stating that the surrender of arms has been slow, and the last delay has
expired. The military authorities will, therefore, treat the offenders
with severity. Active searches have been made in the Rue St. Honoré
to-day.
The Courts-martial at Versailles will try the prisoners exclusively for
offences against the common law, and will not consider them as political
offenders.
JUNE 11th.
The close inspection which has been made of the sewers in Paris has
already led to the discovery of large quantities of weapons and
ammunition, and also of many ex-Federalist combatants, who, despairing
of escape from the regular troops, sought refuge in the subterranean
passages with whatever provisions they could secure. The greater part of
these miserable creatures are in a most deplorable condition from hunger
and the poisonous atmosphere of their hiding places. On Friday, at the
angle of the Rue Vavin and the outer Boulevard, the scavengers found
five bodies in the sewer, one that of an officer, and all mutilated by
rats. The bodies were brought out by means of ropes, and after search
for papers and documents, were interred in the Mont Parnasse Cemetery.
JUNE 12th.
On Wednesday the Commissary of Police for the Quartier Saint Victor
received information that the ex-General of the Commune, Rossel, was in
concealment at the Hôtel Montebello, upon the Boulevard St. Germain. The
Commissary proceeded to the hotel, and upon searching the place found in
a room on the third floor a person dressed in the uniform of the Eastern
Railway service. Upon being questioned this person stated that his name
was Tirobois, that he was an engineer living at Metz, but had been
summoned to Paris by the railway managers on account of the pressure of
traffic on the line. 'Are you sure of that?' asked the Commissary.
'Parbleu.' 'Well, in the name of the law I arrest you. You are Rossel.'
'I? not at all.' The prisoner was taken to the Prefecture de Police
established at the Barracks of the Cité, and thence in a boat to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the head-quarters of the municipal
police are established. During the whole of the journey thither, being
closely pressed with questions by the Commissary, the pretended Tirobois
continued his denials. Upon being further interrogated at the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, he replied, 'I have told you all I know about
myself. Do not ask me any more.' Tirobois was then conveyed to the
Ministry of War, where he was confronted with a number of persons who
were detained in custody. Some of these declared that he was Rossel, but
others, the majority, denied that he was the Communist ex-General. About
10 o'clock at night the prisoner was formally questioned as to his
history. When the customary question, 'What is the name of your mother?'
was put, he became confused, turned red, and, suddenly springing up,
exclaimed, 'Why carry on this pretence any longer. Of what good is this
acting and these lies. Yes, I am Colonel Rossel.' After this avowal the
prisoner was removed under escort to the dépôt of the Prefecture. Upon
being searched there was found 225f. in notes, a political article, and
a longitudinal section of the different public monuments in Paris. The
next day he was taken to Versailles and lodged at the Grandes Écuries.
His real description is Louis Nathaniel Rossel, born at St. Brieuc
(Côtes du Nord), September 9, 1844, of Louis and of Sarah Campbell. The
_Figaro_ states that the artist Courbet was captured at the house of one
of his friends, a pianoforte maker in the Rue St. Gilles. He was
concealed behind a bedstead, and, upon being threatened with a revolver,
gave himself up without attempting resistance.
The destruction at the Gobelins has not been so extensive as had been
apprehended. Only a small portion of the buildings has been burnt, and
work has already been resumed in the parts which have been spared. Even
in those rooms which have been destroyed not all the works of art have
been lost, and especially the "Dead Christ" after Philippes de
Champagne, and the portrait of Louis XIV, after Rigault, have been
saved. The collection of ancient patterns has also been preserved.
JUNE 13th
Some disquieting rumours about the condition of La Villette have caused
the troops quartered there to be strongly reinforced; nevertheless,
perfect tranquility so far prevails.
Business is greatly improving, orders for _articles de Paris_ coming in
pretty freely, and the fine weather bringing increasing crowds of
visitors.
Some further important arrests have been made, including Urbain, alleged
to have been the principal instigator of the massacre of the hostages.
JUNE 14th.
Paris is rapidly resuming its old appearance. The Cafés and Concerts in
the Champs Élysées recommence to-morrow, and various theatres are
re-opening.
JUNE 15th.
