Massacre

by John M. Merriman

  That evening, Communards mounted a sturdy defence at pont d’Austerlitz, with a half-circular barricade stretching between the quai on the Left Bank and the boulevard de l’Hôpital. In an artillery battle, the Commune lost twenty-six people, and had to abandon the first barricade. Soon the Versaillais had crossed the bridge and taken the quai de la Râpée and then Bercy. Losing ground, Communards set fire to the Grenier d’Abondance beyond Gare de Lyon, a measure to prevent the Versaillais from going around the sturdy defences of the place de la Bastille and firing down on fédérés from the imposing structure. Its smoke filled the skyline, giving off an awful stench of burning oil and codfish.2

  Not far away, Émile Maury ditched his weapon and National Guard uniform. He walked down boulevard Mazas (now Diderot) towards the Seine. A few barricades were still going up, including one in front of his apartment building. An enormous barricade still stood on rue de Charonne. But not many people were left to defend these improvised defensive structures. Maury saw what was coming: ‘The noose is getting tighter … the Commune begins its agony.’3

  And, although randomness and serendipity continued to be features of the killings, the violent repression was increasingly organised, especially in and around north-eastern Paris, where the fighting continued. The army had become ‘a vast execution squad’ as it continued to move towards the last bastions of Communard resistance in northern and eastern Paris. There Communards had had more time to prepare their defence.4

  All Communard discipline had evaporated. Improbable suggestions surfaced in the mairie of the Eleventh Arrondissement – to form an entire column of remaining fédérés and recapture Montmartre, or march into the centre of Paris and take it again. Charles Delescluze was prepared to die. After an unsuccessful trek to Porte de Vincennes to convince the Prussians to intervene to save lives by arranging a truce,5 he now sat quietly at a small table in the mairie on boulevard Voltaire. His continuing insistence that all was not lost belied what he knew. He calmly wrote out a few orders. At one point he held his head in his hands, repeating, ‘What a war! What a war!’ His only hope was that he would die without shame, that ‘we also, we will know how to die’. His mot d’ordre remained duty. Delescluze said simply, ‘I don’t want any more. No, everything is finished for me’. He wrote to a friend to say that he would await the judgement of history on the Commune, and to his sister to say goodbye, confiding the letters to a friend.

  Wearing, as always, a frock coat, patent leather boots, a silk hat, and a red sash around his waist, he walked with Commune member François Jourde and about fifty national guardsmen towards the barricades at place du Château d’eau, which were under Versaillais attack. They passed Maxime Lisbonne, who had been badly wounded during the courageous, tenacious Communard defence, being carried by Auguste Vermorel and Victor Jaclard. At a barricade, Vermorel fell wounded. Delescluze shook his hand. As the sun set and bullets whizzed by, national guardsmen urged Delescluze to take shelter. But he kept walking, straight ahead very slowly to a barricade. Jourde moved away after the two friends shook hands. Delescluze stood on the barricade, awaiting death. It came in a matter of seconds. Four men ran forward to get his body and three of them were shot. Delescluze’s body lay where it had fallen for several days, a courageous martyr for a cause whose end was approaching.6

  Eugène Varlin replaced Delescluze as Delegate for War, but his tenure would not be long. Jaclard and a badly wounded Vermorel were carried to a building on boulevard Voltaire, where they managed to avoid arrest thanks to the quick thinking of the person who had taken them in. But near Parc Monceau their luck ran out and they were arrested.7

  The Commune’s leadership was almost entirely annihilated, but still the violence persisted. Anti-Communards sporting tricolour armbands contributed to the carnage. Organised secretly before Adolphe Thiers’s troops entered Paris, such armbands had been prepared in advance as marks of identification. Those wearing them now took on the role of military police, organising searches and setting themselves up in mairies that had been abandoned by the Commune. They responded to the wave of denunciations that began to arrive after each neighbourhood had been secured, carrying out arbitrary arrests. In a typical case, a concierge indicated to a man wearing a Versaillais armband that ‘Monsieur B. buys lots of newspapers, perhaps he is hiding someone, perhaps a Communard.’8

