The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  “The insurgents seizing the guns,” March 18, 1871

  The Commune was a leaderless revolution, not quite by choice and not entirely to its profit. Blanqui possessed all the qualities for leadership—long experience, intellectual clarity, single-minded dedication, strength of character, hard-line intransigence—and Thiers realized this so well that he had him arrested on March 17 as he lay convalescing from illness at a friend’s house in the country. Later, when offered a job lot of priests including Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, in exchange for Blanqui’s freedom, Thiers refused. The other Commune members presented an array of qualities and deficiencies. There was, most of all, a surplus of idealism, along with a corresponding deficit of realpolitik. Revolutions always seem to tilt the scale in one direction or the other; the opposite tilt is, if anything, worse. Charles Delescluze, a veteran of most of the previous uprisings, was loved and respected by all, but his health was too poor to allow him to seize the reins. He was the one who, as minister of war, proclaimed on May 22, when the Versaillais entered the city, “Enough of militarism! No more gilded officer class! Make way for the people, for the bare-armed fighters!… The people know nothing of strategy, but with gun in hand and pavement underfoot, they fear no strategists.” However, as the historian Lissagaray remarks, “When the minister casts off all discipline, who will ever want to obey? When he scorns all method, who will ever want to reason?” In the end, on May 25, Delescluze climbed unarmed atop the barricade at Château d’Eau and allowed himself to be shot dead.

  Louis-Auguste Blanqui

  The Commune membership represented an array of political persuasions; there were hard-line Blanquists, Jacobins nostalgic for 1789, Montagnards nostalgic for 1848, even complacent Radical-Liberals, since the election, after all, took in the entire city, including Auteuil and Passy. Their leading personalities present us with novelistic characters, burning with passion, rife with contradictions, riddled with weaknesses. Raoul Rigault, named police commissioner and later attorney general at the tender age of twenty-five, was youthfully hotheaded and given to violent speeches. He was the one who debaptized the streets, changing Boulevard Saint-Germain to Boulevard Germain, for example, or Faubourg Saint-Antoine to Faubourg Antoine. He showed real promise, pending the fullness of maturity, although no one had a chance to find out. He was killed by the Versaillais while fighting in the Latin Quarter, in full uniform, on May 24. Théophile Ferré, a legal clerk, took charge of the Montmartre cannons on March 18 and afterward proposed marching on Versailles, but was voted down. In the frenzy of the last days he gave the order to execute the ecclesiastical hostages, which accomplished little other than handing the Church a clutch of ready-made martyrs. Nothing in life became Ferré like the leaving of it. Arrested and tried at Versailles, he gave a speech worthy of seventeenth-century theater, one that was constantly interrupted by catcalls, and concluded, “Fortune is capricious. I leave it to the future to guard my memory and achieve my revenge,” while Colonel François-Xavier Merlin, presiding over the tribunal, shouted, “The memory of a killer!” Ferré was shot by a firing squad at the Satory prison camp.

  Raoul Rigault

  Léo Frankel, a jeweler, was a Hungarian immigrant, one of a number of foreigners active in the Commune who were permitted to hold office because “the flag of the Commune is the flag of the world republic.” The only bona fide Marxist aboard, he was responsible for some of the most useful measures passed, such as the law ending night work in bakeries. He was an adept politician, although not one to step into the spotlight. The future novelist Jules Vallès, who put out the newspaper Le Cri du Peuple, seems perhaps closest to the liberal-left viewpoint of our own day. He took the unpopular stance of advocating for total freedom of the press—unpopular because of the damage done, before their suppression in late March, by such Versaillais disinformation sheets as Le Figaro and Le Gaulois. Along with Gustave Courbet, he was one of the members of the minority, which opposed the Committee for Public Safety that was elected in mid-May, with its ominous echoes of Thermidor. Félix Pyat, a successful if not exactly deathless playwright in the Boulevard du Crime days, ran the newspaper Le Combat, which was suppressed a month before the Commune; almost immediately he began putting out Le Vengeur. He was given to grand gestures—he was the one who proposed the demolition of the Vendôme column. He was inclined to rants and threats of resignation, implacable in his grudges—according to Lissagaray, “he would rather have seen the Commune dead than saved by his enemies”—and probably half-mad.

