Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  After the April débâcle, military command of the Paris Commune devolved into the hands of the forty-seven-year-old Gustave-Paul Cluseret. A true soldier of fortune, he had graduated from the elitist military college Saint-Cyr, was wounded in the Crimea, then cashiered for “irregularities” concerning army stores in Algeria. He found his way to America, enlisting as a volunteer on the side of the North during the Civil War before—startlingly—being promoted to brigadier-general. “Never,” said Cluseret on taking over his undisciplined force, “have I seen anything comparable to the anarchy of the National Guard … It was perfect of its kind.” He appointed Rossel as his chief of staff, and the thirty-five-year-old Polish nobleman Jaroslaw Dombrowski as commandant of Paris. These were to prove the Commune’s two ablest officers. But lacking was any kind of staffwork, or a proper commissariat. There seemed to be no effective chain of command: everybody gave orders, few obeyed them. And the Versaillais were closing in.

  Already their guns were shelling central Paris, in a second bombardment just as indiscriminate towards the civil population as Moltke’s had been. The courageous American Minister, Elihu Washburne, who stuck out both sieges, in May recorded shell splinters striking the U.S. Legation near the Etoile “within twenty feet of where I was writing.” Ironically, it was also the most staunchly bourgeois, anti-Communard parts of Paris that bore the brunt of government gunfire. Forming a tentative plan of campaign, Thiers’s generals appreciated that the Achilles’ heel of the Communard defences lay at the Point du Jour, the extreme south-western tip of the city, close to where the Seine flows out towards Sèvres. It was here that his army would try to break in. Cluseret, summoning up a rare burst of energy, on 30 April marched out himself with 200 men to relieve Fort Issy; but, on his return to Paris, he found himself under arrest—charged with having sold himself to Versailles. Spymania was beginning to grip the city.

  Cluseret’s Chief of Staff, Rossel, now replaced him. Born of a Scottish mother, at twenty-six he had been promoted to colonel of the engineers during the first siege, and was by far the most efficient soldier ever available to the Commune. Had he been in charge back in March, events might well have taken a different course. Now he ordered the rapid erection of a ring of barricades behind the city ramparts, those constructed by Thiers himself in the 1840s—a second line of defence in the event that MacMahon broke through the perimeter. But it was all too late. When he ordered a fresh attack to relieve Fort Issy, his battalion commanders evaporated. This was the last straw for Rossel, and on 8 May he sent in his resignation. For Fort Issy, having suffered over 500 dead and wounded, this also was the death-knell. Charles Delescluze, slowly dying of consumption, now took over.

  Meanwhile as Thiers and his regulars looked more and more menacing, within the city the Communards—having seized the Archbishop—went from folly to irrelevant folly. Thiers’s private house was spitefully demolished. In the Place Vendôme the great Column erected by Napoleon I to celebrate the victories of 1805 was brought crashing down. Its destruction now presented a final, futile gesture of contempt for the fallen Empire. (After the collapse of the Commune one of those held responsible, Gustave Courbet the painter, was condemned to pay for it, but took refuge in Switzerland.)

  A CONCERT IN THE TUILERIES

  On the sunny summer evening of Sunday, 21 May 1871, the self-elected Commune de Paris held a grandiose concert in the resplendent Tuileries Palace. Only the previous year it had been inhabited by the now deposed Emperor. No fewer than 1,500 musicians were engaged to take part.

  As the Paris Commune enjoyed its last party, however, just outside the walls troops belonging to the legitimate government of Adolphe Thiers were waiting to enter the besieged city from Versailles. If ever there was a repeat of fiddling while Rome burned, this was it—though not even the most pessimistic apostle of gloom could possibly have foreseen that, within less than a week, much of the centre of Paris (including the historic and sumptuous Tuileries Palace itself) would lie in smoking ruins. Over 20,000 Parisians would have died in the grimmest blood-letting la ville lumière had ever known. The face of Paris, of France herself, and indeed the whole political philosophy of the West, would have been changed. Out of the grim semaine sanglante, Karl Marx would construct a cornerstone for his future doctrines, and an abyss of deep bitterness would be dug between the haves and have-nots of the nineteenth century. The savage street-by-street fighting would bequeath a legacy of a new style of warfare, and horror, to the twentieth century.

