do not easily renounce their privileges. At the moment when so many proletarians were dying of hunger, fourteen bons vivants, for example, gathered periodically to feast at a famous restaurateur’s. Immediately after the siege, as they had the gratitude of the belly, they had a fine gold medal struck at the Mint to offer to Brébant. The inscription is the shameful monument of an egoism which displays itself with the cynicism of unconsciousness. Here it is:

DURING THE SIEGE OF PARIS, A FEW PERSONS WHO HAD BECOME ACCUSTOMED TO MEET AT M. BRÉBANT’S EVERY FORTNIGHT DID NOT ONCE NOTICE THAT THEY WERE DINING IN A BESIEGED CITY OF TWO MILLION SOULS. 1870-1871

On the reverse, one regrets to find illustrious names that out of pity I prefer not to cite. (See A. Arnould, I, page 51)

Madame Milliet to her son

14 January ‘71.

I am very anxious, my dear child, to know you so exposed. Will they not let you rest a little? I should gladly go for news to Madame Mazard’s, but one goes out as little as possible; the streets are not safe to walk. It is very sad to remain without communication with the outside. The fog distresses me and worries me. They are going to try the attack of some fort, and we shall not see them coming. They say they attacked the fort of Issy last night; I know nothing positive.

Jules Favre is going to leave for London. For me, I see this departure with pain. It seems however that it is Gambetta’s advice. (1)

(1) A conference was about to open in London to “settle the affairs of the East” at the moment when the very existence of France was in peril. Jules Favre was invited as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Bismarck offered him a safe-conduct. Gambetta advised him to accept because he saw in this act an official recognition of the French Republic, but Jules Favre would not abandon bombarded Paris.

A newspaper announces that our provincial armies are only ten leagues from Paris; that needs confirmation. An assault is expected — and very soon. Others claim that if Jules Favre leaves, the bombardment will be suspended; but I do not believe it.

15 January. — They say the Germans are beginning to set up batteries on the Avron plateau. (2)

(2) Beneath this plateau are dug immense quarries, which were occupied some time by 20,000 mobiles, in anticipation of an attack. Why were these troops withdrawn? It was no doubt feared that the exit from these underground passages might not allow the soldiers to come out fast enough, and that they might be caught as in a mousetrap.

The national guard had suffered less than the army; it had remained full of dash and resolution. But the soldiers, exhausted by excessive service, offered a heart-rending spectacle.

To understand and excuse a little the lack of confidence of their chiefs, one must have seen these poor people in bivouac, beneath the icy wind, huddled around a brazier where they burned the furniture taken from abandoned houses, gloomy, silent, indifferent to all, scarcely answering the voice of their officers. “They were pitiful to see, their heads wrapped in rags, their blanket folded and refolded around the body, their legs wrapped in tatters, no longer having a soldier’s shape.” (1) It was indeed, in Jules Simon’s expression, “Moscow at the gates of Paris.”

(1) Ducrot, page 272.

5

ILLUSIONS

In a besieged city, imaginations work, and it often happens that café strategists take their fantastic dreams for realities. Some recounted that a French army, set out from Brest, had landed in Denmark; (2) others, that the Bavarians refused to continue the war, etc… Here is a sample of these morbid inventions:

(2) “The Fleet, very strong in warships as in transports, was to be used to throw on the German coast a considerable landing corps, in order to retain in the north part of the Prussian forces.” (Von Moltke, Memoirs)

Louise M. to her brother

15 January ‘71.

… Papa saw at the café a gentleman who claims to know in a positive manner Trochu’s plan. There is nothing impossible about this: the execution of the plan having begun, there is no longer any motive for hiding it. General Trochu has remained insensible to all the suspicions and astonishing accusations launched against him. He has thought only of the execution of his plan, and it will be magnificent. People will see that he is not only an honest man, but a great man. This plan consists in sending into Prussia an army of 150,000 men commanded by Bourbaki. General de Bressoles would join him with 12,000 turcos. Garibaldi would enter Bavaria, where he would proclaim the republic. The invading army would be followed by convoys of arms and munitions for our prisoners, who would be freed. Faidherbe’s army would cut communications between the Prussian army and Germany.

Trochu’s delay had no other aim than to retain the Prussians around Paris. His plan was known only to Gambetta and Jules Favre; it will be published only when our army is in Berlin. The Prussians, seeing that we put all to fire and sword among them, will run to defend Berlin, and we shall be relieved, without having needed to make sorties.

However the Prussians are stubborn; it is to be feared that they may say to themselves: The French are pillaging Berlin, let us pay them back in kind; let us sprinkle Paris with petrol, hurl a rain of incendiary bombs. It would be appalling!

At this moment the cannon roars enough to make one think the windows will break. These are probably our batteries set up on the Orléans railway.

Henri has left for Vitry; Alix came to see us; she wants to sleep here tomorrow; it bothers her too much not to have heard the shells closer up.

