The Greater Journey

by David McCullough

  He and Gratiot both dressed at once and raced out to see with their own eyes. It was true. Others already on the avenue were happily congratulating one another on delivery of Paris at last.

  The regulars had marched in at Porte de Saint-Cloud in force at three o’clock the previous afternoon, and against little opposition advanced steadily along the Right Bank of the Seine on the avenue that connected Versailles and Paris, heading for the Commune stronghold at the heart of the city, at the Place de la Concorde.

  Nothing had foretold the attack. The Commune command was taken completely by surprise. As night came on and the Versailles troops moved forward in the dark, National Guard units manning the barricades at Porte Maillot and on the avenue de la Grande-Armée, beyond the Arc de Triomphe, hastily abandoned their positions, and so another corps of regular troops poured into that quarter of the city. An enormous barricade by the Arc nearly thirty feet high that had taken great labor to build “served no earthly purpose,” as Washburne observed.

  He and Gratiot followed the regular troops down toward the Place de la Concorde, fully expecting to see the National Guard defense there quickly overrun. But it did not happen. Orders had gone out from the Central Committee at the Hôtel de Ville to throw together more barricades, barricades “in all haste,” barricades in every direction. As reported later in Galignani’s Messenger, “Everyone passing was forced to bring forward a paving stone or an earth bag, and any refusal would have been dangerous. Women and children worked just as actively as the National Guards themselves.”

  At about nine o’clock the Communard batteries on Montmartre opened fire on the city and the shells came in “thick and fast.”

  Tired of waiting and doing nothing, Washburne mounted a horse and rode off to see more, entirely without concern for his own safety, it would seem. “5:45 P.M. Have just taken a long ride,” he wrote. “The havoc has been dreadful—houses are all torn to pieces, cannon dismantled, dead rebels, etc., etc. One can hardly believe such destruction.”

  “To arms!” read an urgent appeal posted by the National Guard. “To the barricades! The enemy is within our walls! Let there be no hesitation! Forward the Republic, the Commune and Liberty.”

  By late in the day more than 80,000 Versailles troops had arrived and the western third of the city was in their hands. Still, at the Place de la Concorde and elsewhere, the fighting raged on, gunfire and the screams of the wounded filling the night.

  So began “La Semaine Sanglante,” the Bloody Week.

  On May 23 a city of 2 million people became a deafening full-scale battlefield. For twelve hours there was no letup in the roar of cannon. Montmartre, the symbolic stronghold of the Commune, fell to the regular army, the Communards leaving behind the dreadful spectacle of twelve regular soldiers taken prisoner who, because they refused to join the Commune, had had their hands cut off. Vicious street fighting took heavy tolls on both sides, but of the Communards especially. Some 4,000 Communards were taken prisoner. Any suspected of being deserters from the regular army were shot at once.

  The Communard positions at the Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries Palace, and Hôtel de Ville continued to hold.

  Everyone in Paris tried to keep out of harm’s way, indoors. Washburne, for his part, decided to make still another effort to save the archbishop. He went by carriage to the Versailles army headquarters at Passy to urge Marshal MacMahon to take possession of the Mazas Prison as quickly as possible to save the archbishop and the other prisoners. “He [MacMahon] hopes they will be there in a day or two,” was all Washburne could claim for his efforts in his diary that night.

  At one o’clock (Wednesday, May 24) he was again awakened in bed, this time to be told the Palace of the Tuileries was in flames. He left as quickly as possible, and from a window at the Legation, six flights up on the top floor, much of the city was spread before him.

  It was a terrible, unimaginable spectacle. The blazing palace lighted the sky. The Legion of Honor and the Ministry of Finance, too, were on fire. For a while it appeared the Invalides was burning, but this proved not to be so. “Tremendous [cannon] firing in another part of the city and the windows of the Legation shake.”

