Massacre
Page 25
Sturdy Communard defences did remain in the Thirteenth Arrondissement and on the Right Bank at place de la Bastille, place du Château d’eau, and in the Eleventh Arrondissement, as well as in Belleville and much of the proletarian Twentieth Arrondissement. Thiers’s forces advanced rapidly on all fronts, slaughtering as they went.
If down below in Paris Communards were bitterly discouraged, up in Belleville they still held out hope. Reclus walked into Belleville’s neo-Gothic church around 10 o’clock that Tuesday morning. A young vicar was teaching the Catechism to boys and girls. He reminded them that Hell awaited ‘the ungodly and revolutionaries’ and related that in the two months of anarchy in which they were living, the Commune had inflicted on the Church unprecedented persecution. Even in Belleville, churchmen continued to oppose the Commune, as the fighting drew ever closer.
Looking down on Paris from Belleville, Reclus was reminded of the view of Geneva. In glorious sunshine, the city stretched out far beneath his feet, ‘a vast rocky plain, rather an immense beehive, in which straw and twigs had replaced bell towers, columns and arcs of triumph’. Below, the ‘Party of Order’ was at work with cannons, rifles and bayonets.71
In the Eighteenth Arrondissement, executions continued into Wednesday, even after Montmartre had been taken. On rue Myrha, two Versaillais soldiers followed a man into a house, where he tried to hide. They shot him on the spot. The concierge asked them as they were leaving if they were simply going to leave the body there. When the response was affirmative, he paid them to cart it away. Each took one of the man’s legs, bouncing the head off the ground as they took it to a garbage heap. Onlookers applauded. On rue Montmartre, soldiers were looking for a Communard captain. Finding only his twelve-year-old son at home, they killed him. And when a young man reproached them for their act, they shot him as well.72
The Versaillais set up a court-martial in Montmartre that same day at 6, rue de Rosiers, where Generals Thomas and Lecomte had been executed on 18 March. Forty-two men, three women and four children were shot there, some forced to kneel in front of the wall before being executed.73
One resident living near Porte Saint-Denis who supported the Versaillais watched from his window as guardsmen hurriedly reinforced the barricade below and hauled a cannon toward the Church of the Madeleine; they too seemed determined to keep up the defence. Early in the afternoon on Wednesday, a National Guard company appeared. Sentinels who appeared at the intersections of the boulevard Saint-Denis forced passers-by to add a paving stone to the barricade. More fédérés appeared, threatening to ‘blow the brains out’ of anyone who fled. After sleeping badly, the resident went down the next morning to get a closer look. He strolled about, as on an ordinary day, seemingly oblivious to the danger, and calmly asked his neighbour, ‘And so! Things are heating up?’ He must not have noticed the fédéré riding by, his horse carrying the body of a fallen Communard.74
Edgar Monteil, a journalist for Le Rappel and a National Guardsman, survived the battle and executions, but witnessed first-hand the hatred that enabled the Versaillais to kill so many Communards – men, women and children alike – en masse. He and a colleague called Lemay returned to their office to sleep. Soldiers broke through the office door. The Versaillais searched the office, finding only a gun not in service since the Prussian siege, but copies of Le Rappel were enough to assure arrest. An officer asked about these new prisoners and was told ‘They are from Le Rappel.’ The commander turned towards the journalists: ‘You are the ones who lit the fires of this civil war!’ But for the moment no rifles clicked into readiness. Monteil and Lamy were locked in an old guard post, hungry and thirsty. While hiding compromising documents, Monteil had thought to take along some money. They pounded on the door, asking a guard outside for bread and water. He asked if they had money, and Monteil gave him ten francs. They never saw the bread or water, the guard, or the money.
