The Parisians who fled the city during the Commune were probably wise to do so, because by all accounts, a frenzy of class paranoia seized the city, and anyone suspected of anti-Communard activities was condemned to death by a revolutionary court. The painter Auguste Renoir, famous for his pictures of plump ladies and sunny landscapes, was almost a victim of this casual life-and-death justice. He had initially left Paris before returning in May 1871, and was happily painting a riverside scene when some Commune soldiers arrested him on suspicion of drawing a map for the enemy. Renoir only avoided a firing squad thanks to the last-minute intervention of another Communard, whose life the Impressionist had previously saved by lending the man a smock and a paintbrush when he was being pursued by a squad of Thiers’s troops, so that he could pretend to be a harmless artist.
The Communards did much more than execute perceived traitors, though. Realizing that they might not have very long in power, the members of the revolutionary council quickly responded to their new independence by voting in modern-sounding reforms like equal pay for women, free and secular education for all, and a totally free press.
One of the new newspapers was called Le Vengeur (The Avenger) and this spirit of retribution was expressed in deeds as well as words – we might think that political demonstrations in today’s Paris get out of hand, but in the spring of 1871 Communards attacked and burnt down the Ministry of Finance, part of the Palais-Royal, the Hôtel de Ville, which contained all the city’s archives including its birth certificates, and the imperial library in the Louvre (the Louvre itself was only just saved from destruction by an art-loving Communard).
They also wreaked more personal revenge. The house of Eugénie’s writer friend Prosper Mérimée was destroyed, as was Adolphe Thiers’s hôtel particulier (city mansion).8 The premises of the Jockey Club near the Opéra were trashed as a gesture against the idle rich who – as we saw in the previous chapter – had been acting for the last twenty years as though the city belonged to them.
The worst piece of class vengeance, though, which would have hurt Bertie even more than the destruction of the Château de Saint-Cloud, was the burning down of the Tuileries, the palace where Napoléon and Eugénie had held their most sumptuous receptions, and where Bertie had first encountered the beauty and loose morals of chic Parisian womanhood. Over two days, Communards systematically packed the palace with wagons of explosives and cans of oil, tar and turpentine. They then moved through the building soaking floors, furniture and curtains with oil, and on 23 May the imperial bonfire was set alight. It quickly exploded, blowing off large sections of the roof, and blazed for three days, leaving a shell filled only with embers, blackened stone, melted bronze and shards of marble from statues that had shattered in the heat. The frivolity of Napoléon III’s Second Empire was officially in ashes.
The deposed Emperor himself had been freed by the Prussians in March, and joined Eugénie in England. He was planning his comeback when he got the news that his former neighbours had torched his palace and almost all his possessions. It was not exactly a sign that he would be welcomed home.
In the event, Napoléon would never return, and he must have felt safer in England when he heard about the bloodshed that was being inflicted by Frenchman on Frenchman (and -woman). The demolition of the Tuileries had been a last desperate show of defiance carried out when the anti-Commune troops finally broke into Paris. Let in by a traitor at the porte de Saint-Cloud in the far west of the city on 21 May, 70,000 government infantrymen were fighting their way north, storming barricades, taking few if any prisoners and summarily executing anyone with traces (or suspected traces) of gunpowder on their hands. Some 500 Communard prisoners were shot in Montmartre, the Luxembourg Gardens and in the chic Parc Monceau, one of Bertie’s promenading haunts. In reprisal around fifty hostages were shot by the Communards, including ten priests and the Archbishop of Paris.
One by one the barricades fell as the government soldiers fought their way into the poor northeastern quartiers, and resistance ended on 28 May in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where, after an all-night last stand amongst the gravestones, the last 147 Communard fighters – male and female – were lined up and shot.
Still the slaughter wasn’t over. As columns of prisoners were marched out of the city, Bertie’s friend Gallifet embarked on a personal terror campaign, pulling captives out of the ranks and having them executed. Some of his victims were wounded and moving too slowly, others he just didn’t like the look of. On one Sunday in Passy, a southwestern suburb, he told a consignment of prisoners that ‘all those with grey hair should come forward’, and 111 men did so. ‘You’, he yelled at them, ‘are more guilty than the others. You also took part in the 1848 revolution.’ He had them all shot. One French historian estimates that Gallifet was personally responsible for 3,000 deaths. When working-class Parisians put a stop to Bertie’s aristocratic friends’ champagne-fuelled soirées, vengeance could be swift, extreme and brutal.
Some sources estimate that 30,000 Communards were killed, while others put it as ‘low’ as 6,000 (the French always have two figures for any controversial event – the official and anti-establishment estimates). Thousands more were transported to prison camps in the colonies to catch tropical diseases and die in chains. The British often bemoan the cruel disparity between the working classes and the rich in Victorian England, but in France the class war was a massacre.
A decade later, in commemoration of this enormous self-inflicted French suffering, the construction of a cathedral was begun – the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. What few people realize, though, is that the church was originally conceived by the clergy as an apology to heaven for ‘the crimes of the Communards’. In short, when tourists today take smiling photos of themselves outside the Sacré-Coeur, they are in a way celebrating the massacres of 1871.
