FOOTNOTES:
[189] Souvenirs, IV. 88.
[190] Sarcey, Le Siège de Paris, Eng. trans., 250.
[191] Souvenirs, IV. 143.
[192] Souvenirs, IV. 150.
[193] The Government usually met in the evening at nine o’clock, and the sessions always continued until after midnight, sometimes till two or three in the morning. “From the 4th of September till the 8th of February we never missed a day, and often we had additional meetings,” writes Jules Favre (Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, I. 215).
[194] Souvenirs, IV. 89.
[195] Souvenirs, IV. 161.
[196] Labouchère, A Resident besieged in Paris, 161.
[197] See de Goncourt, Journal under October 31, 1870.
[198] A vivid description of the proceedings inside the Hôtel de Ville is given by Labouchère, op. cit.
[199] Souvenirs, IV. 167-87.
[200] The Revolutionists were discontented with the Provisional Government’s regulation of municipal affairs. After the 4th of September the twenty mayors of Paris had been appointed by the Minister of the Interior, Gambetta, and the Chief Mayor, Etienne Arago.
[201] See Jules Favre, Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, I. 300. “M. Dorian déploya la plus louable activité pour obtenir de prompts résultats. Cet excellent et digne citoyen ... était à ce moment entouré d’une immense popularité.... Il semblait personnifier la défense.”
[202] Souvenirs, IV. 193.
[203] De Goncourt, Journal, December 1870.
[204] souvenirs, IV. 273.
[205] Ibid., 129.
[206] Souvenirs, IV. 119.
[207] Souvenirs, IV. 210.
[208] Ibid., 303.
[209] Ibid., 306.
[210] Souvenirs, IV. 315.
[211] Ibid., 324.
[212] Favre, op. cit., III. 342.
[213] Ibid., 345.
[214] Favre, op. cit., III. 347.
[215] Souvenirs, IV. 324.
[216] Minister of Finance. See ante, 140.
[217] Trochu, who had resigned after Buzenval, had been succeeded as Governor of Paris by General Vinoy.
[218] Mme. Adam dates the signing of the armistice on the 26th, the day when firing ceased. But by an arrangement between Favre and Bismarck the bombardment closed two days before the signing of the capitulation. See Jules Favre, Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, II. 403.
CHAPTER XII
THE COMMUNE
1871
“Cette Commune qui venait de faire sombrer le Paris héroique dans le Paris sanglant et incendiaire.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.
“In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged.”—Shelley, Prometheus
For five months France had been ruled by an oligarchy. The ministers who took office on the 4th of September were responsible to no parliament. No legislative body had succeeded the Corps Legislatif, the members of which, as we have seen, had unceremoniously quitted the Palais Bourbon on that autumn Sunday which saw the birth of the Government of National Defence.
But now at the conqueror’s bidding there was to be a National Assembly. A clause in the Capitulation of Paris stipulated for its election. Accordingly, throughout France, even in the departments occupied by the enemy, elections were held on the 8th of February. They resulted in the return to “Bismarck’s Parliament,” as Mme. Adam called the National Assembly which on the 12th of February met at Bordeaux, of about one hundred and eighty republicans—radicals and moderates being almost equal—of about four hundred and fifty monarchical conservatives, legitimists and Orleanists being about equal, and finally of thirty Buonapartists.[219]
“The final result of the elections,” writes Mme. Adam,[220] “is heartrending. The majority is reactionary, nominated in order to make peace. Country gentlemen and capitulards will vote it. It is the chamber Bismarck desired. He assisted at its nomination. He presided over the elections. In certain towns did not the Prussians themselves distribute the voting papers on behalf of the reactionary candidates? Bismarck is determined that the war shall end. Germany has had enough of it.... Coblentz has returned under another form. Only now it is at home and not abroad that Frenchmen have made a compact with the enemy. Old valiant France is dying, is dead.”
Mme. Adam was now at Bruyères. Her husband had been nominated as candidate for a Paris constituency and for Les Alpes Maritimes. Contrary to his wife’s advice he had insisted on leaving his Paris election to look after itself while he went to Nice. He had started on the 2nd of February, leaving Juliette, as she pathetically puts it, en tête-à-tête, avec la pensée de ma pauvre chère France vaincue, mutilée, broyée.[221]
A few days after her husband’s departure, to her grief and loneliness was suddenly added the most agonising apprehension. She read in the newspaper that her husband’s train carrying twenty thousand kilos of gunpowder had been blown up. Hastily gathering together a few valuables, which, considering the disordered state of the capital, she dare not leave in Paris, she was about to start for the south, when a friend arrived with the welcome news that her husband was alive though seriously injured. A few hours later, accompanied by her dear little friend Bibi, Rochfort’s eight-year-old son, who was staying with her at the time, Mme. Adam was in the train. The journey was terrible. Constantly she was confronted with Prussian soldiers, who insisted on seeing her papers. “Ils me demandent d’un ton rude mon laissez-passer. Celui qui me le rend touche ma main. Je frissonne comme au contact d’une bête venimeuse,”[222] she writes.
