Massacre
Page 14
Paul Vignon, like 200,000 other upper-class Parisians who had already fled, realised in mid-April that the time had to come to leave Paris. In his apartment building on rue de Seine, the concierge took Paul aside and told him that a junior officer in the National Guard had come by with a list of names in a notebook, asking about people living there who were less than forty years old. When the concierge hesitated, the officer mentioned that he knew he had earlier provided information that he had known to be false, adding that the Commune wanted to make examples of this kind of thing in order to reduce the number of draft-dodgers (réfractaires). The concierge took a real chance, saying that there were indeed two brothers normally residing there of the age to serve, les citoyens Vignon, who had been in the 84th battalion during the war, but that they had left for the provinces. The National Guard officer departed, saying he would find out whether this was true or not. Paul Vignon profusely thanked the concierge, but knew he could delay no longer.
The challenge now was to get out. Increased Communard security had made it more difficult to leave Paris. The gates were closely guarded and only civilians with passes stamped by the Commune could leave. Paul had heard that some young men had managed to leave hidden beneath laundry in the wagons of washerwomen, or even, somehow, encased in giant slabs of meat, thanks to sympathetic butchers. But guards had heard about that one and were stabbing meat being transported with their bayonets. Several young department store clerks got away by jumping a guard at the customs barrier post and quickly fleeing. A few other hardy souls had thrown down ropes from the top of the ramparts and climbed down at night.
The Vignon family’s devoted servant had heard that a young Swiss man had loaned his papers to a Parisian, and that she could get hold of them. Paul and his father accepted the proposition. Soon Paul was in possession of a Swiss birth certificate in the name of Schmitt, approximately his age, along with a passport stamped at the Swiss embassy.
Early the next morning Paul Vignon, his father and the domestic – who would return to Paris with the papers once they had arrived in Saint Denis – went to the Gare du Nord, armed with Paul’s new identity. Guards would not stop Paul’s father because of his age, nor the domestic servant, as women could pretty much come and go as they pleased. Paul went up to the window to buy three tickets, indeed second class tickets so they could (for once) ‘travel democratically’ in order not to attract unusual attention. Communards did not travel first class. They registered their two crates of belongings without any problem, and walked into the waiting room.
The travellers showed their papers to a guard at the door, and he stepped back to let them pass. But a young National Guard lieutenant suddenly appeared and asked politely to see their documents. He announced that Paul’s papers were not in order because they had not been stamped at the Prefecture de Police. Paul replied that this was not necessary because they bore the stamp of a representative of Switzerland – ‘my country’, he lied – and no such requirement had been in place when his brother had left. Indeed this was true, the lieutenant replied, but with so many men trying to leave Paris in order to avoid military service, a new regulation had been decreed. Paul reminded him that, as a ‘foreigner’, he should be allowed to go, but the young lieutenant would not relent. Paul told his interrogator that he would find the head of surveillance for the railway station, who would presumably take care of the matter.
When he arrived at the police office, Paul discovered that the suspicious National Guard officer had taken a back stairway and was already there. The surveillance officer assured Paul that he did not doubt for a minute that he was Swiss, but that he had received explicit instructions that he could not ignore. There was nothing to be done. If Paul made a scene, they might well have a look at his luggage and see that as a good Parisian bourgeois, his initials ‘P.V.’ were to be found on his clothes and his cane. He could not go to the Prefecture de Police because for four years he had been attached to the appellate court and often had dealings with officials there. Someone there might recognise him. They would have to find another way out.
By good fortune, they did. As they had been pacing back and forth in the station, a railway employee had brushed past Paul. Looking the man in the face, he had asked Paul if they were being prevented from leaving for Saint-Denis. Paul started to tell his story when the man cut him off: they were to follow him and give him a small bribe in cash. Bribing the guard on duty with 20 francs – a considerable sum – would risk Paul being arrested for bribery if ensnared. So he took out 2 francs, handed it over, and went quickly through the door to the quai while the railway official looked the other way.
