Massacre

by John M. Merriman

  On the Left Bank, a force commanded by Joseph Vinoy moved along the quais, nearing the Seventh Arrondissement, while another under General Ernest de Cissey duplicated the strategy on the Right Bank by moving along the exterior arteries towards Porte de Vanves. Both were protected by Versaillais guns now pounding away from Trocadéro, where MacMahon set up his headquarters. Already 1,500 national guardsmen had been taken prisoner.76

  Communard generals and civilian leaders, meanwhile, provided little or no direction to those defending Paris. Dombrowski sent Louise Michel and a few others to warn the Montmartre vigilance committee that the Versaillais army had entered Paris. ‘I didn’t know what time it was. The night was calm and beautiful. What did the time matter? What mattered now was that the revolution should not be defeated, even in death.’ The cannons on Montmartre were still. In any case, several weeks of neglect had left them in poor shape. By the time they began firing, at about 9.00 p.m., the Versaillais were already well ensconced.77

  In little more than twenty-four hours, the Versaillais troops held about a third of Paris, and now paused so that their reserves could catch up. They had encountered very little resistance from residents – those who had not already left the city – in the fancier neighbourhoods of the western arrondissements. They held all of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Arrondissements, most of the Seventh, including Les Invalides, the École Militaire and the Quai d’Orsay, the Eighth, and some of the Seventeenth. Much of the Commune’s gunpowder had gone up in the explosion on avenue Rapp. Some unrealistic optimism remained. A National Guard officer Leighton met in a café told him that a good chunk of the Left Bank had fallen to the Versaillais. But the officer remained confident: ‘Street fighting is our affair, you see,’ he insisted. ‘In such battles as that, the merest gamin from Belleville knows more about it than MacMahon.’78 But the Commune at this point stood very little chance of surviving and some Communard fighters must have begun wondering if their only hope was not to be massacred. There was already quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

  Versaillais troops continued to gun down captured Communards. They marched sixteen national guardsmen to the Babylone barracks on rue du Bac and shot them dead. Soldier Julien Poirier saw soldiers tear into a building where they had seen a woman enter carrying a red flag. They found her in the attic, with weapons. They hauled her down the stairs, but she never reached the bottom. She was killed on the way.79

  An American family on avenue Friedland welcomed the Versaillais troops as saviours. Several Communard barricades had been hastily constructed nearby and a few shots were exchanged, but that was about it. They watched as Communards pushed cannons down the avenue as fast as they could. A short time later, line troops arrived. The mother of the family ordered the servants to distribute wine and cigarettes to the soldiers, and her young daughter chatted with them. The woman overheard one of them bragging that he had run through five ‘communists’ that morning with his bayonet, which was bent and caked with blood.

  The young girl was skipping in front of their door when she saw a Versaillais officer and several soldiers dragging along a man begging for his life. The scene made the girl’s ‘blood run cold, [her] heart stop beating, to see that poor wretch on his knees, screaming to be spared, and the officer holding a pistol at his head’. The soldiers kicked him to make him get up. Some people watching from a window above the street called out to the officer not to shoot him in front of women and children, ‘so they pushed and kicked him till they came to the end of our street’, where they shot him dead. One of the daughters of their concierge later told her that she had wanted to see him killed, and had been disappointed because she had reached the corner a bit late. The girl had seen a lot in a very short time, more than enough for a lifetime.80

  Summary executions had become routine, even organised. French commanders, humiliated in defeat at the hands of Prussia and its allies but seven months earlier, appeared to be taking revenge on ordinary Parisians. The Marquis de Compiègne recalled that too: ‘The orders to shoot anyone taken prisoner were formal, and the soldiers were exasperated by the fires in Paris’ and by resistance they encountered, ‘without hope and without goal’.81 The Versaillais troops, many if not most of them of rural origin, had been told that the Communards were lawless insurgents and criminals. As a result, many of the soldiers believed that they could kill captured Communards with the blessing of their officers, who would at least turn a blind eye. Would the killings become a massacre?