Arrived at Cannes, she is disappointed to find instead of Adam at the station a note brought by the coachman, explaining that her husband’s electoral duties detained him at Nice, but that he will be home for dinner. This disappointment, at the end of a long, fatiguing journey, exasperated her. “I would have gone back to Paris at once if I could,” she writes.
And Adam, when he returned, was treated to one of those drames de famille which Juliette herself had so often witnessed in her youth. The scene, as Mme. Adam describes it in her Souvenirs, might strike the reader as somewhat brutal. But one must read between the lines, and remember Juliette’s overwrought condition. Then it is easy to see how it came about; how at that moment the sight of Adam’s poor scarred face, recalling how he had been on the brink of death, would make his wife furious to think of his disregard of her entreaties and his persistence in undertaking that disastrous journey.
“How could you have gone off like that, leaving me the sole guardian of our fortune?” she cried. “Why must you insist on pursuing this visionary Nice candidature, risking failure in Paris, where, but for me and Rochefort, you would never have been elected?” Fortunately Adam thoroughly understood his wife. Realising the strain already put upon her nerves, he indulged in no self-justification, but assumed the only possible attitude—one of lamb-like submission. Nevertheless, her agitation distressed him, and two big tears coursed slowly down his lacerated face.
“I am in favour of his being pardoned,” sententiously pronounced the comical little Bibi. Bibi’s advice was taken; and “nous dînons appaisés,” writes Mme. Adam. After dinner her husband told the story of his miraculous escape.[223]
In a few days when his wounds had somewhat healed he left for Bordeaux. There the Assembly had already held its first meeting. Its initial act had been to nominate Thiers President of the Republic, or, to be more exact, chef du pouvoir executif de la République Française. In spite of his three-and-seventy years le petit bourgeois was still in the perfection of health and vigour. He could still say to the friends who gathered round him: C’est nous qui sommes encore les jeunes aujourd’hui.“ Chateaubriand used to call Thiers the ”heir of the future“ (l’héritier de l’avenir). That future had now arrived. During his retirement from public affairs in the early days of the Empire it had been prophesied of him that only a great national disaster would draw him from his obscurity. Now that the disaster had occurred, everyone turned to le petit grand homme as the only man in France capable of confronting Bismarck and facing all the growing difficulties of an almost desperate situation. It was to those difficulties that the third Republic owed its proclamation. For at first sight it seems incredible that an assembly in which monarchists had a substantial majority should decree a Republic. But neither legitimists nor Orleanists desired to assume the terrible responsibilities which would obviously devolve on the new ministers: to restore the monarchy under such circumstances, when the new king’s first act would be to sign the dismemberment of France, would be to discredit for ever the monarchical régime.
Thiers, though holding himself aloof from all parties and adopting no label save one, “La France,” was said to have Orleanist leanings. That is probable. Nevertheless, he realised that only a republic was feasible, because, as he said, “it is the form of government which divides us least.”[224]
Mme. Adam, although at this time of her life she was no admirer of Thiers, refrains from inveighing against the presidency of her husband’s friend. She felt under no such constraint, however, with regard to the chief ministers of his cabinet: Jules Favre, who continued Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Ernest Picard, Minister of the Interior. “Deux clairvoyances, deux compétences rares ... comme insuffisance,”[225] she writes. She knew them both well. They were both habitués of her salon. She could never forgive Favre for having negotiated the capitulation of Paris. And she is not alone in censoring the terms of that surrender. Neither our Ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, nor Labouchère,[226] had a high opinion of Favre’s diplomatic gifts. “He is too much led away by his feelings,” wrote Lord Lyons to Lord Granville.[227] “He is essentially an orator rather than a statesman,” was Labouchère’s opinion. “When he went to meet Bismarck at Ferrières he was fully prepared to agree to the fortresses in Alsace and Lorraine being rased; but, when he returned, the phrase ni un pouce du territoire, ni une pierre des fortresses occurred to him, and he could not refrain from complicating the situation by publishing it.”[228] M. Gabriel Hanotaux[229] marvels to think how a man whose intelligence was so mediocre, whose character was so weak, could ever have risen to a position of such authority.