Each of us was then making his own campaign plan. Among all these projects more or less feasible, here was ours:

To take Paris — the Germans knew it well — would be for them the definitive triumph. To that end, their armies formed around the city a double circle: the first occupied in tightening the investment, the second in preventing the revictualing of the place. To this concentration of enemy forces, another concentration must be opposed, that of the troops France could still dispose of. All were to rush by forced marches around Paris. Four formidable sorties, in different directions, would have been combined and carried out simultaneously. On the same day, at the same hour, four relief armies would have hurled themselves on the besiegers: Bourbaki to the east, Faidherbe to the north, d’Aurelle to the south, Chanzy to the west. While refusing pitched battle, we should have harassed the enemy without respite by continual alarms, by day and by night; all the night raids attempted succeeded. Thanks to the rapidity of our movements, we could throw ourselves in numbers on weaker army corps, seize a few redoubts, defeat the enemy piecemeal, while his reserves, themselves threatened, could not relieve the attacked positions. And the iron circle would have been broken.

The generals considered our situation desperate; but the Paris population could not admit that there was nothing more to be done.

People demanded a general sortie on every point of the perimeter, with the national guard, the regular army, the corps francs, the sailors — in a word, the entire armed population. That was what was called “the torrential sortie.” Ducrot mocked these mad dreams. It is certain that if Joan of Arc had come to offer him her services, he would have had her shut up at the Salpêtrière. There are exceptional moments when sublime madness is more effective than wisdom and reason. The idea was put forward of assembling the members of the Government, the magistracy, the clergy, the young girls, with the banners of the religious corporations; mothers holding their young children in their arms, all would have gone processionally out of the city and marched straight against the German lines. The shame of the massacre would have fallen on our enemies.

6

BUZENVAL

19 January. — Yielding to the population’s wishes, Trochu noisily organizes a new sortie. He could be ready as early as Friday, but he wants to avoid that day. “I confess,” he says, “that Friday vexes me; we already have so many chances against us that we must not add to them.” — Jules Favre, fearing public impatience, insists that the operation be advanced. Trochu, though time fails him to complete the preparations, accepts Thursday the 19th.

“If our attack had been carried out on the 18th, during the proclamation of the German Emperor in the château of Louis XIV, it would have had a certain opportuneness and would have thrown a sinister gleam across that ridiculous ceremony. But it was destined that we should know nothing how to do anything at the right moment.” (1)

(1) Viollet-le-Duc.

It is to the mobilized national guards that the honor of opening fire was reserved. A general said: “These swaggering national guards absolutely want to have their faces smashed; we shall lead them to it.”

“None of the military chiefs had any illusion as to the fate reserved for the attempt about to be made. All considered it doomed in advance to failure.” (2)

(2) Lieutenant-Colonel Rousset, III, 368.

From three in the morning, 90,000 men, of whom 42,000 national guards, set out and mass between the rond-point of Courbevoie and the bridge of Neuilly. Our troops are formed in three columns under the orders of Ducrot, Vinoy, and Bellemare. They are supported by 138 field pieces and 32 mitrailleuses.

The action, which was to begin at 6 in the morning, is delayed by the fog. The march has been so badly regulated that the roads at once become clogged; the columns blend, it is an inextricable jumble.

General Ducrot, having placed his batteries at Rueil, at once launches his skirmishers against the wall of the park of Saint-Cloud. Taking advantage of a few breaches, our soldiers manage to penetrate for an instant, but the Germans soon throw them back outside the boundary wall.

At La Malmaison, the Susbielle division dislodges an advanced post and comes to garnish the wall of the park.

It is the Berthaut division that moves on Buzenval. Here again, a murderous fire from the Germans, hidden under cover, paralyzes its attack.

Everywhere, at Saint-Cloud, at Montretout, at Garches, “the battalions of the national guard are hurled against redoubts, without the attack having been prepared by the artillery.” (1)

(1) It is the Prussian Staff that makes this remark.

Thirteen German companies garnished the wall of Longboyau. General Ducrot, impatient at their resistance, orders the obstacle to be blown up, against which twice already the dash of our men has broken.

Under a hellish fire, General Tripier throws against the wall a brigade of ten sappers and a sergeant. Of the ten men and their chief, none survives; all, victims of their heroism, are mown down before reaching the foot of the wall; the sergeant alone, struck with three mortal wounds, managed to drag his bloody body back to us. (1)

(1) Ducrot, IV, page 126. — Necessities of war? Many people congratulated themselves on not having to take such responsibilities.

“The liveliest and most stubborn attacks are directed at La Bergerie. There again the battalions hurled to the assault are accompanied by a section of engineers who try to overthrow the boundary wall. The attempt fails. The dynamite being frozen, the explosion does not occur.” (2)

(2) Prussian Staff.

The enemy, perfectly under cover, could not suffer serious losses, while ours, badly protected by the woods in which they were stationed, were hit with certainty. At nightfall the fire ceased; our troops, and notably the war battalions of the national guard, had suffered sensible losses. (3) “Their positions were kept a few meters from the enemy: a simple wall separated the French from the Prussians.

(3) We lost five thousand men, the Germans one thousand.

The German generals, who knew the strategic importance of Montretout, gave the order to retake at all costs this position. At eight in the evening three columns set out to make a converging attack on this redoubt, but found there only a few isolated soldiers, who were taken prisoner.

At Saint-Cloud, the resistance of our men was so stubborn that the enemy had to content himself with surrounding the houses.

From the height of the redoubt of Garches, Trochu had followed all the peripeties of the combat. Convinced in advance of the impotence of our efforts, he gave, as early as six in the evening, the order to beat a retreat. He would have done better to send fresh troops and to keep the conquered positions.