Paul, his father and their servant entered the closest second-class train compartment they found. Paul’s heart was pounding. Their travelling companions would be six femmes du peuple, not the sort Paul and his father had travelled with before. One of the women suddenly warned him to be careful: before the train departed, Communard guards would pass through the cars. She remarked that he seemed too young to be leaving Paris in this situation. Paul recounted the now rather tired story about being Swiss, so Communard authorities could not prevent him from leaving, and so on. ‘Believe me!’ the worthy woman replied, telling him to slide under the bench of the compartment, and that the others could conceal him with their clothes. This he did, and an instant later a guard looked in. The train pulled out, and twenty minutes later his new acquaintance said that he could come out from under the bench. She had seen a German soldier on the quay of the train station in Saint-Denis.
Now no longer within the jurisdiction of the Commune, Paul, his father and the servant left the train, giving each of these working-class women ‘a warm handshake’. The Vignons’ domestic servant returned to Paris with the Swiss papers. Paul and his father immediately went to eat a ‘copious’ lunch upon leaving the station. They then left for Falaise. Not long thereafter, Paul Vignon was in Versailles. It seemed to him that he should show ‘some zeal’ about working again. He found Versailles full of deputies and senators, but also a bevy of jobseekers, men like him who had abandoned Paris. Still, Paul managed to find a post in Thiers’s government.78
The Paris Commune brought most Parisians, such as Sutter-Laumann, hardship but also hope. For others with more comfortable existences, like the Vignon family, the Commune was something that had to be endured until the Army of Versailles could put an end to the pretentions of ordinary Parisians. Surrounded militarily, civil war impinged on daily life, as shells fell on western Paris and casualties mounted amid growing, gnawing fear.
Gradually some Parisians who had been willing to give the Commune a chance because they were republicans or favoured the programme for municipal autonomy began to turn against it. Lower middle-class Parisians, for one, seemed disgusted by the quarrels among Communard leaders. In an attempt to combat dwindling support, Communard propaganda, in the Journel Officiel and wall posters, transformed fédéré losses into great victories over depleted Versaillais forces taking many casualties. In their telling, battalions and entire regiments of Versailles line troops were abandoning Thiers and joining the Commune.79 There was little truth in these reports, and Parisians, even those devoted to the Commune, could not have ignored the mounting casualties from the skirmishes.
Yet growing opposition to arbitrary arrests, hostage-taking and the occasional requisition of supplies did not turn all hesitant public opinion towards Thiers. In fact, Thiers continued to do everything possible to merit the hatred of Parisians. The Versaillais leader had agreed to the devastating armistice, and his cannons were inflicting great damage on Paris – more than that caused by the Prussian siege – and killing innocent Parisians. His commitment to the Republic was at best equivocal. Charles Beslay wrote a letter to Thiers, whom he had once known fairly well, calling on him to resign. The Communard moderate saluted this third revolution of the century in Paris, ‘the greatest and the most just’, and accused Thiers of opposing in obvious bad faith the social transformation that had been occurrin
g over the past half century in Europe. If Versailles now was stronger, Beslay and many others firmly believed, Paris at least had right on its side.80
In a grand demonstration of Parisians’ hatred of Thiers, newspapers called for the demolition of the house of the ‘bomber’ who launched destructive shells into Paris while denying doing so. On the morning of 15 April, Communard leaders with national guardsmen turned up at the door of Thiers’s house on the place Saint-Georges. The concierge almost fainted when she saw ‘grim-looking visitors’, but quickly turned over the keys. A quick search revealed objects of art, paintings and books which Thiers had so assiduously collected over the years. They found Italian Renaissance bronzes, porcelain from centuries past, ivory carvings, engraved rock crystals and Chinese and Japanese jade carvings. Courbet proposed that the objets d’art belonging to Thiers should be ennumerated. When Thiers learned in Versailles that his beloved house was to be demolished, he became quite pale, and fell into an armchair. He then burst into tears. Thiers, one could easily conclude, loved objects, not people.81
Destroying Thiers’s home did little to assuage the fears of Communards like Élisabeth Dmitrieff, who worried about the fate of the Commune in which she had invested so much effort. Would there be time to establish unions for female workers as she hoped? Dmitrieff was sick with bronchitis and a fever and there was no one to replace her. She knew time was of the essence. On 24 April she wrote to the General Council of the International: ‘I work hard; we are mobilising all the women of Paris. I organise public meetings; we have set up defence committees in all arrondissements, right in the town halls, and a Central Committee as well.’82 Dmitrieff had worked tirelessly on behalf of the Commune, but would it be enough? Increasingly, it seemed the future of the Commune relied not on Communards like herself, but on powerful forces beyond Paris, and beyond her control. Bringing to earth Thiers’s house would have no impact on efforts to defend Paris against the Versaillais hordes. Thiers no longer had his mansion, but he had a powerful army moving ever closer to the ramparts of Paris.
