The Fall of Paris by Alistair Horne

Author:Alistair Horne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141939179
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-09-04T20:00:00+00:00

Bon canon, mais ayant un peu trop de recul…2

Washburne wrote, ‘Trochu is dethroned, having remained long enough to injure the cause’, and later added that he had ‘proved himself the weakest and most incompetent man ever entrusted with such great affairs… too weak for anything, weak as the Indian’s dog which had to lean against a tree to bark’. But Trochu had never had any tree against which he could have leaned. Although he ‘had much to answer for’, as O’Shea noted rather more charitably, ‘in the entire cabinet there was but one good Minister, Dorian—that because he was a practical man, a man of business. The rest were phrasers and praters.’ Wickham Hoffman, who regarded Trochu as ‘a strange compound of learning, ability, weakness, and fanaticism, and I have little doubt that he confidently anticipated the personal intervention of Ste.-Genevieve to save her beloved city’, also reckoned that ‘had Vinoy or Ducrot been in command from the beginning, the result might have been different’. But nobody was under any illusion that the advent of Vinoy could affect the issue now; it was, said Goncourt, simply ‘the changing of doctors when the invalid was on the point of death’.

As Vinoy took over, Belleville, still overflowing with rage at the futile slaughter of its National Guards, and realization of the imminence of surrender, burst out in its last—and most violent—revolt of the Siege. Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of January 22nd, a band of armed men appeared at the gates of the Mazas prison and demanded the release of Flourens and the others imprisoned after October 31st. They induced the prison Governor to receive a deputation of three or four men; these promptly seized the gates and let in their comrades. The Governor (who seems to have acted with remarkable feebleness, and was indeed later arrested for complicity) handed over Flourens and the rest, merely requesting a ‘receipt for their bodies’. With drums beating, the insurgents then marched to the Mairie of the 20th arrondissement, where they pillaged all the food and wine stored there and set up a headquarters. In the course of the night, Flourens prudently evaporated, but the following afternoon his liberators headed—once more—for the Hôtel de Ville. Delescluze, Arnould, and other Red leaders had been conferring at a nearby house on the Rue de Rivoli, while, as usual, Blanqui was detachedly watching developments from a nearby restaurant. As on past occasions, the demonstrations began peacefully enough; there was much angry invective hurled against the Government, intermingled with cries of ‘Donnez-nous du pain!’ No member of the Government was in the Hôtel de Ville, so a deputy of Ferry, Gustave Chaudey, came out to meet the mob leaders, warning them that this time the building was well defended by armed Breton Mobiles behind every window. This time, the Government forces under Vinoy were ready and determined.

Despite Chaudey’s intervention, at about three o’clock two to three hundred National Guards of the 101st Battalion arrived from the Bastille,

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