  At the end of the concert that May evening, a Communard officer rose to announce, “Citizens, Monsieur Thiers promised to enter Paris yesterday. Monsieur Thiers did not enter; he will not enter. Therefore I invite you here next Sunday, here at this same place.” At that very moment, however, in a scene more reminiscent of the Middle Ages if not of Greek mythology, Thiers’s troops were actually entering the city through the Point du Jour gate, where a white flag had been spotted. Waving it was a civil engineer named Ducatel, who felt no love for the Commune and who had happened quite by chance to take his afternoon promenade near the battlements. He had been astonished to see that, around the Point du Jour, which had been heavily pounded by Thiers’s cannon over the previous few days, there was not a single defender. It was not until Monday morning that most Parisians learned the news of the Versaillais’s entry into the city. In the chic suburb of Auteuil, Dombrowski’s forces had been taken completely by surprise. Sent out on reconnaissance, Assi, an incompetent early chairman of the Commune, was seized near the Trocadéro—the first of the Communard leaders to be captured.

  By dawn on the 22nd, Marshal MacMahon had already poured 70,000 troops through five gaping breaches in the walls between the Portes of Passy and Saint-Cloud. They had been welcomed warmly in this predominantly bourgeois arrondissement, and 1,500 National Guards had surrendered. A frenzy of energy now belatedly gripped the Commune. At bayonet-point reluctant passers-by were forced to assist in the construction of barricades that should have been completed weeks before. “If possible two or three trolleys, cabs or carts would form the foundation; all the apertures being filled with sand, the cubic paving stones from the road, sandbags, bricks or anything else,” reported Dr. Powell, an English physician recently arrived in Paris.

  On the Left Bank, Communards fought at Montparnasse Station until their ammunition ran out; their withdrawal was covered by a courageous singleton, who kept up a steady fire into the station from a one-man stronghold inside a newspaper kiosk. At the other end of the front, the Versailles troops were advancing rapidly towards Montmartre. Near the Madeleine, another English doctor, Alan Herbert, soon found himself a fascinated spectator of the Communard defence as, with mounting ferocity, Frenchmen killed Frenchmen:

  The first who fired was a grey-headed, grey-bearded old man, who was the most bloodthirsty old fellow I ever saw. He hounded the others on … it was a horrible sight. They quarrelled as to … whose turn it was to shoot and from time to time one heard such expressions as these: “Oh, that caught him!” It was just like boys rabbit-shooting. I do not believe, however, they killed many.

  As already noted, Haussmann’s layout of the new Paris under Napoleon III had had as one of its objectives the provision of diagonal intersections so as to outflank barricades thrown up by revolutionaries. Now these proved highly effective for the regular troops to execute turning movements on the Communard defences. But about the only government advance on the Monday afternoon on the Right Bank had been to capture the garden of the British Embassy on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In their scattered little packets, the Communards were beginning to fight as never before—the fight of despair. As the front stabilized by nightfall on the 22nd, it lay roughly along a north–south axis, running from the Gare des Batignolles in the north, through the Gare Saint-Lazare, the British Embassy, the Palais de l’Industrie (now the Grand Palais), across the Seine to the Chamber of Deputies, and up the Boulevard des Invalides to the Gare Montparnasse. Behind it, on the western side, one-third of Pa
ris lay solidly in government hands.

  Late that night, Dombrowski was brought under arrest to the Hôtel de Ville by the National Guard, allegedly attempting to escape through the Prussian lines. He was the second of the Commune’s few competent military commanders to fall.

  PARIS BURNS

  Dawn on Tuesday the 23rd broke on another glorious May day. The Versaillais Generals de Ladmirault and Clinchant were already assaulting the bastion of Montmartre from two directions. Up there, about the only Communard detachment which showed spirit was a squad of twenty-five women from the Women’s Battalion, headed by the redoubtable Louise Michel, who had orders to blow up, if necessary, the Butte Montmartre. Now began the “expiation” for which Thiers had called. Some forty-nine captured Communards were collected at random and summarily shot in the Rue des Rosiers, scene of the lynching of the two generals back in March. When the Madeleine was taken that day, Dr. Herbert recorded:

  we saw the insurgents retreat from the different barricades and cross the Place. The troops then came in. A few scenes of horrid massacre and bloodshed, and then the streets were occupied by the regular troops … I fear there is a very revengeful disposition amongst the regular troops, which is much to be regretted.