  CHAPTER 6

  Bloody Week Begins

  WITH VERSAILLAIS TROOPS POURING INTO PARIS THROUGH THE western gates and much of western Paris having fallen, the next three days – the harrowing of Hell – would be crucial, determining the fate of the Paris Commune and thousands of people who believed in it. Although barricades had been constructed across narrow streets and in places blocked major squares and wide boulevards, these were not enough to hold off the Versaillais for long. Communard defences on the heights of Montmartre, where the Commune had begun sixty-two days earlier, presented the greatest challenge for the Army of Versailles, particularly as Communard fighters would increasingly be forced to fall back to their own neighbourhood strongholds, leaving the rest of Paris at the mercy of the invading troops.

  On Monday 22 May, about 2.00 p.m., Rigault ordered the transfer of Darboy, Abbé Gaspard Deguerry, Bonjean and some other hostages – thirty-eight in all – from Mazas to the nearby prison of La Roquette, which was even more in the heart of People’s Paris. Gaston Da Costa, Rigault’s faithful assistant, requisitioned two wagons for the journey. The prisoners were assembled on the ground floor of Mazas, some seeing each other for the first time in six weeks. Darboy, wrapped in an old raincoat, alluded to the approaching end ‘at last’ as prisoners and guards waited an hour for a wagon to arrive. The move to La Roquette did not auger well. A hostile, threatening crowd of men and women, some wearing work-clothes, surrounded the wagon. Da Costa remembered being unnerved by ‘the shrieks of the delirious mob’ in faubourg Saint-Antoine. Perny, one of the missionary priests, recalled that the crowd was ‘exasperated’, shouting ferociously against the ‘papists!’ Under his breath, he said to Darboy, ‘So there are your people!’, calling for the ‘priests of Bonaparte’ to be thrown into the Seine. Perny recounted that he had spent twenty years living ‘among savages’ as a missionary and he had never seen anything ‘so horrible’ as the faces of the men, women and children who ‘raved’ at them during the painful journey from Mazas to La Roquette. Deguerry, who as curé of Madeline had never seen such neighbourhoods, asked on several occasions, ‘Where are we?’1

  The fates of Darboy and the other hostages would be tied to the rising swell of anti-clericalism that gripped Paris. Gaston Da Costa described the mood as one of ‘legitimate exasperation’ that had increased with military reverses. Gustave Courbet recalled the hardening tone of the Communards: ‘There was nothing left to do. Despair had taken over and with it despairing methods. The drunkenness of carnage and of destruction had taken over this people ordinarily so mild, but so fearsome when pushed to the brink … We will die if we must, shouted men, women and children, but we will not be sent to Cayenne.’2

  When the prisoners arrived at La Roquette, the clerk went through the formalities of their incarceration. Seeing that they were to be in ‘holding cells’ the hostages had reason to fear that their stay at La Roquette was to be short indeed. Outside the gate to La Roquette, members of the 180th and 206th battalions of the National Guard from the neighbourhood stood watch. The thirty-four-year-old director of La Roquette, Citizen Jean-Baptise François, was decked out in Communard red: belt, tie, scarf and trousers. Small, thin and pale, he was a hard-drinking worker who had been in debt before being hired by the Commune. He had spent four months in prison for a speech given at a public meeting in 1870. He lived with a woman on rue de Charonne. François, who hated the clergy, signed a paper: ‘Received, four priests and magistrates’. When a guard referred to Darboy as ‘Monseigneur
’, a young national guardsman snapped, ‘There are no seigneurs here, only citizens.’3

  La Roquette consisted of three large buildings. The offices were in the building on the street, which also had a chapel, which had not been in use of late. There were about forty guards always present. Darboy and the others moved from Mazas prison were in the fourth section, the archbishop in cell number one. Other hostages were held in the third floor in the opposite building, thus close to Père Lachaise cemetery, a proximity that could not be missed. Cells were extremely small and dirty, without a table or a chair, even more spartan than those of Mazas. Insects abounded. An open but barred space linked the cells; thus inmates could talk easily.4

  From their cells prisoners heard the sounds of explosions. As cannon fire moved closer, one priest cried out, ‘In two days, we will all be saved!’ Someone had earlier managed to sneak in communion hosts hidden in an empty milk container, providing the priests with some consolation. The bell awakened the prisoners at 6.00 a.m. At 3.00 p.m., the hostages were allowed to walk in the prison courtyard. Darboy, who was nauseous, was treated by the prison doctor. The hostages were returned to their cells at 4.00 p.m., where they awaited food brought by young prisoners, amid the tension of not knowing what the Commune planned to do with them, and fearing the worst.5