“As for the courageous defenders of Saint-Cloud, he forgot them. It was only in the afternoon of the next day that, at the sight of a new battery directed against them, these brave men, abandoned, decided to lay down their arms.” (1)

(1) Prussian Staff. — We had however cannons in considerable number. “Viollet-le-Duc offered to transport these pieces by hand in an hour, with the help of the Auxiliary Legion. The military men did not accept.” (Claretie, page 529)

Before the park of Buzenval there died heroically one of my comrades from the École des Beaux-Arts, the painter Henri Regnault. Prize-winner of the prix de Rome, he was by law exempt from all military service, but the gallant young man had too much heart not to rush to the defense of his country. On 19 January, toward evening, accompanied by his friend Clairin, he was skirmishing in the wood. The retreat is sounded; Regnault keeps moving forward. He is called back; he cries: “One more shot and I come back.” The next day they found only a body, its face bloodied, on which the dead leaves had stuck. There was a profound consternation among the artists. (1)

(1) This inscription was sewn to his brown overcoat: Regnault, painter, son of Regnault of the Institute. — The father, a chemist, director of the Sèvres Manufactory, was held by the Prussians as a hostage.

“Each felt that a flame had just been extinguished, that something precious and irreparable had just been forever broken. Such a beautiful youth, a talent so precocious and so dazzling, the renown of a master conquered before its age, a radiant future full of promises, the happiness that awaited him, on the threshold of marriage, in the form of an accomplished young woman… a stupid bullet has destroyed all that in an instant. It has struck that brow full of light and of dreams, marked with the sign of the elect of art. So cruel a fatality gives the idea of a crime committed by death.” (2)

(2) Paul de Saint-Victor.

Paul M. to his mother

20 January.

Yesterday’s day was terrible. We are tired, but all safe and sound. They say it is not the same with the Delbrouck company. We did nothing but incomprehensible marches and counter-marches. We waited for hours at Rueil, in front of Jules Favre’s house. Orders and counter-orders succeeded one another all night. We do not yet know the result of the battle. What is certain is that the affair was badly managed. The artillery was five or six hours late. The national guards mounted the assault four or five times in succession against an impregnable wall, and we had no cannons to make a breach in it. They asked us to go and blow it up, but we had no dynamite, and even if we had, no one taught us how to use it. It is shameful! I remember having read in the Revue des Deux Mondes an article on dynamite — look it up, I beg you, and give me all the practical details you find there…

Léon C. to his sister

Neuilly, 22 January ‘71.

… We were at Courbevoie, awaiting the 19th, day of the attack. We were part of the Faron division, 3rd army corps. At six in the morning, we set off; they had us halt at Rueil for hours, doing nothing. We saw the procession of the wounded, and we remained in the midst of the shells until four in the afternoon. (1) Then we were sent back into Rueil to make soup. — We slept in a glass factory half demolished by shells; we had hardly lain down when we had to set off again to work. Three times during the night we were awakened, made to work and return. The last time, however, the order was given to return to Courbevoie. We still had two hours of marching to do, always with pack on back.

(1) The musician Vincent d’Indy, aged 19, witnessed like us this horrible spectacle, the procession of the wounded being brought back, some heaped in ambulance carts, others in mule-litters or stretchers: “It was truly heart-rending to see these men all covered with blood; some inert and as if dead, others uttering piercing cries at the slightest jolt of the carriages… Horrible wounds, arms no longer attached to the shoulder save by a tendon; gaping wounds which, at every movement of the mule-litter, let a stream of blood flow as from an intermittent fountain. From time to time a covered stretcher passed, borne by two men: it was the body of a senior officer… And all that because one man wanted ‘to test his dynamite’ and another wants to steal two provinces!” (Histoire du 105ᵉ bataillon de la garde nationale. Tequi, publisher)

“Back at our first cantonment at three in the morning, we threw ourselves on the ground exhausted, until the next morning.

The 20th, rest. — The 21st we left for Neuilly, where we are today.

I am very tired, and all that for nothing — for a failed action that could have so well succeeded, for the national guards marched very well. M. Delbrouck’s company had five wounded by bullets. With us, no one wounded, but all exhausted.

We are leaving to demolish barricades, while awaiting better.

Madame Milliet to her son

22 January ‘71.

We received your letter yesterday evening, dear child; it reassured me a little, but you have great need of a little rest. Can you not take some? — Things are going badly. Trochu has shown incapacity in this last affair. Chanzy has been beaten. Only Bourbaki has won some successes in the East, but he is very far from us.

The troops come back tired, discouraged. My God, how black all is!

I embrace you tenderly. We shall go tomorrow to sleep at your sister’s.

Paul M. to his mother

22 January.

I have just seen M. Delbrouck at Courbevoie. He is a little tired, but always as energetic. I do not know whether you know it: he has refused the decoration which he so well deserved. The papers reproduce the superb letter he wrote: He will not receive the cross “from a man who has done nothing for the deliverance of Paris.”

My blanket and my tent canvas were lost — or rather stolen — on the 19th, along with the great strap that fastened them on my pack. My jacket has a burn-hole, my shoes are pierced; in short, I was hardly presentable for the review we underwent yesterday. — At this moment we are destroying the barricades that clog all the thoroughfares and that so unfortunately delayed the passage of our troops.