  Like so many days that had followed one after another, the morning that dawned, May 24, was perfectly beautiful, except, as Washburne wrote, that over the city thick smoke obscured the sun. He went “down town” at about eleven o’clock. The insurgents had been driven from both the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Concorde. The fires, it was said, were the insidious work of women carrying petroleum or kerosene who numbered in the thousands—pétroleuses, they were called. “Every woman carrying a bottle was suspected of being a pétroleuse,” wrote Wickham Hoffman, who found it hard to believe the story.

  “I can give no adequate description of what I saw,” Washburne wrote.

  All the fighting in all the revolutions which have ever taken place in Paris has been mere child’s play compared to what has taken place since Sunday and what is going on now. … You can scarcely imagine the appearance of the streets. … Went as far as the burning Tuileries, the front of all falling in and flames bursting out in another part of the building. … Fires in all directions raging—many of them under the guns of the insurgents so they cannot be put out.

  With the Palace ablaze, the Louvre was in imminent danger, but as Washburne could report in a long dispatch to Secretary Fish sent that night, the museum had been saved.

  Two days earlier Police Chief Rigault and a coterie of extreme Communards had met in secrecy and ordered the execution of Archbishop Darboy and five other priests. The hostages were then moved from Mazas to La Roquette Prison in the Belleville quarter, which was still under Communard control.

  At approximately six o’clock on the evening of May 24, as Paris was burning, the archbishop and the others were ordered out into the courtyard of the prison. They then descended a stairway, stopping at the ground floor, where they embraced one another and exchanged a few last words. When a cluster of National Guard soldiers at the door made insulting remarks, an officer demanded silence, saying, “That which comes to these persons today, who knows but what the same will come to us tomorrow?” Darkness had come on, and the six prisoners had to be led into the courtyard and up to the wall by the light of lanterns. The archbishop was placed at the head of the line. At a signal the firing squad shot all six at once.

  Late that night the bodies were tumbled into a cart, hauled to nearby Père Lachaise Cemetery, and thrown into an open ditch.

  At the Mazas Prison another fifty-three priests were murdered in cold blood.

  Nothing of these atrocities was reported until late the next day. Nor was it yet generally known that on the afternoon of May 24, before the execution of the archbishop, Versailles soldiers had found Raoul Rigault hiding in a hotel on rue Gay-Lussac and, upon discovering who he was, took him into the street and shot him in the head. The body lay in the gutter for two days.

  Flames raged through the night. The Hôtel de Ville had been set afire, along with the Palais de Justice and the Prefecture of Police. The Palais Royal and houses along the rue de Rivoli were burning. After nearly a month with no rain everything was dry as tinder.

  Punishment for anyone caught, or suspected of, setting fires was immediate and merciless. Correspondents for the foreign press wrote of the “savage feeling” among the Versailles troops. Such hatred as was let loose in Paris had become terrifying beyond description, Washburne stressed in another hurried dispatch. The victims were strewn everywhere in the streets. That afternoon on the avenue d’Antin, an employee of the legation had counted the bodies of eight children, none more than fourteen years of age, who had been caught distributing incendiary boxes and shot on the spot.

  The insurgents fought on “like fiends,” and the killing continued through Thursday and Friday as the first rain fell—heavy rain. Many hundreds of insurgents taken prisoner were summarily executed in the streets, in prisons, in the Luxembourg Gardens, and
outside the Louvre. Thousands more were herded off through the rain, along streets where enraged crowds screamed for their death.

  “They are as they were when caught, most without hats or caps, their hair plastered on the foreheads and faces,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt, as he watched several hundred prisoners pass on their way toward Versailles.

  There are men of the common people who have made a covering for their heads with blue-checked handkerchiefs. Others, thoroughly soaked by the rain, draw thin overcoats around their chests under which a piece of bread makes a hump. It is a crowd of every social level, workmen with hard faces, artisans in loose-fitting jackets, bourgeois with socialist hats, National Guards … two infantrymen, pale as corpses. … You see middle-class women, working women, street-walkers, one of whom wears a National Guard uniform. … There is anger and irony on their faces. Many of them have the eyes of mad women.

