The World That Never Was (17 page)

Despite the initial rout of the Commune’s forces, optimism in Paris was undimmed. The previous two weeks had seen so many changes. Labourers and artisans had emerged from the sumps of poverty into which Baron Haussmann’s social zoning of the city had penned them, blinking into the bright light of freedom and self-rule. Their ‘descents’ into the affluent heart of the city revealed to many a world of opulence and luxury that previously they had seen, at best, from afar. A small contribution to a fund for recent war widows bought them admission to the Tuileries Palace, the one-time home of emperors, with its acres of gilding, while they could sample the refined musical fare on offer at the new Opéra entirely gratis. Surrounded by the conspicuous pleasures and privileges of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, yet with no cause now to be daunted by rank, Parisians greeted each other as
‘citoyen’
and
‘citoyenne’
.

‘We are free,’ proclaimed Louise Michel, ‘able to look back without unduly imitating ’93 and forward without fear of the unknown.’ They were bold words but her hopes were not without foundation. Idealistic decrees had begun to pour from the Hôtel de Ville. Gambling was banned to save the poor from themselves, the Church disestablished, and a
three-year moratorium declared on debt. It was only the beginning of what would become an extensive programme of legislation, yet immediately the virtuous example of the Commune seemed to begin trickling down. As the spring sun shone, observers claiming impartiality recorded that, in the absence of envy and oppression, crime spontaneously ceased. Only cynics whispered that the explanation lay in the abductions of troublesome elements by the Commune police under cover of night, or else suggested sarcastically that the criminals no longer had time to break the law, now that they themselves were in power.

It was a holiday mood, too, that infused the tens of thousands of the National Guard who mustered in the squares and parks of western Paris before dawn on 3 April, ready to march on Versailles. Some blithely likened the atmosphere to that of a picnic party setting out for the country, and hopes were high that by nightfall they would have secured the heights of the Châtillon plateau and control of the road to Versailles, barely a dozen miles further on. Elisée Reclus was there, as was his brother Elie, posted to different regiments. Leading the central tine of the trident of three columns was the flamboyant Flourens, his blond locks floating in the wind, the heroic role he had so long imagined finally his to command. Such was the abounding optimism that no one had thought to deploy the big guns that had seemed so precious to their defenders in Montmartre only a fortnight before.

‘Vive la République!’
cried the first Versaillais battalion to engage the National Guard on the right flank, as if in fraternal greeting. The Communard troops felt vindicated in their hopes and lowered their rifles as the seemingly congenial foe advanced from cover. Once at bayonet’s length, however, the Versaillais jerked back into an offensive posture.
‘Vive la République
is all well and good,’ they barked, ‘but now surrender!’ Beaten by a ruse, the credulous men of the Guard were bound together at the wrists, five and six abreast, and made to submit to a gauntlet of sticks and curses by the bourgeois inhabitants of Versailles as they were led through the town towards an uncertain fate. The absurd hopes that had allowed the Commune troops to become so fatally trusting was less damaging, however, than the Commune’s complete failure in military intelligence concerning Mont-Valérien, the fort abandoned by the Assembly’s troops in their rush to withdraw from Paris but whose massive gates had subsequently been left invitingly open by the National Guard entrusted with its defence.

Undaunted by the setbacks on his right flank, Flourens had ridden on, the romantic spirit of the Commune embodied. Intent on punching
through to Versailles, his column followed the straightest route, directly under the fortress’ imposing walls. Were he and his generals ignorant of its reoccupation by the enemy, some days earlier, or did men whose previous campaigns had been fought at second hand, in bars and revolutionary clubs, merely underestimate the significance of its loss? Holding fire until the head of the column had passed, the fort’s cannon and
mitrailleuses
then roared out, ripping into the ranks of the National Guard at close range. Within minutes, scores of bodies lay shattered in the fort’s lines of fire, with many hundred more untried recruits limping or carried back towards the city. When the Versaillais cavalry rode in to finish the job, what remained behind of the straggling column was too disorientated to mount any effective resistance. It was not yet midday.

Taking shelter at an inn, Flourens allowed himself a brief rest, but awoke to find himself surrounded. The witty intellectual and eloquent rabble-rouser must finally have realised how utterly different a real-life revolution was to the stage-play antics in which he had indulged a year before, using weapons from a theatre’s props store. Immune to the charms of ‘Florence’, a Versaillais gendarme serving under Boulanger strode forward, raising his sabre, and cleaved the vaudeville general’s handsome head in two.

Alone now, on the left flank of the attack, General Duval showed what might be achieved if the National Guard was marshalled with a degree of professionalism. His men, Elisée Reclus among them, managed to fight their way up on to the Châtillon plateau. But lack of logistical foresight meant a night without cover or rations, and in the morning Duval had no choice but to order his men to lay down their weapons. Herded along in a pathetic column of the defeated, Reclus witnessed those of his comrades who had deserted the regular army to join the Guard lined up for summary execution. Duval himself was dragged out from the ‘miserable scum’ and gunned down, to the jeering of the victors, in front of a sign advertising ‘Duval, Horticulturalist’.

‘Never had the beautiful city, the city of revolutions, appeared more lovely to me,’ Reclus would remember, the panorama of Paris before him as he gazed down from the pathetic column of the defeated, only for a Versaillais officer to interrupt his reverie. ‘You see your Paris! Well, soon there will not be a stone left standing!’ Further on Reclus might have watched local women prodding the brains that spilled from Flourens’ split head with their umbrellas. After such experiences, not even the most idealistic believer in the perfectibility of man could fail to comprehend
the visceral passions that had riven French society, nor the depth and intensity of the hatreds that had taken root.

