Could Communards in defeat actually intend to burn down their own city? The Versaillais siege had pushed the Communards to despair and intense anger. Some among them could imagine the entire destruction of Paris – anything was better than ceding it to Thiers. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray insisted that it was better to burn down ‘our houses rather than to turn them over to the enemy’. And Louise Michel did warn that ‘Paris will be ours or cease to exist.’ However, she went no further than insisting that Communards defend Paris ‘until death’. After finishing his meal on the Terrace of the Louvre on Tuesday, Communard General Jean Bergeret ordered the Tuileries Palace set ablaze. Watching the conflagration consume the palace where Napoleon III and his entourage had romped, Gustave Lefrançais admitted that he was one of those ‘who had shutters of joy seeing that sinister palace go up in flames’. Two days later, seeing fires in the distance a Montmartre woman asked Nathalie Le Mel what was burning. Le Mel replied, ‘it’s nothing at all’, only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, ‘because we do not want a king any more’.
The fires that raged throughout Paris became yet another source of anti-Communard hatred. The burning of the Tuileries, a symbol of the Second Empire, particularly intensified demands from anti-Communards that prisoners be immediately shot, as they shouted ‘pas de quartier! Death to the burners!’33 The writer Louis Énault accused the Communards of wanting to burn Paris to the ground. They began, in his view, with several beaux quartiers, such as rue de Lille, ‘a sumptuous and aristocratic residence’, with the same cachet as nearby boulevard Saint-Germain. From a window afar, Énault marvelled at the horror of it all, as the fires were pushed along by the evening wind, the flames gathering force ‘with a violent speed … the fire took on … fantastic tones … blue, greenish, violet, deep red’. As some Parisians watched the fires spreading in the distance, they wondered which quartier, which monuments, which buildings were up in flames. Théophile Gautier believed he was seeing a modern Pompeii. It was as if the destruction begun under Haussmann had continued. The explosion of an occasional shell fired by the Communards from Montmartre added to the fear.34
Walking from the Church of the Madeleine to the place du Château d’Eau (now place de la République), Reclus encountered so few people that it might have been 2 o’clock or 3 o’clock in the morning, not the middle of the day. Yet at Porte Saint-Martin ordinary people formed a human chain to move paving stones to a barricade, while others stopped passers-by with cries of ‘Citoyen, Citoyenne, to work!’ Children of all ages were actively involved in building barricades, two or three struggling together to carry heavy blocks of stone. Reclus had to show his laissez-passer at each barricade. Even after carrying stones – despite his handicapped right hand, mangled in a childhood fall – he was briefly stopped at rue Lafayette by a national guardsman who accused him of concealing his Versaillais spying activities by helping out. Reclus remained calm and a police official ordered him freed.35
Reclus did not return home that night, fearing capture. He stayed with friends who lived in faubourg du Temple. ‘We are’, he assessed, ‘like sailors whose ship is taking on water during a storm and which every quarter of an hour sinks a bit further down. Leaning against the front of the ship, we can see the against the horizon vast waves pounding towards us, howling and frothing in rage.’ Would the first big wave that came carry them away, or would it be the second, or perhaps the fourth ‘in this stormy sea that is Paris?’ Perhaps it would be that very day that ‘we would die … perhaps tomorrow … or perhaps the day after that … No matter, it will not have been in vain!’36
From Versailles Thiers proclaimed: ‘We are honnêtes gens … The punishment will be exemplary, but it will take place within the law, in the name of the laws.’ This was already clearly not the case, as Versaillais troops were already gunning down Communards right and left. The term ‘honnêtes gens’ was loaded with class connotations that had turned murderous. Many among the honnêtes gens were delighted to see Paris purged of lower-class insurgents who seemed intent on overturning social hierarchy and privilege.37
As Versaillais troops moved through Paris, they killed, shooting down Communards because they had been taught to despise them. Moreover, in a civil war, enemies could be almost anyone, anywhere. The effect of such summary executions probably in some cases stiffened resistance, but over the following days also served to demoralise resisters. Few could have had any doubt at this point about what was occurring in the streets of Paris and what the eventual outcome of the struggle would be.
