Massacre

  Unfortunately for Raoul Rigault he was near the Panthéon just before it fell. Earlier that day, he had gone to his beloved Prefecture of Police with the ever-faithful Théophile Ferré. Rigault freed the few political suspects and several common criminals still in custody, shouting ‘Let’s go, bandits, we’re going to burn this place down! We don’t want to roast you!’ A man called Veysset who had been arrested ten days earlier as a presumed spy for Versailles accused of trying to bribe General Jaroslaw Dombrowski was also in a cell there. Seeing him, Rigault turned the man over to Ferré and Georges Pilotell, mediocre artist and Communard policeman, who took him with soldiers from the Vengeurs de Flourens to the statue of Henri IV on the western tip of the Ile-de-la-Cité. There they shot him.18

  Rigault, wearing his uniform as a commander of the 114th battalion of the National Guard, went to the Panthéon, in his old quartier, to encourage resistance. One of his friends reminded him that wearing this uniform was not perhaps a good idea, should he be captured. ‘Mon vieux,’ he replied, ‘better to die like this! This will be useful for the next time!’ After the barricade on rue Soufflot fell, Rigault entered a hotel on rue Royer-Collard. He had rented a room there under the name of Auguste Varenne. Now, he perhaps wanted to rest and await his fate. Not far away, several line troops, one a corporal who had seen a guardsman open the door and enter, ran to the hotel and stormed in. They accosted the hotel’s owner, a certain Monsieur Chrétien.19

  Rigault, hearing the commotion, ran up the stairs to the sixth floor. The soldiers ordered the hotel owner to go after him and tell him that the soldiers would shoot him – Monsieur Chrétien – if he did not come down. They did not know the man they wanted to capture was Raoul Rigault, who proposed to the hotelier that the two of them make their perilous escape across the rooftops. When Chrétien refused, Rigault replied, ‘I am neither an idiot nor a coward. I will go down.’ The soldiers were waiting for him on the second floor. They took him in the direction of the Jardins du Luxembourg, where execution squads were at work. Rigault announced to his captors: ‘Here I am! It’s me! [Me voilà!]’, surrendering his pistol. Unsure of whom they had captured, they found an officer who asked the prisoner his name. Rigault, a prize catch, identified himself. When he shouted ‘Long live the Commune! Down with the murderers!’ the soldiers put him up against the wall and shot him dead.

  Rigault’s body lay on the ground. The so-called ‘men of order’ who had killed him poked at it with their umbrellas and canes. The artist Georges Pillotel, who admired him, came upon the corpse and sketched it. Finally, Rigolette, who ran the café Cochon Fidèle, brought down an old blanket and covered up Rigault’s bloody head.20

  Henri Dabot was bourgeois, a moderate republican, and a fervent Catholic. Fighting now swirled around his neighbourhood. Communards were killed at the barricade at rue Cujas above rue Saint-Jacques. Dabot’s cook, Marie, tried to hide a boy of about fourteen or fifteen whom soldiers were chasing, believing that he had fired a shot at a captain after the barricade fell at the corner of rue Saint-Jacques and rue des Écoles. The boy, who lived near the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont next to the Panthéon, was small enough to hide, literally, under the skirts of the cook. The soldiers found him, however, marched him to the Cluny Museum, and shot him in front of it. The boy’s friends found his body.

  Now that the barricades on rue Saint-Jacques and rue Cujas had fallen, Communards began to retreat from the Fifth Arrondissement. A fédéré went from house to house, telling people to run for their lives. On rue Clovis, a mother replied ‘Run! Run where? A hail of bullets everywhere! Leaving here would be the most certain way of finding death.’ She held her two young sons in her arms, saying ‘at least we can die together’, praying to Saint Geneviève for protection.21

  The fighting moved down boulevard Saint-Michel and then rue Saint-Jacques to rue des Écoles and boulevard Saint-Germain. The barricade at rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève fell, followed by others on rue Ulm, rue Lacépède and rue Monge. Jean Allemane believed that there were only about 200 Communards left fighting in the Fifth Arrondissement, some of them no more than fifteen years old. After two days of bitter fighting, on Wednesday evening the last Communard defences in the Fifth Arrondissement in the Latin Quarter fell to the Versaillais on rue Monge, next to the Roman wall of the amphitheatre, dating back to the origins of Paris itself.22

