The Downfall (La Débâcle): A Story of the Horrors of War

by Émile Zola

After the middle of April the cannonade and fusillade went on without a pause. At Levallois and Neuilly an endless combat was kept up, a skirmishing fire which rattled uninterruptedly by day and night alike. Heavy guns, mounted upon armour-plated carriages, travelled along the circular railway line, and fired over the roofs of Levallois at Asnières. But it was at Vanves and at Issy that the cannonade proved fiercest, all the window-panes on that side of Paris rattled as they had done during the most terrible days of the German siege. And on May 9, when, after a first alert, the fort of Issy finally fell into the possession of the Versaillese, the defeat of the Commune became a certainty, and a fit of panic impelled its members to the most evil resolutions.

Maurice approved of the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. Pages of history returned to his mind; had not the hour struck for energetic measures to be adopted if the country were to be saved? Of all the many acts of violence, there was but one which wrung his heart with a secret anguish—the destruction of the Vendôme Column. In vain did he reproach himself for this feeling, this childish weakness as he deemed it; his grandfather's voice still rang in his ears telling him tales of battle—Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, the Moskowa—all those epic narratives which thrilled him yet. But it was different when the question was one of demolishing the house of that murderer, Thiers, of detaining the hostages as a guarantee and a menace, for were not acts like these fitting reprisals now that the rage of Versailles against Paris had increased to such a pitch that the city was being bombarded, and that shells were plunging through the house-roofs and killing women? That sombre longing for destruction mounted to his brain as the end of his dream drew nigh. If the principle of justice and retribution were destined to be annihilated in bloodshed might the ground open and everything be transformed by one of those cosmical convulsions that have renewed the life of the world! Might Paris fall, burn like a huge sacrificial pyre rather than be again delivered over to its vice and its misery, to that old rotten social system that had ever upheld abominable injustice! And he dreamed another great gloomy dream—the giant city reduced to cinders, naught left but smoking embers on both banks of the river, a nameless, unparalleled catastrophe whence a new people would arise. And thus he took a more and more feverish interest in the wild reports which circulated: whole districts undermined, the catacombs chokefull of gunpowder, everything ready to blow up the public monuments; electric wires connecting the mines so that a single spark would at the same moment ignite them all; vast stores of inflammable products gathered together, especially petroleum, enough to turn the streets and squares into rivers and seas of flame. The Commune had sworn it—if the Versaillese should enter the city, not one of them would pass beyond the barricades blocking the crossways, the pavements would open, the edifices would crumble, Paris would flare from end to end and swallow up a world!

And if Maurice began clinging to this wild dream, it was because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He despaired of the men composing it, felt them to be incompetent, pulled this way and that by conflicting views and interests, growing more and more exasperated, losing their heads, and lapsing into imbecility as their peril gradually increased. Of all the social reforms to which the Commune was pledged, it had been unable to realise a single one; and it was already certain that it would leave no durable work behind it. But the great evil from which it suffered was the rivalry tearing it asunder, the mutual suspicion which consumed each of its members. Many of them, the Moderates, the timid ones, had already ceased taking any part in the deliberations. The others acted on the spur of the moment, as events might suggest, trembled at the prospect of a possible dictatorship, had reached indeed that phase when the factions of revolutionary assemblies exterminate one another in the hope of saving the Commonwealth. After Cluseret, after Dombrowski, it became Rossel's turn to be suspected. Delescluze, appointed civil delegate at War, could himself do nothing, despite his great authority. And on the other hand the social effort, of which there had been just a faint glimpse, subsided to insignificance, proved utterly abortive amid the hourly increasing isolation of these men, rendered powerless by dissension and reduced to acts of despair.

