“ROSSEL.”[[82]]
Delescluze, Delegate of War.[[83]]
Most certainly I do not like the Paris Commune, such as the men of the Hôtel de Ville understand it. Deceived at first by my own delusive hopes, I now am sure that we have nothing to expect from it but follies upon follies, crimes upon crimes. I hate it on account of the suppressed newspapers, of the imprisoned journalists, of the priests shut up at Mazas like assassins, of the nuns shut up at Saint-Lazare like courtesans; I hate it because it incites to the crime of civil war those who would have been ready to fight against the Prussians, but who do not wish to fight against Frenchmen; I hate it on account of the fathers of families sent to battle and to death; on account of our ruined ramparts, our dismantled forts, each stone of which as it falls wounds or destroys; on account of the widowed women and the orphaned children, all of whom they can never pension in spite of their decrees; I cannot pardon them the robbing of the banks, nor the money extorted from the railway companies, nor the loan-shares sold to a money-changer at Liège; I hate it on account of Clémence the spy, and Allix the madman. I am sorry to think that two or three intelligent men should be mixed up with it, and have to share in its fall. I hate it particularly on account of the just principles it at one time represented, and of the admirable and fruitful ideas of municipal independence, which it, was not able to carry out honestly, and which, because of the excesses that have been committed in their name, will have lost for ever, perhaps, all chance of triumphing. Still, great as is my horror of this parody of a government to which we have had to submit for nearly two months, I could not forbear a feeling of repulsion on reading the letter of Citizen Rossel. It is a capitally written letter, firm, concise, conclusive, differing entirely from the bombastic, unintelligible documents to which the Commune has accustomed us; and besides, it brings to light several details at which I rejoice, because it permits me to hope that the reign of our tyrants is nearly at an end. I am glad to hear that the Commune, if it possesses artillery, is short of artillerymen. It delights me to learn that they can only dispose of seven thousand combatants. I had feared that it would be enabled to kill a great many more; and as to what Citizen Rossel says of the committees and officers who deliberate but do not act, it is most pleasant news, for it convinces me, that the Commune has not the power to continue much longer a war, which can but result in the death of Paris; and yet I highly disapprove of the letter of Citizen Rossel, because it is on his part an act of treachery, and it is not for the friends and servants of the Commune to reveal its faults and to show up its weaknesses. Who obliged Rossel, commander of the staff, to take the place of his general, disgraced and imprisoned? Did he not accept willingly a position, the difficulties of which he had already recognised? He says himself that his predecessor was wrong to have stayed in so absurd a position, and why did he voluntarily put himself there, where he blamed another for remaining? If the new delegate hoped by his own cleverness to modify the position, he ought not, the position remaining the same, accuse anything but his own incapacity. In a word, the conclusion at which we arrive is, that he only accepted power to be able to throw it off with effect, like Cato, who only went to the public theatres for the purpose of fussily leaving the place, at the moment when the audience called the actors before the curtain. Not being able or perhaps willing to save the Commune, M. Rossel desired to save himself at its expense. There is something ungentlemanly in this. Do not, however, imagine for a moment that I believe in M. Rossel having been bought by M. Thiers. All those ridiculous stories of sums of money having been offered to the members of the Commune, are merely absurd inventions.[[84]] What do you think they say of Cluseret? That he was in the habit of taking his breakfast at the Café d’Orsay, and afterwards playing a game of dominoes. One day his adversary is reported to have said to him, “If you will deliver the fort of Montrouge to the Versaillais, I will give you two millions.” What fools people must be to believe such absurdities! Rossel has not sold himself, for the very good reason that nobody ever thought of buying him. It was his own idea to do what he did. For the pleasure of being insolent and showing his boldness, he has pulled down from its pedestal what he adored, consequently the most criminal among the members of the Commune, once a swindler, now a pilferer, is free to say to M. Rossel, who is, I am told, a man of intelligence and honesty, “You are worse than I am, for you have betrayed us!”