III
While Paris was seeing its paving stones ripped up and its people shot, Bertie was still in action. Having failed to get himself appointed as a peacemaker, he did the rounds of the French exiles in London, undertaking a personal opinion poll about the future of his favourite travel destination – and taking the opportunity to enjoy some French fun on home soil.
He became close to the Comte de Paris, a claimant to the French throne vacated by Louis-Philippe in 1848, and therefore a rival to both Napoléon III and the republicans. The Comte de Paris was the grandson of King Louis-Philippe, a man of about Bertie’s age who had been an exile in England for a dozen years, and who was planning his return to Paris now that the political landscape was a heap of rubble and there was a chance of installing a real monarchy rather than a Napoleonic empire.
Despite his friendship with Napoléon and Eugénie, Bertie was for obvious reasons a royalist at heart, as were many of his Parisian friends. And in 1871 the Comte had a real chance of stepping in to take power, because, unlike Louis-Philippe, he was a man of action. In the early 1860s, he had got bored in exile and gone to fight in the American Civil War – not, as we might imagine of a French conservative, on the Confederate side, but with the anti-slavery Union. He had even seen action in battle, at Gaines’s Mill in June 1862, although it is surely a coincidence that the presence of a French aristocrat in the Union army led to one of its only defeats of the whole war.
The Comte was not at all Bertie’s usual choice of friend – he was renowned as a thinker, and his contemporaries found him prudish and cold, which probably explains why he would never become ruler of France. His wife (and cousin), the half-Spanish Marie-Isabelle, was more Bertie’s type, and might have reminded him of a younger Eugénie. She was a keen smoker, fond not only of cigars (she often used to steal Bertie’s) but also of a pipe, and it is said that Bertie ‘liked’ her a lot – though whether he went so far as to sleep with a French queen-in-waiting is doubtful.
Even after a republic was well and truly installed in Paris, Bertie felt so close to these French pretenders’ cause that he tried to unite the British and French royal families. In 1891, his son
Prince Eddy decided (albeit briefly) that he was in love with Hélène, the Comte de Paris’s daughter, and Bertie attempted to convince Queen Victoria that a marriage was possible, despite the fact that the French family was staunchly and politically Catholic. The government refused, though, and Eddy remained a promiscuous bachelor until his untimely death from flu in 1892.
Meanwhile, back in 1871, Bertie also kept up his relationships with friends from Napoléon’s court and held gatherings for them at Marlborough House, his London home. The star amongst these was the half-American Blanche, Duchess of Caracciolo, a scandalous woman who had openly cuckolded her husband with one of Napoléon III’s equerries. She was another heavy smoker – always a trait that endeared Bertie to women – and was in the habit of paying a slightly perverse public homage to Alexandra. Although she was almost certainly having an affair with Bertie, Blanche would dress like Alexandra, in high collars and tight-bodiced dresses, which his mistresses often did to confirm their status as royal bedfellows. It was heavily rumoured that Blanche’s daughter, born in 1871, was Bertie’s child – the girl was christened Alberta in his honour and he would later set mother and daughter up in a house in Dieppe that he liked to visit on short yachting expeditions. One of Bertie’s biographers, Jane Ridley, says that Alberta could not have been Bertie’s child because Blanche’s husband registered himself as the father, but that seems slightly naïve – a man of the period, especially a nobleman, would not refuse to acknowledge paternity of his wife’s offspring unless he was determined to ridicule himself and disgrace his family name. Legitimate bastards were on every branch of the noblest family trees.
So in late 1870 and early 1871, Bertie was a loyal friend to French exiles of different persuasions, even if it was partly because the female members of the families were amusing. But this public closeness to royalist and imperialist sympathizers from across the Channel was not winning him any friends at home. Emboldened by the swift fall of Napoléon III and the uprising in Paris, British republicans were speaking out – and shocking new revelations about Bertie’s private life would only add fuel to the bonfire that they hoped to light under Victoria’s throne.
* * *
1 One of France’s most endearing qualities is that it never seems to learn from history and keeps believing the impossible until it is much too late.
2 Is it going too far to say that unlike the French generals of July 1940, those of October 1870 proved that they were willing to destroy Parisian buildings rather than put up with occupation?
3 Just as other wars have inspired leaps in technology, the need to send messages out of Paris by pigeon in 1870 led to the invention of the microfilm by the French photographer René Dagron.
4 Victoria was seen nodding her approval when listening to a sermon given at Balmoral by her favourite preacher Dr Norman Macleod, who declared that France was ‘reaping the reward of wickedness, vanity and sensuality’. In Victorian English eyes, the Prussian siege was a holy war.
5 For French grammar fans, Bertie wrote to Eugénie that he and Alexandra would be happy if she would accept their offer: ‘nous serions heureux si vous l’accepteriez’. However, ‘accepteriez’ is a conditional, and here he should have used the imperfect, ‘acceptiez’. It was lucky that Eugénie was of Spanish origin, otherwise she might have refused the offer on grammatical grounds.
6 It should be pointed out that, at this point, in France the Impressionists were thought of as deranged hippies who couldn’t paint. The next time Germans occupied the area, they would crate up Impressionist masterpieces and send them to Goering to add to his private collection.
