Godfrey on Montbazet (2022)

Thibault Montbazet is interested in understanding the nature of the event. In a December 2022 interview in Front Populaire about his book, Une Année terrible. Histoire biographique du siège de Paris, 1870–1871, he explains: “un événement touche plus généralement la société toute entière, et fabrique des discours et des récits communs dans lequel l’individu va devoir trouver une place. Raconter cette collusion particulière … m’a paru pertinente pour comprendre un peu de ce qu’est un événement.”  

In his compelling “biographical history” of the siege of Paris, Montbazet pursues that collusion of “l’intime et le collectif” (241), drawing on three folders of private letters by his nineteenth-century forebearer, Léon Lescoeur, that he found in the old family home. Lescoeur, a provincial bourgeois notable and haut fonctionnaire in the ministry of public education, found himself stuck in Paris at the time of the siege after sending his wife and children back to that family home in the country. From there he wrote to his wife daily: 157 letters written between 5 August 1870 and 3 January 1871 recount in detail his daily routine and life in the city under siege as conditions became increasingly challenging and precarious and desperate people—Montbazet calls them “les invisibles”—froze and starved. With this book Montbazet adds another account to a rich corpus of correspondence and memoirs about the siege, many of which he cites. These include Victor Desplats’s Lettres d’un homme à la femme qu’il aime pendant le siège de Paris et la Commune, Jacques-Henry Paradis’s 1872 Journal du siège de Paris. Septembre 1870–janvier 1871, Francisque Sarcey’s 1871 Siège de Paris, Impressions et souvenirs, and even the Goncourts’s Journal. As Colin Foss notes in his 2020 The Culture of War many Parisians became diarists during the siege.  

What makes Lescoeur’s account distinct, however, is what lay in the fourth folder Montbazet opened. It contained “Souvenirs d’un grand-père,” the draft of a fourteen-chapter narrative Lescoeur wrote in 1905 about his escape from Paris in February 1871 and his return to the provinces. In revisiting the “année terrible” so many years later he thus presents the siege in a “double temporalité” (13). The letters offer snapshots of events as they happened and were experienced by a middle-aged bourgeois Frenchman in 1870–71; the narrative represents an eighty-four year-old bourgeois Frenchman’s memories filtered through the years that followed the chaotic days of the siege and the Commune. The Lescoeur writing in 1905 is at odds with the ideological premises of hardline French republicanism in a post-Boulangist, post-Dreyfus France, as much as a post-Commune France; his discourse now overlaid with traces of antisemitism.   

The book is divided into five chapters, the first of which offers the history of Lescoeur’s old, provincial Jansenist family as well as the history of his career from unremarkable teacher in the provinces to educational administrator in Paris. Chapter two takes us directly to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, the humiliating defeat at Sedan and complex feelings about both. Chapter three begins with disbelief that Paris can be besieged. That disbelief is soon contradicted by the exodus of some 100,000 people—that is, the 100,000 who have the option to do so—to the provinces. Class differences are never far from surface. Léon will choose to stay in Paris but stores his valuables with his servant’s brother. “On ne pensera pas à aller mettre au pillage l’habitation d’un ouvrier” (113, Sept. 11, 1870). As the siege progresses he continues to reassure his wife: “J’ai toutefois ce matin pris mes précautions; j’ai acheté un revolver avec cent cartouches… Que les Prussiens de l’intérieur ou de l’extérieur essayent de venir piller chez moi, ils trouveront à qui parler” (122–3, Dec. 9, 1870). When food becomes scarce and expensive, he also reassures her about what he has eaten that week. Like many Parisians, the forty-nine-year-old Lescoeur is recruited to the Garde nationale: “Je manœuvre comme un vieux troupier” (137, Oct. 5, 1870). Chapter four, “Cette grande prison,” recounts the worst of the siege, first the monotony then the hunger. At the hospital where his son works “ils font des festins avec des chats et des rats qu’ils mettent à toute sauce” (170, Nov. 11, 1870). Bourgeois Parisians substitute horsemeat for beef while workers and servants “font les difficiles” (171, Oct. 25, 1870). (Lescoeur does not hesitate to criticize the Parisian working classes, deracinated from the local solidarity of the provinces.) At the end of January, when an armistice is signed, Lescoeur writes: “J’attends avec anxiété les conditions définitives de cette honteuse capitulation…pour savoir comment je pourrai fuir Paris et aller vous rejoindre” (195, Jan. 28, 1871). On February 2, 1871 he finally leaves Paris. 

Chapter five, “Retours,” presents Lescoeur’s physical return to his family and his temporal return in 1905 to the year 1871. In many ways it is the most revealing chapter of this book as it traces both the letter-writer’s re-encounter with the provinces and the political and ideological transformations that emerged from wartime defeat. In Nevers, Lescoeur claims retrospectively, he encountered not just real food, but figures of betrayal, an anti-France made up of people whose loyalty was not to the homeland but to their own self-interest, “des étrangers “très affairés” cherchant visiblement à profiter du ravitaillement de Paris pour faire commerce” (203): that is, Jews. Between 1871 and 1905 resentments had shifted from taking righteous “revanche” on an external enemy (Prussians) to a moral identification of internal traitors and cowards who needed to be expurgated. And during that period the idea of the defense of the nation shifted from left to right. In Lescoeur’s 1905 narrative, coded words like “cosmopolite,” suddenly turn up and the words “France,” “Français,” and “patrie” are, in Montbazet’s laconic formulation, “surreprésentés.” (210). Montbazet’s reading of Lescoeurs’ “Souvenirs d’un grand-père” is full of nuggets such as these.  

For historians of French education, Lescoeur’s position on Republican education reform and the Ferry laws of 1882 in chapter five will be of special interest, given his administrative role in the French education system both before and after the war. After holding a post in the office of higher education from 1869–74, in 1874 he was named General Inspector for primary education with the support, it turns out, of the bishop of Orléans, a fervent defender of religious education. This said, while he opposed Republican anti-clericalism, Lescoeur advocated for confessional schools to come under the jurisdiction of the state system. He thus survived the installation of the République des républicains in 1879, only to be eventually nudged into retirement by Jules Ferry shortly before the enactment of the Ferry laws in 1882 that declared primary education to be free, mandatory, and secular.  

In the end Montbazet’s biographical history of the Siege of Paris offers an exemplary demonstration of the collusion of the intimate and the collective that for him defines the nature of the event. In his presentation of the letters and memoirs of an otherwise unknown nineteenth-century relative he moves between the two seamlessly, reconstructing for the modern reader the personal and social experience of this most tumultuous time in French history. Students and scholars of nineteenth-century French history alike have much to gain from this very readable book.