CHAPTER 4
The Commune Versus the Cross
THE SUMMARY EXECUTION OF COMMUNARD COMMANDERS ÉMILE DUVAL and Gustave Flourens on 2 April changed the story of the Paris Commune. From the Commune’s point of view, the Versaillais had no right to execute any captured prisoners. It had demanded that its fighters be treated as ‘belligerents’ and thus cared for, as specified by the Geneva Convention of 1864, passed in response to the bloody Crimean War of 1853–56 and the 1859 war between France and Austria. But Thiers and his government continued to insist that Communards taken prisoner were insurgents, indeed bandits and criminals, and deserved no protection under any kind of international law.
At the meeting of the Commune on 4 April, Raoul Rigault insisted that action be taken in response to the killing of Duval and Flourens. With the support of Édouard Vaillant, he proposed that hostages be taken, suggesting the incarceration of the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, and other ecclesiastics. Four days earlier, Darboy had already received a warning that he would be arrested. When Rigault ordered the archbishop’s arrest, he barked ‘Get me two cops and go arrest the priest!’1
Born in 1813 in the small town (2,500 people) of Fayl-Billot in Haute-Marne in eastern France, Georges Darboy was the eldest of four children, whose parents owned a small grocery and haberdashery store. Their neighbours worked the land or produced baskets and other wickerwork sold in or beyond the region. The world of the Darboy family centred on the village church. Early on, the parish priest decided that Georges seemed destined for the priesthood.
Georges started at the Little Seminary in Langres in 1827 with about 200 other boys, sitting in classrooms that were so cold that the ink sometimes froze in winter. Four years later, Darboy entered the Grand Seminary in Langres, announcing that he would always stand ready to die for his religion, which had been the fate of a good many priests and nuns during the Terror in 1793–94 during the French Revolution. Ordained in 1836, Darboy became professor of philosophy and later theology at the Grand Seminary. He was always fascinated by history and its relationship to theology, and believed that the Church had to adapt to new social and political realities.
Darboy became more and more preoccupied with the growing indifference to the Church among large segments of the population and the staggering difference in religious practice between women and men, with the former more likely to attend Mass. He lamented that people were more concerned about ‘terrestrial things’. Could not the sciences, in which he had become keenly interested, help reawaken faith? And should the Church not trumpet its historical role in France?2
Darboy’s intense study and quest for personal perfection took a physical toll, bringing even suffering, a kind of private calvaire (ordeal) that would bring him grace in the mission of saving himself and others. Pale and small, the priest gave the appearance of being reserved, nervous, pensive, even melancholy. His hair, prematurely greying as if coloured by worry, hung limply over his narrow temples. An English contemporary described him: ‘His nose is too big, his lips are too thick, his chin is too heavy, and he is lacking in finesse and grace.’ Yet, as one of his admirers put it, ‘a flower does not require a dazzling casing’.3
In 1845, Denis Affre, the archbishop of Paris, summoned Darboy to the capital, where he was named chaplain of the prestigious Collège Henri IV. Darboy described himself as ‘happy, free and cheerful’ in Paris, with ‘its atmosphere, its chaos, its ideas – its all-consuming life’. Yet as he walked through the city, Darboy was appalled by the poverty of the working poor, the majority of Parisian residents.4
On a rainy 22 February 1848, Paris exploded in revolution when a movement for political reform culminated in street demonstrations and troops shot dead several protesters. The July Monarchy collapsed, and, like his Bourbon predecessor Charles X, King Louis-Philippe high-tailed it for England. Darboy immediately threw his support behind the Second French Republic. The young priest believed that the February Revolution could bring better relations between the Church and ordinary people. Then the June Days uprising rocked the capital, as demonstrations by workers turned into full-scale insurrection. As fighting swirled around the Panthéon, Darboy gave the last rites to several dying workers. In the year that followed, as the revolutionary Left continued to grow in strength, Darboy’s enthusiasm for the Republic ended.