We should much like to know what is happening in Paris and how the stupid reports that appeared in the Officiel were received.

I learn that the bombardment continues on your quarter. I beg you, go to Alix’s and write to me.

Trochu threw consternation into Paris with this distraught dispatch:

Governor to General Schmitz

Mont-Valérien, 20 January, 9:30 in the morning.

The fog is thick. The enemy does not attack. I have moved back most of the masses that could be cannonaded from the heights, some into their former cantonments. We must now urgently parley at Sèvres for a two-day armistice, which will allow the removal of the wounded and the burial of the dead. For this we shall need time, efforts, very solidly harnessed carriages, and many stretcher-bearers. Lose no time in acting to this end.

Evidently we could not advance to Versailles in a single day, but why make us retreat when we were already halfway? The Prussians were persuaded that we were going to continue our attack. General Clément-Thomas paid homage to the dash of the national guard.

After this useless battle, “undertaken without precise aim, without hope of success, badly conceived and worse directed,” (1) no one in Paris was thinking of surrendering.

(1) Lieutenant-Colonel Rousset, III, page 389.

The next day, the mayors of the twenty arrondissements were summoned to a session of the Government; they energetically rejected any idea of capitulation and demanded a mass sortie.

A poster of the Republican Alliance was also the faithful interpreter of the feelings animating the Paris population:

The people wishes to fight and conquer. To oppose this would be to provoke the civil war that the republicans intend to avoid. — In the face of the enemy, before the danger of the Fatherland, Paris, besieged, isolated, become the sole arbiter of its fate, to Paris belongs the choice of the citizens who will direct at once its administration and its defense. The Republican Alliance asks that within forty-eight hours the electors of Paris be convoked, in order to name a sovereign assembly of two hundred representatives elected proportionally to the population.

We recalled this solemn promise: “The Governor of Paris will not capitulate.” Now, on 21 January, Trochu handed over to Vinoy the command of the place, while keeping for himself the presidency of the Government. A sleight of hand unworthy of a soldier, a mental restriction that gave a sad idea of French loyalty.

Vinoy, former senator of the empire and detested in Paris, could have no authority.

People thought of the energetic men held at Mazas. Drums beating, red flag deployed, a troop of national guards advanced and penetrated into the prison. Flourens and his companions were freed. They would have liked to organize the supreme struggle, but they were not seconded by the battalion chiefs. For at that moment the situation was desperate. Paris had just learned of Chanzy’s defeat at Le Mans and Faidherbe’s at Saint-Quentin. On 25 January, Longwy capitulated with 40,000 men and 200 cannon. Of all our besieged citadels, only Bitche and Belfort remained to us, which Colonel Denfert-Rochereau defended with such valor.

7

Louise M. to her brother

23 January ‘71.

For two nights we have been sleeping at Alix’s. The previous night, mamma had not been able to sleep because of the noise of the shells; then everyone is moving out of the house, and all advise us to leave. We have decided to, to papa’s great displeasure. Well, since it is a necessity! Rosalie is going to fetch our meager ration of bread.

Political affairs are not going well. Yesterday, we left our apartment, laden with parcels; we knew that the omnibus only ran from the Saint-Michel fountain. There we were told it was not running at all; people feared the carriages would be overturned to make barricades. — Impossible to pass over the pont Saint-Michel; we make a long detour, but there was a crowd of stretcher-bearers going by and wounded coming back. Many people, caught in the crush, were quite happy to be there. The Belleville battalion had gone to free Flourens, imprisoned at Mazas. They wanted to overthrow the Government and proclaim the Commune. Two thousand rations of bread have been pillaged from the municipal bakeries. That will deprive many poor people. People cried: Down with Trochu! — He has been obliged to give his resignation as Governor of Paris. It is Vinoy who has taken his place; we do not gain much by the change. — The Belleville battalion wanted the Commune; the Breton mobiles were defending Trochu, and they fired at each other. There were 10 dead and 50 wounded. (1) Small bombs were thrown at the Hôtel de Ville, and people fired with explosive bullets. It is really sad to see Frenchmen killing one another.

(1) “Without any prior summons, a frightful discharge sowed death among that inoffensive crowd of onlookers, women, children, who covered the square.” (A. Arnould)

Trochu no longer has anyone’s confidence; he has spoken and acted in such a way as to terrify the population and sow discouragement. The two-day armistice he was asking for to bury the dead and remove the wounded has been refused him.

From Alix’s we hear Saint-Denis being bombarded. We may have to clear out soon; one is safe nowhere.

I saw the other day Prussian prisoners go by; they were quite young and had galley-slaves’ faces.

On 23 January, Jules Favre went by night to Versailles to begin negotiations.

On the 26th, at 9 in the evening, General Vinoy sent the following dispatch to all the forts:

Suspension of arms at midnight: Cease fire along the entire line.

An official poster announced the end of the resistance; but as a revolution was feared, the capitulation was presented under the name of armistice. The members of the Government strove to excuse themselves and to appease the citizens’ anger:

Paris wishes to be sure that resistance has lasted to the utmost limits of the possible. The figures we shall give will be the irrefragable proof.

We shall show that we cannot prolong the struggle without condemning to certain death two million men, women, and children.

