AUTUMN BOOKS 2 The Fall of Babylon

By D. W. BROC

MR. HORNE rightly insists on the shock to . nineteenth-century optimism caused first of all by the siege of Paris and then by the Com- mune.* A few months before, la vine ltaniere had been as gay and as brilliant as ever. The Paris of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann was the wonder of the world. It was ten years since Tom Appleton had been reported as laying down the great theological law, `Good Ameri- cans when they die go to Paris.' The Great Exhibition of 1867 had brought the world to Paris---emperors, kings and the tourists of the in- genious Mr. Thomas Cook. (It is odd that Mr. Horne does not draw on . Mark Twain's first full-length book, The Innocents Abroad, which is one of the best reports on Paris in 1867.) Yet in a few weeks the armies and the Second Empire were swept away, captured, besieged.

For many people, for Queen Victoria and Tennyson, the fall of Paris was a due punish- ment for its ostentatious sins. The virtuous, Protestant, disciplined Germans were rightly on tor). True, the Scottish gasbag Thomas Carlyle (in' his own way, as unending an ass as Herbert

t SPencer) defended his spiritual home. But as far mere Americans and Britons knew and loved Paris (notably. the Prince of Wales) than knew and loved Berlin or even Coburg, the shock of the fall of the modern Babylon was very great. This shock was apart from the immense change in the balance of power in Europe produced by Sedan. Nietzsche might look on with pessimism at the triumph of German culture and the highly intelligent Walter Bagehot refused to rejoice in the .destruction of the old enemy. But, aided by the folly of Napoleon III and Gramont, the Preneh had started the war in an apparently ;rivolous manner which deserved to be pun- 'shed, and had the war ended with the surrender of Napoleon 111 at Sedan and with the locking- UP of Bazaine in Metz. it might have been a mere episode in the shifting of the balance of happen such as had happened before and was to "annen again.

But the war. did not end. The French, led

;`,_s!raY, as some censorious critics thought and think, by vanity, by a tradition of conquest, by their belief that they were la grande nation, continued the war in face of hopeless odds. And central to the conduct of the war was the block- `,!de of the immense enceinte of Paris' outside the fortifications built in the reign of Louis-Philippe. k Paris did not surrender. Perhaps it might have been taken by storm in the first few days when Lie Germans got to the edge.of the fortified city. !I'M this was too big a risk for Moltke to take: in `t 1Y case, he thought that the pear was about St jail into his hands without much effort. ..irictly spe.aking, the first part of the so-called I4e or Paris was a mere blockade. No attempt , "kts- made to capture the great fortress city by ni assault or by bombardment. It was only

"nths later, when the city obstinately refused

i( 1:'111. that the Germans decided to bombard

1, r's. It is an example of how civilised the

tteenth century was, compared with • the wil entieth, that there was a great deal of hesita- ...., __ *Ttip r.

lion in the Prussian camp before this decision was taken and it was very Much opposed by Crown Prince Frederick and by many of the ladies of the Prussian court.

So the outside world, getting intermittent news of Paris largely from Berlin. wondered what was happening to the modern Athens. (Edin- burgh had by this time lost its title!) Inside the beleaguered city was the greatest of French poets who was also one of the most foolish of French politicians and a man who, in his own way, was as big a gasbag as Carlyle. although a much more important man of letters. All that Mr. Horne has to do is to quote some of the oracular declarations of Monsieur Hugo to make one understand that cynical observers inside Paris like Mr. Henry Labouchere were ironical on the subject of French rodomontade. (It might be pointed out that Labouchere was not, as Mr. Horne says, of Huguenot origin: he was of much more recent French émigré origin, like Madame Tussaud; but his cynical mind was not much affected by the woes of the ancestral

country.) . • Inside Paris were other eminent men of letters like Edmond de Goncourt, whose journal is one of the chief sources for the dietary possibilities of Paris under siege. (Mr. Horne does not seem to have used the admirable diary of Edmond Got, the actor.) People in London and New York and Rome and Brussels all wanted to know what was happening inside the recently dominant city. They wanted news of the great monuments, not only the Louvre but the Varidt,ds (the Folies Bergere had been founded only a year before, and was not yet one of the great illustrations Of Paris as it has since become).

News came into and out of Paris through the extremely intelligent American minister, Elihu Washburne, who had been General Grant's patron when that eminent soldier was nearly down-and-out and had been rewarded with the Paris mission. He brought to the job all the shrewdness of the Middle-Western politician and his judgment is impressively accurate nearly a century later. Lord Lyons, the British am- bassador who had been so successful in Washing- ton, was not quite such a success in Paris. For 'one thing, he left it, leaving Washburne as the only representative of the corps diplontatique. For another thing, the new political scene was upsetting to a man of regular habits. There were other episodes. The conversion of Lord Lyons to the Church of Rome was postponed for a few years when he learned, as a result of the siege, that the curd of the Madeleine had a mistress—a point Mr. Horne does not remind us of.