  Clearly Bloody Week provided French officers with a way of restoring morale and prestige after their inglorious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and their failure to hold onto Paris in March. The National Guard seemed to be the antithesis of the French army: it accepted its men from all social classes, and many, including some officers, were ordinary workers. This flew in the face of the values of the professional army and its aristocratic leadership. Members of the officer corps, many of whom despised the Commune and all who stood for it, distrusted their few republican colleagues. The arrogant Ernest de Cissey hated the Commune and was eager to take revenge. Joseph Vinoy, who had been humiliated after the surrender of France to Prussia, and had been marked as a ‘capitulard’ (defeatist) and identified with the failure to seize the cannons on Montmartre, awaited the chance to settle scores. He offered no apologies for the executions ‘of modern barbarians’. General Félix Douay played a lesser role in the mass killings, having turned operations at Châtelet over to Colonel Louis Vabre, who gleefully presided over the prévôtal court. Justin Clinchant, who had moderate republican sympathies, forbade the shooting of prisoners in parts of Paris under his control, but he was one of the few officers who did anything to hinder the executions. Lesser officers followed the instructions of those who commanded them, yet with some variation depending on personalities, attitudes towards the Communards, and circumstances.9

  Paul de Ladmirault was one officer who resisted the urge towards violent reprisals to which his colleagues were succumbing. He was from an old aristocratic, Catholic and military family from Touraine which had lost land during the Revolution. His father fought in 1792 against the Revolution, and there was no doubt that Paul would fight against the Commune eighty years later. Hearing the volleys of an execution squad, Ladmirault insisted that he did not like ‘summary justice’ because of the potential for errors. On seeing several pale, frightened Communards who were about to be executed, he stopped the firing squad and asked them if the Communards had fired at the soldiers or were carrying weapons. The squad said they hadn’t, but the captives’ hands were blackened, possibly by gunpowder. Ladmirault told his soldiers that the fate of the prisoners would be up to judges and not to them. He expressed some sympathy for ordinary Communards who had joined the National Guard in order to receive the 1.5 francs per day. At one point, Ladmirault watched a badly wounded prisoner being taken in a convoy to Versailles. Barely alive, he raised his hand and fixed his eyes on his captors. With what remained of his voice, he told them, ‘The insurgents are you!’10 Ladmirault may have been affected by the accusation, but he did not retaliate in anger as others might have. He was by far one of the least murderous of his fellow commanders.

  The mentality of the soldiers themselves also contributed to the violence of Bloody Week. Negative images of Paris, particularly Montmartre and Belleville, abounded in Versailles and across France. The propaganda seemed to have had the desired effect. In late April, for instance, Le Soir warned its readers that, once the Commune had fallen, property in Paris would require fumigation. For its part, Le Gaulois related that residents of Belleville had taken over homes in prosperous Passy and that ‘all your cupboards and your wine cellar have been broken into … men and women lay in your beds’.11 Soldiers conscripted from rural areas, especially those from regions with a relatively high degree of religious practice, such as Brittany and Normandy, were particularly opposed to the Commune, which in propaganda and in reality had taken aim at the Church.

  Of course, soldiers also acted on the orders of their leaders. In the view of Jules Bergeret, a Commune member from the Twentieth Arrondissement, Versaillais troops entering P
aris had received orders ‘to give no quarter’. A municipal policeman related that he had proceeded with the execution of a Pole, referring to ‘the orders of the Marshal [Patrice de MacMahon] and also those of the Minister of War … [which were] definite concerning deserters and foreigners who have served the Commune’. MacMahon knew what was going on, though perhaps not the exact extent. Like Thiers, he did not forbid or denounce the shooting of prisoners, at least those taken with weapons. General Alexandre Montaudon, for one, excused the summary executions, claiming that the soldiers took the initiative, following the orders of their officers. But he had to admit that hatred existed among soldiers for ‘the agents of this awful civil war’, which they had fomented in ‘their meetings and in their [political] clubs’.12

