The Committee of Public Safety learned from a message sent by Dombrowski that Versaillais forces were inside Paris, advancing through Passy. They sent several men to La Muette to confirm this, and the men somehow returned ‘with the most reassuring news’ that all was well. Delescluze, incredibly enough, refused to allow the ringing of the tocsin and simply denied that the Versaillais had penetrated the walls of Paris.60
After having deserted his battalion early that morning, Émile Maury and his father walked along deserted boulevards and could hear gunfire far away. Everything ‘seemed to suggest that something awful was going to happen’. The tocsin, which by now was ringing its call of great alarm, and the roll of drums followed them home, while the gunfire in the distance appeared as a ‘shroud of death and of mourning over the great city’. Émile believed that the Commune could not win. He did not want to die in a revolution that he did not really understand.61
That day Archibald Forbes, a British journalist, wanted to interview General Dombrowski, who was overseeing the defence of Paris from the Château de la Muette. At the Ministry of War on the Left Bank, the British journalist was astounded by ‘the utter absence of red tape and bureaucracy there … a shock to the system of the Briton’. He there received a pass to allow him ‘to witness the military operations in the capacity of a correspondent’, both inside and outside of Paris. Both had been granted with a ‘simple “fine”’.
The Commune had requisitioned his horse, however. Forbes needed a carriage. As they passed Pont de Jéna, the battery on Trocadéro opened up. The Versaillais cannons on Mont Valérien replied. Telling Forbes he had children and would take him no further, the driver deposited the journalist on the Grande Rue de Passy. Nearby houses were virtually empty ‘but a large colony of shell-holes’ could be seen. Forbes saw Communard soldiers and even some sailors lounging ‘idly about the pavements’. No one seemed at all afraid, although Versaillais shells were landing ‘pretty freely’.
General Dombrowski greeted Forbes cordially, even with enthusiasm. ‘We are in a deplorably comic situation here,’ he said, with a smile and a shrug, ‘for the fire is both hot and continuous.’ The likable ‘neat, dapper little fellow … with very little gold lace’ spoke no English but, like Forbes, was fluent in German. His staff of eight to ten young men ‘seemed thoroughly up to their work’. Dombrowski chatted as he read dispatches and ate, asking Forbes if he knew anything about possible German intervention. A battalion commander came to report that the Versaillais forces were pouring through the gate of Billancourt. A shell hit the château but the general did not seem worried. An adjutant took Forbes up to the roof, where they could see puffs of smoke as Versaillais sharpshooters tried to pick off fédérés on the ramparts. Dombrowski admitted that he would have to abandon the ramparts from Porte d’Auteuil to the Seine. He counted on the second line of defence and believed that the Army of Versailles would have to fall back. The Polish commander insisted ‘there is plenty of fight still in our fellows, especially when I am leading them’.
Dombrowski asked Forbes to follow him as he left to observe for himself the progress Versaillais troops were making. They scurried down rue Mozart, with Versaillais guns ‘in full roar’. As they came upon reinforcements waiting for Dombrowski on quai d’Auteuil, they learned that the Versaillais also had taken Porte Saint-Cloud. Communard forces had begun to fall back right and left, and brief counter-attacks failed. Forbes lost sight of Dombrowski and never saw him again.62
Forbes himself retreated to the second line of Communard defence, which stiffened behind the railway line. By 11.00 p.m., all was quiet. Forbes made it to rue de Rome, and then Trocadéro, in a dense fog.
As Dombrowski orchestrated the city’s defence, even more line troops marched through the gates of Auteuil, Passy, Sèvres, Saint-Cloud, and Versailles, readying for a massive assault at dawn.