Since 15 January, the bread ration has been reduced to 300 grams; the ration of horsemeat, since 10 December, is only 30 grams. Mortality has more than tripled. Amid so many disasters, there has not been a single day of discouragement.

The enemy is the first to pay homage to the moral energy and the courage of which the entire Paris population has just given the example. Paris has suffered much; but the Republic will profit by her long sufferings, so nobly borne. We come out of the ending struggle, tempered for the struggle to come. We come out with all our honor, with all our hopes, despite the sorrows of the present hour; more than ever we have faith in the destinies of the fatherland.

The conditions of the armistice and the revictualing were posted in Paris:

The enemy is to occupy all the forts. The army, which is to be disarmed except for a division of 12,000 men, remains in Paris. The officers keep their swords. The national guard keeps its arms.

Jules Favre had obtained this last clause. — “Believe me,” Bismarck repeated to him, “you are doing a stupid thing! Sooner or later you will have to reckon with those rifles you are leaving to fanatics.”

The capitulation was signed on 28 January 1871. The blockade had lasted 132 days.

VI

1871

AFTER THE STRUGGLE

LETTERS. — OPINIONS. — THE SHARE OF BLAME. — THE SHARE OF PRAISE. — LESSONS.

1

M. de Tucé to his sister

30 January ‘71.

My dear friend. — I think M. de Bismarck will allow this letter to cross the lines of investment; it will tell you where to reply to me.

At Rouen I was sent to the outposts. I led there a fairly hard life until 27 October, when I was named brigadier general, with the command of the division of Rouen. I exercised this command until 15 November, the time at which I was sent to the army of the Loire, to command the first cavalry brigade of the 16th corps. I marched with this corps, I took part in all its combats and all its retreats. (1)

(1) “In the day of 14 December, the 16th corps sustained a fierce struggle which does it great honor, and which is the last really important combat of the campaign.” (Chanzy, page 87)

We have at last arrived at Laval, where the cavalry I command is to guard the course of the Mayenne as far as Château-Gontier. — The intense cold has brought on a slight illness that renders me incapable of any service. I had to enter the hospital at Angers. I shall be there about a fortnight.

How did you get through that time of trial? I learned that bombs fell very near you. I received news of you three times by balloon. Fernand has written to me several times from Guelma, always greatly distressed at not setting out.

On learning of the armistice, I wrote to you at once, but I think my letter will not get through. I had sent it open, by way of Versailles…

I saw in the environs of Orléans the mobiles of the Sarthe; I asked whether there were any Pelouses among them (the fermier of Madame Milliet — he was the father of nine children). Indeed, there were two. I was able to see only François. Since then, the poor lad sent me from Magdeburg a fine letter of good wishes. He was wounded and taken prisoner.

I learned that the bombardment caused much damage in your quarter and that the Egyptian School had been hit. — Fernand received your letter of 1 December, but what has happened since that time?

Send me the letter at the hospital at Angers; be careful not to seal the reply.

15 February.

I leave the hospital tomorrow to take up my service again, although I am not yet very fit.

Jules Nicole to Paul M.

Saint-Petersburg, 10 February 1871.

I do not need to tell you that I have done nothing but think of you all winter. Send me news of yourself quickly, of all of you; answer me with a word, but at once…

… At Saint-Petersburg, we organize collection upon collection in favor of the victims of the war, so that we may in some sort be forgiven our egoistic security amid such great sufferings. — At Geneva and throughout Switzerland, there is rivalry as to who shall best take care of his Frenchman.

Fernand to his brother

Soukaras, 20 March ‘71.

I received your letter (of 1 December) and you cannot imagine the pleasure I had in reading it. There you are now a true soldier. You have known how to take part in all these scenes so terrible and so courageous, in all these combats that took place before Paris. Ah! You are quite right to say it: I rage at not having been able to do as much. But come, I have none the less amassed a fine quantity of hatred against the Prussians. (1) I hope to be on my feet on the day of revenge, and to be able to strike hard. I swear I shall have neither pity nor mercy; besides, I was not raised in that school in the campaigns I have fought.

(1) It will be seen later that I do not at all share my brother’s feelings on this point: a whole people must not be held responsible for the crimes of its governors.

I leave Soukaras tomorrow; I am named administrator of the district of Jemmapes; I received the order today. It is an advancement. We had been told: “Those who do their duty to the end will be rewarded.” I should have been a lieutenant long since.

The Arab insurrection is nearly quelled; yet these imbeciles continue to revolt partially on different points. A captain, head of our Arab bureau, has been killed. The newspapers want to throw on the Arab bureaus the responsibility for the insurrection, but all the colonists demand the military regime; they well know that it alone is capable of containing the natives.

P.S. — I have found here the entire Milliet family from Savoy. The father died two years ago. One of his sons, Nestor, had enlisted for the duration of the war. I attended his funeral service this morning. He was killed in France. The others were on their farm at the time of the Arab insurrection. They were saved by a Caïd who played a double game and had warned the troops. The unfortunate had a narrow escape. Their whole farm, the most important in the area, was pillaged and ransacked. Happily they had a house in town, where their mother lived, and they were able to take refuge there. As there are still seven or eight of them here, I meet one at every street corner. With what we are making the Arabs pay, the colonists will be indemnified. We give ten thousand francs per head of a colonist killed; but the dead are not compensated for.