Only days before the National Guard had marched out, the artist Daumier had made a drawing that envisioned the apocalypse that might engulf Paris in almost mystical terms. ‘Death disguised as a shepherd playing his pan pipes among the flowers of a water meadow beside the Seine, every flower a skull’ was how Jules Verne described Daumier’s picture, published in the magazine
Charivari
. Already, the image seemed horribly prescient and if the credulity, unprofessionalism and lack of organisation demonstrated by the National Guard’s catastrophic sortie proved representative of the Commune as a whole, further tragedy was inevitable. As long as the opportunity remained to them, however, the Communards would allow themselves to dream.

During the hard winter of the siege, Louise Michel had been a vocal advocate of the immediate needs of the poor, as well as of their wider aspirations, petitioning the mayors of the arrondissements to assist with food for the starving and help meet the educational needs of the young. Clemenceau had responded to her pleas as best he could in Montmartre, and in Belleville it was Benoît Malon who had answered her call, a figure familiar to Michel from visits before the war to the Paris offices of the International on the rue de la Cordonnerie, where it seemed to her that the narrow, dusty staircase led to ‘the temple of a free and peaceful world’.

If Bismarck and Thiers truly believed the International to be a tight-knit and disciplined conspiratorial network, they could not have been more wrong. When attending its founding conference in London seven years earlier, Malon had, he would insist somewhat disingenuously, known of Karl Marx merely as ‘a German professor’. Whilst Marx and Engels had imposed their will on the organisation in the years since, the French section had yet to be converted to their ideological dogmatism. ‘I frequent all the parties, democratic, radical, Proudhonian, positivist, phalansterist, collectivist…Fourierist cooperations, etc…. I see everywhere men of good faith and that teaches me to be tolerant,’ Malon had written of his pre-war position. Despite Marx endorsing Leo Franckel and the young Elizaveta Dmitrieva as his two emissaries to the Commune, while he stayed in London to nurse a conveniently recurring kidney complaint, the same pragmatic ecumenicalism now applied to the Commune’s attempts to mould a new and ideal society in microcosm.

Malon’s own sympathies lay with the federalism of the Russian Bakunin, Marx’s rival for influence over the International, but it was the older
anti-authoritarian theories of the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with which the experiment in social revolution now initiated in Paris was most strongly stamped. On 16 April, reviving the legacy of the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848, all workshops that had been abandoned or stood unused were taken into national ownership. The initiative provided the basis for a federalised, cooperative model of industrial organisation, and less than a fortnight later the system of fines imposed on workers as a means of unjust social control was abolished. Franckel’s efforts to secure a prohibition on night baking, which had entailed notoriously inhumane working conditions, provided Marx with a rare success.

For all Louise Michel’s admiration for the late Proudhon, however, she could hardly condone his conservative and some said misogynistic views on the role of women. For whilst the deliverance of the working men of France appeared to be at hand, Michel was adamant that for the social revolution to be truly radical, women would have to win their portion of liberty too; not only for reasons of justice and equality, but because it was they whose experience of oppression taught them the extent of what was required. ‘Men are like monarchs, softened by their constant power’ had been the sermon preached at the women’s clubs in which she had been so active over the winter. To break through the final barrier of male tyranny she would embrace whatever alliance was necessary, even with one of Marx’s envoys.

The relationship between Michel and the twenty-year-old Elizaveta Dmitrieva contained more obvious grounds for rivalry than cooperation. Dmitrieva was as spirited and inspiring as Michel, but half her age and far more conventionally beautiful. Like Michel, who had worn the black of mourning ever since the funeral of Victor Noir, Dmitrieva too dressed to be noticed, in a black velvet riding habit with a red silk scarf slung around her neck. And whereas the romantic life of the Red Virgin always seemed tinged with obsession, the Russian flaunted the kind of carefree attitude to romantic passion that Michel must have envied. But their common background of illegitimacy bonded them, and in the newly formed Union des Femmes they found a vehicle for the social change to which they both aspired. The combined pressure they brought to bear on the Commune’s legislature quickly produced policies that would constitute the Commune’s most humane achievements, many of them more than a century ahead of their time.

A guarantee that unmarried widows would receive the same pension as those who had been married was adopted on 10 April; a week later a law was passed banning discrimination against illegitimate children, while
a groundbreaking commitment to equal pay for women would follow. Yet even then the battle would only be half won, with education the key to further success. For if the new society were to allow women to participate fully, it would need not only to alleviate their present burdens, but assist them in the essential task of raising the enlightened citizens of the future. ‘Politically,’ Michel would write, ‘my goal is the universal republic, which is to be achieved through the development of the highest facilities of each individual, the eradication of evil thoughts through proper education, the profound comprehension of human dignity.’

Michel was not alone in seeking to redress the skewed and inadequate syllabus of France’s Catholic schools: the Freemasons had been prominent in recent years as campaigners for reform. Nevertheless, the methods she advocated, based on ideas innovated with the 200 children taught in her own school, must have seemed somewhat esoteric: the use of a pedagogic language that children could naturally understand, of easily legible visual aids and of learning through play. And yet the programme for universal state education that she submitted to the Commune found influential advocates, with Edouard Vaillant, the commissioner for education, shepherding through legislation for compulsory free schooling until the age of twelve, together with provision for children of nursery age that would allow their mothers to train for work. Only the ideal society being forged in Paris in the spring of 1871, with its uncertain future, could afford to countenance ideas so far ahead of their time.