7 One of the men elected to a special artists’ committee on the council (this was a French council, so it had to have artists) was the Impressionist Edouard Manet, who had no desire to have his name on a list of revolutionaries, and went into exile until the troubles had died down. Another painter, Gustave Courbet, was a willing member of the council, and was later imprisoned for it.
8 Thiers later got the government to pay for his house to be entirely rebuilt, and it can be seen today on the place Saint-Georges, just south of Pigalle.
8
SAVAGED BY THE PRESS
‘Even the staunchest supporters of monarchy shake their heads and express anxiety as to whether the Queen’s successor will have the tact and talent to keep royalty on its legs and out of the gutter.’
Reynolds’s Newspaper, February 1870, after Bertie appeared in court in a divorce case
I
THERE HAD LONG been republican rumblings in England (the French usually forget, when boasting about their own revolution of 1789, that Britain decapitated a king 150 years earlier), and in 1871 the decibel count rose considerably. The widowed Victoria was playing at Greta Garbo – and with her slightly Germanic accent, it would have been a good imitation – while Bertie was doing his best to provoke howls of outrage, and not only because of his attitude to France.
The outrage wasn’t all Bertie’s own fault. In the spring, while Paris was undertaking its campaign of self-destruction, he and Alexandra suffered their own loss. Their sixth child, Alexander John, was born prematurely and survived only twenty-four hours. At the small private funeral, Bertie wept. Despite his constant extra-marital adventures, he was a genuinely affectionate father – unlike his own. This pregnancy had caused Alexandra a lot of suffering, physical as well as emotional, and doctors told the young couple that another could be life-threatening. From now on, even though they were only in their mid-twenties, it was suggested that they stop sleeping together.
Not that they had been tearing off each other’s royal pyjamas very often. Bertie’s sexual attentions were, as we have seen, often distracted, and all Alexandra’s contemporaries agree that she was not a vixen in the bedroom. She was attractive – in some of her photos, she looks chillingly like Princess Diana. She was also eternally youthful – her face hardly gained a wrinkle until she was well into middle age. And she laughed infectiously, even during official ceremonies. But she wasn’t, so everyone agreed, seductive. It was for this reason that although Bertie was very fond of Alexandra, sex had always belonged to his extra-marital life – like his gambling and smoking – rather than being an integral part of a loving marriage. This was also why he had been captivated by Frenchwomen, who were the opposite of Alexandra – if she was a cute, playful kitten, then the sophisticated Parisiennes were witty, shameless tigresses.
Even so, this apparently final medical verdict must have hit Bertie hard. These days, we would immediately think of contraception, but in 1871, there was no sure means of avoiding pregnancy other than abstention. In England, only coitus interruptus was used by married couples. Rubber condoms had been available since the 1850s but the early models were as thick as kitchen gloves and used mainly when men had sex with prostitutes. This, after all, was one reason why men like Bertie chose married mistresses. Any accident could be attributed to the husband (although Bertie was to regret this policy, as we shall see very soon).
High-class French cocottes often got pregnant because their main method of trying to prevent this professional problem was the bidet. They didn’t use condoms. Disease was therefore a real concern – if Napoléon Bonaparte made prostitution legal in France in the first place, it was so that the women would be under medical surveillance. Which was another reason, incidentally, why Paris was such a popular destination for playboy tourists – the prospect of safer sex.
Although Alexandra was relatively naïve about sexual matters, she was aware of her husband’s affairs and must have known about the danger of catching syphilis from him. Wayward Bertie had been lucky to have such a tolerant, sexually available wife. But now his luck had run out, on doctors’ orders.
Of course Bertie had never been one to sit around moping about abstinence, and this was no exception. Unfortunately for him, though, lack of contraception took its toll almost immediately. One of his mistresses, Susan Vane-Tempest, was a close friend of the family – she had been a bridesmaid
at Bertie’s sister Vicky’s wedding – and had been in the Prince’s little black book for several years when, in September 1871, she told him that she was pregnant. She was young – thirty-two – but a widow, which meant that unless Victorian society believed in immaculate conception amongst the upper classes, only a lover could be to blame.
Bertie dealt with the matter clinically, by setting up an appointment with a doctor who was known to perform abortions. But Susan’s pregnancy was too far advanced and the doctor refused. Bertie therefore decided that his embarrassing mistress would have to be exiled. Not to France, where he sent Blanche de Caracciolo (so that he could visit her again discreetly) but to the more prosaic Ramsgate, where Susan settled, accompanied by a maid who was also pregnant (quelle coïncidence). Susan sent Bertie heart-rending letters, begging for just one face-to-face farewell, but he ignored them all, and their baby, if it was born (there are suspicions that the doctor finally performed an abortion despite the dangers), has been erased from history. Perhaps the maid declared it as hers without knowing its true royal origins. Perhaps it died in infancy, as so often happened. In any case, the whole affair revealed a ruthlessness in Bertie that can only be explained by his terror that the truth would come out. In 1871 his (and the British monarchy’s) reputation was on a knife-edge.