Terror was rising in Paris. Irritated, at first, against Versailles, shuddering at memory of the sufferings of the siege, the city was now detaching itself from the Commune. The compulsory enrolment, the decree incorporating every man under forty years of age in the insurrectionary forces, had angered people of calm minds and caused a flight en masse; some folks went off by way of St. Denis, disguised and provided with spurious Alsatian passports,[55] others with the help of ropes and ladders let themselves down into the ditch of the fortifications on dark nights. The wealthy people of the middle class had long since taken themselves off. Not a factory, not a workshop had reopened its doors. There was no trade, no work, the old life of idleness continued during that anxious wait for the inevitable ending. And the people—the poorer classes—still lived upon the paltry pay allowed to each National Guard—that franc and a half per diem paid from the millions which were now being requisitioned from the Bank of France, that franc and a half for the sake of which alone many men still continued fighting, and which was really one of the primary causes, the why and wherefore of the insurrection. Entire districts had become depopulated, the shops were shut, the house-fronts lifeless. And in the deserted streets under the warm sun of that lovely month of May, there was nothing to look at but the funerals of Federals who had been killed in action—processions unaccompanied by any priest, but fraught with a barbaric pomp, the hearses draped with red flags and followed by crowds wearing 'button-holes' of immortelles. The churches, closed for purposes of worship, became transformed every evening into political club-rooms. Only revolutionary newspapers were published, all the others had been suppressed. And all this was tantamount to the destruction of Paris, that great, ill-fated Paris which, like the Republican capital it was, still retained a feeling of repulsion for the Assembly, even while its terror of the Commune, and its impatience to be delivered from it, grew and spread amid all the alarming rumours that circulated—rumours of the daily arrest of hostages, and of barrels of gunpowder lowered into the sewers, where men were said to watch with lighted torches waiting for a signal.

And at this stage Maurice, who hitherto had never been inclined to drink, found himself caught and submerged as it were in the universal intoxication. At present, when he was on duty at some advanced post or spent the night in a guard-room, it frequently happened that he accepted a nip of brandy. And if he took a second nip excitement followed, fanned by the breath of his comrades as it blew past his face, reeking with alcoholic fumes. The drunkenness had become chronic, an all-invading epidemic, bequeathed by the first siege, aggravated by the second; for if the population had lacked bread it had always possessed brandy and wine in profusion, and had so saturated itself with drink, that the merest drop now sufficed to make it delirious. For the first time in his life, on the evening of Sunday, May 21, Maurice came back drunk to his lodging in the Rue des Orties, where he still slept from time to time. He had again spent the day at Neuilly, firing at the Versaillese and drinking with his comrades in the hope of surmounting the intense weariness which was overpowering him. Then with his head in a fog and his limbs exhausted, he had come and thrown himself on the bed in his little room, led thither by instinct, for he never remembered how he had managed to make the journey. And on the following morning the sun was already high in the heavens when the tumult of alarm bells, drums, and bugles at last aroused him. On the previous evening, finding a gate of the ramparts at the Point-du-Jour abandoned, the Versaillese had entered Paris unopposed.

Hastily dressing, and taking his gun, which he slung over his shoulder, Maurice went down into the street, and, scarcely had he reached the district municipal offices, when a cluster of scared comrades whom he met there acquainted him with the events of the evening and the night, in so confused a way, however, that it was at first difficult for him to understand the position. The fort of Issy and the great battery at Montretout had been pounding away at the ramparts for ten days past, and with such effect that the St. Cloud gate of the fortifications had at last become untenable. An assault had therefore been resolved upon, and was to have taken place on the morning of May 22. But on the afternoon of the 21st, at about five o'clock, a passer-by, seeing that nobody remained guarding the St. Cloud gate, simply beckoned to the Versaillese posted in the trenches, which were scarcely fifty yards away. Two companies of the 37th of the Line thereupon at once entered the city, and behind them followed the whole of the Fourth Corps, commanded by General Douay. The troops poured into Paris in a ceaseless stream throughout the night. At seven in the evening General Vergé's division set out towards the Grenelle bridge, and even pushed forward as far as the Trocadéro. At nine o'clock General Clinchant captured Passy and La Muette. At three in the morning the First Corps was camping in the Bois de Boulogne; and at about the same hour General Bruat's division crossed the Seine to carry the Sèvres gate and facilitate the entrance of the Second Corps, which, under the orders of General de Cissey, occupied the Grenelle district an hour later. Thus on the morning of the 22nd the army of Versailles held the Trocadéro and La Muette on the right bank of the river, and Grenelle on the left bank; and this to the stupor, wrath, and consternation of the Commune, whose members were already accusing one another of treachery in their agony at the idea that annihilation was now inevitable.