  Garnier’s still unfinished Opéra was soon hemmed in on three sides. Marine sharpshooters positioned in the top storey of the surrounding buildings directed a devastating fire down on to the Communards exposed behind their barricades. By 6 p.m., after both sides had suffered heavy losses, the Opéra was carried; and a soldier clambered up on to the statue of Apollo at its entrance and tore down the red flag. Near the Bibliothèque Nationale, Edmond Goncourt saw a Communard across the street killed by a bullet. His companion:

  threw off his sword behind him, as if with scornful deliberation, bent down and tried to lift the dead man. The body was large and heavy and, like any inert object, evaded his efforts and rolled about in his arms from left to right. At last he raised it; and clutching it across his chest, he was carrying it away when a bullet, smashing his thigh, made the dead and the living spin in a hideous pirouette, collapsing one upon the other …

  I retained in my ear for a long time the rending cries of a wounded soldier who had dragged himself to our door and whom the concierge, through a cowardly fear of compromising herself, refused to let in.

  All through that Tuesday the 23rd, Paul-Antoine Brunel and his men had continued to hold out with extraordinary tenacity at the barricades in the Rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde. Turning movements from the direction of the Opéra were threatening their rear, and now deadly rifle-fire from sharpshooters on top of the high buildings along the Rue Royale mowed them down behind their barricades. Swiftly Brunel—justifying the nickname of “The Burner” gained during the First Siege—ordered the firing of these buildings.

  That evening, away in the darkness, Parisians saw the glow of a great fire. It looked as if the Tuileries Palace might be burning. Commander Jules Bergeret, one of the more incompetent Communard leaders who had just been released from a well-deserved spell in prison, had carried out a desperate action, dictated, apparently, more by vengefulness than by military necessity. Inside the Tuileries Palace, where only two days previously the last of the famous concerts had taken place, he stacked barrel after barrel of gunpowder. With a colossal roar the central dome housing the Salle des Maréchaux vanished in a conflagration that dwarfed any fireworks display laid on by either past Emperor.

  By the night of the 24th, to Edwin Child lying low in the Marais of eastern Paris, “it seemed literally as if the whole town was on fire and as if all the powers of hell were let loose.” The list of buildings already incendiarized was extensive: the Tuileries, a large part of the Palais Royal, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police and the Conseil d’Etat. Whole sections of streets, including the Rue de Lille and much of the Rue de Rivoli, were ablaze; so was the Ministry of Finance, housed in one wing of the Louvre, and the priceless treasures in the museum itself were gravely threatened. At Notre-Dame, which had escaped destruction by so narrow a margin during the Great Revolution, National Guards built up a large “brazier” from chairs and pews; they were prevented just in time from setting it on fire. But the superb medieval building of the Hôtel de Ville, the focus of so much Parisian history from Philippe Auguste onwards, was also consigned to the flames, despite the protests of Delescluze.

  Now there entered into the limelight les pétroleuses, daemonic maenads who allegedly crept about the city flinging petroleum-filled bottles into basement windows belonging to the bourgeoisie. “Last night,” wrote another Briton in Paris on 25 May, Colonel John Stanley, “three women were caught throwing small fire balls down the openings of cellars in the street. There was no doubt of it of course. Already smoke was coming from some of them. They were driven into a corner and shot then and there through the head.” Or were these women one of the grim myths that civil war produces? That night, too, the Communards committed their most infamous crime: the crude execution in an alley outside the prison of La Roquette of Monseigneur Darboy, the hostage Archbishop of Paris. Retribution was not long delayed in catching up with the Chief of Police responsible for his death, Raoul Rigault. The next day Rigault was seized on the Left Bank, at lodgings he shared under an assumed name with an actress, and he was shot in the head. For two days his body lay in the gutter, partly stripped by local women, and kicked and spat upon by passers-by.