Monteil and Lemay were taken to Versailles as part of a convoy of 500 prisoners. An officer told them as they passed near the ramparts that Communards were being killed there, but not all of them, for ‘we will make a choice, that’s for sure’. Monteil realised that he certainly had never detested the Versaillais as much as the anti-Communards hated them. In contrast to the Parisian middle classes, the inhabitants of outlying villages seemed sympathetic to the plight of the prisoners. But at the gates of Versailles it started up again: ‘Dirty Parisians!’ yelled a captain, ‘Heap of rabble. You are going to enter the capital of the good, worthy and honest rural people! Take off your hats, vermin, hats off!’ He hit those who refused with the flat of his sword. At place des Armes, the well-dressed hurled mud at the ragged prisoners and a lady struck at them with her cane. Another captain ordered them to salute the palace of kings, raising his sword in warning. When they reached the prison camp of Satory at Versailles, line troops shouted out, ‘Do you see the pepper-mill [la mitrailleuse]? … Nothing to fear!’75
CHAPTER 7
Death Comes for the Archbishop
MONTMARTRE, THE GREAT STRONGHOLD OF THE COMMUNE STANDING TALL above Paris, had fallen on Tuesday 23 May. Wednesday would be another critical day. The task of Thiers’s troops now seemed easier. The Committee of Public Safety – a couple of members had already fled the city – now met in permanence in the Hôtel de Ville. The Commune on Wednesday issued a proclamation to the Versaillais troops: ‘Do not abandon the cause of the workers! Do as your brothers did on 18 March!’ The Committee of Public Safety followed with its own message, hoping against hope that the Commune might still endure: ‘Like us, you are proletarians … Join us, our brothers!’1
The Versaillais did not slow down. There would be no repeat of 18 March. Communard fighters readied their weapons. When Paris awoke, the skies were red and black from smoke rising from the Palace of the Legion of Honour, Palais-Royal, and houses on rue Royale – where the clock had stopped at 1.10 p.m. the previous afternoon.2 In the Hôtel de Ville, national guardsmen slept where they could, among wounded men resting on bloody mattresses. Two men arrived carrying an officer who had lost most of his face and jaw to a Versaillais shell. Barely audible and clutching the remnants of a red flag, he encouraged his compatriots to keep on fighting. Gabriel Ranvier, a member of the Commune from the Twentieth Arrondissement, ordered two men to return to their arrondissements and lead the fight, threatening to have them shot if they failed to do so.
In another upper room, members of the Commune and various military officers, some in civilian clothes, sat around a large table, solemnly discussing the worsening situation. They had been meeting all night, and must have been exhausted. During the course of their deliberations, they ordered the execution of a Versaillais spy, whose body was tossed into the Seine. As Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray observed, hope was gone but courage still remained. Charles Delescluze was there, determined, but he gave the impression of a defeated man, going through the motions as he awaited the final act. In a room near the entrance to the Hôtel de Ville lay the body of the Polish General Jaroslaw Dombrowski. The murderous thunder of cannons crept in from outside.3
A proclamation of the Committee of Public Safety tried to reassure the population. Despite the fact that, thanks to ‘treachery’, Versaillais forces had occupied some of Paris, such setbacks should not ‘dishearten you but rather spur you to action’. Parisians should build more barricades to make Paris ‘impregnable’. But it was certainly too late for that. The absence of centralised planning for the defence of the capital was even more sadly apparent. The Central Committee appealed also to the soldiers of Versailles, urging them not to fight for ‘military despotism’, that disobedience was ‘a duty’, and asking them to ‘fraternise’ with the people.4
That same day, Adolphe Thiers, fearing a hostile reaction in other parts of France to all the summary executions, sent out a telegram to the prefectures of the provinces announcing that Marshal Patrice de MacMahon had warned the Communards to surrender or risk being shot. In fact, no such notice to Paris had gone out. Thiers and his government wanted n
othing less than the execution of as many insurgent Parisians as possible. The president of the provisional government assured the National Assembly that ‘Our valiant soldiers conduct themselves in such a manner as to inspire foreign countries with the highest esteem and admiration.’5 At the time the members of the National Assembly may not have been unaware of the extent of the summary executions. But most of them certainly did not care.