  One woman bragged that her brother, a ‘distinguished’ officer in the army, had ordered the shooting of 400 ‘obstinate insurgents … at the last barricades of Belleville’. She added, ‘The cowards! They were crying!’ Another Parisian ran into a policeman who proudly stated that he had killed more than sixty people himself and that ‘the cowards’ had asked for mercy.13

  Soldiers and commanders alike frequently compared Communards to colonial ‘barbarians’. Théophile Gautier described them as ‘savages, a ring through their noses, tattooed in red, dancing a scalp dance on the smoking debris of society’. Gaston Galliffet once contrasted the Communards with North African Arabs, whom the French army had been brutalising for forty years: ‘The Arabs have a God and a country; Communards have neither.’14 Another general noted that, ‘If given the choice between Arabs and these rioters, I would easily choose the Arabs as adversaries.’ Many of the line troops had fought in Algeria, Mexico and even China, and, in their view, the Communards no more qualified as French than the insurgents they encountered abroad. Alphonse Daudet, another anti-Communard, intoned that Paris had been ‘in the power of negroes’.15

  Charles de Montrevel held that, of the Parisians who participated in ‘this immense orgy’, by which he meant the Commune, most were ‘lower-class provincials’. His view associated large-scale immigration to large urban centres with social and political turmoil, as newcomers were torn away from traditional rural roots, including family and organised religion, which might have kept them in check. The result was a collective psychosis. This and no other would be the verdict of history, Montrevel believed. Gustave de Molinari was also sure of it. In his eyes, immigration from the provinces into plebeian, peripheral neighbourhoods had made Paris into ‘a sort of interior California’. What was to be done to prevent the government becoming ‘subject to a harsh slavery’ at the hands of such people?16

  A man originally from Bourdeaux living in the capital during the Commune had little good to say about the Parisians, whom he considered to be ‘artificial creatures’: ‘The true Parisian, eternally and tiringly cheeky, [is] incapable of a serious and deep sentiment [and] laughs or is ready to laugh wherever, on any occasion: he respects nothing, believes in nothing.’ Thus the Parisian was incapable of making political decisions but, rather, quietly awaited orders from ‘stronger minds and free-thinkers, ornaments of common bars’.17 If they could not be political actors in their own right – as the much-despised Commune made all too clear – stronger forces would have to come in and set things right, even if doing so entailed unprecedented violence.

  MacMahon, the one man who might have put an end to the executions, turned a blind eye to what was happening in Paris. On 25 May, Jules Ferry reported that three of his generals had ordered the execution of captured ‘insurgent leaders’. MacMahon claimed to have reminded the generals of his orders to send prisoners who surrendered to the courts-martial at Versailles.18 In the end, however, MacMahon simply allowed the slaughter to go on.19

  Whatever MacMahon professed to Ferry, however, his commanders seem never to have received the order to send prisoners to Versailles. Commanders often ordered that Communards taken prisoner with weapons should be shot, although, to repeat, whether someone lived or died depended on individual officers. Cissey had no qualms at all – he notified General François du Barail that anyone found fighting for the Commune was to be executed. The missive reached Thiers, who knew very well about the summary shooting of prisoners and did nothing to stop it. In sharp contrast, General Clinchant, a moderate republican, may have attempted to put an end to executions at Parc Monceau.20

  However, some generals, like Gaston Galliffet, ‘the star of the Tricolour Terror’, took matters into their own hands and handed down instantaneous life-or-death decisions. Galliffet bragged that he had killed seventy Communards himself. When a woman threw herself at his feet begging for her husband’s life to be spared, the general replied, ‘Madame, I have attended all the theatres in Paris; it serves nothing to put on this performance.’ The number of prisoners Galliffet ordered killed in the Bois-de-Boulogne will never be known, but he revelled in his infamy, once crowing that he would rather be known as ‘a great murderer than taken for a little assassin’. He announced, with pride, ‘Above all, to the highest degree, I have disdain for the lives of others.’ He yelled at a convoy of prisoners, including Louise Michel, ‘I am Galliffet! People of Montmartre, you think me a cruel man. You’re going to find out that I am much crueller than even you imagined!’21

