Paris Under Siege

While Napoleon was defeated and his regime ended, the war with Prussia was far from over. Paris was particularly hard hit: the Prussian army besieged the city from September 1870 to January 1871, enclosing the city and severing nearly all connection to the outside world (Figure 1). As Clayson demonstrates in Paris in Despair, the Siege transformed Parisians’ everyday lives. Paris as the once brightly lit city full of open spaces of pleasure became a secluded city that gave way to jarring reversals to the social order set out by the Second Empire. New forms of military, political, and secular life overlapped during the Siege and merged to the point where the domestic became militarized. Consequently, the old social distinctions no longer existed. Instead, everyone, including soldiers, intermingled as travelers on foot (Figure 2). In a journal he kept during the events of 1870-71, Edmond de Goncourt documented the way in which spaces of war and spaces of civilian life were often the same stating, “war everywhere; everywhere soldiers and workmen toiling in their shirt sleeves; everywhere men in all sorts of costume on patrol; everywhere civilians…”[1] The infiltration of soldiers into the private life of Parisians ultimately upended the stability and reliability of the Second Empire’s pre-war social order.

The Siege not only blurred pre-war social conventions, but it also drastically altered the spatial appearance of Paris. A privileged space and setting for distinctive forms of pleasure during the Second Empire, the boulevards served as the setting for the transformation of Parisian public life. However, the boulevard was the primary site of wartime transformation that resulted in the diminution of Parisian public life. Paris’s pre-war boulevards and cityscape, as a space of significance and interest at the time, meant that their altered appearances, and appropriation for novel uses were highly vexed and noticed. Gaslights, verdant trees, booming consumerism, and proudly inhabited new residences were all casualties of the war. Sites associated with leisure and entertainment became spaces of war. The Bois de Boulogne, once known as “the preserve of fashion,” was now used to pasture animals for food, becoming an enormous stockyard.[2] Distinctive landmarks were repurposed to accommodate the city’s militarization. Once home to Napoleon III, the Tuileries Palace and its associated garden became overrun by soldiers who stationed artillery camps within the space for the entirety of the Siege.[3] Along with the Tuileries, the court of honor in front of the Hôtel de Ville became a post for national guardsmen and franc-tireurs.[4] In a letter to his wife, Victor Desplats, a liberal intellectual and professor at the École de medicine, expressed the effects of the alterations of the cityscape caused by the Siege. He stated:

“You can’t imagine the condition of the physiognomy of Paris and its environs. It’s no longer that elegant city, clamorous and agitated. The stores are closed, the streets deserted and silent.”[5]

 

Figure 1. Map of the Prussian Army Surrounding Paris in 1870.

Figure 2: Unknown, Prussian soldiers and artillery in Paris during the Siege, 1870. Photograph.

Figure 3: Adolphe Braun, Saint-Cloud after French and German bombardment during the battle of Châtillon, 1870. Photograph.

Figure 4: Unknown, Prussian Victory March through Paris after the January 28 Armistice, 1871. Photograph.

The Siege intensified when the Prussian forces began shelling the city on January 5, 1871. During the nighttime campaigns, the Left Bank, which was poorer than the right, bore the brunt of the shelling, and the residents’ fury grew rapidly. At the expense of enormous suffering, Paris had held on for four grueling months, but the 23 nights of shelling coupled with the rising death tolls due to starvation prompted France to finally surrender. On January 28, France agreed to an armistice with the Prussians, marking the end of the Siege. The treaty—which required ratification by a representative Assembly within three weeks—dictated that France would cede the greater part of Alsace and Lorraine; pay an indemnity of five billion francs; and suffer the indignity of triumphal procession of Prussian troops in Paris (Figure 4), where they would remain until the National Assembly ratified the agreement. The Prussian victory quashed Napoleon’s grand vision of France and allowed for the unification of the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck.

Elections were held in the midst of a crisis for a new National Assembly to carry on negotiations with the Prussians. By February 8, voters elected a conservative, monarchist-dominated government with Adolphe Thiers appointed as chief of the executive power. However, there was greater discontent in the capital, where radical republicans and socialists swept the board. These choices were largely dictated by those who had lived in Paris during the Siege, who were now a “war-battered, highly politicized population that seethed with anger and frustration at the betrayal it felt as its government’s ignominious surrender.”[7] The elections, therefore, set Paris against the rest of France and resulted in increased tensions and galvanized opposition to the regime. The popular discontent resulted in a series of riots against the National Assembly beginning on February 15 when a crowd of working-class Parisians stormed into the archbishop’s palace.[8] Invoking the collective memory of previous revolutions, on the anniversary of the Revolution of February 24, 1848, a crowd formed at the place de la Bastille surrounding the Victory Column.[9] That evening, during what journalist André Léo, termed “a night of indignation and tumult, justly defiant crowds” outnumbered soldiers watching over National Guard cannons and claimed the artillery from the bourgeois neighborhoods.[10] Demonstrations occurred almost daily at the place de la Bastille throughout early March and Theirs’s decision to abandon the war-torn city to establish his government in Versailles intensified outrage within the capital.

Thiers, determined to establish his government’s control over Paris, decided to seize the cannons of the Central Committee of the National Guard in the working-class quarters (Figure 5). As an entity committed to representing Parisian interests, with arms, if necessary, against the Versailles government the cannons of the Central Committee had become symbolic of the independent power of Paris that Thiers intended to regain. On March 17, the Versailles government posted announcements on walls across Paris, proclaiming, “In your interest, and that of your city, the government is resolved to act.… The cannons stolen from the State will be restored to the arsenals … The good citizens must separate themselves from the bad … restoring order is necessary at any price, even the use of force.”[11] The following morning, Versailles troops arrived at Montmartre to seize the cannons, but were confronted by National Guardsmen and angry citizens. As the events unfolded, many sympathetic Versailles soldiers switched sides and refused to fire on the crowds. The plan became a spectacle for the city to witness and in response, Thiers ordered all remaining government officials and troops to retreat to Versailles.[12] The Central Committee of the National Guard now the sole authority in Paris, seized the Hôtel de Ville on the evening of March 18 and took control of the city. Paris was now severed from the rest of France.

Figure 5: Bruno Braquehais, Battery of the Montmartre Hills, 1871. Photograph.