Fernand to his mother

Soukaras, 25 February 1871.

I received at the same time your letter of the 8th of this month and Alix’s of the 10th. What sufferings, what privations you have had to bear! Happily none of you has perished. If Paul or Henri had been wounded or killed, I should have wept for them, but after all they were soldiers and consequently exposed to that fate; but if the Vandals had had the misfortune to kill or merely wound one of you, I should have avenged you, mark you! I swear that I should have left, without orders, without saying anything, and on the first group of Prussians I had met, I should have used my revolver, all my weapons; I should have rushed upon them like a mad beast and killed until my last breath.

I did not suffer physically, it is true, during all this war, but morally! Do you understand that? I, a soldier since childhood, not to be able to ply my trade on such an occasion! I sent in my resignation twice from the Arab bureaus to be able to leave; it was always refused. Four squadrons of my regiment were called up recently; I was unable to join them. I did the impossible to set out with the goums, no way! By the way, they returned firmer than ever in defiance of common sense. I wrote letter upon letter to my uncle to have him bring me out to him; he refused.

I wrote to General de Kératry with the army of Brittany, to Garibaldi — in short, none of my steps could succeed. I am at this moment at Soukaras, a frontier town of Tunisia. The Arabs imagined that all the troops had left; they carried off with them a squadron of spahis from Aïn-Guettar, which we wanted to send to France, and rose up. With great effort 2,000 men were at once gathered, which sufficed to relieve Soukaras and to quell the revolt on this side. In Kabylia they stirred too, but there by now it must be finished.

— I had a moment of danger: I was at the head of a small goum which deserted me outright, and I nearly was taken — which would not have been pleasant, for the wretches mutilated alive all whom they took. There were 14 colonists murdered; all the farms destroyed. At this moment I am occupied with the head of the Arab bureau in making the tribe that took part in the revolt pay seven hundred thousand francs in war taxes, without counting the razzias we have made. Unfortunately we had too weak a general: instead of shooting on the spot all those taken with arms in hand, they were referred to civil justice, which, with its ordinary slowness, will come to nothing. The French are everywhere as stupid.

What are we going to become now? What shameful peace are we going to conclude? I dare not think of all that, so shaken am I, lost as I am in the depths of Africa, where news reaches us a week late.

To say that not a single capable general has been found! There is but one great figure who remains and will remain — Gambetta. He has done the impossible, and he was not seconded. (1)

(1) “He alone possessed the ardor, the sincerity, and the audacity demanded by the circumstances; he alone was destined to come out grown by this tragic period. Facts speak for themselves with irresistible eloquence; and although in their study many errors and many faults are revealed, they leave at least the impression of an ardent conviction, of an exalted patriotism and of a unique selflessness before which the liveliest rancors have at last fallen.” (Lieutenant-Colonel Rousset, III, 55)

To continue the war to the utmost, that is what we should do; but for that we should have to stop bickering as we are doing, the chiefs casting the fault on the soldiers and the soldiers on the chiefs. And then we have no more cannons, no more resources; they took everything from us, more by trickery and treason than by courage, the wretches!…

When shall we all be able to meet again, dear mother? How I should like to see Paul again as a sergeant, and my big Louisou. If you knew how anxious I was during the bombardment! The dispatches said it well; your quarter was the most exposed. And I was not there beside you! Ah, I rage!

Farewell, dear mother; embrace them all for me — father, Paul, Alix, Louise, Henri — and send me news of you.

Your son who loves and embraces you,

Fernand

On a notebook of my father’s I find a few notes written in pencil. The members of the Government of National Defense are treated severely there.

The poor health of Félix Milliet had not allowed him to take a very active part in military operations, but he keenly felt the sadness of our defeats. As the emotion takes hold of the old poet, his prose becomes more and more rhythmed and transforms into unfinished verses:

In the hour of danger, he writes, France, who had always shown herself ready to support the cause of the oppressed against their tyrants, has seen herself abandoned by all.

The peoples are for us brothers… enemies.

We have lived on horse, dog, rat, and 300 grams of black bread… We are soon to have white bread, they say, and we shall be able to butter it with shame. Poor France!

The present generation is three-quarters gangrened, rotten. It is of the one to come that we must concern ourselves. To raise from the cradle citizens and at the same time future soldiers. From childhood to think of making men in body and in soul. We can carry on side by side scientific, industrial, artistic, or mechanical instruction with military instruction. One can be a scholar and a soldier, a merchant and a soldier, an artist and a soldier, even a priest and a soldier.

The march of humanity undergoes a forced halt by this war, the last stage of barbarism. But progress will resume its civilizing march only after a revenge of right against brutal force. — It is not vain reprisals we seek; it is a work of justice we wish to accomplish. Forgetting is not possible. Expiation must precede pardon.

Stains on our honor remain indelible. — Ours needs a lye of blood; Germans, you have overstepped the limits, Justice and right are no longer with you.

2

It remains for us to pose a difficult problem, that of responsibilities — a problem poignant by the gravity of the consequences that the answer given to it will entail for the future.

Have our defeats had as causes fortuitous circumstances, personal failings, the ignorance and incompetence of our generals, or rather a weakening, a decline, an irremediable decrepitude of our race? Opinions differ; I shall indicate only a few:

People try today to incriminate pacifist doctrines, but it is to the manners developed among us by twenty years of empire that our military weakness must be attributed.