NOTES:
[81] PARIS AT DINNER.—An ogress, gentleman! A famished creature, faring sumptuously; her face flushed with wine, her eyes bright, her hands trembling. Madame Lutetia is a strapping woman still, with a queenly air about her, in spite of the red patches on her tunic; somewhat shorn of her ornaments, it is true, as she has had to pawn the greater part of her jewelry, but the orgie once over she will be again what she was before.
For the time being she is wholly absorbed in her gastronomic exertions. She has already devoured a Bergeret with peas, a Lullier with anchovy sauce, an Assy and potatoes, a Cluseret with tomatos, a Rossel with capers, besides a large quantity of small fry, and she is not yet appeased. The maître-d’hôtel Delescluze waits upon her somewhat in trepidation, with a sickly smile on his face. What if, after such a meal of generals and colonels, the ogress were to devour the waiter!—Fac simile of design from the “Grelot,” 17th May, 1871.
[82] He was convinced of the hopelessness of any further struggle after the capture of Fort Issy; gave in his resignation, and hid himself to escape the vengeance of his former colleagues. He was supposed to be in England or Switzerland, whereas, in fact, he had fled no farther than the Boulevard Saint Germain. He was arrested by the police on the ninth of June, disguised as an employé of the Northern Railway. He was first interrogated at the Petit Luxembourg, and afterwards conducted handcuffed to Versailles, where three mouths after he was tried by court-martial and sentenced to military degradation and death.
[83] Delescluze’s wild life began at Dreux, in 1809. Driven from home on account of his bad conduct, he came to Paris, and obtained employment in an attorney’s office, from which he was very soon afterwards, it is said, discharged for robbery. In 1834, he underwent the first of his long list of imprisonments, for the part he took in the April revolution, and in the following year, being compromised in a conspiracy against the safety of the state, he took refuge in Belgium, Where he obtained the editorship of the Courrier de Charleroi. In 1840 he returned to Paris, where he founded a journal called the Révolution Démocratique et Sociale, which brought him fifteen months’ imprisonment and twenty thousand francs fine. After a long period of liberty of nearly eight years, he was condemned to transportation by the High Court of Justice, but the condemnation was given in his absence, for he had slipped over to England, where he remained until 1853. On his returning in that year to France he was immediately imprisoned at Mazas, transferred afterwards to Belle-Isle, and then successively to the hulks of Corte, Ajaccio, Toulon, Brest, and finally to Cayenne. These sojourns lasted until 1868, when the amnesty permitted him to return to France, where he made haste to bring out another new journal, Le Réveil, which of course earned him fines and imprisonments with great rapidity, three of each within the twelvemonth.
In the month of February, 1871, he was elected deputy by a large number of votes; and later, when the Assembly went to Bordeaux, sat there for some time, and then gave in his resignation, in order to take part with the Commune.
By the Commune he was made delegate at the Ministry of War, after the pretended flight of Rossel, and in a sitting of the 20th of April, in which the project of burning Paris was discussed, Delescluze ended his speech with the words—“If we must die, we will give to Liberty a pile worthy of her.”
[84] “A plot had just been discovered between Bourget of the Internationale, Billioray, member of the Commune, and Cérisier, captain of the 101st Battalion of the insurgent National Guard. For a certain sum of money they were to deliver Port Issy into the hands of General Valentin, of the Versailles army. The succession of Rossel to the Ministry of War frustrated the whole project.
“In the night of the 17th of May another attempt of the same kind met with failure. The Communists Bourget, Billioray, Mortier, Cérisier, and Pilotel, the artist, traitors to their own treacherous cause, were to open the gates to the soldiers of Versailles, an hour after midnight, at the Point du Jour; the soldiers to be disguised as National Guards. But, at the appointed hour, Cérisier took fright, and contented himself with the money he had received on account (twenty-five thousand francs) in payment for his treachery, and did no more. When the Versailles troops presented themselves at the gates, they had to beat a retreat under a heavy fire of mitrailleuses.” Guerre des Communeux.]