  When the fighting ended in the Latin Quarter, twenty bodies lay on rue Sommerard; more were scattered above at the intersection with boulevard Saint-Michel. On rue Cardinal Lemoine, soldiers roused from bed Eugène André, a mathematician and professor known for his opposition to the empire. He had not served in the Commune and had refused a position in education when offered. André, who had ignored advice to hide, was shot immediately, leaving behind his carefully calculated mathematical tables, not the kind of thing that would have interested Adolphe Thiers.

  The Versaillais newspaper Petite-Presse informed readers in Versailles and the provinces that the soldiers refused to take more prisoners. The news almost certainly pleased many readers. A Communard remembered that all that could be heard in the Latin Quarter were ‘sounds of execution squads … at every step, bodies, every second, the sound of shots killing ordinary people’. This spelled the end for an eighty-year-old man on rue du Dragon, arrested for wearing the cap of a national guardsman.23 Thousands of other Parisians met the same fate.

  Rumour now had the Communards preparing to win back lost territory by sending National Guard battalions beyond the ramparts around northern Paris and then back into the western districts of the capital. By this point, such a tactic was no longer a possibility. Most National Guardsmen would not have left their neighbourhood to have participated in such a plan. The Versaillais, who had advanced during Tuesday morning on the Right Bank as far as the Church of the Trinité, seemed to hold back, for the moment not pressing the enormous advantage that they now held. Many Communards battled courageously, as on rue de la Ferme des Mathurins, where guardsmen constructed a barricade while under fire from the Versaillais troops. However, the only advantage they held – besides, for many, their passion – was that they were now defending their neighbourhoods.

  But the Versaillais did not hold back for very long. Thousands of Versaillais troops attacked the barricade of rue Thévenot, which had been well defended near rue Saint-Denis. Once the barricade fell, rue Saint-Denis was overrun, opening the way to the quartier du Temple, a centre of Communard support and a gateway to the Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements. Few barricades now obstructed the Versaillais path, and those on small connecting streets were quickly abandoned.

  Now that Montmartre and much of the Left Bank had fallen, the Versaillais were making their way through the Right Bank, getting closer and closer to La Roquette prison. The fate of the hostages would need to be decided – and soon. The prison pharmacist recommended that Archbishop Georges Darboy be transferred to the infirmary, but the archbishop refused to be separated from the others. Enormous tension hung over the quartier – and the prison in particular – as the Versailles troops drew nearer. Cannon fire launched against the Versaillais from the heights of Père Lachaise cemetery alarmed the hostages, and they greeted the slightest noise in the corridor with gnawing apprehension. The angry members of the Vengeurs de Flourens, a battalion of young Communards constituted in memory of the executed leader, were omnipresent in the neighbouring streets.

  An example of the popular anger at the impending catastrophe in the neighbourhoods near La Roquette occurred nearby. Fear and outrage swirled around the prison in which the hostages awaited their fate. Charles de Beaufort served as captain in the 66th battalion assigned, before the Versaillais entered Paris, to guard the Ministry of War in the Seventh Arrondissement. When Beaufort tried to enter the ministry on Saturday 20 May, a guardsman had barred his way. The captain announced drunkenly that he could go where he wanted, threatening to ‘blow out the brains’ of the guard and bragging that he would purge the battalion. His behavi
our won him no friends in the neighbourhoods.

  Now, with Versaillais guns drawing closer and nothing but bad news arriving from other quartiers, Beaufort arrived to help defend boulevard Voltaire. People in the neighbourhood, increasingly anxious about their own fates, were quick to turn their ire towards this unwelcome officer. Marguerite Lachaise, who ran a small business with her husband and belonged to the International, recognised Beaufort and denounced him as the officer who had sent men into a hopeless situation in which many men from the quartier had been killed. She, and soon others, mostly women, began shouting for his death. Some accused Beaufort of working secretly for Versailles. It didn’t help Beaufort that, at the same time, stretchers were bringing back more badly wounded men from the barricades, the same guardsmen Beaufort had sent into battle. Several people went to find Gustave Genton, who had recently been appointed juge d’instruction (examining magistrate).