At 9.00 a.m. the Commune’s War Delegation issued an order, dated ‘4 prairial an 79’, for the destruction of any house from which shots were fired on national guardsmen, and the execution of everyone in the building if they did not immediately hand over the ‘authors of the crime’. As the Versaillais advanced even deeper into the city, the National Guard insisted that windows be closed because some Communard soldiers had ‘treacherously’ been shot from such places.6
Even though Montmartre had fallen, the fighting continued and casualties mounted. On 24 May, early in the morning, Albert Hans’s battalion went down the hill from Montmartre towards Porte Cligancourt, where barricades had also fallen the day before. Then, turning in the direction of Gare du Nord on the chaussée Cligancourt, they came upon the bodies of a dozen Versaillais troops. They also came upon weapons hastily abandoned by Parisians, including some of the cannons seized by the population at place Wagram on 18 March, which now seemed like an eternity ago. A tricolour now floated above the Moulin de la Galette. At rue Rochechouart, bullets were still flying, fired from the barricades at the corner of rue du faubourg Poissonnière, boulevard d’Ornano and boulevard Magenta. These positions, too, soon fell. In the confusion, Hans and other Volunteers of the Seine found themselves fired on by regular Versaillais troops, before they could identify themselves.7
A guardsman came to the door of the apartment where Élie Reclus was staying, asking the friend hosting him to ‘take a position at the barricade being constructed nearby’. Reclus’s friend replied that he was over forty and therefore exonerated from National Guard service, which the guardsman accepted, returning to the barricade below. He had not addressed a word to Reclus, who was in the next room with the door open. Suddenly, an explosion like thunder, all too close, enveloped everything in a huge white cloud of smoke. Communard fighters had blown up the munitions storage facility in the Jardins du Luxembourg in order to slow the Versaillais advance. From their window Reclus and his friend could see fires burning in the distance. Soon after, line troops swept through nearby barricades, leaving nothing but rubble. Reclus would not forget the scene: ‘Victorious, the tricolour flag was hoisted above a pile of cadavers, in a sea of blood.’8
Reclus reflected on the hopelessness of the situation. Paris was powerless before an army of 130,000 men with 500 cannons, a giant ‘horde of Bonapartists, clergy, Orléanists and conservatives’, intent on destroying the democratic and social Republic. Poorly organised and without effective leaders, the Communards were ‘floating like the unfortunate jellyfish left aground by the ravages of a storm, our willpower is useless, our efforts in vain, our hope has become ridiculous … our little lives are engulfed by these incredible events’. All night one could hear the ‘horrifying clamour of the painful tocsin rung in Belleville and Ménilmontant, falling still, and then taking up again, followed by the desperate roll of the drums calling everyone to combat’.9
Not all Parisians noticed the bloodshed. While the fighting moved eastward through Paris, Gustave des E. slept. He bravely ventured out, ‘after a nice lunch’, of course, to go to his club, avoiding the smouldering rue Royale, where, as described by Théophile Gautier, fire had ‘continued the work of the cannon fire and shells. Gutted houses reveal their insides like gutted bodies.’ Twelve members had somehow managed to get to the club, so Gustave did not have to dine alone.10
Georges Jeanneret watched the Versaillais tide sweep through Communard defences: ‘While the battle continues in Paris and its faubourgs, bourgeois Paris celebrates its triumph in its sumptuous neighbourhoods.’ It was impossible to ignore that this was very much a class war. The weather was beautiful. Well-dressed ladies, some carrying parasols ‘in order to protect their complexions from the bright sunshine … approach the corpses which were lying about, and with the tips of their parasols deliberately remove the caps or clothing placed over the faces of the dead’. One woman stepped up and chided one of them: ‘Madame, death should be respected.’11
Maxime Vuillaume knew full well that the end was near and that he needed to destroy any evidence that tied him to the Communards. He tore up a ticket to the toppling of the Vendôme Column and, even more compromising, an identity card given him by the Commune detailing his name, address and profession: journalist. He had no illusions: from rue Lacépède in the Fifth Arrondissement he could hear the volleys of executions in the Jardin des Plantes. Crossing place Saint-Michel, a young woman said to him, ‘Let’s go, citizen, your cobblestone!’ Vuillaume obliged, putting a large stone on the barricade intended to block the entry to the quai and the Pont-au-Change. At 11.30 a.m., the barricade was more or less ready, but where were the guardsmen to defend it? Hoping to get both lunch and news, Vuillaume headed to the restaurant Chez Lapeyrouse along the Seine, where Raoul Rigault often dined with his Communard colleagues from the Prefecture of Police. Five or six tables were taken. Vuillaume lunched with friends. With the bill came the news that the Versaillais were near.
