Massacre
Page 33
As more and more Communard prisoners arrived in Versailles, les honnêtes gens found new ways of condemning the defeated Communards. The claim that the riffraff from Paris were drunks was a popular notion that emerged in Versaillais discourse, with references to the dependence of ‘drunken commoners’ on absinthe, which was already ravaging the French population. Enemies often described the Communards as crapules, a term of extreme denigration that comes from the Latin word for drunkenness.20
Versaillais lore had insurgents supposedly storming into a restaurant on boulevard Saint-Martin, plunging into fine wines and liqueurs found in the cellar. When they had had their fill, the intruders supposedly announced that they planned to shoot ‘the brave soldiers’ attacking Paris. A loyal anti-Communard stepped forward and slapped ‘one of those bastards’, or so went the story. The Communards then pillaged the house, killing the honnêtes gens who opposed ‘their orgies’, and set fire to the establishment. When a panicked woman managed to extract her daughter from the flames, the Communards pushed both back in, and they burned to death. This, of course, never occurred, but that was of no matter to the honnêtes gens. Ironically, some of the Versaillais line soldiers who killed may have been drunk, the effects of the alcohol compounded by sun and fatigue.21
As thousands of prisoners awaited their fates in Versailles, ‘liberated’ Paris suffered ‘the sickness of denunciations’. Of all the horrendous statistics surrounding Bloody Week, one of the most chilling is that, between 22 May and 13 June, the Prefecture of Police received 379,823 denunciations of people accused of serving the Commune. Of these, only 5 per cent were actually signed. Of course, what makes this number so astonishing is the fact that those who denounced neighbours were very well aware that, if the Versailles authorities took the denunciations seriously and if the accusation seemed grave – simply being in favour of the Commune was taken seriously – execution could follow. To be sure, a few of these were attempts to settle personal debts or conflicts. Others may have hoped to receive the rumoured 500 francs for turning in a Communard. There were cases of denunciations leading to people being killed, as in the case of the Marquis de Forbin-Janson, who denounced some of his neighbours and tenants, leading to one of them being shot. One Parisian, acquitted by a court-martial, had been denounced seventeen times.22
On 1 June, two men, one wounded, turned up at the door of the house next to where Pastor Eugène Bersier and Marie Holland lived. Only the domestic was at home. They asked to be taken in, as they knew the nephew of the owner. The woman let them in and provided a bed for the wounded man. She then denounced them to the police. Soldiers arrived to take them away, one on a stretcher, the other walking head down, very pale. Marie Holland was sickened. The pastor received a visit from a certain M. Bockairy, who told her that she would be happy to learn that a Communard officer had been shot and that of his men ‘not one escaped’. The smug bourgeois seemed to her for a moment even more odious than the Communards she despised.23
With the return of the old civil police, police spies were everywhere, proudly sporting tricolour armbands. Jacques Durant, a fifty-three-year-old shoemaker who had been elected to the Commune from the Second Arrondissement, was denounced and hauled off to the mairie. After an interrogation of not more than two minutes, he was shot in a courtyard adjoining the church of the Petits-Pères. Édouard Moreau, who had opposed burning the Grenier de l’Abondance, was arrested after being denounced while hiding near rue Saint-Antoine. At Châtelet, Louis Vabre, the provost marshal, asked him if he was indeed M. Édouard Moreau, member of the Commune? Moreau replied, ‘No, of the Central Committee [of the National Guard].’ The response came immediately, ‘It’s the same thing!’ He was taken to Caserne Lobau and shot with another batch of victims.24
The denunciations primarily targeted ordinary people, reflecting the Versaillais assumption that one’s social class was marker enough of one’s involvement in the Commune. General Louis Valentin, serving Thiers as prefect of police, said that ‘the simple fact of having stayed in Paris under the Commune is a crime. Everyone there is to blame, and if I had my way everyone would be punished.’25 Many working-class Parisians had indeed supported the Commune, but even those who had not were targeted. Those left in Paris during the Commune were overwhelmingly working-class, unable to get out and with nowhere to go.