This, too, was Maurice's first feeling when he at last understood the situation. The end had come, and no course remained but to meet death boldly. Meantime, however, the alarm bells were pealing, the drums were beating more loudly, women and even children were helping to build barricades, and the streets were filling with all the feverish stir and bustle of the battalions hastily assembled and hurrying to their posts of combat. And at midday hope again sprang from the breasts of the excited, determined soldiers of the Commune when they found that the Versaillese had scarcely stirred from their positions. This army, which they had feared to find at the Tuileries in a couple of hours' time, manœuvred with extraordinary caution, profiting by the stern lessons of defeat, and exaggerating the tactics which it had learnt at such dire cost from the Germans.[56] Meantime the Committee of Public Safety, and Delescluze, the delegate at War, organised and directed the defence from their quarters at the Hôtel-de-Ville. It was noised abroad that they had disdainfully repulsed a supreme attempt at conciliation. These tidings inflamed the courage of their partisans; the triumph of Paris once more seemed assured, and on all sides the resistance was to be as fierce as the attack had been implacable—such was the hatred, fed by lies and atrocities, which burnt in the hearts of either army.

Maurice spent that day in the neighbourhood of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, falling back slowly from street to street whilst firing upon the troops. He had not been able to find his own battalion, and was fighting in company with some comrades who were strangers to him, and who had led him to the left bank of the river without his even noticing it. Towards four o'clock they defended a barricade blocking the Rue de l'Université, at the point where it reaches the Esplanade des Invalides; and they did not abandon this position until the twilight fell and they learned that Bruat's division, stealing along by way of the quay, had secured possession of the Corps Législatif. As it was, they narrowly escaped being caught, and only reached the Rue de Lille with great difficulty, after making a long round through the Rue St. Dominique and the Rue Bellechasse. When night fell the army of Versailles occupied a line starting from the Vanves gate, on the left bank of the Seine, and passing by way of the Corps Législatif across the river to the Elysée palace, the church of St. Augustin, and the St. Lazare railway station, until it finally reached the Asnières gate on the north-west.

It was the morrow, May 23, a beautiful spring Tuesday, bright with warm sunshine, which proved the terrible day for Maurice. The few hundred Federals of various battalions, among whom he found himself, still held the whole district from the quay to the Rue St. Dominique. Most of them, however, had bivouacked in the gardens of the large mansions lining the Rue de Lille, and he himself had fallen fast asleep on a lawn adjoining the palace of the Legion of Honour. He fancied that the troops would emerge from the Corps Législatif at dawn to drive him and his comrades behind the strong barricades which had been thrown up in the Rue du Bac, but several hours went by and there were no signs of an attack. The combatants merely continued exchanging random shots from one to the other end of the streets. All this, however, formed part of the plan of the Versaillese, which was now being slowly, cautiously carried out. Firmly resolved not to attempt a front attack upon the formidable fortress into which the insurgents had converted the Tuileries terrace, they had decided upon a double advance along the ramparts on either side of the river in view of capturing Montmartre on the north and the Observatory on the south to begin with, and thence swooping down upon the city, surrounding the central quarters and seizing upon them at one great stroke. Towards two o'clock Maurice heard a comrade say that the tricolour flag was waving over Montmartre. Simultaneously attacked by three army corps, whose battalions had climbed the height on its northern and western sides, the great battery of the Galette windmill had been captured; and the victors were now streaming down into Paris, carrying in turn the Place St. Georges, the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, the municipal offices in the Rue Drouot, and the Grand Opera House; whilst on the left bank the turning movement, starting from the Montparnasse Cemetery, was now reaching the Place d'Enfer and the Horse Market. At these tidings of the rapid progress made by the army the Communists gave way to stupor, wrath, and fright. What! Montmartre had been carried in a couple of hours—Montmartre, the glorious, impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice noticed that the ranks were thinning around him, that trembling comrades were slinking away to wash their hands and slip on a blouse, in their fear of the troops' reprisals. It was rumoured, too, that they would soon be turned by way of the Croix-Rouge crossway, the attack on which was now being prepared. The barricades in the Rue Martignac and the Rue Bellechasse had already been carried, and the insurgents were beginning to espy the red trousers of the soldiers at the end of the Rue de Lille. And now the Communist force upon this point became limited to the men of conviction, the desperate ones; Maurice and some fifty others who were resolved to die after killing as many as possible of those bloodthirsty Versaillese who treated the Federals as bandits, dragging those whom they made prisoners to the rear of their line of battle and shooting them down there. Since the previous day the execrable feelings of hatred animating either side had yet increased; it was now a war of extermination between those rebels dying for their dream, and that army hot with reactionary passions and exasperated at still having to fight.