Returning to place Saint-Michel, Vuillaume ran into Rigault, who suggested a drink at the Café d’Harcourt. Rigault told him that the previous evening he had had his old friend Gustave Chaudey shot. Before Vuillaume, shaken by the news, could reply, Rigault was off, saying ‘See you in a minute. At the Panthéon!’ Vuillaume walked up boulevard Saint-Michel, came upon an ambulance next to the gardens, and shook hands with people he knew. No one said a word. On rue Royer-Collard, he ran into Rigolette, who ran the Cochon Fidèle on the corner of rue des Cordiers. There, two Communards stood behind a barricade, ready to fight, in front of the house of one of Villaume’s former teachers, Joseph Moutier, who had taught Rigault physics. Death was in the air, intensified by the seeming normalcy of walking past the house of someone the two Communards had known and admired.12
Julien Poirier’s Versaillais infantry unit had taken fifty prisoners without firing a shot, having slept the previous night with troops on the pavement outside Les Invalides. As they neared the Jardins du Luxembourg, they faced cannon fire and several Versaillais troops were killed. As they made progress, Poirier saw a woman carrying a red flag going into a building and told his captain, who sent men in after her. At the top of the stairs, they found her in the attic, ‘armed to the teeth’. Pushing her into the middle of the room, they took turns beating her with the butts of their rifles. Poirier and some of the others then forced her down the stairs, killing her before they reached the ground floor.
Once outside again, they noticed that no more Communard shells were falling. As the powder magazine at the Jardins du Luxembourg exploded, the troops continued to advance, eyeing the buildings on either side, fearing snipers. Arriving at boulevard Saint-Michel, they faced determined opposition and for the moment could not cross one of Paris’s main arteries.13 Although Baron Georges Haussmann’s boulevards helped the Versaillais by allowing them to move quickly into central Paris, they also gave Communard fighters the chance to defend themselves with cannon fire, slowing the onslaught.
To Edmond de Goncourt, the dark smoke hanging aggressively above his city gave the impression of ‘a day of an eclipse’. The acrid smell of gasoline permeated the air. The apocalypse had come to Paris. As clouds of smoke poured into the air, wild stories spread that new and terrible means of destruction were imminent. Baron de Montaut, an agent of Thiers working inside Paris, insisted that Communards had mined the sewers of Paris, which was not true.14
Versaillais troops encountered pockets of Communard resistance that Wednesday in the Sixth Arrondissement. Line troops overwhelmed the barricade at Carrefour de l’Observatoire above the Jardins du Luxembourg, and soon t
he neighbourhoods around the Jardins du Luxembourg, Saint-Michel and the Panthéon were besieged. A Communard warning was posted that in, the interest of defending Paris, the Panthéon would be blown up in two hours. Those living in the quartier were asked to ‘move away a reasonable distance from the area of the explosion’. The neighbourhoods around the Panthéon became a battlefield. Versaillais soldiers drove the Communards out of the Jardins du Luxembourg, attacking the barricade defending rue Soufflot, beneath the Pantheon and the Sorbonne. Communard defenders retreated towards the Seine, leaving behind barricades on rue Royer-Collard and rue Gay-Lussac, which fell when the Versaillais outflanked the resistance by taking side streets. Troops commanded by Cissey moved towards the Panthéon but were stalled when Maxime Lisbonne ordered the munitions storage facility in the gardens destroyed.
Still, the Versaillais had utterly destroyed what little Communard resistance remained. That day about 700 Communards were shot in the vicinity of the Panthéon, including 40 on rue Saint-Jacques. Local Communard officers met for the last time in the mairie at place du Panthéon.15 They rejected a suggestion that they surrender. Surviving Communards headed down the hill and over the Seine to the Eleventh Arrondissement.
Alexander Thompson, a young Englishman, lived with his parents on boulevard Saint-Michel across from the Jardins du Luxembourg, so he witnessed the fighting there first-hand. Two barricades stood before their house, ‘under the command of a pretty Amazon whose beauty, charming ways, and always ready revolver convinced each passer-by to lend a hand’. Several hours later, he saw the woman, clutching a rifle, lying dead on the barricade of rue Soufflot. A soldier tore open her clothes with his sword for the amusement of the other troops.16
Reclus watched the sun set from pont de Bercy behind the Gare de Lyon, ‘the green waters flowing slowly and quietly: the beacons, their masts and the arches of the bridges are clearly reflected in their peaceful mirror’. In the distance he could see ‘a golden and silver rain of opaline, iridescent pearls, an orange dust, (as) the monuments stand profiled in lightly violet fumes’. A red flag still flew from the top of the Panthéon, but it would soon be replaced by the tricolour. He could hear ‘the distant sounds that float in the luminous sky, the song of the trumpet, the whistling of bullets and the crackle of machine guns’.17