  A forty-five-year-old woodworker who never knew his father, Genton was in some ways typical of many working-class Communards. He lived with his wife child at 27 rue Basfroi, not far from where he had been born. Genton had spent six months in prison in 1866 for participation in an ‘illegal’ gathering at the Café de la Renaissance which had involved Rigault. During the Commune, he served as lieutenant and porte-drapeau (standard bearer) of the 66th battalion. A Blanquist and member of the Commune, he had served in the National Guard, but had resigned after becoming ill. His friend Ferré then nominated him to serve as juge d’instruction.24

  Genton now set up a court-martial in order to placate the crowd. It quickly found Beaufort guilty, and sentenced him to be stripped of his rank. Delescluze was there and tried to calm things down, as did Marguerite Lachaise – although she had just called for Beaufort’s execution. The crowd paid them no mind and continued to shout for Beaufort’s death. Three men in navy uniforms grabbed him and hauled him off to a vacant lot just off the place Voltaire. There, they killed him.25

  At about 3.00 p.m., apparently to calm popular agitation, Communard leaders organised another improvised court-martial, over which Genton presided, this time at the mairie of the Eleventh Arrondissement. On trial at this court-martial were the hostages held at La Roquette, including Darboy. They condemned six of the hostages to death, apparently in retaliation for the summary execution of fédérés captured at the barricade of rue Caumartin near the Church of the Madeleine. In principle the execution of these high-profile hostages required a signature of a justice of the peace. Ferré signed the order, adding the name of Raoul Rigault (killed a few hours earlier, although it is uncertain that this news had crossed the Seine) as an authorising signature, along with a third name that was illegible. Genton and his secretary, Émile Fortin, arrived at La Roquette with an execution squad of about thirty or forty men and an order instructing prison director Jean-Baptiste François to turn over to them ‘without any explanation’ Archbishop Darboy and Louis Bonjean (the former imperial senator), in addition to ‘two or three others to be chosen’.26

  François insisted that he required more specific instructions listing the names of all those to be executed, along with a copy of the official judgment. Genton returned to the mairie of the Eleventh Arrondissement to clarify the matter, leaving the execution squad at La Roquette, rifles readied. The juge d’instruction returned at about 7.00 p.m. with an order that François again did not find explicit enough. It was virtually the same order for the execution of six hostages, signed by Ferré, who now added ‘and notably the archbishop’, the most prominent hostage of all. Fortin and Genton came up with the list of the others to be shot, in addition to Darboy. At the bottom of the document were three stamps of the Commune. Genton scratched out the name of Swiss-born Bonapartist banker Jean-Baptiste Jecker, replacing him with Deguerry, the curé of the Church of the Madeleine.27

  Finally accepting the order, François sent a guard to get the six men. The guard had no idea why he was to bring down these hostages until he came upon the execution squad, commanded by a certain Captain Vérig who had selected its members from men of the neighbourhood. They were for the most part young volunteers (some eighteen years old or even less) who wanted to avenge the death of their relatives at the hands of the Versailles forces. Two-thirds of them were from the 66th battalion; others probably came from the Vengeurs de Flourens, or were simple defenders of the Republic.28

  Ferdinand Évrard, who described himself as ‘only a Parisian bourgeois’, was in a cell next to Darboy’s. An officer in the army, he had been arrested on 6 April after being taken off a train as he attempted to get to Versailles. He heard the ‘chief of these wretches’ shout ‘I need six!’ Two officers commanded the execution squad. Some prisoners saw an officer enter the prison courtyard and bark out, ‘Are the soldiers ready?’ Vérig went to cell number 23, to which the archbishop had been transferred the day before, and asked, ‘Citizen Darboy?’ ‘Present’, came the reply. Bonjean, in the adjeacent cell, did not hear his name called, but his neighbour l’Abbé Surat told him they wanted him. He started out, then turned back to get his overcoat. ‘It is useless’, replied the guard Antoine Ramain, ‘You are very well as you are!’ Ramain told another who had to go to the toilet, ‘It’s not worth it!’ Two of the priests swallowed the last two Communion hosts before the six hostages – Darboy, Bonjean, Deguerry, Michel Allard (a missionary priest who had been a frequent presence in the quartier of Saint-Sulpice), Léon Ducoudray, a Jesuit and director of the school of Sainte-Geneviève, and Alexis Clerc, another Jesuit priest – were marched out.29