People, in France, are discussing the causes of the late insurrection,
and measuring the consideration to which the Insurgents, whether as
rebels or refugees, are justly entitled. That the tendency of opinion
should be strongly against the Communists is natural, for the
justification of their revolt appears difficult, while their last acts
have excited universal abhorrence. It is, indeed, perfectly true that
they had no grievance against the Government which they defied, for
though, perhaps, the National Assembly might not have voted for a
Republic, no Republic which could have been voted by any Assembly of
Frenchmen would have satisfied the Insurgents of Paris. The political
leanings of the Assembly may be put out of the question in searching for
the origin of the Civil War. That war was hatched in the brooding minds
of Parisian workmen, intent on one single object, and it became
practicable when the Revolution of September last put arms in their
hands and the capitulation of February left them there still.
The one fixed idea of the workmen of Paris was that work entitled them
to something more than wages. They had so long and so intently
contemplated the relations between labour and capital that they knew
nothing of any other elements of human society, or of any other classes
beyond employers and employed. They saw that a hundred workmen got their
five francs a day each, and that the single person who hired them got
his thousands a year. We are not aware that, as a rule, they were
ill-paid or overworked, or in any way oppressed. We should infer rather
that they were in the receipt of good wages, that they possessed
education as well as skill, and that they had leisure enough and to
spare for discussion and thought. The misfortune was that they thought
of one subject only, until at last their conceptions grew actually
monstrous. It was not all at once that they reached the doctrines
recently declared. There is a wide difference between the ideas of 1871
and those of 1848. At the latter period the labourer was held simply to
be worthy of his hire, and nothing was proposed beyond such an
organization of labour as would insure a constant supply of work for all
who wanted it, at wages determined rather by considerate adjustment than
unrestricted competition. But the men of the Commune had advanced far
ahead of such old Tories of Socialism and Democracy as LEDRU ROLLIN and
LOUIS BLANC. Still occupied with the one single prospect of their daily
life, and regarding the relations between capital and labour as the
be-all and end-all of existence, they had reached the conclusion that
all capital should be transferred bodily to themselves; that they alone
ought to constitute society, that all other classes should be
dispossessed as worthless, and all established institutions abolished as
effete. They began their demolition with the nation itself. They would
have no nation, no France, no French Government. They renounced not
only all Kings and Emperors, but all Presidents, all Conventions, and
all Parliaments, the latter especially. In the place of such authorities
they proposed to substitute Committees of working men, and to cut up the
country into such areas as Trade Unions might conveniently govern. For
their own particular Union they thought Paris might serve well enough,
and so they stipulated for their own sovereignty within these limits
under the title of the Commune. On those terms--every other species of
authority and power being excluded--they believed they could put into
practice their one idea of turning their own little world upside down
and making the working class everything and other classes nothing. As
they never looked beyond their own workshops, they considered that none
but working people had ever done any duties or suffered any wrongs, and
that no others, therefore, were entitled to any rights. The one object
of their hatred, envy, and antagonism was capital, and they resolved to
take capital into their own hands. For the future they would lead easy
lives, and be the lords instead of the slaves of their old and detested
enemy.
In those pretensions and those desires originated the Revolution just
suppressed. The war thus undertaken was a Civil War, conducted without
the least respect to any laws of war at all. The flight of the
Government left the entire Capital not only with all its resources, but
with all its treasures and all its inhabitants, in the hands of the
insurgents. With these advantages they preferred their demands. They
asked for the Capital of France to be delivered over to them as an
estate or province within which they might proscribe the worship of GOD,
appropriate every form of capital, and depose all authority and all
ranks in favour of their own. Failing this, and in the event of their
being defeated in the actual war, they asked for amnesty and liberty to
depart. At first they reckoned on victory, for the Assembly appeared
disorganized and its armies wavering; the support of other great towns
was anticipated, and the outlaws of every country in Europe--the
veterans of the universal Revolution--had carried their swords to the
service of its latest and ripest expression--the Parisian Commune.