When the Versaillais encountered resistance in narrow streets, fired upon from windows of houses, brutal searches and executions followed. Line troops had to be on constant alert, constantly checking windows on the upper floors of houses for Communard snipers. With fighting nearby, a woman living on the elegant rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré had a chimney-sweep come to work. When he left the building, he was seized by troops because his hands and face covered with soot, taken to be gunpowder, and immediately shot, as the woman looked from her window above. The soldiers did not bother to take the time to consider what was a perfectly plausible explanation.38
Fear probably made the soldiers more ruthless. The Versaillais often killed Communard insurgents they discovered, regardless of whether the fighters put up any resistance. On rue Saint-Honoré, line soldiers found thirty national guardsmen hiding in a printing shop. They had thrown away their weapons and hurriedly put on work clothes, but that would not save them. The soldiers took them to rue Saint-Florentin and shot them in the enormous ditch in front of what was left of the barricade. Nearby on rue Royal, troops came upon six men and a young woman in National Guard uniforms hiding in barrels. They were thrown into a ditch and killed. Volunteers de la Seine shot fifteen men and a woman at Parc Monceau.39 When line troops reached place Vendôme, the fallen column further stoked reprisals against Communards who had surrendered or been captured; Versaillais shot at least thirty people there.40
Édouard Manet’s lithograph Civil War evokes the horror of death at the Church of the Madeleine, where the Versaillais gunned down about 300 Communards who had taken refuge in the church. No insurgent escaped. At first glance, Civil War would lead one to think that Manet was depicting the tragedy of civil war in a general, neutral way. However, the dead man is clearly wearing a National Guard uniform and is clutching a piece of white cloth, suggesting that he and others had been trying to surrender; the Madeleine appears unmistakably in the background. Manet’s The Barricade, another gripping indictment of the repression during Bloody Week, depicts a firing squad killing Communards.41
The killing went on, supported in no small part by Parisians who welcomed Versaillais troops. Forbes, for one, was appalled by the ‘Communard hunting’ of Versaillais soldiers, aided by some people whom he suspected had earlier shouted for the Commune and now denounced fédérés. Concierges eagerly informed soldiers where Communards might be hiding: ‘They knew the rat-holes into which the poor creatures had squeezed themselves, and they guided the Versaillist soldiers to the spot with a fiendish glee.’
Versaillais troops seized on any evidence they could find of insurgency. Three women were gunned down because the Versaillais came across several pairs of National Guardsman’s trousers in their apartment. A furrier on rue des Martyrs allegedly was summarily executed because he had invited Pyat to his apartment six months earlier. When the man’s wife protested, she was also killed. On place du Trône (now Nation), soldiers saw light in an upper apartment and went up to find two elderly men drinking tea. They were shot for no reason, despite the pleas of their concierge that they had had nothing to do with the fédérés. Social class did them in. The Versaillais paid no mind to the fact that some of the Communards they were gunning down had a few months earlier fought for France against the Prussians and their German allies.42
The Communards began frantically to organise resistance in the Sixth Arrondissement. On Tuesday Jean Allemane helped organise the defence of rues Vavin and Bréa, jus
t below boulevard Montparnasse, thus joining defences at place de l’Observatoire, protecting the Jardins du Luxembourg. Not far away, Eugène Varlin readied defenders at the small place du Croix-Rouge. The task was imposing, with Cissey’s huge army of three divisions attacking only three battalions of National Guardsmen. When orders came from Commune leaders that they should fall back to defend their own quartiers, the defence of the Left Bank became impossible. Two battalions of national guardsmen from the Eleventh and Twelfth Arrondissements refused to obey Allemane and crossed the Seine to their own neighbourhoods, saying that if they were going to die fighting, they preferred to do so in their own quartiers.43
