Free The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne Page B

magnificently attired as Marie-Antoinette. As the menace from across the Rhine grew simultaneously with the Republican clamour at home, it seemed a remarkably ominous choiceof costume. About the same time, Lord Clarendon remarked to his Ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, ‘I have an instinct that they will drift into a Republic before another year is over.’ His guess was exactly five days out.

September 4th, 1870. Rochefort at the Hôtel de Ville
    3. The Disastrous Six Weeks
    N OT unlike that other year of catastrophe forty-four years later, 1870 arose wreathed in a warm smile of hope. In France, the ‘Liberal Empire’ which Louis-Napoleon had introduced under the ministry of Emile Ollivier at the end of the previous year seemed so full of promise that there was even a momentary upswing in the popularity of the Emperor. In a plebiscite held to approve the new Constitution (even though its terms, like those of most such referenda, were something of a swindle), the Government won an apparently striking success with a majority of nearly six million out of a total poll of nine million. Over Europe as a whole such a spring of content had not been seen for many years, so that by June the new British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, could justly claim not to discern ‘a cloud in the sky’. Peace was everywhere. But as summer developed it was a particularly trying one; in fact one of the hottest in memory. There were reports of drought from several parts of France, with the peasants praying for rain and the Army selling horses because of the shortage of fodder. It was just the kind of summer when tempers fray.
    Then, at the beginning of July, a small cloud had passed across thesun. To fill the vacant throne of Spain, Bismarck suddenly advanced a Hohenzollern candidate, Prince Leopold of Sigmaringen. So violent, however, was the alarm expressed in France at this threatened act of ‘encirclement’ that the candidate was promptly withdrawn. Relieved, Lord Granville chided the French Government for resorting to such strong language, and the Illustrated London News devoted its July 16th frontispiece to Queen Victoria dispensing prizes amid the peaceful surroundings of Windsor Park. Manet began to make plans for his holidays at Boulogne, and the clouds seemed to have evaporated. But the truth was that France, like a mass of plutonium, had reached the ‘critical’ stage. Ever since Sadowa she had not forgotten the apparent Prussian affront to her grandeur, and in 1868 one of her most intelligent men, Prévost-Paradol, had predicted that no French Government, however patient, could stand idly by while Prussia proceeded to unite Germany under her, without eventually ‘drawing her sword’. When dashing General Bourbaki of the Guard heard that the Prussians had climbed down over Spain, he hurled his sword down to the ground in disappointed rage. The country’s mood, that of a great power which sees its position of eminence being speedily eroded, was dangerous, and the Press, led by Le Figaro , now set to whipping up flames of bellicosity by inflammatory articles. After all the failures of Louis-Napoleon’s foreign policy in previous years, mounting pressure was applied upon the Government to seize this opportunity of pulling off, at any cost, a brilliant coup. Neither the Emperor (who still heard his cousin Prince Napoleon’s whispered warning that an unsuccessful war would mean the end of the dynasty) nor Ollivier actually wanted war. But the ailing ruler was being pushed hard, on one side by his heavy-handed Foreign Secretary, the Duc de Gramont, who has never forgiven Bismarck for calling him ‘the stupidest man in Europe’, and on the other side by his own Eugénie who, pointing to the Prince Impérial, declared, ‘this child will never reign unless we repair the misfortunes of Sadowa’.
    Gramont now began to adopt towards Prussia a plaintive, hectoring tone. It was not enough that Prussia had retracted; she must be