Did not Marshal Lebœuf himself recognize this when, at the death of Napoleon III, he threw himself on his knees before the emperor’s coffin, sobbing and begging pardon?

“Was resistance to the utmost possible?” asks Henri Martin. (1) “Almost general opinion has denied it; yet, when one studies certain writings of our enemies, when one recognizes, on their own avowals, to what point their army corps melted as they pushed deeper into the interior of France, when one recalls the symptoms of weariness reported in their ranks, one is seized again with a poignant doubt: one comes to no longer rejecting as chimerical the thought that France would have been able, if she had willed. If there was an impossibility, it was less material than moral.”

(1) Volume VII, page 338.

Viollet-le-Duc also insists on the share of responsibility incumbent on the French nation. “It is we who declared war — or, if you prefer, the government we had chosen and supported by plebiscites declared it. We disavow it; we claim to separate the nation from this government it had given itself; that is puerile.”

As for our chiefs: “They did what they could do; one cannot blame people for not possessing genius, and genius alone, in default of the dejected soul of the nation, could give life back to that body falling into shreds under the blow of our disasters.” (1)

(1) Like the Greeks of the decadence, our generals retained superiority only in the art of writing. Their proclamations were admirable; their campaign plans less so.

The history of this war has been written principally by the chiefs responsible for our defeats. With regrettable bad faith, to excuse themselves, they tried to cast their faults on the account of their political enemies. History protests against these hateful and mendacious testimonies. Vinoy, for instance, launched against the national guards accusations to which the second siege of Paris gave a striking denial:

“Culpable examples of cowardice,” he writes, “are given above all by men belonging to the battalions of Belleville and of other outlying and populous quarters.” (2) However, to spare the self-esteem of the rich people of his acquaintance, he immediately adds that “their battalions showed before the enemy a really solid attitude, doing honor by their conduct to their social position, and proving that true courage develops in environments where order and regularity reign.”

(2) Is it a crime not to inhabit a palace surrounded by gardens in the center of Paris?

This partial judgment is refuted by Ducrot himself: (3)

(3) III, 217.

“One may say that in Paris all classes, rich or poor, all ages, young or old, vied in ardor, in devotion. Each, setting aside his affections and his hopes, thought only of the threatened country. This dash was real, lively… and if our rulers had not erred as much by political clumsiness as by military incompetence, this devotion, this ardor to serve the public good, could have been better used.”

According to C. Farey, (1) what rendered the continuation of the war difficult was much more the absence of patriotism in the greatest number of citizens and the care for material interests than the destruction of the means of resistance. “Do you think,” he says, “that Spain had sufficient resources to beat Napoleon? She did not seek to beat him, she wore him out. Was Juárez a great war chief? What resources had he, when he was pursued from city to city to the confines of Mexico? He endured, and that was enough. The Polish insurrection of 1863 never numbered 30,000 combatants. It cost Russia 80,000 men… The German army was absolutely exhausted. Germany had furnished all or almost all that she could give. More than 125,000 soldiers had fallen on the battlefield or lay groaning in the hospitals. To save France, by inflicting on the enemy a frightful consumption of men, all that was needed was a little patriotism and much resignation. May our sons know how to recover the lost vigor, and may republican France one day efface, by driving the foreigner from our provinces, the stain of mud with which we have sullied her history.”

(1) Histoire de la guerre de 1870-1871.

3

Let us beware, however, of generalizing the blame and of exaggerating it. In a seriously documented book, M. Henri Genevois arrives at a less discouraging conclusion. For him, “our national qualities were eclipsed for an instant by the faults of the ruling classes and by the country’s abdication into the hands of a baneful power, but the struggle against the foreigner reveals, on the contrary, in our race, inexhaustible resources of endurance, dash, energy, and vital fluid.”

And it is among our enemies that he goes to seek testimonies whose impartiality cannot be suspected:

M. von Moltke is the first of the witnesses, the one whose deposition is capital in this cause… On 21 September he writes to his brother: “I cherish the secret hope of killing some hares at Creisau toward the end of October.” — Now, as early as that month of October, astonishment and disappointment begin to manifest themselves in his letters: “One must recognize the power of endurance and the obstinacy of these French. They cannot admit that they are vanquished.” And after the fall of Metz: “There go another 150,000 French to be led off into captivity, and the powerful place of Metz in our power. Since the Babylonian captivity, the world has seen nothing like it. We need an army to guard our 300,000 prisoners. France has no more soldiers. And in spite of all, we must still wait to see whether these feverish Parisians will renounce this hopeless resistance.”

The same surprise is manifested in the Historical Record of the great Prussian Staff: “After the enemy had succeeded, with astonishing promptitude, in putting new troops in the field on the Loire, the German cavalry divisions no longer sufficed to cover effectively the rear of the army of investment of Paris.” (1)

(1) II, page 263.

And further on: “Thanks to an iron will served by that almost limitless omnipotence which he preserved until the end of the war, Gambetta, the indefatigable Minister, succeeded in putting on campaign against the Germans a mass of 600,000 men, with 1,400 mouths of fire.” (2)

(2) Page 385.

