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.
FOOTNOTES:
[219] M. Gabriel Hanotaux’s numbers are slightly different; but the
main point is that a substantial balance remained on the side of the
Monarchists. See _Histoire de la France Contemporaine_, I. 39.
[220] _Souvenirs_, V. 23.
[221] _Souvenirs_, IV. 341.
[222] _Ibid._, V. 5.
[223] _Souvenirs_, V. 12, 13.
[224] Hanotaux, _op. cit._, I. 64 _et passim_.
[225] _Souvenirs_, V. 25.
[226] Hanotaux, _op. cit._, I. 105, does not hesitate to condemn
Favre’s conduct of these negotiations.
[227] From Bordeaux, on December 26, 1870. He repeats this judgment on
February 16, 1871. See _Life of Lord Lyons_, by Lord Newton.
[228] Labouchère, _The Besieged Resident in Paris_.
[229] _Histoire Contemporaine_, I. 87.
[230] _Op. cit._, I. 89.
[231] _Souvenirs_, III. 44.
[232] Hanotaux, _op. cit._, 60.
[233] _Souvenirs_, III. 365.
[234] The general, who, during the siege of Paris, had commanded the
army of Central France.
[235] _Souvenirs_, V. 44.
[236] _Souvenirs_, IV. 47.
[237] _Ibid._, 55.
[238] Hanotaux, _op. cit._, I. 130.
[239] _Souvenirs_, V. 120.
[240] _Ibid._, 83.
[241] _Ibid._, 92, 105.
[242] _Souvenirs_, V. 124.
[243] _Souvenirs_, IV. 149.
[244] _Ibid._, VII. 282.
[245] _Ibid._, V. 222.
[246] _Ibid._, VII. 355.
[247] That for the Commune’s excesses the Government held “the
Internationale” partly responsible is proved by the introduction into
the National Assembly of a Bill condemning as a criminal offence
membership of this society. Favre, _op. cit._, III. 479.
[248] _Souvenirs_, V. 80.
[249] _Ibid._, 76; Hanotaux, _op. cit._, I. 188.
[250] _Ibid._, 81.
[251] _Souvenirs_, V. 158.
[252] _Ibid._, 9.
[253] _Ibid._, 213.