Communards continued to fall. An English doctor helping wounded Communards recalled: ‘We took in only the worst cases on 21, 22, 23 May. Our garden, court, corridors and floor were crowded with wounded brought in fresh from the fight … Many did not make it.’44
Many of the barricades on the Left Bank had been built within a day, after the first line troops had entered Paris. They did not survive Versaillais attacks on Tuesday. A barricade on rue de Rennes, below Gare Montparnasse, was the largest, but no more than thirty men were there to defend it. Yet Communard cannons firing behind sizable barricades still inflicted casualties on the attackers. Barricades fell at Croix-Rouge and rue du Dragon. The quartier was ablaze, and the barricades at rue de Rennes fell on Tuesday, with their defenders, including the Enfants du Père Duchêne, who fell back along boulevard Saint-Germain. A Versaillais officer believed they were executing more men than had fought behind barricades.45
Allemane and others sought to impose some order on the defences at rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and boulevard Saint-Michel, but it did not help that, now that the fight seemed all but lost, guardsmen cared only about protecting their own neighbourhoods. Versaillais troops surrounded remaining barricades and fired down on them from adjacent buildings. Calls for reinforcements brought no response. Smoke rising from the Hôtel de Ville and other important buildings further demoralised remaining Communard fighters.46
At this point, forced to acknowledge that there was little hope of victory, most Communards began to prepare themselves for the end. As the battle drew nearer to the Latin Quarter, Maxime Vuillaume went to his apartment on rue du Sommerard to burn papers that, if seized by the Versaillais, would surely mean big trouble. He had copies of the letter Archbishop Darboy had written to Thiers on 12 April and another to Vicaire Lagarde on the same day – these he gave to Benjamin Flotte, who lived nearby. They went together to have a drink chez Glaser, which they found totally empty. After that brief meeting, Vuillaume never saw Flotte again.47
Jean Allemane, like so many other Communards, also now had few illusions about what lay ahead. He pulled everything out of his pockets: a pocket-knife, sixty centimes, some papers, and a card indicating that he worked for the Journel Officiel. He began to try to imagine how he would die. Walking towards boulevard Saint-Germain, he ran into a friend called Treilhard, who was going home to put the accounts of Assistance Publique (Welfare Assistance) in order, as he had promised. Allemane advised him that he should go with him to the Eleventh Arrondissement, where the remaining Communards intended to hold their ground, and that, if he did not, Treilhard risked being captured and shot. Treilhard declined, was soon after arrested, put up against a wall, and gunned down.
Allemane managed to get down boulevard Saint-Germain, where various undercover Versaillais policemen were making arrests. One stopped him on the quai and asked what he was doing out at 1.00 a.m. Allemane replied that he was going to boulevard de l’Hôpital to check on his aged parents. He got through but passed a young boy, Georges Arnaud, he knew from the neighbourhood being marched along by soldiers. The boy did not give him away by nodding, which could well have cost him his life. A neighbour who ran the bistro Au Chinois told a Versaillais officer that he knew the boy very well and he did not fight and he was released (but later to die of tuberculosis aged twenty-four). Georges’s parents took Allemane in. From their apartment they could hear the sound of line troops searching the building. Allemane barricaded the door of the room where he was hiding, preparing to defend himself, but the soldiers were looking for someone else. He resolved to leave and take his chances so as not to jeopardise his rescuers.