Arthur de Grandeffe entered Paris on 21 May along with the Volunteers of the Seine. The residents of Passy, a relatively prosperous neighbourhood, treated them as long-lost friends, telling them stories of Communards smashing crucifixes. A lady offered Grandeffe and others soup that she had prepared for them. Beyond, they came upon dead insurgents. One was still alive, sitting on the ground, propped up against a wall. No one left the ranks of the Volunteers to help him. Grandeffe considered the prisoners he saw ‘the scum of Paris’. One could not reason with them. In his view, they had to be dealt with harshly. If not, French society risked falling back into ‘barbarism’.63
After camping in the park of Malmaison, Albert Hans and his battalion of the Volunteers of the Seine moved to Rueil, where they awaited orders to return to Asnières. In the evening, a rumour spread that line troops had passed through the ramparts at Pont-du-Jour, easily taking Auteuil, and, commanded by Clinchant, were moving rapidly towards Trocadéro. The ‘joyous’ Volunteers of the Seine soon followed, crossing a wooden bridge, the horses and wagons generating a rumble that sounded like distant gunfire.64
From the moment the first Versaillais troops entered Paris, it became clear that Communards could expect little in the way of mercy from them. Some of the first summary executions carried out by the Versaillais took place in Passy and Auteuil, where there had been virtually no fighting. A reporter for Le Gaulois came upon about thirty bodies, and asked around. Troops had lined up victims along a ditch and dispatched them with a mitrailleuse. A merchant confirmed that the first killings had involved two men put up against the door of a tobacco shop.65
Eager to finish with the ‘bandits’, the Volunteers of the Seine reached Porte d’Auteuil. They passed overturned cannons with shattered carriages, a burnt-out railway station, and houses that had been blown apart. The Volunteers came upon the bodies of fédérés whom even Albert Hans had to admit had shown courage by remaining at their position as shells rained down from the Bois-de-Boulogne. One man was still breathing, and, after some Volunteers threatened to shoot him, was finally given a drink of eau-de-vie, and then left along the side of the road with a blanket thrown over him, before a priest or someone from the neighbourhood arrived with a stretcher.
Coming upon a half-destroyed fort along the ramparts, Hans and the others came upon more bodies and the first group of prisoners they had seen. The boulevard Beauséjour was littered with képis, military sacs and even guardsmen’s trousers whose occupants had hurriedly left them behind for fear of being arrested. At the Château de la Muette, where Archibald Forbes had interviewed Dombrowski the day before, the troops found several dozen Communards hiding in woods and gardens. A concierge had hidden about a dozen Communard volunteers, young men and boys aged twelve to seventeen. They let the boys go.
In a charitable establishment for young women, which Communards had converted into a small barracks, Hans was outraged to find graffiti and obscene drawings scrawled on the walls, and empty bottles and garbage that had been left here and there. Finally Hans reached the Arc-de-Triomphe and the beaux quartiers of western Paris. Here, as in Passy, they were saluted with great enthusiasm. A woman came down from her apartment, dutifully followed by several servants, who distributed cigars, wine, bread and other food to the soldiers. She insisted that the troops return to her residence to rest up briefly.
Moving past the church of Saint-Augustin, Hans reached Parc Monceau. When they arrived, troops had just executed a dozen ‘deserters’ – that is, soldiers fighting for the Commune who were considered to still be in the French army. The scene smelled of fresh blood, in sharp contrast to the spring scent of the surrounding greenery.
After camping at place Wagram, the Volunteers took their first prisoners. Several claimed not to have fought, yet their rifles, which they had not had time to clean, revealed otherwise. One admitted that he had participated in a recent encounter at Levallois but had been in the National Guard because he had no work. ‘This poor devil’ had been caught between being ‘mistreated’ by the Communards if he did not fight or being taken by the Versaillais if he did.
At rue Cardinet, some f�
�dérés called out from behind a barricade that they would surrender, wanting assurance that, if they laid down their arms, they would not be harmed. They hesitated. A couple of the Volunteers, including Hans, went forward and convinced three of them to give up. One kept repeating, ‘I did as the others. I could not do anything other than they had.’ Believing that he had come upon someone who was clueless and not a scoundrel, Hans told him to remain quiet, fearing that he could well end up like the Communards he had seen as they passed Parc Monceau. Hans spoke with another fédéré, whom he believed to be drunk, when shots came from the Communard barricade. The Versaillais responded with fire and Hans took refuge in a shop. Eventually the remaining fédérés abandoned their barricade and fled.