The historian of contemporary France also shares Mme. Adam’s opinion of the Minister of the Interior, Picard. “Bourgeois de Paris, homme gras et de teint fleuri, orateur élégant et fin, esprit sceptique et dépris, il savait trouver de mots heureux,” is M. Hanotaux’s description of the new Home Secretary.[230] “Il ne vise qu’aux mots d’esprit,”[231] writes Mme. Adam.
Jules Grévy, the eminent lawyer, who was now President of the New Chamber, had in the days of her matrimonial difficulties been Juliette’s guide, counsellor and friend, placing at her disposal all that sagesse pondérée, that finesse matoise,[232] with which this ideal bourgeois was so plentifully endowed. When she had first met him in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon, Grévy, like herself, was a republican abstentioniste, detached from any participation in the hated imperial régime. Mme. Adam had never forgiven him for abandoning that position, for yielding to Ollivier’s persuasions and entering the Corps Legislatif as one of the famous “five,” the first republicans to take the oath of allegiance to the Empire. “For me, henceforth,” she said to Adam, “Grévy is no longer a man whose political honour is intact.”[233]
These various appointments and other news sent by Adam from Bordeaux, his wife at Bruyères discussed at length with Thiers’ old friend, her neighbour, Dr. Maure, and with M. and Mme. Arlès Dufour, who had come to cheer her loneliness. Her mornings were spent in teaching her young friend Bibi. But all the while her heart was rent by maternal as well as national anxiety. For weeks she had had no news of Alice.
“All my friends speak of my daughter,” she writes; “she will soon be with you, they assure me. And the days and the hours pass, and silence, horrible silence, weighs upon me, broken only by the wailings of my patriotic grief.”
On Sunday, the 26th of February, Thiers and Jules Favre had signed the preliminaries of peace at Versailles. The next morning, as Mme. Adam was giving Bibi his geography lesson, she wept to see lying before her the map of France, the tangible image of her adored and mutilated patrie.
“Why are you crying?” asked Bibi. He also cried when he heard the reason, and said: “They are taking from us the heart of France.”
Adam wrote briefly announcing the terms of the treaty. “Vae victis! I send you the text of the treaty which M. de Bismarck has dictated. ‘Session of the whole of Alsace, except Belfort. Session of a part of Lorraine with Metz. Five milliards indemnity. Entrance into Paris on the 1st of March of 30,000 Prussians through the Arc de Triomphe and as far as the Place de la Concorde, until the ratification of the treaty.’
“Such is our fate, Juliette. It is horrible. The stories of Bismarck’s insolence are ghastly. Indignation is universal. Nevertheless, the majority will vote for peace. Will the minority be large enough to show the Prussians that their victory might have been disputed?
“Every one is afraid of what may happen in Paris when the Prussians enter. Chanzy[234] said just now in my presence: ‘I have thought it over well. It will be better to resume hostilities. There is still a chance of our being able to pull ourselves together. I shall certainly feel justified in voting against the treaty of peace.’”[235]
Adam interrupted his letter to go and vote. The poor little minority was miserable—only 107 against 546 votes in favour of peace. Then in heartrending terms Adam proceeds to describe the famous protest of the twenty-five deputies of Alsace-Lorraine, and Grosjean’s sorrowful leave-taking uttered on their behalf and terminating with the words: “We shall ever cherish with a filial affection France absent from our hearths until the day when she returns to her place there.”
“I have always foreseen it,” writes Mme. Adam. “From the day of surrender I had grieved over that shameful, cowardly peace. The France I idolize! Now she sees torn from her those provinces which our husbands and our sons might have preserved.... The days may pass and years be added unto them, but never, until the hour strikes for the deliverance of our brethren now handed over to Prussia, will the wound I receive to-day be healed.”[236]
The Treaty signed by Thiers and Jules Favre at Versailles was ratified by the Bordeaux Assembly on the 1st of March. Henceforth there was no reason why the Parliament should not return northwards.
“Just now,” wrote Adam to his wife,[237] “Thiers opened the question of the town in which the Assembly shall deliberate. He is resolved to leave Bordeaux immediately. This is foolish, unless he is prepared to return at once to Paris.”
But the conservative majority of the Assembly was averse to carrying on their deliberations in the capital. Paris they regarded as the hot-bed of revolution, creating a new government and imposing it by telegraph[238] on the rest of France every fifteen years. For the first time in French history a great gulf had opened between Paris and the provinces. Bourges and Fontainebleau were both suggested as suitable meeting-places. But the choice finally fell on Versailles, whose monarchical associations harmonised so well with the hopes cherished by the party in majority at Bordeaux.