Prisoners identified as foreigners were singled out for particular vociferous contempt, primarily because foreigners who had remained in Paris during the Commune were assumed to be part of the International. One rumour had 10,000 Poles among the Communards. Denis Arthur Bingham noted that ‘virtuous Parisians claimed that the insurrection was the work of foreigners’ such as Italians and Poles. The conservative historian Hippolyte Taine subscribed to this belief, insisting that half of the 100,000 ‘insurgés’ were not French. The literary critic Paul de Saint-Victor denounced ‘Polish forgers, “gallant” Garibaldians [followers of the nationalist Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi], mercenary Slavic soldiers, Prussian agents, Yankee buccaneers stampeding in from of their battalions … Paris has become the sewer collecting the dregs and scum of two worlds.’ Some of the Poles had fought courageously but futilely against Russian ‘Congress Poland’ in 1863. For her part, Louise Lacroix insisted that ‘To love France, one has to be French.’26
Two Poles were executed after shots were fired from a building on rue de Tournon. They had been arrested and accused of having ‘spread terror in the entire quartier of Luxembourg’ during the Commune. After their execution, Count Czartoryski, president of the Polish Committee, complained; the ‘incendiary tools’ suspected by the Versaillais were, he insisted, simply lights for the Polish library on the street. One of the men had fought for the Commune, but the other, from Lithuania, had not – he ran the library and lived in the house. In any case, the role played by General Dombrowski in the Communard resistance helped fuel anger among Versaillais against the Poles. One officer, on hearing that prisoners brought before him were Polish, said, ‘Well, they’re Polish. That’s enough right there.’27
Contemporaries were virtually unanimous that the Communards about to be shot accepted their fate with heads held high. A Belgian journalist quoted soldiers who had been part of execution squads. One related that they had killed ‘forty of this rabble’ in Passy. They all died ‘as soldiers’, proudly, with arms folded across their chest. Some even opened their uniforms and shouted, ‘Go ahead and fire! We are not afraid of death.’28
A Versailles official went out to have a look for himself. He saw prisoners under escort and, counting twenty-eight of them, recognised some men with whom he had fought during the Prussian siege. Almost all of them were workers. Their faces ‘betrayed neither despair, nor despondence, nor emotion … they knew where they were being taken’. The Versaillais had not taken more than four steps when he heard the execution squad’s volley. The twenty-eight ‘insurgents’ fell. What he heard made him dizzy. But what made it worse was the series of individual shots that followed, the coups de grâce. He ran in the other direction, but ‘around me, the crowd seemed impassable’. Parisians were now used to it.
Even if the Communards died ‘as soldiers’, they were certainly not afforded the rights soldiers and even prisoners were owed according to international conventions. The Communard Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray came across young sailors in a bar on place Voltaire. He asked them, rather coyly, if there had been many dead among the ‘enemy’. ‘Ah’, replied one of them, ‘we were given orders by the general to take no prisoners.’ Young soldiers from the provinces were pushed by officers to kill anyone who had fought for the Commune. Versaillais soldiers with rural origins who might have resisted such an order had been inundated with anti-Parisian propaganda claiming that Parisians were evil, scoundrels, liars, thieves and degenerates who had turned their back on the Church.