Hans and other Volunteers were ordered to take the prisoners to a post, from which they would be transferred to a court-martial. Hans worried about the guardsman whom he had taken prisoner, fearing that he would be shot, particularly as he was technically a deserter from the army. Moreover, the prisoner’s livret recounted only several punishments for insignificant lapses. The captive asked Hans if he thought he would be shot. Hans told him that he should simply deny his name and gave him a story to relate, in the hope that he would be sent back to the mass of prisoners. When the Volunteer asked the man to repeat to him the story, he was incapable of doing it. Hans then turned him over to someone he knew of good heart. By chance, the plan worked, and Albert Hans saved his life.
Moving past the remains of Communard barricades at place Pereire, Hans and other Volunteers of the Seine came upon some very sad-looking prisoners. Then when a shot was fired from a nearby house, soldiers poured into it, finding a Communard sergeant. The commander grabbed him and ordered his immediate execution. The sergeant begged for mercy, and suddenly bolted from the wall against which he had been placed, reaching a door, aided by shots arriving from somewhere. The Volunteers fired, but he made good his escape.
As the Volunteers of the Seine passed along the avenue de Saint-Ouen on the northern edge of Paris, residents expressed anything but good feeling to the Versaillais, particularly the women, ‘strong in their weakness’ as Hans liked to say. One of them who was greeted informed them with pride that her husband was fighting with the fédérés not far away, and that he would break their heads. Hans had to admit that some of the Volunteers arrested people in the quartier for no particular reason, angered by such defiance.66
Edmond Goncourt spent Sunday ‘in fear of a setback for the Versailles troops’. From his window he could hear in the distance ‘the regular tramp of marching men who are going to replace others, as happens every night. Come now! It is the effect of my imagination. I go back to bed, but this time it really is the drums, it really is the bugles! I hurry back to the window … Above the shouts of “To Arms!” rise in great waves the tragically sonorous notes of the tocsin, which has begun to ring in all the churches – a sinister sound which fills me with joy and marks the beginning of the end of hateful tyranny for Paris.’67
That morning, Élie Reclus awoke to the news that Versaillais troops were moving rapidly inside the walls of Paris. While walking down rue Saint-Pères on the Left Bank, a bullet whizzed past his head. He suspected that this was the work of ‘some good bourgeois, attached to “order”’. In the Seventh Arrondissement, it was not difficult to see ‘secret jubilation of all the concierges, shop owners, merchants of holy articles, and the religious men and women who make up the base of the population there. Their eyes follow you so that they can denounce you as soon as possible to the first gendarme or policeman’ who represents their cause. Reclus could see that Communard resistance lacked a well-developed plan to defend the Left Bank. Moreover, around the École militaire and Les Invalides, Bonapartists abounded and the noble faubourg Saint-Germain still had its niche of Legitimists, with the residence of the Jesuits not far away at Saint-Sulpice, along with other religious congregations. Medical students also marched under the clerical banner. Enthusiastic calls for heroic resistance and the stirring sounds of the tocsin signalling grave danger, the roll of drums and the alarmed cry of trumpets were one thing; effective organisation, another.68
National guardsmen were now rushing about preparing to fight, although Delescluze still denied that the Versaillais were inside the city walls. British subject John Leighton asked a guardsman if the news was true. Yes, he replied, ‘we are betrayed’. The red trousers of line troops had been seen in the distance. He heard the heavy sound of rolling wheels and beheld a ‘strange sight’: ‘a mass of women in rags, livid, horrible, and yet grand, with the Phrygian cap [of the French Revolution] on their heads, and the skirts of their robes tied round their waists, were harnessed to a mitrailleuse, which they dragged along at full speed; other women pushing vigorously behind’. He followed along, to the point where a barricade was under hurried construction, when a boy confronted him: ‘Don’t you be acting the spy here, or I will break your head open as if you were a Versaillais.’ An old man with a long beard told the boy that that would be a waste of needed ammunition, and turned to Leighton and politely asked ‘Will you be so kind as to go and fetch those stones from the corner here?’ Leighton complied, and, when the barricade was completed, the guardsman told him, ‘You had better be off, if you care for your life.’69 A Parisian living near Porte Saint-Denis awoke at 6.00 a.m. on 21 May to hear newspaper vendors announcing the ‘Great Victory of Dombrowski at Neuilly’. He stayed in his room all day, smoking his pipe and reading Communard newspapers. After going to bed, he was awakened about midnight by the tocsin from the bells of the churches of Paris. Below, national guardsmen were moving along the boulevards. He did not think much of it. The next morning, the same newspaper vendors were out early, but shouting the same news as the day before. He sent out the concierge to buy more papers, who returned with the news that Versaillais troops had entered Paris. Parisians on the boulevard below seemed ‘worried and stupified’.70
A sizeable barricade went up at the base of rue Saint-Denis. The Parisians living near Porte Saint-Denis at the other end of the street watched as Communard fighters who had been fighting at the Church of the Madeleine and place Vendôme returned to their neighbourhoods, some wounded. In the evening a delegate of the Commune for the arrondissement, a large man about fifty or sixty years of age, turned up. Looking around, he ordered the construction of several barricades, instructing several people standing nearby to help out. A paver seemed to be overseeing the work, and about a dozen children joined in. Soon a National Guard platoon of a dozen men showed up. They parked their rifles and slept on the pavement. By now shells had begun to scream above the building at Porte Saint-Denis. One witness began to wonder if the barricades below would keep him and his neighbours from getting out if the shooting drew nearer. Yet he went out to dine. Returning home, he heard shouted orders to turn off the lights and close windows. Then all fell still.71
Soon 50,000 line troops were within Paris and within seventeen hours of the first breach of the ramparts 130,000 Versaillais soldiers, along with artillery, had entered the city.72 Soldiers moved easily down avenue de Versailles and then along the quai, sweeping aside a single barricade that stood between them and Trocadéro. That no Communard cannon fire greeted them reflected the ultimate lack of coordination and inadequacy of the Commune’s military defence. Versaillais line troops reached Trocadéro before daybreak on 22 May. The Marquis de Compiègne stood there, ‘Paris stretched out beneath our feet. Joy took over all our faces.’ The Versaillais had taken the barely-defended Trocadéro along with 1,500 prisoners. The fall of Trocadéro shattered the illusion for many Communards that they could hold off the Versaillais.73
There were more signs during the assault of the violence that was to come. Near Trocadéro, a Versaillais officer called Filippi came across a wounded National Guard officer lying on a stretcher. He ordered four soldiers of the 79th regiment to carry the man to an improvised care facility. When they grumbled, Filippi reminded them that a wounded combatant was ‘sacred’ and insi
sted they carry out the order. He had just begun to walk away when he heard shots that told him that ‘the unfortunate wounded man had been finished off’.74
Versaillais forces moved towards Champs-Elysées. They took the vast Palace of Industry, used by the Communards to store supplies and as a hospital, which Thiers’s forces transformed into a prison. The capture of 30,000 rations reduced food available to the fédérés. Early that morning, the tricolour flag fluttered above the Arc-de-Triomphe. Hundreds of Communards had simply abandoned their posts in western Paris, so the Versaillais faced little or no resistance. A large column moved along boulevards towards Porte de Clichy, thus preparing for an ultimate attack on Montmartre.
It quickly became apparent – to Versaillais forces and Parisians alike – just how unprepared the Commune was. At daybreak on Monday, Archibald Forbes could easily see Versaillais forces advancing. Heading towards the Champs-Elysées he came upon newly arrived line troops in their red trousers. The Versaillais faced not cannon fire but only rifle shots and now held boulevards Haussmann and Malesherbes and the entry to rue Royale. Beyond stood imposing Communard barricades, the only Communard defences that slowed the Versaillais down. Built of furniture, omnibus, carriages and mattresses, as well as stones and sandbags, one blocked rue Rivoli and the other rue Saint-Honoré. Communards forced Forbes at bayonet point to add chunks of pavement to the barricade, despite his insistence that he was British. His immediate goal was to reach his hotel on Chaussée d’Antin and have breakfast. Back in his room, he discovered a bullet hole in his tobacco pouch.75
Massacre Page 20