  Versaillais troops moved swiftly through western Paris. Ernest Vizetelly watched a gendarme carrying a dispatch bag riding down the street from Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. As he approached, ‘a gun-barrel gleamed between the slightly opened shutters across the street’. A shot rang out. The gendarme threw up his arms and fell from his horse, dead or dying. Several Versaillais soldiers ran up to help him, and the others raced to the house from which the shot appeared to have been fired – a trace of smoke gave away the location – and battered down the door. In a few minutes, the soldiers emerged from the building with ‘a grey-haired dishevelled woman, whose scanty clothing was badly torn’. They pushed her quickly up against a wall, ‘but she gave no sign of fear. She drew herself up and answered tauntingly, “Well done! Well done! You killed my son this morning, and now I have killed one of you. You bunch of cowards!”’ Her cry, ‘Long live the Commune!’ expired in her throat as she was shot, falling face-first on the pavement.6

  In retreat, Communard soldiers returned to central Paris from the fighting in the western neighbourhoods. On rue Montmartre, one of them shouted, practically in tears, ‘Betrayed! Betrayed! They came in where we did not expect them!’ Nearby shops closed or simply did not open. A newspaper vendor on Tuesday shouted ‘Get one today! You will no longer have one tomorrow!’ At place d’Italie, a Communard stronghold in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, some national guardsmen hurriedly disposed of their rifles, muttering ‘It is the end!’7

  On the morning of Monday, 22 May, while the hostages awaited their fate, Commune leaders met at the Hôtel de Ville. Félix Pyat was among them, but not for long; he soon slunk out of Paris and managed to reach London. Soon after the meeting, a proclamation signed by Charles Delescluze appeared on the walls of Paris: ‘Citizens, enough of militarism, no more fancy officers sporting decorations on their uniforms. Give way to the people, to bare-knuckle fighters! The hour of revolutionary war has arrived!’

  As during the French Revolution, the levée en masse (mass conscription) had been proclaimed. The Commune began to organise defences in the arrondissements not yet occupied by the Versaillais, hoping to use to advantage the narrow streets of People’s Paris. Communard defenders assumed that Adolphe Thiers’s army would launch frontal assaults on barricades. A swarm of men, women and children reinforced barricades that already existed, or put together new ones. The role of women became even more important in the defence of the Commune because barricades took on such great importance. The American W. Pembroke Fetridge watched about thirty women demand a mitrailleuse to protect the barricade defending place du Palais-Royal: ‘They all wore a band of crepe round the left arm; each one had lost a husband, a lover, a son, or a brother, whom she had sworn to avenge. Horses being at this time scarce in the service of the Commune, they harnessed themselves, and dragged [the mitrailleuse] off, fastening their skirts round their waists lest they should prove an impediment to their march. Others followed, bearing the caissons filled with munitions. The last carried the flag.’8 These were ordinary women catapulted into an exceptional situation, one that had begun with their role in defending the cannons of Montmartre on 18 March.

  At faubourg Saint-Antoine, women and children built barricades, together with workers in smocks, calling on passers-by to lend a hand: ‘Let’s go, citizen, a helping hand for the Republic!’9 Despite the rapid Versaillais advances, Delescluze remained convinced that the Commune could hold Paris by defending it quartier by quartier, street by street. But the stirring sound of the tocsin and calls for a ‘revolutionary war’ could not compensate for numerical inferiority and chaotic organisation.