Louis Blanc, one of the deputies for Paris, loudly protested against this decision. Thus to abandon Paris, he argued, would be to drive the metropolis to create a government of its own. Alas! cette vieille barbe of 1848 proved only too true a prophet. This slight put upon Paris was partly responsible for the institution of the Commune and all the horrors of civil war which followed. For the Government to turn its back upon Paris was not a measure likely to placate the discontent with which the city was seething, or to soothe the nerves of the heroic town all unstrung by the horrors of the siege.
The National Assembly held its last meeting at Bordeaux on the 11th of March. The Versailles session was to open on the 20th. By that time Paris was in open insurrection; and the President, who on leaving Bordeaux had with his ministers taken up his residence within the capital, deemed it expedient to decamp to Versailles. The declaration that the Commune est le pouvoir unique, son autorité est absolu appeared in the Officiel on the 26th.
“Between Paris and Versailles,” wrote Adam to his wife, “there is something more than the Great Wall of China, there is something more than a hundred leagues, there is a hundred years, a whole century.”[239] Nevertheless, throughout those hideous two months from the outbreak of insurrection to the fall of the Commune at the end of May, Edmond Adam, deputy of Paris, braving the dangers of arrest and execution, continued to pass to and fro, between the revolted city and Versailles, ever hoping that he might be able to facilitate some compromise between the rival authorities. From an interview with his old friend Thiers, however, he derived no encouragement. He feared that the President’s chief desire was to appear in the eyes of the world as conqueror of provincial France and of the Revolution at Paris.[240]
Of her husband’s attitude Mme. Adam strongly approved. “You owe it to Paris,” she wrote. “For to Paris you are indebted for everything since the day when you first joined the staff of the National. Paris has chosen you for its representative. Paris, though misguided, is well worth the risk you are running for her.”[241]
But Juliette longed to share her husband’s dangers. Alice, after weeks of agonising suspense, had been restored to her. “Alice and Bibi might well,” she wrote to Adam, “be left in the care of M. and Mme. Arlès Dufour,” le père and la mère, as Juliette called them, who were still at Bruyères. For was it not the place of a deputy’s wife to be at his side in the city which had elected him? Banished from Adam and from her friends her exile was intolerable. But her husband replied that he could not endure the anxiety of her presence in Paris; that while he was obliged to be at Versailles the thought of her in the revolted city, a prey to the horrors of that terrific insurrection, would drive him mad. “My only strength,” he continued, “arises from the thought that you are far from the terrible events which threaten us. Our friends think it is the end of the world. But I am resolved, even in this cataclysm, not entirely to despair. In all the darkness and chaos, I seem to discern a ray of hope. As for us, deputies of a capital in insurrection, our situation becomes terrifically difficult. I am on the boulevard this evening. But shall I be to-morrow? Every one is trying to persuade me to abandon my daily journey, which is so likely to be interrupted either at Paris or at Versailles.”
While feeling that no reproach was too bitter to bring against the leaders of the Commune, against those who, under the conqueror’s very eye, had let loose the rabid hounds of civil war, with Paris and the rank and file of Parisians Mme. Adam never ceased to sympathise. “Most of the Communards,” she writes, “... are possessed by the madness of defeat, a madness which I understand, for I have suffered from it myself at the close of the siege. In that madness there is no cowardice. It consists rather in a passionate desire to assert, no matter where and how, the courage one has acquired, the courage which traitors have neglected to utilise.”[242]
The correspondence between the Adams throughout these weeks shows husband and wife in complete agreement. It also reveals great moderation and a desire to see both sides of many difficult questions.
It was not until the last days of May, as we have said, that Mme. Adam returned to Paris, to a Paris desolated by two bombardments, by ferocious street-fighting and by the madness of a defeated mob, raging throughout the days and nights of a hideous week of explosions and incendiarism. Mme. Adam returned to find the blackened ruins of the Tuileries, the smoking ashes of the Hôtel de Ville, a heap of stones in the square where the Vendôme Column had stood.
