The next morning, Thiers informed Flotte that no exchange would be possible, because to ‘turn over Blanqui to the insurrection would be to provide it with a force equal to an army corps’. Flotte reminded Thiers that there were seventy-four other hostages being held at Mazas, and that if he would sign an order releasing Blanqui, he would bring them all to Versailles the next day. Thiers was probably overstating Blanqui’s influence. His return to Paris would not necessarily have provided much leadership to the Communards. Blanqui was a sick, old man, whose influence arguably came from his legend and imprisonment in a distant place. Few Communards besides Rigault and Flotte had ever met him.
Back at Mazas, when Flotte related what had transpired, Deguerry called Thiers ‘a man without a heart’, believing it to be a calculated manoeuvre on his part. Thiers may well have believed that the execution of Darboy and other hostages would greatly discredit the Commune. The killing of the archbishop would justify continued reprisals against the Communards.57
As days became weeks, bringing no sign that his release was imminent, the archbishop seemed almost indifferent to his earthly fate. Darboy wrote to his brother that he was doing well enough, had all that he needed, and ‘was not being treated as badly as they [his family] might have heard’. The prison doctor warned that if the archbishop’s situation was not improved, he would not last a fortnight. Darboy was transferred to a larger cell, with a small table, a chair, more air, linen brought from the archbishop’s residence, and food from the outside. He was provided with theology books. He had in his cell a cross that Archbishop Affre had given him and a large sapphire ring, the gift of Archbishop Sibour.58
Two proposals for escape presented themselves to Darboy. A young man, Count Anatole de Montferrier, managed to reach the archbishop and offered him a convoluted plan involving fake safe-conduct passes. The archbishop quickly declined. Then one of his guards offered to help him escape, but Darboy replied that his flight would be ‘the signal for the massacre of the priests’, and that he would rather be shot than have others killed in his place.59
The summary execution by Versaillais forces of Communard commanders Flourens and Duval raised the stakes for the Paris Commune, as well as for Archbishop Darboy and the other hostages being held in Mazas prison. All the pieces were in place for a dramatic military confrontation as Versaillais line troops edged closer to the ramparts of Paris.
CHAPTER 5
The Battle Turns Against the Communards
THE VERSAILLAIS HAD BEGUN TO BOMBARD PARIS ON 2 APRIL. METHODIST pastor W. Gibson heard a national guardsman say the next day, ‘Soon we will be crushed!’1 The shelling intensified on 12 April. Five days later, Gibson concluded, ‘It appears, from what has transpired in the Assembly of Versailles, that there are many among the deputies who would be glad to see Paris bombarded and the city burnt to the ground.’ Indeed, by 21 May, Versaillais’s shells had indiscriminately killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of Parisians and destroyed hundreds of buildings in neighbourhoods in western and central districts within the reach of army artillery. Ironically many of these quartiers were noteworthy for being against the Commune or at least neutral. The Commune was being pushed into a corner by the might of Thiers’s army, and it seemed increasingly unlikely they would ever recover.2
British resident John Leighton was outraged that the Versaillais, with whom he had a certain class sympathy, were ‘not content with’ battering forts and ramparts and killing not only Communard soldiers, but also ‘women and children, ordinary passers-by [including] unfortunates who were necessarily obliged to venture into the neighbouring streets, for the purpose of buying bread’. US diplomat Wickham Hoffman agreed: ‘It must always be a mystery why the French bombarded so persistently the quarter of the Arc de Triomphe – the West End of Paris – the quarter where nine out of ten of the inhabitants were known friends of the Government’.3
For Parisians who had just lived through the Prussian siege, this was much worse. Prussians had never bombarded medical facilities. The Versaillais did just that. Thiers proclaimed to provincial France that the Communards were pillaging property in Paris, this as Versaillais cannons were obliterating rows of houses on the Champs-Elysées. Thiers then denied that shells were falling on Paris.4
Some Parisians flocked to the Arc de Triomphe on 6 April, to watch what was going on, as they had during the first week or two of the Prussian siege. One enterprising man charged a fee to those who wanted a better view from atop some piled up chairs. From the Arc de Triomphe, Leighton watched ‘a motionless, attentive crowd reaching down the whole length of the Avenue of the Grande Armée, as far as the Porte Maillot, from which a great cloud of white smoke springs up every moment followed by a violent explosion … suddenly a flood of dust, coming from Porte Maillot, thrusts back the thick of the crowd, and as it flies, widening, and whirling more madly as it comes, everyone is seized with terror, and rushes away screaming and gesticulating.’5
The first Communard funeral for victims of the Versaillais bombardment took place on 6 April, immediately after the siege began. Horses hauled giant hearses through the boulevards of Paris. The Jacobin Charles Delescluze, a member of the Commune’s governing council, gave a funeral oration for the martyred Parisians, concluding that ‘this great city … holds the future of humanity in its hands … Cry not for our brothers who have fallen heroically, but swear to continue their work!’ Less ceremonial funerals would become a daily occurrence. The Commune awarded annual pensions of 600 francs to widows whose men had been killed fighting, and 365 francs for their children.6
Among the killed and wounded were boys, including thirteen-year-old Eugène-Léon Vaxivierre, who continued to man a cannon despite being wounded. Another boy, Guillaume, was wounded by a shell while firing an artillery piece with his father. Charles Bondcritter, fifteen, was killed after remaining at his cannon for ten days.7
On the avenue des Ternes, now well within range of Versaillais shells, a mournful funeral procession moved slowly along. Two men carried a small coffin, that of a young child. The father, a worker dressed in his blue smock, walked sadly behind, with a small group of mourners. Suddenly a shell, fired from Mont-Valérien, crashed down, destroying the small coffin, and covering the funeral entourage with human remains. Leighton wryly commented, ‘Massacring the dead! Truly those cannons are a wonderful, a refined invention!’8
Thiers’s army was indeed ruthless. On 11 April Versaillais troops pushed Communard forces back at Asnières and moved into the plateau of Châtillon to the south of the capital. This permitted the army to move cannons closer and bombard the exterior forts and ramparts of Paris. As Communards fled back across what was left of a railway bridge, which had been partially destroyed by Versaillais shells, Ernest Vizetelly watched gendarmes on horses as they ‘picked off men who had fallen’, some drowning in the Seine.9
Alix Payen, whose husband Henri was a sergeant in the National Guard, volunteered as an ambulancière (an ambulance aide) because she did not want to be separated from her husband. She was with him at Fort Issy caring for the wounded during the fighting there. One of the Communard fighters found Alix something of a shelter – in a family tomb in a cemetery. The Communards Alix met while tending to the wounded were a mixed bag, representing the range of supporters for the Commune itself. With them at the shelter, for instance, was ‘a real Parisian from the faubourgs, cheerful, sarcastic, a little bit of a thug and as chatty as a magpie’. Another was a professor at the Collège de Vanves, ‘very well-educated and a poet. He improvised verses inspired by our situation.’ The man had suffered a ‘brutally unhappy love affair’, which had left him so devastated that Communard fighters considered him ‘a little crazy’.
The next day, 12 April, the Communard fighters let the Versaillais approach, then fired on them. All was quiet for a time. Henri Payen and the poet, hoping to take advantage of the lull, wanted to organise a concert to cheer up the wounded. Alix took a collection and went nearby to buy some flowers. A mulatto woma
n, who, like Alix, had accompanied her husband into battle, sang some songs. During the concert, someone shouted, ‘A wounded man!’ and Alix ran to help an artilleryman hit by a shell while the woman sang on. More and more shells began to rain down on Issy, killing or wounding twenty-six Communards. Their position untenable, the troops retreated to the entrance to Levallois-Perret, their flag riddled by Versaillais bullets. The period of intense Versaillais shelling had begun.
As wounded Communards began to stream into Paris, the city scrambled to find places to house and treat them. Within Paris, each arrondissement had a medical facility, such as that at Porte Maillot, swamped with wounded Communards because it was near the fighting beyond the western walls. Civilian hospitals cared for the wounded, as well, although many fighters simply wanted to be carried home. A medical facility occupied a lecture hall at the Sorbonne. Bodies were stacked in the Medical School, which was also empty of students, primarily because most of the students were against the Commune, although some teaching took place elsewhere. British and American organisations also helped care for the Communard wounded. Near the faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Union Jack and the flag of the Red Cross flew at the English medical facility with its fifty beds. A British Protestant organisation had 600–800 beds in Paris. An American facility also helped out.
The wounded faced the horrors of inadequate care. At Beaujon Hospital, all fifteen men who had had limbs amputated died of pyaemia or gangrene. Hospitals and medical clinics were grossly overcrowded and lacked suitable dressing and sterilisation supplies. Despite all this, British doctor John Murray insisted that the Commune was looking after the population as best it could. Yet Murray feared that poverty and hard times would exacerbate cholera, ‘which is assuredly approaching’.
Dr Murray recalled the sad case of a woman mortally wounded by a shell while caring for the Communard injured at Issy. She passed away after thirty-six hours of suffering. Her friends wanted to arrange a funeral service presided over by a priest, which the Commune hesitated to allow, but then permitted. No priest, however, could be found. A Protestant minister was present and performed the service instead.10
In one large facility, Dr Danet cared for between 1,500 and 2,000 men. It was difficult to find enough people to help care for the wounded and he complained that in some cases the Commune’s leaders hindered rather than helped doctors. One day, Delescluze, Jules Miot, another Jacobin member of the Commune’s administrative council, and Gustave Courbet came along. Danet had been denounced for having the wounded trade their National Guard uniforms – because they were so filthy – for more simple hospital garb. But some national guardsmen had somehow concluded that this measure was to prevent them from visiting wounded comrades in other facilities. Danet complained that some Communards did not seem to realise that a hospital is not a restaurant, and people came there to eat and drink. He had thrown some out, and they had denounced him. Courbet told Danet that he was too ‘severe’ and raged at him with ‘his booming voice’.11
With the number of casualties increasing daily, the Commune began to rally women to the defence of the city. On 11 April, Parisians awoke to find in their newspapers an ‘Appeal to citoyennes’ calling on women to take up arms in defence of the Commune: ‘the decisive hour has arrived’. Élisabeth Dmitrieff and seven other female organisers of the Union des femmes proclaimed that women should be prepared to fight and, if necessary, to die for the cause. A group of women formed their own fighting legion, the Amazons of the Seine. Ernest Vizetelly went to their recruiting office to see these ladies for himself. His account, like others essentially hostile to the Commune and the role of women in it, emphasised what were considered to be unfeminine physical characteristics – at least as he interpreted them. He described them as ‘mostly muscular women from five-and-twenty to forty years of age, the older ones being unduly stout, and not one of them, in my youthful opinion, at all good-looking’.12
Women conducted public demonstrations intended to rally flagging spirits in the struggle against Versailles. A mobilisation of some 800 women took place in early April at place de la Concorde in front of the statue of Strasbourg, a city that had already been incorporated into the German empire. Women in Belleville proposed to march towards the armies of Versailles to see whether soldiers would really fire on them – the answer would prove to be that they would do so eagerly.13
During skirmishes in April women battled the Versaillais army outside the ramparts. In several cases, female fighters shot at and sometimes hit and killed troops of the line. Atop the city walls a crowd of onlookers supposedly applauded a woman supplying food to Communard fighters who shot and killed a gendarme chasing her. If rumours and Versaillais reports of entire battalions of women engaged in the fight were not true, the participation of ordinary women in the battles is undeniable.
Women who supported the Commune without taking up arms were equally instrumental. Those who supplied food to Communard fighters or worked as doctors’ assistants contributed enormously to the Commune’s defence. Doctors’ assistants wore red crosses and, often purchasing medical supplies themselves, cared for the wounded and dying. The Union of Women for the Defence of Paris and for Care of the Wounded actively recruited women to serve in both essential capacities. Anti-Communard commentators mocked them; for instance, one cartoon depicted a cantinière (a canteen-worker) as a silly, flippant creature dispensing alcohol to drunken Communards. Maxime du Camp described female doctors’ assistants handing out eau-de-vie, and not the ‘simple medication that would have healed’. Some faced the condescension of national guardsmen. Nine such women were forced to return to Paris by males who rejected their presence at the front. Louise Michel commented acidly, ‘If only they would let me take care of the wounded. You would not believe the obstacles, the jokes, the hostility!’14
Michel cared for the wounded as an ambulancière, but had also volunteered her services to sneak into Versailles and assassinate Adolphe Thiers. ‘I thought that killing M. Thiers right in the [National] Assembly would provoke such terror that the reaction against us would be stopped dead,’ she later admitted. Michel was at first quite serious about carrying out her plot. She left for Versailles, and got through, as she was respectably dressed. But she could not get near Thiers, and returned to Paris.15
Michel, a decent shot, also fought with the 61st National Guard battalion at Issy and Clamart in early April. Nothing seemed to frighten her. She later related, ‘Was it sheer bravery that caused me to be so enchanted with the sight of the battered Issy fort gleaming faintly in the night, or the sight of our lines on night manoeuvres … with the red teeth of the machine guns flashing on the horizon … It wasn’t bravery, I just thought it a beautiful sight. My eyes and my heart responded, as did my ears to the sound of the cannon. Oh, I am a savage, all right. I love the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but, above all, I’m devoted to the Revolution.’ In one calmer moment, she and a friend were reading some Baudelaire together, sipping coffee on a spot where several of their comrades had been killed. They had only just left when a shell crashed to earth, shattering the empty cups. Later a bullet grazed her and she fell, spraining an ankle. For Louise Michel, who always gave the impression of sadness and melancholy, the Commune’s struggles ‘became poetry’.16
The Commune sought to rally Paris’s women and nurse its wounded fighters back to health, but neither effort would be enough. Daunting problems threatened to undermine the defence of Paris, and instability in the Commune and the National Guard did little to help matters. No well-planned, sturdy network of defence had been constructed within the ramparts of besieged Paris. The confusion of competing authorities in Paris and the chaos engendered by the election and re-election of National Guard officers worked against the Commune. Some of the officers were happy to flash glittering symbols of their status, but did little more. Unreliability and lack of training within the officer corps, as well as difficulty getting often hard-drinking Communard guardsmen to accept military-type
discipline, were constant problems. Jealousies and rivalries between officers contributed to the confusion. Insubordination remained chronic and the distribution of weapons and munitions erratic. Perfectly capturing the growing lack of confidence in National Guard commanders, a cartoon in a Communard newspaper depicted a hungry man in a restaurant exclaiming, ‘Waiter, two or three more stuffed generals!’ ‘We are out of them’, the waiter replies. ‘Very well, then a dozen colonels in caper sauce.’ ‘A Dozen? Yes! Directly!’17
Furthermore, not all guardsmen were absolutely committed to the Commune and some fulfilled a minimum of their duties, their loyalty more to their comrades in their company or battalion. Émile Maury was one of these. Born in Colmar, he now lived in the quartier populaire of Popincourt. He had joined the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, which he viewed as a patriotic struggle because of his Alsatian origins. Maury had turned up when the roll of the drums summoned him on the night of 12 April, after a demonstration by ‘the friends of order’. In late April, when called to service again, he instead visited his mother in her small shop. In his view only ‘the very needy, the rabid, and the curious’ in his unit actually marched out of Paris to fight – and he was none of these. From the environs of the Church of the Madeleine he could hear the explosion of shells falling near the Arc de Triomphe. On another occasion, he did venture out to Porte Maillot with part of his unit. When a Versaillais shell fell near him, he took refuge under a carriage door on the right side of the avenue and then at the Gare de la Porte Maillot. After his ‘baptism of fire’, he took an omnibus back to Paris, and then went to assure his parents that he was fine, cynically describing ‘this brilliant expedition’. At the end of April, he feared that everything would finish badly for the Communards, referring to them in the third person as though he no longer counted himself as one. Such indifference, however widespread, compromised the defence of Paris.18
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