  The nearer the end came, the more the atrocities accelerated on both sides. On Friday, 50 prisoners of the Communards were taken from La Roquette Prison and shot. That night another 38 were led to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and executed, followed by another 4 the next day, making 92 victims in all.

  On Sunday, May 28, when the last of the Communards still fighting were finally overrun, Marshal MacMahon declared Paris “delivered.” But the atrocities continued, growing still more horrific. One of the most infamous took place again at Père Lachaise when 147 Communards were lined up and shot against a wall to be henceforth known as the Wall of the Communards.

  “There has been nothing but general butchery,” Washburne wrote in his diary.

  The rage of the soldiers and the people knows no bounds. No punishment is too great, or too speedy, for the guilty, but there is no discrimination. Let a person utter a word of sympathy, or even let a man be pointed out to a crowd as a sympathizer and his life is gone. … A well-dressed respectable looking man was torn into a hundred pieces … for expressing a word of sympathy for a man who was a prisoner and being beaten almost to death.

  “The vandalism of the dark ages pales into insignificance before the monstrous crimes perpetrated in this great center of civilization in the last half of the nineteenth century,” he wrote in an impassioned dispatch to Secretary Fish.

  The incredible enormities of the Commune, their massacre of the Archbishop of Paris and the other hostages, their countless murders of other persons who refused to join them in their fiendish work, their horrid and well organized plans of incendiary intended to destroy almost the entire city … are crimes which will never die. I regret to say that to these unparalleled atrocities of the Commune are to be joined the awful vengeances inflicted by the Versailles troops. … The killing, tearing to pieces, stabbing, beating, and burning of men, women, and children, innocent and guilty alike, by the government troops will stain to the last ages the history of France, and the execrations of mankind will be heaped upon the names who shall be found responsible for acts which disgrace human nature. …

  Although estimates of the total carnage inflicted by the regular troops vary, there seems little doubt that they slaughtered 20,000 to 25,000 people. No one would ever know for sure what the total numbered, but nothing ever in the history of Paris—not the Terror of the French Revolution or the cholera epidemic of 1832—had exacted such an appalling toll. At one point the Seine literally ran red with blood.

  The value of the architectural landmarks and other treasures destroyed was inestimable.

  Olin Warner, like Washburne an eyewitness to events, was later to write a lengthy defense of the Communards, in which he compared their initial idealism to that of the American rebels of 1776. At the time, however, in a letter to his “Dear Ones at Home” he said he had seen more than enough. “I hope it will never be my lot to see a drop of blood shed again. I never want to hear another cannon roar as long as I live. … I am disgusted with everything pertaining to war.”

  On June 1, three days after the fighting had ended, Elihu Washburne went to La Roquette Prison to see the cell in which the archbishop had been held, and to pay homage at the spot in the prison yard where the archbishop and the five priests had been executed. The marks of the bullets on the wall could be plainly seen.

  The body of the archbishop, having been rescued from the ditch at Père Lachaise before decomposition had taken place, lay in state at the palace of the archbishop at 127 rue de Grenelle. For several days thousands came to pay their respects, Washburne among them. On June 7, still greater numbers lined the streets to see the funeral procession pass on the way to Notre-Dame, where services were held with all appropriate majesty. To Washburne it was one of “the most emotional and imposing” services he had ever attended.

  IV

  Charred beams, dead animals, shattered doors and window frames, the remains of broken lampposts, wagons, mountains of wreckage, and all the barricades were hauled away. With people working day and night, life steadily resumed. Omnibuses began running, restaurants opened. It was not that the horrors of what had happened were put out of mind, any more than the horrendous damage done vanished entirely from sight. The blackened ruins of the Palace of the Tuileries were to be left standing for more than ten years as a mute reminder.