  Although these executions stemmed from the murderous hatred of Versaillais of all ranks, and although they could seem haphazard to those who witnessed them, the massacre was organised. Even before the Army of Versailles entered Paris, Thiers had organised courts-martial to be held there. He fully expected that his troops would be executing Communards in the city. Given this kind of foresight, there is no reason to believe that he intended his men to keep all prisoners alive and bring them back to Versailles. After his troops entered Paris, they had organised two of the main centres for executions by at least 23 May at Parc Monceau (where fifteen men and a woman had been shot the day before) and the École militaire. The killings then proceeded systematically.22

  Journalist Camille Pelletan, a Communard, was convinced that the massacres were planned, and that lists of people to be arrested and killed existed. She thought that the Versailles troops encountering so little resistance, particularly upon their entry into Paris on 21 May, made it even more difficult to excuse the mass killings. ‘Most [Communards], discouraged, gave up the struggle; only a handful of men, resolute, scattered, remained to defend the Commune.’ Pelletan had it right when he insisted that the massacre was much more than ‘a ferocious repression undertaken against the fédérés’. It was directed ‘against all of Paris, and not just against supporters of the Commune’. Nothing like it had been seen in the capital since the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when Catholics had slaughtered Protestants. To Thiers and his entourage, Paris was the enemy and merited ‘a considerable, rapid massacre’. Thiers boasted in a speech of 24 May, ‘I shed torrents of [Parisian] blood’.23 And indeed, he did.

  Those interrogated were routinely asked, ‘Were you part of the Commune? You were there! It is written all over your face. Your age? Your name? Where are your identity papers? Well … Go!’ This meant death. One victim was asked if he had participated in the insurrection. ‘He’s a scoundrel [coquin]’, said a soldier. The presiding officer responded, ‘Classé [kill him].’24

  There is thus truth to Pelletan’s claim that the Versaillais had all of Paris in their sights, not just the Communards. Although Thiers’s forces targeted some groups in particular, of course, some troops seemed eager to find any reason to kill those they encountered. They were by no means careful or discerning. One such unlucky victim was Jean-Baptiste Millière, who was arrested on Friday, although he had not participated in the Commune. When a captain named Garcin asked him if his name was Millière, he replied in the affirmative and said that surely the officer knew he had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Garcin said he did, but it made no difference to him. General Cissey was having a nice lunch in a nearby restaurant. When an officer interrupted his meal to relate
Millière’s arrest, Cissey ordered his immediate execution, between mouthfuls of ‘the pear and the cheese’. When Millière asked why he, a deputy, was to die, Garcin said he had read some of his articles and considered him to be a ‘viper on which one should stomp’. The general ordered Millière to be shot at the Panthéon, on his knees, and forced ‘to ask pardon of the society to which you have done evil’. Millière refused to kneel and opened his shirt to receive the bullets. Garcin had two soldiers throw him to his knees. The deputy shouted, ‘Long live humanity!’ and started to say something more before shots silenced him.25

  Social class could determine life or death. Middle-class Communards were more likely to talk their way out of encounters with Versaillais. Sutter-Laumann survived because he washed carefully, combed his hair, and spoke ‘without a working-class accent in good French’ when stopped by an officer of the Volunteers of the Seine. If those who were stopped spoke the argot of the Parisian street and workplace, execution usually followed. An officer interrogated a man at a barricade on rue Houdon: ‘Who are you?’ ‘A mason’, the man replied. ‘So, now it’s masons who are going to command!’ The officer shot the man dead on the spot.26 Social stigmatisation led to massacre.

  Captured foreigners had little chance of surviving, because their presence in Paris corresponded to one image of the Commune as, in part, the work of good-for-nothing Poles, Russians, Germans and members of the International. Responding to a question from a Versaillais with a foreign accent could prove immediately fatal, as could having an ‘exotic’ name. Men over the age of 40, French or foreign, were particular targets. There is an infamous story of Galliffet ‘reviewing’ a convoy of prisoners on their way to Versailles and pulling several out to be shot immediately because they had grey hair – and thus had presumably fought with the insurgents in the June Days of 1848.