Little more than two months earlier, line troops taken prisoner by the insurgents on Montmartre had been well treated. Now, thousands of Communards taken prisoner by
the Versaillais were gunned down. A few men were shot because they had the misfortune of somewhat resembling a prominent figure from the Commune. Such was the case of a shoemaker called Constant who lived in the bourgeois quartier of Gros-Caillou in the Seventh Arrondissement. He resembled the painter Alfred-Édouard Billioray, a member of the Commune. A certain Martin, taken to be Jules Vallès, was killed near Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, while a crowd roared its approval.29
The Versaillais discourse openly encouraged the policy of killing Communards, comparing the insurgents and those who supported them with brigands or wild animals, thus dehumanising them and justifying mass executions. Watching the lugubrious procession of prisoners on the way to Versailles, Augustine Blanchecotte castigated ‘these wild beasts, savage, raging … these are monsters who should be classified by zoologists. These are not men.’ According to Figaro, ‘One cannot have any illusions. More than 50,000 insurgents remain in Paris … What is a republican? A wild animal.’30
Théophile Gautier agreed: ‘In all the great cities there are lion pits, caverns closed with thick bars where all the wild beasts, smelly animals, venomous snakes and all the perverted resisters who civilisation could not tame are to be found; those who love blood and adore fire as one does holiday fireworks, all those delighted by theft, those for whom attacks on decency represent love, all those who are monsters to the core, all those with deformities of the soul, a filthy population, unknown to this day, who swarm ominously in the depths of underground darkness.’ One day, he went on, a guard loses the keys to the zoo ‘and the ferocious animals scatter throughout the terrified city with terrifying savage shrieks. Their cages now open, the hyenas of 1793 and the gorillas of the Commune rush out.’31
Female Communard prisoners resembled, for Gaultier, ‘the bearded and moustached sorcerers of Shakespeare, a hideous variety of hermaphrodite, formed by ugliness drawn from both sexes’. He mocked ‘the horrible, inextinguishable, burning thirst of these scoundrels, infected by alcohol, combat, their journey, intense heat, the fever of intense situations and the torment of their coming death … crying out with husky and hoarse voices now lubricated only by saliva: “Water! Water! Water!”’32
Henri Opper de Blowitz, a German journalist who after becoming naturalised worked for Thiers, visited a Versailles prison during the Commune. He became obsessed with a young woman he observed from a safe distance beyond the fence, describing what he saw as if he had returned from visiting a zoo. She was ‘one of the most beautiful women’ he had ever beheld: ‘Her long black tresses fell over her bare shoulders, and as she had torn her dress to shreds, not to wear the clothes of the ‘accursed Versaillaise’, one could see her naked body through the rents. She was tall and graceful, and on the approach of visitors she reared her head proudly, like a horse about to neigh … her bright eyes glisten[ed]; a blush teint took over her face. She compressed her lips, ground her teeth, and burst into a shrill, defiant, vindictive laugh when she recognised the officer of the prison who accompanied us.’ In the final hours of the Commune, the young woman had apparently fought alongside her lover. When he was killed, or so the Versaillais story went, she attacked a Versaillais officer and ‘furiously stabbed him, plunging her weapon again and again into her victim. Before she could be removed from his body, she had cut, bitten and torn it with all the fury of a hyena.’ The young woman had been taken to Versailles covered with blood and ‘she had to be bound and gagged before she would allow the blood to be washed off. Hideous!’33
Maxime Du Camp, writer and friend of Gustave Flaubert, nuanced this biological discourse. The Commune, he explained, had been caused by ‘furious envy and social epilepsy’. It reflected conditions that had always existed, ‘a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil, civilisation and barbarism, order against anarchy, and intelligence opposed to stupidity … work and finally the very idea of the elite of society against the jumble of all that is evil, perverse and bestial’.
Women were particularly suspect in these accounts. Le Gaulois quoted a doctor, who insisted that the female incendiaries were acting: ‘under the epidemic influence of the incendiary mania … their brain is weaker and their sensibility more lively. They also are one hundred times more dangerous, and they have caused without any doubt much more evil.’ Some accounts emphasised that ‘female incendiaries’, as well as other female insurgents, wore men’s clothing, such as parts of National Guard uniforms. The point of such descriptions was to point out how unnatural, and thus subversive, they appeared to them.34
A bourgeois who visited the Chantiers prison distinguished between women who had ‘an honest and proper appearance’ and others whose rags and wild hair were taken to indicate ‘their moral state and social position’. Journalists and curious bourgeois seemed obsessed with the physical appearance of women, particularly when it came to unflattering characteristics.35