  On the evening of Thursday the 25th, as Commune resistance was beginning to crumble, Charles Delescluze decided that he would not “submit to another defeat.” Dressed as always like an 1848 revolutionary in a top hat, black trousers, polished boots and frock coat, with a red sash tied round his waist, he set off towards an abandoned barricade. He was seen slowly to climb to the top, where he stood briefly before pitching forward on his face, felled by Versaillais rifle-fire. In defeat, the old Jacobin had achieved a measure of nobility denied to Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan. But the Commune was now leaderless.

  Friday, 26 May, was a day of savage killings on both sides, in which the battle became a ruthless mopping-up operation. Goncourt was moved to pity by one group of 400 Communard prisoners:

  The men had been split up into lines of seven or eight and tied to each other with string that cut into their wrists. They were just as they had been captured, most of them without hats or caps, and with their hair plastered down on their foreheads and faces by the fine rain that had been falling ever since this morning.

  Many never reached prison camp in Versailles. Before the eyes of Alphonse Daudet:

  A large man, a true southerner, sweating, panting, had difficulty in keeping up. Two cavalrymen came up, attached tethers to each of his arms, around his body, and galloped. The man tries to run, but falls; he is dragged, a mass of bleeding flesh that emits a croaking sound; murmurs of pity from the crowd: “Shoot him, and have done!” One of the troopers halts his horse, comes up and fires his carbine into the moaning and kicking parcel of meat. He is not dead … the other trooper jumps from his horse, fires again. This time, that’s it …

  One of the Versailles generals, the dashing Marquis de Gallifet, now secured for himself a reputation for barbarity that Paris would never forget. “I am Gallifet,” he told prisoners. “You people of Montmartre may think me cruel, but I am even crueller than you can imagine.” Twirling his moustaches, with his mistress on his arm, pointing out who should die and who should live, he is described as “making caustic jests as he did so.” Troops under Gallifet’s orders treated the captured Communards with particular brutality, many never surviving the journey to Versailles. The districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant alone were still wholly in Communard hands. Here, as at Warsaw and Leningrad in the Second World War, a whole population was now fighting for its life—not against a foreign army, but against its fellow countrymen. General Vinoy’s regulars were approaching one of the last of the Commune’s remaining strongholds: Père Lachaise Cemetery. Possessing what is still one of the bes
t views of Paris, the vast cemetery dominated the whole smouldering city. There the last of the Communard defenders, firing from the cover of its elaborate family mausoleums, had to be winkled out gravestone by gravestone.

  The next morning, 28 May, Thiers’s army moved in for the kill. It was Whitsunday. Within a few hours, there was only one Communard barricade left, on the Rue Ramponeau, where an unknown lone defender held off the attackers with a cool and undeviating accuracy. When he had expended his last cartridge, he strolled calmly away and disappeared. At La Roquette the unburied corpse of the murdered Archbishop had been discovered. That Whitsun morning, in revenge, the Versailles troops marched 147 of the captured Communards out to Père Lachaise and summarily shot them against a wall of the cemetery. Inside La Roquette, which held such grim memories for the hostages of the Commune, some 1,900 prisoners are said to have been shot in two days, and at the Mazas prison another 400.

  AFTERMATH

  The last great siege of Paris was at an end. On 1 June, the London Times declared, “Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris … The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘Party of Order’ [Thiers’s supporters] sicken the soul.” France herself was sickening of the slaughter. “Let us kill no more, even murderers and incendiaries!” the Paris-Journal entreated on 2 June. “Let us kill no more!”

  Estimates of the numbers of Parisians slaughtered during the semaine sanglante vary wildly between 6,500 and 40,000. Reliable French historians today seem more or less agreed on a figure of between 20,000 and 25,000—larger by far, even so, than the blood-letting of the Terror of 1793 in Paris. The Paris Commune itself was to remain a touchstone and a rallying point for the French left. Out of it would spring the Front Populaire of the 1930s, and the alliance of Socialists and Communists eventually to be presided over by François Mitterrand. For over a century, at each anniversary of the final massacre at Père Lachaise, the left would process in their thousands to lay wreaths at the cemetery’s Mur des Fédérés.