Moreover, they had tremendous means of extortion in their hands. They
held possession of all that was precious and admirable in the Capital of
France, and they declared that, if they were neither allowed to prevail
nor permitted to escape, they would spare nothing in their vengeance. In
preparation for the worst they stored combustibles in the noblest
edifices of the city, and then, laying their hands on some of the most
eminent and venerated of its inhabitants, they penned them in a body for
the contingency of prospective slaughter. They had no more personal
animosity against Monseigneur DARBOY than against any statue in the
Tuileries or the Louvre. Animate and inanimate objects were marked for
destruction on precisely the same grounds--the necessity of putting
stress upon the enemy; and the threat was actually executed because its
execution might improve the effect of terrorism another day. Of laws or
of rules of war these men took not the slightest account. The military
leaders of the insurrection had been trained in combats where every
imaginable expedient had been held lawful, and the Committee of the
International thought no price too high for the realization of their
fixed idea. Soldiers and workmen alike were prepared for any extremity
of outrage either in pursuit of victory or prosecution of revenge.
Such was the cause and such the conduct of this two months' war; but a
war, nevertheless, it was, waged by a political insurrection on behalf
of a political object. It is very true that the Insurgents aimed at no
form of polity known to the world, and that it would have been
impossible to content them by any measure of civil freedom or political
rights. Their chief and most peremptory demand was, not for any rights
of their own, but for the suppression of the rights of others. They
denounced the extension of the suffrage to the rural population, and, as
they were in a very small minority themselves, they protested against
the right of any majority to outvote them, though they were preparing
all the while to impose their own will on a constituency of ten times
their number.
Such are my summary reflections concerning that gigantic insurrection.
Now, my Dear, that I have brought my daily correspondence to an end,
happy shall I be, if such as may happen to read my small volume can find
the perusal of it as interesting as you told it was to you.
I don't expect to stay much longer abroad: I shall soon return to
England but quite heart-rent at what my eyes have witnessed, and
notwithstanding my admiration for the noble qualities of the french
nation, more than once, I fear, I shall not be able to refrain
exclaiming: _Poor France!_
THE END.
HISTORICAL INFORMATIONS ABOUT THE PRINCIPAL BUILDINGS BURNT
The Palais Royal, built on the site of Cardinal Richelieu's Palace,
faces the Louvre, and adjoins the Place des Victoires. Given by Louis
XIV, to his brother the Duke of Orleans, it passed from him to the
Regent Duke. Here, but not in the existing edifice, the Regent and his
daughter held their incredible orgies; here lived his grandson Egalité,
who rebuilt the palace after a fire, and relieved his embarrassments by
erecting the ranges of shops. The Palais Royal Gardens were the nursery
of the First Revolution; they were the favourite resort of Camille
Desmoulins and the other mob orators not yet sitting in Convention; and
in them was unfurled, on the 13th of July, 1789, that tricolour flag
which was to prove even a deadlier symbol than the red and white roses
plucked once for England's woe in our own Temple-gardens. At the Palais
Royal Egalité hatched the plots which ended in his execution, when it
was disposed of by lottery, to be bought back, repaired, and beautified
by the Orleans family after the Restoration, and inhabited by them till
the second death of the Monarchy, in 1830, removed them to the
Tuileries. In 1848 the palace was plundered and the interior destroyed
by the mob, who at the same time burnt Louis Philippe's fine library.
The Palais was turned into a barrack, but when the new Republic
developed into an Empire, it naturally changed back again into a palace.
The Emperor made it over to his uncle Jerome, who left it to Prince
Napoleon, by whom it was fitted up in sumptuous style. The great
staircase and its balustrades and the Galerie des Fêtes were fine in art
and in general effect, but nothing that may have been destroyed can be
half so great a loss as the Library which went in 1848, or as the Hôtel
de Ville, a magnificent structure, dating in part from 1628. The
additions of 1842 to this municipal palace cost 640,000_l_., and some of
the saloons were the most gorgeous in Paris, perhaps in the world. Here
in the days gone by, the Prefect of the Seine was wont to entertain his
7,000 guests in the great gallery, with its gilt Corinthian columns and
3,000 wax lights, the whole suite of rooms measuring more than 1,000
yards in length. In and about the building were some 500 statues of
French celebrities, from Charlemagne to Louis XIV, in a full-bottomed
wig. Painting, gilding, carving, glass, and velvet here had done their
utmost, and as a specimen of magnificence in the modern French taste
the furniture and decorations of the Hôtel de Ville were unrivalled. The
building, however, was far from depending altogether on its sumptuous
upholstery. Not only was the architecture worthy of all praise and the
art of much of the decoration as intrinsic as its gold, but here had
been enacted many famous and infamous scenes in the history of Paris.