  On June 3, Galignani’s Messenger carried an item from the Times of London declaring, “Paris, the Paris of civilization, is no more. … Dust and ashes … smolder and stench are all that remain. …” Cook’s Tours of London was already selling special trips to see the ruins of the fire. But there seemed a united, pervasive zeal to put Paris in order again as quickly as possible. By July the Tuileries Garden had reopened and some 60,000 stonemasons were at work repairing, rebuilding, building anew, a force of stonemasons equivalent to the entire population at the time of Portland, Maine, or Savannah, Georgia.

  The Hôtel de Ville would be rebuilt, the Column of the Place Vendôme put together again and restored to its old pedestal.

  The Venus de Milo was recovered from a secret hiding place and returned to the Louvre. The incomparable Greek statue, dating from before the birth of Christ, had been buried during the siege in, of all places, the cellar of the Prefecture of Police. Packed into a giant oak crate filled with padding, it was taken in the dead of night to the end of one of the many secret passages in the Prefecture, where, as only a few knew, a wall was built to conceal it. Stacks of documents of obvious importance were piled against the wall, then a second wall built to make it appear the hiding place was for the documents. When the Prefecture caught fire the night so much of Paris went up in flames, the anxiety of those in the know about the Venus was extreme. It seems a broken water pipe “miraculously” saved the statue. Once the smoking ruins were removed, the oak crate was found intact and brought back to the Louvre to be opened.

  Everyone leaned forward eagerly to look [read the account in Galignani’s Messenger at the end of August]. Lying in her soft bed … she seemed to look gratefully on her preservers. … All her features and limbs were complete, no injury has been done. …

  To many her return from the ashes seemed a resurrection of the Paris of art and culture, a Paris that would not die.

  Those Parisians who had fled the city for their safety returned like an incoming tide. With them were foreign students, business people, diplomats, and the families of diplomats, including Adele Washburne and her children. The Americans who had never left tried to pick up their lives where they had left off.

  Lillie Moulton ordered several fine dresses from Worth, in preparation for a September concert tour in America. (“And if my public don’t like me,” she wrote, “they can console themselves with the thought that a look at my clothes is worth a ticket.”)

  Mary Putnam, like many of her French friends, had seen her initial fervor for the Republic vanish, not because of the excesses of the Commune so much as the brutal vengeance of the Versailles government. Her engagement, too, had ended when the return of her fiancé brought “a sense of estrangement.” Part of the problem was that as a woman she would face inevitable di
fficulties practicing medicine in France and he was unwilling to leave France. She did, however, complete her dissertation, for which she was awarded the highest honors, just as she received the highest possible marks in each of her five examinations. “I have passed my last examination [and] … passed my thesis, and am now docteur en médecine de la Faculté de Paris,” she wrote to her mother on July 29. She was the first American woman ever to attain such a professional standing.

  Her achievement received notice in the New York and Paris papers, and in the Archives de Médecine, which mattered most to her. That a woman had acquired the legal right to practice medicine, said the learned professional journal, was “not without importance at large.”

  By then also, the American minister to France, Elihu B. Washburne, after several restorative weeks “taking the waters” at Carlsbad, the famous health spa in Bohemia, decided that, if needed, he would happily stay on in Paris.

  Tributes were to be published celebrating the part Washburne had played. At home he would be talked of as a possible candidate for president. There were dinners in his honor in Paris, and much said in diplomatic circles about the courage and perseverance he had shown.

  “Speaking of diplomacy, hasn’t our Minister in Paris done splendidly,” wrote Frank Moore, the assistant secretary at the legation who had served with Washburne through the siege and the horrors of the Commune and was still on the job.

  By the use of sound common sense, a kindly, generous disposition and a true appreciation of the right, he has during the past year brought more credit to our government and people at home than they can ever reward him for. His name is on every tongue and I am sure that he will not escape the fate of other honest men for whom thousands of boy babies have been and will affectionately and admiringly be named. … That it will ever be a pleasant chapter for Americans to read in future history which must say that the U.S. Legation alone remained in Paris throughout the siege and the fearful scenes of the Commune of 1870 and 1871.