  The fall of the Vendôme column, May 16, 1871

  Émile Eudes was an upright and intelligent revolutionary who, because he led the capture of the Hôtel de Ville on March 18, was named a general. His lack of real military experience was an unfortunately decisive factor in the incompetent defense of the city when the Versaillais invaded the week of May 21. Then again, military training was no guarantee of strategic success. Gustave Cluseret, who among other things had fought as a general for the Union in the American Civil War, was unable to adapt to the circumstances of urban warfare, was accused of treason for his bad decisions, and spent most of the last month of the Commune locked up in Mazas. Louis Rossel, the only high-ranking French military officer in the Commune, was unable to impose discipline on the ranks. He refused Thiers’s offer of exile and was shot with Ferré at Satory. Jaroslaw Dombrowski, a Pole who had received a superior education in Russian military academies and had planned an abortive uprising in Warsaw in 1862, was sufficiently formidable that Thiers tried to lure him to the other side with a bounty of a million and a half francs; Dombrowski had the emissary shot. He did the best he could, from a military standpoint, with ragged troops that took commands poorly if at all. He fought valiantly during the Bloody Week, leading a battalion that included women, one with a babe in arms. He died on the Rue Myrha barricade.

  Félix Pyat

  There were no female members of the Commune because women did not yet have the right to vote, also because one of the principal political models then, the peasant socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), was profoundly misogynistic, relegating women strictly to the kitchen and nursery. From our vantage it necessarily appears strange that these combatants for social progress were unable to recognize the equality of genders, although women did not have the right to vote anywhere in the world at the time and did not obtain suffrage in France until 1944. These factors did not, however, prevent quite a few women from acting almost as though there were no inequality; certainly the role of women in the Commune was unprecedented. Louise Michel might actually have led the Commune had the times been different. The illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landowner and his servant, she was raised in the manor and given a good education. She worked as a teacher, wrote poetry, and began moving in Parisian revolutionary circles sometime prior to 1869. She was elected president of a women’s vigilance society in Montmartre, and attended Victor Noir’s funeral dressed like a man and with a knife concealed on her person, just in case. On March 18 she was guarding the Montmartre cannons, rifle in hand. During the Commune she did everything. Like many women she was an ambulancière (a volunteer nurse), but she was also enrolled in the Sixty-First Battalion and fought on the front lines, worked on the Commune’s proposed educational reforms, and led the Club of the Revolution, one of the active and influential debating societies that functioned as the Commune’s outlets for direct democracy. During the Bloody Week, she managed to flee the city after fighting on the Clignancourt barricade, but gave herself up when she heard her mother had been arrested in her stead. At her trial she demanded to be shot in the field at Satory. Her stance inspired Victor Hugo’s poem “Viro Major”:

  Having seen the immense massacre, the combat,

  The people on their cross, Paris on its sickbed,

  Formidable pity was in your words;

  You did what the great mad souls do,

  And tired of fighting, of dreaming, of suffering,

  You said: I have killed! Becaus
e you wanted to die.

  Lying against yourself, you were terrible, superhuman.

  She was sent to New Caledonia instead, and came back from it after the 1880 amnesty to become a pillar of the anarchist surge. In 1882 she was the first to fly the black flag—the color of mourning rather than the color of blood, in her words. She risked everything over and over again and spent many years in prison. Her enemies and her followers alike called her the Red Virgin because she was married to the revolution; you could almost say she was led by a mystical vision, like Joan of Arc. She possessed a moral grandeur no one during her lifetime could match.