Darboy remained concerned about the plight of poor Parisians, however, and hoped to address the anti-clericalism stemming at least in part from the profound disparity in wealth between privileged and plebeian parishes. When the new archbishop of Paris, Marie-Dominique Sibour, assigned Darboy to undertake a survey of the parishes of the diocese of Paris, he discovered the obvious. Parishes in the wealthy western districts enjoyed virtually inexhaustible resources, their religious ceremonies taking place in splendour and pomp. Such ostentation served to accentuate popular anti-clericalism in the poorer neighbourhoods, whose churches were spartan, often almost bare, and priests found fewer and fewer faithful in attendance.5
Darboy’s primary battle, however, was with the Vatican, and his refusal to submit to Pope Pius IX pushed him closer to Napoleon III. As a young man, Darboy had accepted Gallicanism, a doctrine which held that the authority of the ninety-one French bishops should take precedence over that of the pope.
As one of the major figures in France’s most important and visible diocese, Darboy got to know one of the best-connected clergymen, Abbé Gaspard Deguerry, curé of the Church of the Madeleine where the marriages and baptisms of the elite took place. Deguerry was a large, imposing, outgoing man who gave the impression that he was holding court, and served as confessor to Empress Eugénie who, like her husband Napoleon III, seems to have had lots to confess.6
In 1859, the Emperor named Darboy bishop of Nancy, making him the first openly Gallican bishop appointed during the first seven years of the Second Empire. The Vatican went along with the nomination, having no choice, because the Concordat signed w
ith Napoleon in 1802 gave the French state the right to name bishops. The new bishop insisted that the Church could not exist independently of social and political conditions and that the temporal authority of the pope simply did not correspond ‘to modern realities’. In his view, ‘the great days of the Papacy as a political institution are no more’.7
When the archbishop of Paris died on the last day of 1862, the Emperor selected Darboy to replace him, ignoring the opposition of the Vatican. Learning of his appointment, his mother remarked, ‘Archbishop of Paris, that’s nice, but archbishops of Paris do not last very long.’8 Since Darboy had moved to Paris, three archbishops had died – two violently.
In his new role, Darboy became even closer to the Emperor. Pleased with Darboy’s loyalty to the empire, Napoleon III named him to the Senate, the only archbishop or bishop so honoured, and to the Emperor’s private advisory council. In 1864, Darboy became Grand Chaplain to the Emperor’s residence at the Tuileries, where imperial occupants surrounded themselves with adoring wealthy people. The archbishop married and baptised members of the imperial family and oversaw the first communion of the Prince Imperial. Such flamboyant events made him uncomfortable, because it clearly identified him with fancy folk, among whom the son of provincial shopkeepers never really felt at home. When Napoleon III awarded Darboy the Légion d’honneur, the archbishop reassured his parents that he had not been struck by ‘the sickness’ of seeking imperial honours.9
The First Vatican Council began at the Vatican in December 1869, summoned to approve the pope’s planned proclamation of papal infallibility, which he assumed would mark the end of Gallican opposition to papal prerogatives. French Ultramontanes were pleased, insisting that the pope was ‘Christ on earth’. In Rome Darboy emerged as a leader of opposition to papal infallibility. On 13 July, the pope got his way: the bishops supported papal infallibility but a third of French bishops voted against papal infallibility or did not vote. Darboy left for Paris without voting, later sending in his formal acceptance to a doctrine he had vigorously opposed.10