In the lives of many strong personalities there comes a crisis, a parting of the ways, when in a convulsion of the whole being character and disposition receive a new orientation. For how many is not such a crisis presented by the present war! In the religious world such a revolution is described as conversion. This crisis came to Mme. Adam through national humiliation and the civil strife which followed the catastrophe of 1870. La patrie’s defeat had planted deep in her nature an antagonism which will doubtless endure to the end. Henceforth we shall find accentuated more and more strongly in her character and disposition the irreconcilable note. She had always been emphatic. She was born to be as fervent a hater as she was an ardent lover. For her there had never been many open questions. Now in every cause she espouses she holds the position of à l’outrance. The iron of national defeat and civil war had entered into her soul. On the 30th of October, 1870, on learning the loss of Le Bourget Fort, she had written:[243] “I cannot describe the vexation, the discouragement, the wrath, the moral perturbation which possess me.” On so patriotic and fervent a nature as hers these experiences could not fail to imprint an indelible mark. Her patriotism, as we have repeatedly seen, had always been ardent. Je prétends être Français plus que personne was her own sentiment put into the mouth of the Picard weaver in her first novel, Mon Village. After the war, growing with national disaster,[244] her patriotism became a consuming fire. Of herself she might have written the words she penned of Edmond About: “il s’est reveillé de l’horrible cauchemar patriote fanatique.”[245] “Votre patriotisme,” wrote her friend General Gallifet,[246] “est peint sur vos traits et pétille dans votre conversation.”
The Commune had taught her to regard socialism and internationalism as, after Germany, her country’s most formidable enemies. Her horror when her father proposed to marry her to a working man had shown that in those early days she was not free from a certain class prejudice. An ardent republican, she had believed in fraternity but not in equality. For her as for Plato the ideal state would be governed by the élite. Socialism she had ever abhorred. And as the years went on, she came to have less and less faith in the masses. During those disturbed months which preceded the war, when, looking down from her window on the Boulevard Poissonnière, she saw Paris workmen (les blouses blanches) holding nightly conferences with policemen, she had no doubt of their being agents provocateurs. That the Commune’s excesses should confirm and aggravate this suspiciousness was inevitable.
Her father’s sympathy with the revolutionists caused her unspeakable grief. Dr. Lambert, after sending Alice to Bruyères, had returned to Paris, where he remained to witness and to approve the insurrection. Nothing could ever induce him to blame the communards. He had welcomed the movement as the dawn of social regeneration. And for the crimes of the rebels he held Thiers and his government responsible. How painful for Mme. Adam was all conversation with her father at this time will readily be imagined.
Closely associated with the communards throughout had been members of “the Internationale,”[247] that vast cosmopolitan organisation, inspired by Karl Marx and instituted in London in 1862. “The Internationale” had given its support to the Central Committee which ruled Paris, and it had fully approved of the message sent to the German commander assuring him that the German army had nothing to fear from the insurrection.[248] Indeed, it seemed to Mme. Adam that the Germans had everything to gain from the civil strife then rending France, and that the Communards were simply playing Bismarck’s game. Had they not purged of danger and disorder other European capitals by gathering into Paris from London, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin, anarchists whose railway fares “seemed to fall like manna from heaven!”[249]
For some years, while she had been gradually coming to perceive the danger which threatened from German aggression, Mme. Adam had been growing more and more suspicious of the internationalist movement. With the Germanising tendencies of Renan, Gaston Paris and other members of her circle she had no sympathy whatever. After the war she could not refrain from regarding all internationalists as traitors to their country.[250] Any sympathy with Germany appeared to her as nothing short of treason, and treason of the deepest dye. The bonds of friendship which united her to George Sand were strained almost to breaking-point when her friend wrote that she desired peace “not for the sake of France alone but for the sake of Germany, and in order to avert the ruin of two civilisations.”
“This is one of my most cruel sorrows,” wrote Mme. Adam.“ A gulf has opened between me and the friend whom I adored. Never shall we understand one another again. She ... has reverted to the old humanitarianism of 1848. She, like my friend Arlès Dufour, permits herself to be moved by pity for the Germans.”
Had Mme. Sand witnessed with Juliette all the horrors of the siege, could she have maintained that serenity which from henceforth she never wearied of preaching to her young friend? “Do not let us be nervous and agitated,” she writes, “but reasonable, for in that direction alone lies the path of duty.”[251] In those days it seemed to Mme. Adam that this sweet reasonableness was only possible for those who had remained aloof from the struggle; and between them and herself who had lived in the heart of the inferno there was a wide gulf fixed. How wide she realised painfully when, worn and wan, after that terrible railway journey from Paris, she was greeted by her friends at Cannes with the words, “Are you not glad to be at Bruyères once more?” “Glad!” She was aghast at that word. Yet it accorded well with their smiling faces and their perfect health. “But are you pleased that the war is over?” they persisted. “And our defeat?” she cried. “Do you not realise that it is going to tear out our very flesh?” And she dismissed them abruptly, horrified to find “French people so detached from France.”[252] Later she wrote: “The pure southern sky has never been defiled by the smoke of German bivouacs. For the people of Provence the war has been a blood-stained book, but one the pages of which they have hardly turned over.”[253]
With Mme. Adam it was very different. For la grande Française “the terrible year” stands out as the one ineffaceable landmark, dominating the whole of her subsequent career.