  Louise Michel

  A meeting of a debating society. Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from Le Charivari, 1848

  The Union of Women for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded was founded on April 11 by Nathalie Le Mel and Élisabeth Dmitrieff, two intellectuals. Le Mel was a bookbinder and bookseller, and Dmitrieff, a Russian active in the International, was in Paris on a fact-finding mission for Marx. She cultivated an air of mystery and was noted for the elegance of her turnout: riding habits always, with a red feather in her hat and a red silk scarf trimmed with gold. The union organized labor for women, obtaining commissions and filling work crews, and agitated for women’s rights: to vote, to enjoy full legal rights, to choose jobs, to receive pay equal to men. André Léo was a professional writer (her real name was Léodile Béra; her pseudonym came from the names of her two sons), well known before the Commune for her novels. She worked for the Union of Women and ran a newspaper, The Workers’ Republic. She wrote:

  Later on, they’ll be studied as models of illogic, those democrats who, right after proclaiming their famous declaration … have the gall to sacrifice half of humanity to a dogmatic concept, to dissolve women into the family and construct yet another fiction atop that pretext beloved of all despots: order. Eighty years have passed since the launch of human rights, and it still seems like a bizarre novelty to claim justice for women, bowed since the beginning of the world under a double yoke, in slavery doubly a slave, eternally a slave in the bosom of the free family, and even now, in our civilizations, deprived of all initiative, of all vigor, abandoned to either the corruption of idleness or the corruption of misery, and everywhere subject to the demoralizing effects of the shameful mix of dependency and love.

  These women and a few others whose names we know—Paule Mink, Maria Deraismes, Noémie Reclus, Marie Ferré, Élisa Gagneur, Maria Verdure, Sophie Poirier, Anna Jaclard, Béatrix Excoffon—were both well educated and involved with the social movement, a reasonably unusual combination in the mid-nineteenth century. But there were thousands of other women active during the Commune, many of them illiterate, some of them factory workers, some wives and mothers, some prostitutes.* They worked as ambulancières and cantinières, built barricades and fought and died on them, died in great numbers during the Bloody Week, filled the prison camp at Versailles (1,058 women and 651 children), and were executed or shipped off to New Caledonia. Still, as André Léo wrote:

  Once more, women have nothing to gain from the immediate effects of this revolution, since its present goal is the emancipation of men, not of women … You could write a history of the inconsequences of the revolutionary party going back to 1789. The woman question would form the longest chapter, and it would illustrate how that party found a way to drive over to the enemy half of its troops, which asked for nothing more than to march alongside.

  But over in that enemy camp, the notorious quip by Alexandre Dumas fils can be taken as a representative opinion: “We will say nothing about their females, out of respect for the women they resemble—when they are dead.”

  The Commune was so rich in ideas, initiatives, debates, and grand plans that it is easy to forget that it lasted only seventy-two days. The Versaillais army entered Paris on the morning of May 21 by the Point-du-Jour gate, which was left undefended—inexplicably, since it was the one closest to Versailles. The army also cut a deal with the Prussians, allowing them to attack from the north. Because the Germans occupied the northern suburbs, the Commune had given those gates only token support. Moreover, there was no strategy in place for how to repel an invasion. The Communards apparently hadn’t read Blanqui, who advised, “Above all, don’t shut yourselves up in your own neighborhoods, as republicans have never yet failed to do.” But that is exactly what happened. And many of the barricades, built hastily when the enemy was just blocks away, were more symbolic than strategic—piles of rubble, irregularly defended, that ground troops could easily walk over. Barricades were erected on a whim, guarding corners of local significance that did not necessarily figure in any broader plan. The army sliced through the city from the southwest and across, then down from the north via the Batignolles, gradually closing in on the northeast, where they met the strongest resistance and where the fighting finally ended on May 28, in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

  A Versaillais shell explodes in the street, May 1871

  Along the way, the troops executed on the spot anyone captured whose hands showed traces of gunpowder; many of the rest were judged by courts-martial in the Luxembourg Gardens or at the Lobau barracks near the Hôtel de Ville, after which they were shot. On May 23 the National Guard detachment headquartered in the Tuileries palace, realizing that they were outgunned and about to be overwhelmed, set fire to the building. The following day, Communards torched the police prefecture, the Palais de Justice, and the Hôtel de Ville (which contained the city’s historical archives and thus constituted the one truly irreparable material loss of that week). Many other government edifices went up in flames—among others the Ministry of State, the Ministry of Finance, the Court of Auditors, and the Palace of the Legion of Honor—but it has never been determined who burned them. A rumor spread that the fires had been set by pétroleuses (women bearing buckets of fuel oil), which focused the army’s contempt for the women of the Commune and gave license to shoot on sight any working-class woman carrying any sort of jug or pail.