  It was more difficult to barricade boulevards than narrow streets in workers’ quartiers, as Baron Georges Haussmann had fully understood. The Army of Versailles could blast away at barricades blocking these major arteries, while using tactics of outflanking the defensive impediments. However, for the most part, troops did not attack barricades head-on, to the surprise of Communard defenders. The Versaillais circumvented major defences by sweeping through adjoining streets and going into nearby buildings, enabling them to fire down on barricades. Wickham Hoffman watched line soldiers entering ‘adjoining houses, passing from roof to roof, and occupying the upper windows, till finally they commanded the barricade, and fired down upon its defenders’. At Porte Saint-Denis, the Fifth Corps overcame twelve barricades without attacking any of them from the front. It soon became clear that the Communards’ chances of holding on to a barricade depended on their ability to hold adjacent buildings.10

  John Leighton, no friend of the Commune, noted that in some places people seemed to greet these dangerous events with ‘silence and apathy’. Life seemed to go on strangely as usual on some major streets: ‘Some ribbons here and there brighten up the shop-windows; bare-headed shopgirls pass by with a smile on their lips; men look after them as they trip along.’ Yet at this point only old men dared be seen without a National Guard uniform. Overall, ‘solitude has something terrible about it just now … Quite a crowd collects round a little barefoot girl, who is singing at the corner of a street.’ The theatres were now virtually empty. Laughter seemed ‘out of place’. Death was in the air.

  A sergeant stopped Leighton when he was out walking, asking him why he was not in uniform. The man was a Spaniard, to whom the Englishman had given some cigars during the Prussian siege. Leighton replied that it was not his turn, and the Spanish sergeant answered sarcastically, ‘No, of course it’s not, it never is. You have been taking your ease this long time, while others have been getting killed.’ He seemed to have forgotten about the cigars and escorted Leighton to Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where about fifty men who had avoided National Guard service were being held. All ended well for the moment, as Leighton pulled off an improbable bluff, telling the officer who questioned him that he was a prize-fighter, entreating his stunned interrogator, ‘Be kind enough to allow me to depart instantly.’11

  Élie Reclus walked down rue des Saint-Pères in the Sixth Arrondissement, his perambulation curtailed when a nervous guardsman told him that he could go no further, while ‘worried, sombre, concerned figures’ built barricades, preparing for the onslaught. Concierges immediately began relating their narrow escapes to attentive listeners, describing how they had absorbed Communard bullets with mattresses placed in windows, and how they looked for fleeing Communards trying to hide in their houses. One proudly related, ‘I found three of them in my court; I told a lieutenant they were there, and he had them shot. But I wish they would take them away; I cannot keep dead bodies in the house.’ ‘Citizen’ quickly disappeared as a greeting, ‘under pain of being suspect’, replaced by ‘the undemocratic Monsieur’.12

  Communard re
sistance stiffened briefly on Monday at place de la Concorde, where Napoléon Gaillard’s ‘château’ – the massive barricade – stood. A young woman climbed on top and waved a red flag. Versaillais troops shot her dead as an American family looked down from an elegant apartment above. They also watched as an elderly female resister was put face first up against a wall. Before they gunned her down, she turned and offered her killers a gesture of defiance, amid bodies and shattered poles that had proudly held the gas lights of the enormous place.13 There, too, Communards had hoped for a frontal attack by the Versaillais, but the line troops simply went around, taking nearby buildings and firing down on Napoléon Gaillard’s giant barricade. When buildings looming above barricades were still occupied by wealthy Parisians, this made things easier. The fall of the place de la Concorde left open central Paris to the Versaillais troops.

  Nearby on rue Royale, at the corner of rue Saint-Honoré, Communards hung a dead rat from a miniature gallows on a barricade, with a sign indicating that this would be the fate of Thiers and MacMahon, ‘who have so long devoured the people’. However, Parisians looking from upper reaches of their buildings towards the west could now see soldiers wearing red trousers in the distance. Closer to them, they could also spot units of fédérés moving about in disarray.14

  Against the reconstituted and, at 130,000 strong, relatively enormous forces of Versailles the Commune could muster only around 15,000–16,000 fighters, if that. It was increasingly becoming a mismatch, despite the resolute courage of so many Parisians. The Committee of Public Safety met at the Hôtel de Ville, amid the chaos of the arrival of messengers carrying increasingly bad news. Conflicting orders, for example, coming from the Commune’s Delegate for War and from the Central Committee of the National Guard and individual officers, reflected the absence of effective military leadership. Above all, they reflected the virtual impossibility of centralising the authority over planning the defence of Paris and, in particular, over the National Guard, on which the Commune would depend for its survival.15