Here the first Commune held its bloody sittings; here Robespierre took
refuge with his partisans, and was found by the soldiers with his broken
jaw; the "Citizen King" was presented here to the people by Lafayette
from a central window; here the soldiers were quartered in 1848; and
here in 1871 was the stronghold of the last Commune, less bloody in its
life but more desperate in its death than the first.
The Palais de Justice is a vast pile, which includes the Sainte
Chapelle, numerous courts of law, and the Prison of the Conciergerie.
Anciently the site of palaces inhabited by the Kings down to Francis I.,
afterwards the meeting place of the Parliaments of Paris, it has been
repaired and rebuilt since 1831 at a cost of nearly 1,000,000_l_. The
courts of law open from the vast but inelegant Salle des Pas Perdus,
which answers to our Westminster-hall. One of these courts was the
Chamber of the Tribunal Revolutionnaire, and communicated by a small
door with the Conciergerie Prison. In the precincts of the Palais
stands, or stood, the Sainte Chapelle, an exquisite specimen on a small
scale of the best style of Gothic architecture. The Chapelle was
finished in 1248, having been built by Pierre de Montereau to enshrine
the thorns of our Lord's crown and the wood of the Cross, relics bought
for an immense sum from the Emperor Baldwin by St. Louis, and carried
through the streets of Paris by the King barefoot. In 1791 the Sainte
Chapelle became a club, then a corn store, then a record office; Louis
Philippe commenced its restoration, and up to the fall of the Empire
about 2,000,000f. had been spent upon it. It is in two stories,
corresponding with the floors of the ancient palace; the lower chapel,
or crypt, was intended for the servants, the upper, on a level with the
Royal apartments, for the Royal family. The glass is exquisite, and the
statues of the twelve Apostles date from the 13th century, and are
admirable specimens of the art of their age. A small square hole to the
south of the nave communicates with a room in which Louis XI was wont to
sit and hear mass without fear of assassination.
GRAND-HOTEL
_12, Boulevard des Capucines, 12._
* * * * *
REOPENING
=After entire restoration.=
* * * * *
The new direction of the Grand-Hotel has greatly reduced the prices.
The price for service will be no more charged to travellers.
=700 rooms and drawing-rooms=
very comfortably furnished, from
5 francs a day, service included.
* * * * *
=TABLE D'HOTE=
BREAKFASTS--at 4 francs, wine included,
every day from 10 a.m. till 1 p.m.
DINNERS--at 6 francs, wine included,
every day at 6 p.m. precisely.
* * * * *
MEALS BY THE CARD.
* * * * *
SPECIAL SERVICE AT MED PRICE.
Including the lodging, fuel, light, service and food, with choice to
take the meals in the apartments, in the restaurant, or at the table
d'hôte:
1st class--30 frs. 24 sh. 6 d.
2d d° --25 » 20 » 5 »
3d d° --20 » 16 » 4 »
OPPOSITE THE NEW OPERA GRANDE BRASSERIE.--GRAND BREWERY
ENGLISH ALES,--DUTCH BEER
COFFEE-HOUSE.--EATING-HOUSE
_Breakfasts at 2 Fr. 50 (2 shil.).--Dinners at 4 Fr. 50 and à la carte
(bill of fare)_
31, BOULEVARD HAUSSMAN =The most comfortable in Paris=
* * * * *
CABOURG-DIVES
GRAND HOTEL DE LA PLAGE
Establishment for bathing situated in the most luxuriant and salubrious
country in Normandy
SPLENDID CASINO.--ROOMS FOR THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES
* * * * *
=DIEPPE=
HOTEL ROYAL ON THE PLAGE
THE MOST COMFORTABLE
Kept by Mme LAFOSSE
* * * * *
=CAEN=
HOTEL DE LA VICTOIRE
NEAR THE CATHEDRAL
_Kept by Mr BEUZELIN_
* * * * *
WINE AND SPIRITS
J. CHAIGNEAU AND CO
_31 and 33, rue Doidy_
=BORDEAUX=
Appointed to supply H.M. the king of sweden and norway
* * * * *
CAEN. TYP. F. LE BLAC-HARDEL.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Insurrection in Paris, by An Englishman: Davy