  The final battle between Communards and Versaillais, Père-Lachaise cemetery, on the evening of May 27, 1871

  But then, the troops hardly needed goads or justifications. Communards were shot in the Catacombs, in the cellars of the uncompleted Opéra, in the gypsum quarries in the Buttes-Chaumont. Tony Moilin, a doctor and the author of a book called Paris in the Year 2000, was shot for attending to wounded Communards. Dr. Faneau, running a field clinic at Saint-Sulpice, was shot along with all eighty of his patients. People who merely looked like Commune leaders were summarily executed, “and their understandable emotions allowed the newspapers to assert that the heads of the Commune had died as cowards, even denying their own names.” There were mass executions at the mint, at the observatory, at the law school and the polytechnic institute, at the Panthéon, at Mazas and La Roquette, and in Parc Monceau. The Commune member Eugène Varlin was stoned and had his eyes put out by a mob before being shot in Montmartre. People who had nothing to do with the Commune were shot after being falsely denounced by their enemies or their concierges. In 1897 a mass grave was found in Charonne that contained some eight hundred corpses, apparently mowed down with primitive machine guns.

  Corpses in the courtyard of La Roquette prison, May 1871

  No one knows how many died. Maxime du Camp claimed there were six thousand dead, an insufficient number according to him. In a parliamentary inquiry that August, General Félix Antoine Appert cited the figure of seventeen thousand, which was taken up by most of the historians of the Commune, beginning with Lissagaray, although most also allowed for the many back-street murders and unofficial burials and raised the figure to twenty thousand. In 1880 the politician Camille Pelletan claimed thirty thousand. Revisionist historians of recent times seem to think the figure is closer to ten thousand, half of that number from combat and half from summary execution, which still represents a large percentage of the Parisian population, less than two million in the 1866 census. On May 31, Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his jou
rnals that the wound had been bled white, and that with the warring part of the population dead or in prison, society could look forward to twenty years of rest. Maxime du Camp claimed that the population of Paris during the Commune had been three-quarters provincials and foreigners, and that if there had been only Parisians, there would have been no uprising. On the other hand, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, not especially a friend of the people, told his son Jean about the Communards, “They were insane, but they had that little flame that never goes out.”

  Ruins of the Palais de Justice, May 1871. Photograph by the Pignolet brothers

  The Mur des Fédérés in Père-Lachaise cemetery, the site of mass executions of Communards by the Versaillais

  The Commune member Jean-Baptiste Clément wrote “Le temps des cerises” (cherry blossom time), the song that because it was in the air in May 1871, became, for anyone who was there, forever associated with the Commune, both its triumphs and its disasters. (It’s a lovely tune, but with a hint of a dirge already built in.) He also wrote a song about the Bloody Week, which has the refrain “Les mauvais jours finiront” (the bad days will end). He was, of course, both right and wrong. In the meantime, Paris had to rebuild, even while it was under heavy repression. Between the killings, the imprisonments and deportations, and the flights of people—to Belgium, England, Switzerland, the United States—industry suffered. Tailors were down by a third. Plumbers, roofers, smelters, carvers, gilders, drapers, printers, tanners, sculptors, jewelers, lithographers, decorators, makers of surgical, optical, and musical instruments—all were lacking. The city was hollow; life itself felt as if it were being enforced. A law was passed on December 28 that prohibited “the exhibition and sale of all drawings, portraits, lithographs, photographs, or emblems connected to recent political events and particularly the insurrection,” including, needless to say, “the acts of repression of the legitimate authorities.” The sole exception to the rule: “From a purely artistic perspective: fire or ruins.” Rimbaud, who may or may not have been in the city during the Commune—accounts differ—wrote a poem called “The Parisian Orgy, or Paris Repopulates”: