Massacre
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Attempts to achieve some sort of negotiated settlement briefly revived but utterly failed. The Freemasons sent a delegation to Versailles on 21 April. Thiers sent them away, telling them: ‘A few buildings will be damaged, a few people killed, but the law will prevail.’ On 29 April, a demonstration of 10,000 people, many wearing masonic symbols, moved from the place du Carrousel near the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville. Masons planted their flag on the ramparts. On 8 May, a poster appeared on the walls of Paris calling for conciliation and criticising the intransigence of the Commune’s leaders. This drew a violent response from the Union des Femmes.19
Adolphe Thiers remained convinced that superior cannons would suffice to achieve victory. Versaillais shelling of Paris became increasingly incessant. Fifty-two guns opened fire from Châtaillon, Breteuil and the heights of Bagneux on 25 April. Thiers’s insistence that a private contractor mount eighty enormous naval guns at Montretout to increase firepower probably delayed the Versaillais assault on Paris, annoying his generals. At one point, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon had had enough of Thiers’s insistence that he knew it all and told him that it would be impossible to continue in his post because of the latter’s constant interference. Thiers backed down.20
*
Confronted by an increasingly precarious military situation and the Versaillais threat to Fort Issy, the aged Jacobin Jules Miot had suggested on 28 April the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. This was a self-conscious throwback to 1793, when the Republic was under assault from counter-revolutionary forces within France and from the armies of the crowned allies of the Bourbons. The Paris of 1871 bore some striking similarities to the city of the revolutionary era. Jacobins, including Charles Delescluze, Félix Pyat and others who constantly referred to the French Revolution, generally favoured the proposal. And so did Blanquists, including Rigault – it sat nicely alongside Blanquist ideology and his own obsession with the French Revolution. A ‘minority’, which included Lefrançais, Gustave Courbet, Éugène Varlin and Benoît Malon, opposed the constitution of the Committee of Public Safety.
On 1 May, the Commune approved the proposal by a vote of 34 to 28. The minority called such a step dictatorial, while the majority insisted that, as in 1793–94, the war necessitated such a move. For his part, Courbet concluded that the Committee of Public Safety represented a ‘return, dangerous or useless, violent or inoffensive, to a past that should teach us, but without us having to copy it’. Le Prolétaire echoed the ‘minority’: ‘You are servants of the people: do not pretend to be sovereigns, for the role befits you no more than it did the despots who came before you.’21
Members of the Committee of Public Safety included the Blanquists Armand Arnaud, Léon Meilliet and Gabriel Ranvier – by far the most able – as well as Charles Gérardin and Félix Pyat. The Committee immediately began to butt heads with the Central Committee of the National Guard, the continued existence of which compromised attempts by the Delegates for War to centralise its authority over the National Guard itself. On 1 May, General Gustave Cluseret, who became a scapegoat for the Commune’s inability to transform the National Guard into an organised fighting force, was falsely accused of treason and arrested at the behest of the Committee of Public Safety, and incarcerated in the Conciergerie, the Gothic prison on the Ile-de-la-Cité. Three days later, the Central Committee challenged the Committee of Public Safety, demanding that it replace the War Delegation with new members. In the Commune’s view it was clear that the Central Committee sought to take over the defence of Paris.22
In response, the Commune chose Louis-Nathaniel Rossel to replace the imprisoned Cluseret. Born in the Breton town of Saint-Brieuc in 1844 into a military family of republican Protestants from the Cévennes, Rossel had graduated from the elite École Polytechnique. A critic described him as speaking ‘too rapidly, the words gushing from his mouth in a most disorderly manner’. Rossel had served as chief of Cluseret’s staff, but claimed that his boss was jealous of him. He noted cynically that ‘men are soon worn out in revolutionary periods’ and that this was Cluseret’s case. The Central Committee feared its influence would be eclipsed by Rossel, who had been all for the idea of the Committee of Public Safety, in part as a way of getting rid of Cluseret. On 30 April the Commune named Rossel Delegate for War.
The Central Committee might have been wary of Rossel, but it was inaction and infighting among the Commune’s leadership that stymied his plans for the defence of Paris. The Executive Commission summoned Rossel, demanding to know his overall strategy. Rossel was instinctively suspicious that the ‘amateurs’ of the Commune would obstruct serious reform. Hoping to work around them, he had met secretly with Maxime Vuillaume and the Communard General Jaroslaw Dombrowski, a member of the minor Polish nobility, to discuss the possibility of creating a dictatorship in the interests of defending the Commune against Versailles. Rigault apparently agreed with the idea of a coup d’état, but, single-minded as ever, wanted to wait for the exchange of his hero Blanqui. In the meantime, Rossel had to deal with the five-man War Delegation, only three of whom did any work. As for the Central Committee, he observed with frustration, it ‘was incapable of managing anything’. Yet Rossel went along with the Delegation’s plan to administer the Commune’s military structure, while he oversaw the actual defence of Paris. Commanders of the National Guard promised that twenty-five battalions of 500 men each would be ready to fight. Versaillais attacks on the night of 3 May had already moved them closer to the ramparts of Paris and they took many Communard prisoners.23
Rossel’s first move as the new Delegate for War was to order the construction of more barricades, particularly to protect major strategic points within Paris. He named Napoléon Gaillard, a shoemaker sometimes credited for inventing rubber overshoes and a member of the International, to oversee the construction of these barricades, including the one protecting the key artery parallel to the Seine, rue Rivoli, at the corner of Saint-Denis. Rossel described the average barricade as being ‘a wall of cobblestones between 412; and 5 feet high and 3 to 412; feet thick’. At place de la Concorde, Gaillard’s enormous ‘château’ – constructed at the cost of about 80,000 francs – connected rue Saint-Florentin to the Tuileries gardens. Built of sandbags and barrels, with a ditch about sixteen feet deep dug in front of it, it stretched across the enormous place. One small passageway cut through it was ‘so narrow that only one person could pass at a time’. Gaillard later proudly posed in front of it, wearing a splendid uniform with gold decorations and shiny boots.
Yet several newspapers, including Le Cri du peuple, complained about the lack of speed with which such defences were built. An American family living on avenue Friedland, which had only a hastily constructed and relatively flimsy barricade, even hired a taxi to behold Gaillard’s masterpiece.24 No such giant barricade had before graced the squares and streets of Paris. Fearful of what now seemed an inevitable battle of frightening proportions, people living nearby began to leave their apartments.
While the new barricades were being built, Rossel ordered Polish General Wroblewski to organise the defence of the remaining exterior forts and the defence of the ramparts. For example, Wroblewski appointed commanders to be responsible for specific sectors in Paris, naming Napoléon La Cécilia to the area between the Seine and the left bank of the small Bièvre River. The hope was that barricades could slow down a Versaillais advance, possibly demoralising the invading troops. However, the Commune lacked a coordinated structure of defences to defend central Paris against the certainty of an invasion by the reconstituted powerful army of Versailles. Imposing defensive impediments were particularly absent in western Paris.25
Versaillais forces continued to gain ground beyond the ramparts of Paris, inflicting huge casualties on Communard fighters and, in defiance of the Geneva Convention of 1864, killing Communard prisoners and women alike. Capturing a château and the railway station at Clamart on 2 May, they executed former soldiers as deserters. This allowed the Army of Versailles to set up an
other huge battery, which rained shells on Fort Vanves. Nearby the soldiers of ‘order’ shot two young women aiding doctors, including seventeen-year-old Armande Lafort, gunned down despite the pleas of the wounded men in her care. A week later, Versaillais forces stormed a defended windmill in Cachan and then took two barricades in Bourg-la-Reine, south of Paris, killing a hundred defenders and taking fifty prisoners. The next day, the shelling of Porte Dauphine, Porte Maillot and Point-du-Jour took on a new intensity.26
Versaillais forces made further advances toward the western ramparts of Paris on the night of 3 May, taking some prisoners. In the wake of a Versaillais victory at Moulin Saquet, between Fort Montrouge and Fort Ivry to the south of Paris on 3 and 4 May, the victorious soldiers mutilated some of the 300 or more Communards killed in the fighting. Already weakened by weeks of conventional shelling, and after putting up stiff resistance in and around the village of Issy, the fédérés abandoned Fort Issy on 8 May after two weeks of fighting, with up to ten Versaillais shells thundering down each minute of the previous day, and the loss of about 500 men killed or wounded.27
In Paris news of the fall of Fort Issy led to what US Ambassador Elijah B. Washburne called ‘a day of panic’, despite the Commune’s official denials. The next day Versaillais cannons pounded the gates of Auteuil and Passy, and an eventual entry seemed possible through Point-du-Jour on the western edge of the capital, where the Seine met the ramparts of Paris. The great battery at Montretout opened fire on 8 May. Three days later Thiers promised the honnêtes gens (men of property) that his troops would enter Paris within eight days. Communard forces abandoned Fort Vanves on 13 May. A successful defence would have required 8,000 men; the Commune could muster but 2,000, if that. Firing from forts Issy and Vanves, Versaillais cannons could now inflict even greater damage on the capital, forcing more defenders from the ramparts. The Army of Versailles now held the entire Bois-de-Boulogne. Within a week Thiers’s army was ensconced on the other side of the fortifications.28
Rossel planned an attack to retake Fort d’Issy, lost by his predecessor. Upon his arrival at place de la Concorde on 9 May, he expected to find about 12,000 national guardsmen ready to march. He found only a few battalions, no more than 7,000 guardsmen. Diminishing numbers of available, committed national guardsmen, as well as the lack of discipline and centralised authority, compounded the enormous material disadvantages confronting the defence of Paris.29
Immediately after the place de la Concorde fiasco, Rossel, who had angered Communard leaders by releasing the news of the fall of Fort Issy, resigned. The Commune convened in a secret session to try to resolve tensions between the minority and the majority. Old quarrels and hatreds came pouring forth. Although the Military Delegation of the Commune continued to support Rossel, the majority on the Committee of Public Safety denounced the Delegate for War. Pyat accused him of dictatorial methods, demanding his arrest on the charge of treason. Under guard, Rossel requested a cell in Mazas prison, and then, with the help of his friend Gérardin, managed to get out of the Hôtel de Ville and hide in Paris until 8 June. The members of the Commune elected new Committee of Public Safety members drawn from the majority, including Eudes, Ranvier and Delescluze. Pyat was not re-elected. The reconstituted Committee then decided that the next Delegate for War would be a civilian: Delescluze, who had seemed on the verge of joining the minority. He had absolutely no military background, and found Rossel to secretly sound him out on the military situation.30
Even from hiding, Rossel continued to try to run Paris’s defence. He sent Napoléon Gaillard suggestions for how the defence should be organised. He warned that the Versaillais would attack the ramparts via le Pont-du-Jour and Fort Issy, and reminded Gaillard that the only ‘seriously revolutionary forces’ were those of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements. Rossel had confidence in the determination of the remaining national guardsmen, insisting that ordinary people of Paris fought not only for their 30 sous but ‘for a settlement of the social question’. However, he believed that if National Guard units fell back to defend their own neighbourhoods, the overall defence of what was left of Communard Paris would be compromised. He recommended the repositioning of National Guard units that were particularly reliable: those of the Eighteenth Arrondissement to go permanently to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Arrondissements to reinforce the defence of Grenelle, Vaugirard and Montrouge; those of the Nineteenth to La Muette near the western ramparts; and those of the Twentieth, widely considered the most reliable, to the Pont-du-Jour. His informed advice fell on deaf ears.31
On 15 May the minority published a scathing protest, attacking the majority for leading the Commune towards dictatorship and away from meaningful social and political reform. The members of the minority announced that because of their devotion to ‘our great communal cause, for which so many citizens were dying’, they would withdraw to ‘our arrondissements, perhaps too neglected’, adding that ‘the principles of serious and social reform’ seemed to have been forgotten. The minority issued a statement calling for members of the minority to return to their neighbourhoods and attend to important tasks there. The majority reacted by announcing the suspension of four members of the Commune, including Varlin. In a flurry of verbal violence, Père Duchêne denounced the twenty-two members of the minority as ‘deserters in the face of the enemy who merit nothing more than an execution squad!’32 These acrimonious disputes compromised the defence of Paris, eroding the trust of the people of the besieged capital.
Karl Marx’s daughter Jenny was in Paris during the Commune. She, like Rossel, understood just how precarious the situation had become. On 12 May, she related to her father that the end of the Paris Commune loomed because of the lack of military planning (accentuated by an inveterate resistance towards ‘everything that is military’) and open dissension among leaders. She wrote chillingly, ‘We are on the verge of a second June massacre.’33
Thiers’s flat refusal to agree to an exchange generated outrage in Paris and calls for the archbishop’s execution. La Montagne insisted that ‘not one voice would be heard to damn us on the day when we shoot Archbishop Darboy … and if they do not return Blanqui to us, [Darboy] will indeed die’. Addressing a club, Louise Michel demanded the execution of a high-profile hostage every twenty-four hours until citoyen Blanqui arrived in Paris. On 15 May, Citizen Widow Thyou got up in the club of Saint-Ambroise and demanded that within twenty-four hours all people having anything at all to do with the Church be shot, from the parish priests down to those filling vessels with holy water.34
While the Commune’s leaders quarrelled and Versaillais troops neared the city, the Parisian elites waited, hoping that the Commune would come to an end with no trouble to themselves. Others took a more active role and joined in the fight against the Communards. Gustave des E. was very much in the former camp. As May arrived, his peaceful existence in Paris continued, even as Versaillais troops drew nearer to the fortifications. A well-off forty-eight-year-old bachelor trained in law but who had never worked, he was just the kind of person who would hate the Commune. A carriage was always available to take him to the Cercle des Arts at the corner of boulevard des Italiens and rue de Choiseuil. His club offered very comfortable salons for conversation, and some members referred to it jokingly as the ‘Circle of Grocers’, playfully differentiating bourgeois members from artists, if there were any to be found there. Most members were magistrates and lawyers, ‘all friends of calm and good manners’.35 Gustave lived on rue Auber near Garnier’s uncompleted Opera, with a servant and a very good cook to take care of his daily needs. Food was never in short supply. On 4 May, he bragged that for lunch he had dined on a beautiful fillet of sole, boiled mutton with vinaigrette, asparagus (very much in season for those who could afford it), and dessert. Paris may have been suffering under siege, but he found it drôle that he could still eat so very well. The evening before, he had put away ‘the most succulent duckling and [later] today a delicious roast with a famous ham with spina
ch’. His cook took care of the shopping, purchasing enough provisions to last for three or four days, including an entire leg of venison. Fine vegetables and butter were still available – at least to Gustave.
One day his brother’s valet refused to carry mail to Saint-Denis, on his last trip there having been warned by a Prussian soldier that he would arrest him. In Gustave’s quartier, things began to go downhill that month. He resented the instruction that, from 14 May, all Parisians were supposed to carry an identity card. Moreover, nearby churches had been transformed into political clubs and there were only lay teachers in the local schools. More people in the neighbourhood had gone off to Versailles or elsewhere.
Gustave was convinced that Karl Marx’s International controlled the fate of Paris. Communards, in his eyes, were ‘adventurers, the ambitious, and the down-and-out’. On a Saturday, national guardsmen came through the neighbourhood searching for men dodging conscription into the National Guard. Gustave felt a little humiliated that they did not ask for his papers, because he did not look younger than forty, the maximum age (in principle) for obligatory service. Like a few of his neighbours, he hung an American flag from one of his windows in the hope of confusing Communard officials.
By mid-May, once the Versaillais had advanced close to the ramparts, Gustave was forced to deal with the fact that his life might be at risk. Increased Communard security now made it more difficult for Gustave to get out of Paris. Moreover, it seemed inadvisable to stray too far away from one’s quartier, especially the prosperous one in which he resided, and especially to avoid the peripheral districts such as Montmartre. Ordinary people saw Versaillais spies everywhere, and if someone like Gustave should be stopped, ‘a bad quarter of an hour could follow’. He then returned to his favourite theme, what he had eaten: ‘Yesterday, it was a first-rate mackerel, a fillet of venison with small white onions with cream’. Cannon fire in the distance provided seasoning. His little cat slept through it all. If fighting came to central Paris, he would simply remain inside his apartment. Besides, he had enough to eat for several days, at least. He had just polished off ‘an exquisite fillet purchased for 55 sous’.