TOPICS OF THE DAY • PANDEMONIUM.
ONLY Jeremiah, only the Prophet of Woe, the poet who sang of the coming destruction of Jerusalem in strains which have ever since been used by mankind to express a horror otherwise inexpressible, could adequately describe the fate which has fallen upon the capital of France, a fate belong- ing properly to other times, to older and fiercer races, to a world differently ruled from ours. Little doubt can now exist either as to the meaning or the authorship of the events now occurring in Paris. Deserted by all the more moderate of their leaders, despairing of aid from the rest of the cities of France, threatened daily by the cruel proclamations of the Head of the Government, too well aware that they had neither mercy nor quarter to expect from the exasperated soldiery, maddened by the continuous excitements of nine months, by defeat, by fatigue, by the certainty that their cause was lost, the remaining Reds, it is clear, resolved to inflict on France, on mankind, on Paris itself, one tremendous vengeance, which should live for ever as proof of the danger of driving the Red party to despair. France would have Paris, and France should have her, as a heap of ashes. The rival suitor had won, but should only find his bride a corpse. The prize so long played for should be surrendered, but only when its value had been destroyed. Collecting all that remained of the Red battalions, the chiefs—first among whom we fear was Delescluze—prepared for a desperate resistance, and a more desperate catastrophe. For three days they fought step by step, from barricade to barricade, from building to building, and as each was abandoned each was given to the flames. Paris, of all cities in the world, will not burn ; but a devilish ingenuity was taxed to overcome that difficulty,—the stores of petroleum were requisitioned, and the almost inextinguishable flame of burning oil proved irresistible even by stone masonry. The Tuileries, the Louvre, the Hotel de Vile, the Palace of Justice, the Ministry of Finances, the Palace of the Legion of Honour, the Luxem- burg,—most, as we believe will be found, of the great buildings of Paris, the pride of generations,—were set on fire or shattered by explosions, and under a pall of pungent smoke, by the light of burning treasures, the common property of mankind, the Reds fought street by street against the advancing troops. The scene must have been one which Josephus could scarcely have described or Martin painted, for, maddened by the resistance, by the fires, by the destruction of the city, by religions and political hate, and by M. Thiers' ex- hortation to treat their enemies as malefactors, the Generals gave a loose to the fury of their troops, and treated their own capital as a city taken by storm. Shells were fired without respect for monuments, palaces were de- stroyed merely to make a road, quarter was refused even to the submissive, and the horror-struck correspondent of the Daily News, himself a soldier, deseribes scenes of vengeance and fiendish cruelty, such as it is not well to dwell on, such as have not been known in Europe since Tilly excused the similar scene in Magdeburg, by declaring that soldiers must have some recompense for their trials. The fighting all this while was not good. It seems clear that the Reds, though they resisted, strove to shelter themselves, and that the Versaillese troops, though they obeyed orders, pressed on slowly ; but that feebleness on both sides deepened rather than lightened the horror of the astounding tragedy. By the latest accounts, the troops had prevailed, and the Reds were being massacred, though resisting, but the subjugated city was still in flames, still hidden from observers by the red smoke, still liable to the destruction its insane children intended to have brought upon themselves.
We do not know yet, and shall not know for days, precisely the extent of destruction accomplished ; probably it is much less than was described in the first horror-struck reports,—but we know sufficient to see that the Reds intended to bury themselves under the ruins of Paris, to perceive, if we cannot understand,the height to which hatreds have risen on both sides. That, after all, is the truly horrible revelation of those three days. France might survive the burning of Paris as Russia survived the burning of Moscow, or England the Fire of London ; but what resources can suffice to fill up the chasm which evidently exists in her society, what is to cure social hate so deadly that rather than offer terms to her capital the country sanctions a war of extermination, and rather than yield to the provinces the capital contrives her own destruction in blood and fire ? That Parisians should hesitate to admit defeat is intelligible, that they should have merged all love for country in love for their own city is conceivable, that they should be wild for vengeance. on France, on M. Thiers, on the soldiery, all this is within experience ; but that they should destroy their own city rather than see it in the hands of their own countrymen, that they should give to the flames their own buildings, their own homes, their own families—for all were equally endangered—rather than yield for a time tp a rule that they detested, these things re- veal a power of unreasoning hate, a capacity of resultless malice such as the mind refuses to analyze, and almost to believe. It is the fury of .a Malay, not of a fanatic, which is betrayed. in a design like this, as it is the fury of a drunken peasant, not of a true soldier, which is manifested in the hideoua cruelty with which punishment is said to have been enforced. There is a wild beast in man, we all know; but the beast in its maddest fury defends its own den and its own litter, instead of raging against both. In the worst excesses of the first Revolution, when the people had the wrongs of centuries to. avenge, they still spared the city which their successors, suffer- ing under much less oppression, have endeavoured to destroy-. The catastrophe is enough to destroy hope in the future, for what hope is there if men, trained to civilization for genera- tions, not immediately oppressed, not possessed by an idea, not excited by the presence of the foreigner, can deliberately sacri- fice themselves, their works, the possessions of mankind, to the thirst for a momentary vengeance which, in intention at all events, they are not to live to see ? The men who burnt Paris would, if they had the power, burn a world rather than its people should live after their own_fashion. No- thing like the suicide of Paris—whether it be accomplished. or only attempted—has ever occurred in history, and it perhaps as vain to study it as a political incident, as it would3 be to draw a social argument from a scene in Bedlam ; but we may record a political impression. This great crime has. been fatal for the present to the chances of a Republic. It, has been, it is true, committed by Reds and punished by Republicans ; but the average Frenchman will not draw that distinction, will insist that moderation is no security, will demand that the form of government Reds prefer shall under- no circumstances be the form adopted. M. Thiers may holci out, probably will ; but the rush of emotion, of rage,. of fear, will, we anticipate, prove too strong for him,. and power will be transferred either to some military chief, or to avoid that very danger, to a monarch selected by- the Assembly, and sure therefore to be a member of the- House of Bourbon. In any event and in any form, the govern- ment will become sternly, perhaps savagely, repressive, an& the master evil of France, the limitation or destruction of free. political life, will be continued, and will renew and revive the malignant hatred, the hardly human social antipathies, the- burning fury which twenty years of stern repression have generated in the minds of the artizan. If there is a lesson to be learnt from the burning of Paris, it is that political passion driven in on itself by external violence festers in Frenchmen. until it develops political insanity. Yet this is the one lesson which the Assembly and its leaders are certain not to learn. Nothing but miracle can save France from recommencing her dreary round—repression to be followed by revolution, revolu- tion by anarchy, anarchy by still severer repression—once more. Nothing in the history of the century, not even the war On freedom proclaimed when the First Napoleon fell, has ever disheartened and saddened true Liberals like this last declara- tion by the Reds of war upon the accumulated civilization of mankind.
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