TREASON?

"...HAD THE AUTHORITIES TURNED THEIR CANNONS AGAINST THE REVOLUTIONARIES THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED"

-- Louise Michel

Many Parisians doubt that monarchist or republic generals will fight for a republic, or that conservative republicans will defend one that comes with social change.

Replacing the hated but republican commander of the militia with the monarchist general who lost Orléans adds weight to that suspicion.* 

* Aurelle de Paladines replaced Clément-Thomas.

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General Louis Jean-Baptiste d'Aurelle de Paladines (1804-77)

More reasons for distrust:

• Railroad tracks are not destroyed when they are abandoned, and the Prussians use them to take troops to Paris.

• The army hands over 12,000 more rifles than the armistice demands.

• Guards holding the forts are not allowed to fire on Prussians building their fortifications, or their supply convoys... 

-- Trains: Guerilla en 1870 by Armel Dirou, 2014, p.  47 (in French)
-- Rifles: Lissagary citing General Vinoy, p. 101
-- No firing on Prussians: Lefrançois, p. 355

Granted, there are other explanations for the generals' mistakes:

• They substitute courage for logic.

• War in Algeria and Mexico gives no experience in handling vast armies, while in Algeria relatively easy victory over Arab bands brings overconfidence.

• Though irregulars immobilize a fourth of the Prussian army, French generals distrust them:

-- Armel Dirou

 Chouans! (royalist Bretons) by Philippe de Broca, 1988 

Giuseppe Garibaldi's redshirts are treated with skepticism. Royalist Bretons begin as an exceptionally mobilized fighting force and end in freezing camps without supplies.

-- The Terrible Year by Pierre Milza (in French), 2009

Louis Rossel, the only officer of the French army to join La Commune, thought guerrillas could pursue the fight with Prussia. His unpublished writings are inaccessible.

• They face a disciplined adversary that has not fought colonial wars and whose cannons load faster and fire farther...

A Krupp cannon / Prussian engraving, eBay

"Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity:"

-- Calendar "Quote of the day" in the office of a former FBI director (James Comey)

• The cannons are shown at Paris's International Exhibit of  1867, and the generals neglect them. 

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 "Section of Prussian metallurgy in the grand gallery of machines"

 

• Mobilizing and concentrating troops at the same time brings chaos (the Prussians separate the two operations, which take place smoothly).

• Changing plans worsens the confusion. A general's telegram  — "Can't find my brigade. Can't find the Division general. What should I do?"

-- Louise Michel using documents published later

• Supplies and munitions are immediately insufficient. 

• Many officers, even generals, cannot read a map... that may show Pomerania rather than the French frontier.

• "The lack of a plan, the dispersal of forces, the lack of coordination between generals, failures of intelligence [...], the poor use of artillery and cavalry, the latter gratuitously sacrificed, the disordered counter-attacks, all contributed to the defeat of an army that until then had been thought the best in the world." 

-- Milza, ch. 3 and p. 78.

# # #

The right will unhesitatingly accept 

Prussian help in fighting La Commune,

and a general condemned to death for treason

has his sentence commuted to imprisonment.

He mysteriously escapes... .

Stupidity and treason are not incompatible. 

Whatever the reality, belief in treason

 by generals and government was real,
and helps explain what came next.

Saint-Denis City Museum

 Thiers and ministers throw the keys of the city to Bismarck. 

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Next,

Tensions rise