Louise Lacroix stared at the female prisoners. Some, who were clearly workers, ‘dressed modestly’, and some very young ones who had probably spent their childhoods in workshops or factories seemed old before their time. In her view, these were not the women ‘who would be going out preaching insanities on the rights of women’. At the head of this particular group strode ‘a large creature, about forty or forty-five years of age, with two large headbands’. To the hostile onlooker, the woman seemed more masculine than feminine, with robust arms. Next to her was a small, pale, blonde woman, about eighteen to twenty years of age, ‘slender, gracious’ in a skirt of grey silk who had to walk rapidly to keep up. On her right cheek, black gunpowder and strands of hair partially covered a smear of blood. Lacroix had certainly never before seen ‘women marching with such determination towards certain death’. A tall brown-haired woman raised her arms above her head and shouted in a voice both calm and convincing, ‘They killed my man and I avenged him. I die content. Long live the Commune!’36
The widespread belief among the Versaillais that the Commune had in part been the work of ‘uppity’ and ‘unnatural’ women may help explain the brutal treatment some women faced after being arrested. Rapes were reported in the First, Eighth and Ninth Arrondissements. Georges Jeanneret saw women ‘being treated almost like the poor Arabs of an insurgent tribe: after they had killed them, they stripped them, while they were still in their death throes, of part of their clothing. Sometimes they went even further, as at the foot of the faubourg Montmartre and in the place Vendôme, where women were left naked and defiled on the pavements.’ Versaillais soldiers ripped away the blouses of women and corpses to reveal their breasts, to the amusement of hostile onlookers. In one instance, troops killed with bayonets a young woman about eighteen to twenty years of age, then they removed all her clothes, ‘cynically tossing her beautiful body, still throbbing, in the corner of the street, after having odiously insulted all of her charms’.37 Undressing served as the kind of humiliation some believed was required to put things back in their proper order. The fury of upper-class onlookers, particularly women, towards women assumed to be female insurgents reflected a desire to point out the potential danger of women forgetting their place.
Versaillais newspapers shouted for more vengeance to clean the contagious Communard stain from the city. Le Figaro demanded a complete purge of Paris: ‘Never has such an opportunity presented itself to cure Paris of the moral gangrene which has eaten away at it for the last twenty years … Today clemency would be completely crazy … Let’s go, honnêtes gens! Help us finish with the democratic and socialist vermin.’ Goncourt compared the repression to a therapeutic bloodletting. Le Bien public called for a ‘hunt for the Communards’, and that was what it got. The Journal des Débats reasoned that the army had now ‘avenged its incalculable disasters [in the Franco-Prussian War] by a victory’. Le Figaro saluted the ‘General enterprise of sweeping Paris clean’. All the guilty ‘should be executed’. Similar calls came from overseas. The New York Herald advised ‘no cessation of summary judgment and summary execution … Root them out, destroy them utterly, M. Thie
rs, if you would save France. No mistaken humanity.’38
The goal now was to protect and restore Paris so that it might once again be deserving of the honnêtes gens who had once flourished there. ‘Honesty’ became the word of the day. La Patrie, for one, made it clear that if Paris ‘wants to conserve its privilege of being the rendez-vous of the honest and fashionable beau monde, it owes it to itself and to its invited visitors a security that nothing can trouble … Examples are indispensable, a fatal necessity, but a necessity.’ Marshal Patrice MacMahon pointed out that, now that the Commune had been crushed, he could finally ‘address [himself] to the honest population of Paris’, by which he meant the upper classes on whose behalf Versaillais forces were carrying out the massacre.39 Those who had supported the Commune had no illusions about Paris’s future, knowing full well that Thiers, along with his army and his government, would purge the city of any traces of the Commune or its ideals. When Henri Rochefort arrived in a convoy of prisoners in Versailles, a man ‘in a cinnamon coloured frock coat … waving a beautiful red umbrella, shouted at the top of his lungs: “It’s Rochefort! He must be skinned alive!”’ Rochefort had to stifle a laugh – the man was indeed ‘the type of ferocious bourgeois such as Daumier painted for us’. Jules Simon identified civilisation with the power of the bourgeoisie: ‘One overturns aristocracy, which is a privilege … One does not overturn the bourgeoisie, one attains it.’ Pierre Vésinier, a journalist and Communard who survived, assessed: ‘The victorious bourgeoisie showed neither pity nor mercy. It had sworn to annihilate the revolutionary and socialist proletariat for ever – to drown it in its own blood. Never had a better occasion presented itself; and it profited by it with ferocious joy.’