What was happening inside Pa! is'? Although in vneral Mr. Horne's book is full of interest and full of very sound judgment, he does not, it seems to me, understand adequately the political situation. The Second Empire had been overthrown merely by military defeat. There was no reason to believe it would have been overthrown for any other reason, any more than the Third Republic would have been but for the defeat of 1940, and the Third Republic ended far more ignominiously than did the Second Empire. This meant that there was no generally accepted' political authority inside Paris and that the Government of National Defence was a very shaky source of power. So that in addition to the besiegers outside Paris, there were enemies of the government inside Paris. The unfortunate ministers had to face both the Prussians and the left in Paris. Their only man of governmental talents. Gambetta. had wisely left the city by balloon and was busy organising the relict of Paris.

I think that Mr. Horne exaggerates the chances Of French success. // Metz had held out a few days longer after the first French victory at Coulmiers. Moltke might have been forced to raise the siege: his troops were very thinly spread round the great city. But Bazaine threw away the last real card the French had. Despite the heroism of the armies of Chanzy and Faidherbe, the game was over when Prince Frederick Charles brought his army from Metz into the heart of France. Bourbaki's attempt to cut the German lines of communications was hardly even a forlorn hope. So the Parisians slowly began to realise that they were not going to be rescued. They had learned very painfully that sorties would not shake the German grip on the city. They learned that Bismarck was not in the least intimidated by memories of the great Revolution or affected by moral or testhetic arguments.

Paris was doomed. With a brilliant stroke, Mr. Horne compares the siege with the siege of Leningrad, and of course the siege of Lenin- grad was a far more heroic, far more desperate and successful effort than the resistance in Paris was. But finally Paris fell. King William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles (Mr. Home never gets his title correctly). and power passed

from the heirs of Louis 'ay to the heirs of Frederick the Great. Mr. Horne makes plain how normal life was in Paris for many people. I had a great-aunt who was a governess in Paris during the siege. 'Her' family did not leave and my mother told me that Miss Nixon had apparently noticed very little of what was going on—just like the English governess during the Revolution in Maurice Baring's Lost Diaries.

The Commune is a different and more desper- ate matter, and I must say that Mr. Horne has not handled it nearly as well as he handled the siege. First of all, he greatly over-estimates the importance of Marx and of the First Inter- national. Only one of the leaders of the Com- mune, the Hungarian Jew, Frankel, was in any real sense a Marxist. Far from going on from triumph to triumph, as Mr. Home suggests, the International was in fact dissolving as a result of the feud between Marx and Bakunin. Marx's pamphlet, now called The Civil War in France, was a take-over bid to claim for the Marxists the glory of the Paris Commune. Paris suffered far more from French atrocities than from German. It was the French who burned down the Tuileries and the Hotel de Ville and were just barely prevented from burning down the Louvre. It was the French 'Forces of Order' who carried out the horrible massacres in the last days of the Commune. (Mr. Horne exaggerates the horrors of this slaughter. By nineteenth- century standards, it was startling and horrible, but for a generation that has known of the de- struction of the Warsaw ghetto surely a little moderation in Mr. Home's moral indignation is called for?) The complicated political history of the time is told in a rather amateurish way. In general, Mr. Horne is inclined to be cen- sorious. There were a great many high-class tarts in Paris—les grandes horizontales—but there were a great many in London too. Cora Pearl was simply a smarter version of Skittles, the chief ornament of St. John's Wood and the mistress of the Marquis of Hartington. I do not really believe that Verlaine was driven to drink and homosexuality by the ordeal of the siege! But although one can quarrel with details and although one could think, as I do, that the Com- mune is inadequately treated, this is a book of very real merit. So is Airlift 1870,t which has an intelligent text and really admirable illustrations.

Readers of The Old Wives' Tale (which Mr. Horne aptly quotes) will remember the lively description of the departure of Sophia's French admirer by balloon. And of course the postal ingenuity of the French has made the siege a source of philatelic rarities. Perhaps I may end with a note that Mr. Home has taken too seriously Moltke's own picture of the perfection of his campaign of 1870. It was only the in- credible incompetence of the French generals that saved the Prussians from serious reverses. The French guns, it may be noted, were of brass, not of bronze, and.one of the weaknesses of the French artillery was the fact that it was trained for royal tournament activities, not for actual warfare. German illusions about the perfection of the campaign of 1870 led to their losing the Battle of the Marne in 1914 as French illusions about 1914 led to their disastrous defeat in 1940. It is not that we learn nothing from history but that we learn the wrong things! But Mr. Horne and Mr. Fisher are mainly concerned to tell dramatic stories, and each succeeds in what he has set out to do.

t AIRLIFT 1870: THE BALLOON AND PIGEON POST IN THE SIEGE or PARIS. By John Fisher. (Max Parrish, 30s.)