After a quick dinner, Allemane headed for the apartment of his brother who lived in the Twentieth Arrondissement. But not long after arriving at rue Levert, police and troops surrounded the building and arrested him. He had no money and no papers that could get him out of Paris. Moreover, ‘denunciations rained down on Paris … where the police spy was king’. After giving his name as Monsieur Roger, the next day he admitted that he was Jean Allemane. There had been little chance of escaping arrest. He was soon imprisoned in Versailles.48
The Army of Versailles and the Volunteers of the Seine had in little more than two days taken more than half of Paris. The only hope now seemed to be for Communard fighters to fall back to their neighbourhoods in eastern Paris and organise the defence of the ‘quartiers populaires’.49 A sergeant in the National Guard, who might have got out, related: ‘I can’t leave, because what would my comrades from the quartier say?’50 For the Communards, neighbourhood solidarity became even more essential to survival. The defence of Paris withered into the defence of quartiers. The role of women became even more important. One of the strange things about the conflict was that, in the street fighting, ‘you were sometimes certainly surprised to came upon a childhood friend’ fighting for the Versaillais.51
Montmartre, where the Commune had begun little more than two months earlier, remained potentially the strongest point of defence. The Commune sent General Napoléon La Cécilia there. Of ‘sad and solemn appearance, without charm, with a cold and proper air’, La Cécilia’s abilities were far below what was required and he had difficulty communicating because he was Corsican and did not speak French well. The task before him was daunting. La Cécilia found defences on Montmartre disorganised and National Guard battalions demoralised. Communard fighters instinctively resisted his authority because he was virtually unknown in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. But, more importantly, it was too late for anyone, even the most savvy general, to make any difference. Some of the barricades that had gone up on 18 March were still there, and while they could provide some resistance to attacks from the south they could not help if the Versaillais attacked from other directions. By 5.00 a.m. on 23 May line troops had reached Porte de Clignancourt, to the north beyond the Butte, a distance of about three kilometres from Batignolles in the Seventeenth Arrondissement.52
Louis Barron agonised over the state of the defences in Montmartre: ‘The Mont-Aventin [one of the hills of Rome] is so poorly defended! Spies of Monsieur Thiers, your task will be easy … no moats, no trenches, no dry walls at the approaches to this position, whose strength has been exaggerated, because indeed it could have been made formidable.’ Barron had a premonition of ‘the coming horrible carnage, furious massacres, uncontrolled shooting; I smell the insipid, nauseating odour of streams of blood, saturating the pavement, flowing in the streets’. Yet somehow – at least in People’s Paris – the illusion of the invincibility of the popular will persisted.53
La Cécilia wanted to know why the cannons on Montmartre were silent. He found eighty-five cannons and about twenty mitrailleuses just sitting there, unattended and unused for two months. Finally, under La Cécilia’s direction, the cannons fired several shells, but some of the guns then slid back into the mud, to the extent that they were unusable. Reclus reflected on the irony that when Communard shells finally were launched from the heights of Montmartre, Belleville and Ménilmontant, they fell on ‘the rich and commercial neighbourhoods’ of western Paris, where nonetheless many good republicans were still to be found, neighbourhoods that had already suffered Versaillais shelling.54
Knowing that line troops had swept so easily through Batignolles and having insufficient numbers of national guardsmen to organise a stout defence, Polish General
Jaroslaw Dombrowski now realised that there was no hope. He tried to get out of Paris, but was stopped at Porte Saint-Ouen by fédérés. He was then taken to the Hôtel de Ville, where the Committee of Public Safety expressed confidence in him and refused to accept his resignation. Still loyal to the Commune and having nowhere to go, Dombrowski returned to service, just like that. Despite the increasingly desperate situation, Pyat’s Le Vengeur kept reassuring its readers that all was well although Père Duchêne published its last issue that day, carrying the date ‘3 Prairial, an 79’, 23 May 1871.55
That day the Army of Versailles launched its assault on Montmartre early Tuesday. Armies attacked from three directions. The army commanded by Clinchant had easily moved through Batignolles, left virtually undefended despite the best efforts of Benoît Malon. Troops killed indiscriminately along the way. A Versaillais officer apparently ordered a soldier who refused to gun down women and children to be shot. Not far away, troops allegedly killed a man who had done absolutely nothing, shot his wife and child when they hugged him too long, and then finished off, for good measure, a doctor who tried to help the child.56
With rifle fire from the Butte passing well over their heads, no cannon fire to fear, and only a single mitrailleuse to be avoided, the Volunteers of the Seine reached Montmartre. They encountered a defended barricade on rue Marcadet on the far side of the Butte, but were protected by the curve of the street. Soldiers were sent into houses on both sides of the street to fire down on the defenders. Two cannons were brought up to shell the barricade. The fire of the fédérés soon weakened, and then the Communard defenders abandoned it. Albert Hans was amazed to find Montmartre, traditional hotbed of radicalism, defended with so little organisation, personnel, or energy. The Volunteers of the Seine reached two barricades at rue des Abbesses and took both quickly, along with 600 prisoners.
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