  A Polish guard from La Roquette’s infirmary heard someone say to the hostages, ‘You are going to die. You have done nothing for the Commune. You have always been hostile to it. You are going to die!’ A guard who saw the execution squad remembered that many of them showed sangfroid; he did not see any who were drunk. When the gate was opened and the hostages were taken out, he heard other prisoners shout obscenities at them and denounce them as ‘papists’ and ‘traitors’.30

  Clearly poorly prepared for the task, the execution squad discussed, in the presence of the hostages, the best place to shoot them. The first plan was to shoot them in the small exercise yard, but this could be seen from the infirmary windows, which they decided would be bad for morale. In the end, they decided to execute them on the Chemin de ronde, the ‘Gate of Death’ that led to the guillotine.

  The hostages passed through two lines of executioners, waiting ten awful minutes while the keys could be found for the gate. Darboy asked if there were many barricades in Paris. ‘Ah! If I could only go and die like my predecessor! I envy the fate of Archbishop Affre.’ When a guard asked Darboy why he did not do anything for the Commune, the archbishop said that he had been arrested after the first real fighting. ‘In God’s name, at least spare us such insults.’ One young fédéré asked Darboy of which party he was a member. The archbishop replied that he was ‘in the party of liberty’, adding that he and the others would die for freedom and for his faith. The response: ‘Enough sermons!’ An officer intervened, telling the executioners in no uncertain terms to shut up: ‘You are here to carry out justice, not to insult the prisoners!’31

  Following Ramain, Allard led the prisoners, singing prayers in a low voice. They passed along the wall of the infirmary, until the gate of the second chemin de ronde. Darboy could barely walk and a guardsman pushed him along. Bonjean offered his arm for support. Another guard discreetly held out his hand to the hostages as if to say goodbye. Ramain stopped at the corner of the wall which ran along rue de la Folie-Regnault and rue Vacquerie. From his cell, Perny could see Darboy below, raising his arms to the heavens as he called out, ‘My God! My God!’ The archbishop and the others knelt down and said a short prayer. Darboy stood with the others and blessed them, amid shouts from the Communards of ‘enough prayers’.

  Ramain arranged them in front of the wall, with Allard first, followed by Darboy. The names of the hostages were read out loud. Deguerry opened up his shirt to expose his chest to the rifl
es. Several minutes later, Vérig raised his sabre and commanded the squad to fire. Two quick volleys followed. Darboy fell. One of the men reportedly said, ‘This old bastard Darboy did not want to die. Three times he got up, and I began to be afraid of him!’ Vérig, to whom Fortin had loaned Ferré’s sword to command the execution, later claimed to have given the archbishop the coup de grâce. Vérig proudly showed a prison warden his pistol, still hot from firing. From his cell above, Abbé Laurent Amodrou could hear ‘first a long volley, then a pause, and then several single shots, and finally a last salvo’.32

  With silence engulfing the inside of the prison, the bodies lay where they had fallen for six hours, until 2.00 a.m., before they were taken to Père Lachaise cemetery, where they were dumped in a ditch. Darboy’s sapphire ring, cross and even the silver buckles of his shoes had disappeared. Up in their cells above the scene, Pères Perny and Amodrou and the other hostages assumed that they would be next to hear the steps of guards coming down the corridor, even as the forces of Versailles drew nearer and nearer.33

  Since 4 April the fate of the hostages had hung in the air. The Communards’ ploy to take Archbishop Darboy and other clerics hostage in hopes of discouraging the Versailles government from carrying out further summary executions, had backfired. Now, the shooting of Darboy and the other hostages gave Thiers an excuse to escalate the killing, both during ongoing fighting in the streets of Paris and in hastily organised courts or tribunals dispensing Versaillais ‘justice’ in the name of the upper classes.