Vae Victis indeed! How hard the conquerors have been, and what a mistake in a great country like Germany to give up all direction of its affairs to one bold unscrupulous man!
We do not believe in France being able to bear the burden which has been put upon her.
I presume one of the results will be to put protectionist duties on all imported articles. I do not think we should complain much. We shall lose to a certain degree, but infinitesimally as compared with France. You had better, in conversation with Thiers, and others, say that you shall regret it on French account. They want money, which is to be chiefly got in England. Here, rightly or wrongly, we believe that protective duties are most injurious to the revenue to which money-lenders look for their interest. If it is known that Thiers means to go in for large armaments and for protection, self-interest will shut up the hoards here.
Peace having now at length been assured, there arose the question of where the new Assembly was to establish itself, and as there was an only too well-founded suspicion that Paris was no place for a conservative chamber with a hankering after a monarchy, Versailles was eventually selected.
Lord Lyons to Lord Granville.
Bordeaux, March 6, 1871.
Thiers asked me yesterday whether I thought it would be advisable for him to bring the state of affairs between France and Germany before the Conference in London.
I did not very well see what there was to submit to the Conference, as the preliminaries of peace were signed and could not be altered. I thought it however better to avoid any discussion on this point, and to say decidedly that in my opinion it would be very unadvisable to do anything of the kind. I told him that I thought it would be a particularly bad opportunity to take, if he wished to consult the European Powers; that the German Plenipotentiary would say, and say with reason, that his Government had entered into a Conference for a specific purpose and was not to be entrapped into an extraneous discussion, that in this view he would no doubt be strongly supported by the Russian, and that probably none of the Plenipotentiaries would approve of a proceeding, which would certainly retard the business for which the Conference had met, and might very likely break it off altogether.
I think Thiers rather asked my opinion pour 'l'acquit de sa conscience,' than from having himself any strong desire to attempt to bring his affairs before the Conference. At any rate he gave a very conclusive argument against doing so himself, for he said that it might have the effect of delaying the Prussian evacuation of the neighbourhood of Paris.
He hopes to get the half milliard necessary to get the Prussians out of the forts on the North side of the Seine, before the end of the month. He speaks altogether more hopefully of the financial prospects than any one else whom I have heard. He says Bismarck was extremely hard about the money, and that the negociation was nearly broken off altogether on the question of Belfort. On this question he believes Bismarck was with him, and had a tremendous fight to obtain leave from the Emperor and Moltke to make the concession. Strange as it may appear Thiers seems really to have a sort of liking for Bismarck personally, and to believe that if he had been let have his own way by the militaires, he would have been much kinder to France.
It has been generally supposed that the Assembly will adjourn to Versailles, and St. Germain has also been mentioned; but Thiers told me yesterday that he should himself propose Fontainebleau. He would like himself to take it to Paris, as soon as the Prussians are out of the forts, but the majority will not hear of putting themselves so near the Belleville mob. I think it will be a great mistake not to go to Paris, and I hope Thiers will pluck up a spirit, and carry his point. He said something about being glad to have me near him at Fontainebleau, but I do not know that it was more than a compliment. At any rate I am myself strongly of opinion that the best thing for me to do is to go to Paris as soon as possible, and re-establish the Embassy there on the normal footing. If there should be (which I doubt) any necessity for my going to Thiers or Fontainebleau or elsewhere for more than a few hours at a time I should still propose to have the headquarters of the Embassy in the Faubourg St. Honoré and to treat my own occasional absence as accidental. In fact to act as I did when invited to Compiègne in the Emperor's time. I hope to be in Paris by the end of this week, or at latest, the beginning of next.
The Ambassador and his staff returned to Paris on March 14, finding the Embassy quite uninjured, no traces of the siege in the neighbourhood, and the town merely looking a little duller than usual. They were enchanted to be back, and little suspected that in three or four days they would again be driven out.
Previous attempts on the part of the Red Republicans to overthrow the Government of National Defence during the siege had met with failure, but Favre's stipulation that the National Guards should be permitted to retain their arms gave the Revolutionary Party its opportunity. The new Government was obviously afraid to act, and matters came to a crisis when an ineffectual and half-hearted attempt was made to remove some guns which had been seized by National Guards. Regular troops brought up against the latter refused to fight and fraternized with their opponents; two generals were shot under circumstances of great brutality, a Revolutionary Central Committee took possession of the Hotel de Ville and proclaimed the Commune, and the Government withdrew such regular troops as remained faithful to Versailles. On March 18, the insurgents were completely masters of the right bank of the Seine, and on the following day an emissary from the French Foreign Office appeared at the Embassy with the information that the Government had been forced to retire to Versailles, and that as it was no longer able to protect the Diplomatic Body at Paris, it was hoped that the Representatives of Foreign Powers would also repair to Versailles with the least possible delay. Nearly all of these did so at once, but Lord Lyons with his pronounced sedentary tastes had had quite enough of moving about and decided to wait for instructions.