Colmar von der Goltz, (3) military man of high worth, also brings us a precious testimony:

(3) Gambetta and his armies, page 358.

People said: “For the French, the outcome of the first battle is decisive; if they lose it, the war is over.” “Anything would have been supposed of this people other than tenacity and perseverance in an unhappy struggle.

“It was said that Paris would capitulate if its arrival of fresh morning milk were cut off for only eight days… Well! We have neither the qualities nor the means the French possess for improvising armies. We should be still less able, as they did, to repair a first defeat by rapidly carrying out a mass levy.”

“On five or six occasions in the past thirty-five years,” writes M. H. Genevois, “war has been at the mercy of a word. What then has protected us, if not the memory of a struggle that lasted five months after Sedan and three months after Metz. In saving our honor, we have furthermore gained our security… We succumbed not through the weakening of the qualities of the race, but through the inability of the command.”

4

Viollet-le-Duc wondered whether a German army, having to sustain a long siege, would have conducted itself better than ours. One is permitted to doubt it. “People who in peacetime see only an occasion to practice on a large scale espionage among their neighbors, and in war only a means of enriching themselves — those people obviously do not understand honor as we understand it.

“I know well that thieves are very proud of their thefts and murderers of their crimes. We are not jealous of that glory, esteeming that it is better to be robbed than robbers, and victims than executioners.”

We shall also make this consoling observation: from the Abbé de Saint-Pierre to Nicholas II, by way of Rousseau, Kant, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and many other minds who are not altogether negligible, pacifist doctrines have not for an instant slackened their invincible — soon triumphal — march. The ideas of justice and humanity will not die. They have enthused Gambetta, Jules Simon, Taine, Renan, Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme… They animated the generous hearts of French students, when they naively sent to their backward brothers in Germany these fine words, which we are ready to utter again: “Of war we want none; let us proclaim aloud and let reason cry to us: that war is the retreat of civilization, the source of the miseries of peoples, that the battlefield is the soil on which despotism grows.” (1)

(1) We do not forget, however, that there are holy wars.

Certainly the education of democracy will not be made in a day; yet it will be made. Little by little, the notion of international rights and duties will penetrate everywhere, even in Germany, and with it the deep and sweet feeling of the fraternity of peoples. Those alone mock at our hopes who regret the shame and the profits of servitude.

“France,” said Viollet-le-Duc, “has no need to seek a savior; saviors cost too dear; and when, in these last times, I heard frantic well-meaning people demand ‘a man,’ I blushed with shame. Let each resolve to be the man necessary to himself and to his neighbors, in the measure of his intelligence and his strength, and we shall no longer have to look every morning for that providential man who is to think, to act for us, into whose hands we hand over our honor and our property, and whom we smash as soon as fortune abandons him — like those savages who beat their fetish if the prayers they address to him are not heard.”

“The nation must raise itself,” writes de Freycinet too, (2) “if she wishes to possess one day an army capable of defending her and of restoring to her the rank that was assigned her in the world… Two reforms are imposed immediately: that of the military institution and that of popular instruction. It is by instructing the citizens that one will prepare good soldiers. Instruction must be at the base and at the summit of our army. Let us not forget it: it is by knowledge even more than by number that we have been defeated.

(2) La Guerre en Province.

“If certain moral qualities, which are the soul of armies — such as bravery, dash, enthusiasm — seem in some sort spontaneous in the French soldier, others, no less useful in war — patience, the spirit of sacrifice, constancy — are evidently linked to education.

“Today still, the soldier’s life is of a nature to diminish his moral worth. Held for two years at the regiment, employing on tedious maneuvers four or five times the necessary time, he spends a great part of his days in idleness; he frequents the tavern; he loses respect for authority, the sense of duty, the spirit of sacrifice.

“Entering the regiment ignorant and honest, he comes out too often as ignorant, but corrupted.

“We must as soon as possible restore in our armies the law of work. We must put back in honor that great principle that knowledge makes the dignity and the strength of command. Advancement must henceforth be granted not to the most protected or the oldest, but to the most worthy. Examination or competition must become the basis of advancement up to the higher grades.” (1)

(1) De Freycinet.

Perhaps it is permitted to dream and to hope that an era of progress will open, allowing all peoples to associate at their will and to decide freely their destinies, without there being any need for shedding blood.

In the wake of our disasters, the honest Laprade, carried away by a very respectable patriotism, took up the heroic trumpet and set to exhaling in fine verses his furies of an enraged sheep. Perhaps he forced the note a little, when he let himself go to feelings of an abominable ferocity, as in the following lines:

…. Let us again become barbarians, Egoists, jealous… let us abjure pity. Let us close to the oppressed, let us close our miserly hearts, Of all the unhappy let us despise the friendship.

Let us remain alone, cultivating hatred to the utmost.

I hate the cunning Teuton and the cunning Roman, Let us return, let us return to the barbarian virtue, That our Muse may sing, axe in hand!

And under the moist earth, at the warmth of the blood, My bones shall thrill, watered with vengeance.

Time had, it is true, already done its work, when I wrote in reply to Laprade the following lines:

TO THE LAND OF FRANCE

O France ever young, O hospitable land, The peoples in emulation celebrated thy beauty, All the noble spirits who seek clarity Turn their eyes toward thee, radiant light.