Massacre

  Show trials like Courbet’s were intended to reassure the upper classes about the efficiency of the repression. A lawyer called before a court-martial expressed outrage at what he had seen, ‘men led like worthless livestock; chained, insulted by a cowardly and idiotic crowd’. He was proud to defend defeated Communards, who, for the most part, did nothing more than raise up a flag, ‘that of Misery’.23

  In trials of suspected female incendiaries, ‘moral’ considerations – ‘living in sin’, children born out of wedlock, the lack of a ‘good’ family background, and so on – undoubtedly influenced the harshness of the sentences. The Versaillais image of the militant female insurrectionary would linger on, and along with the ‘drunken commoner’ idea would influence the emergence of crowd psychology; crowds were described as having characteristics drawn from anti-Communard discourse, as individual identities were subsumed in and overwhelmed by irrational, emotional, flighty behaviour, the way female incendiaries supposedly behaved, or lurching irrationally like drunks.24

  During her trial, Louise Michel proudly faced the judges, telling them that, although she always dressed in black, she had never been without her red belt since the proclamation of the Republic on 4 September. Looking as severe as always, Michel denounced the execution of hostages, insisting that the Commune ‘had had absolutely nothing to do with assassinations or burning’. Social revolution had been its goal. She flatly stated that she would ‘have had no hesitation about shooting people who gave orders’ to execute Communard prisoners, resolving at one point to assassinate Thiers. She was ‘honoured to be singled out as one of the promoters of the Commune’. She swore ‘by our martyrs who fell on the field of Satory’ that if the judges did not condemn her to death, she would ‘not stop crying for vengeance … If you are not cowards, then kill me.’ The judges condemned her to deportation, but not to death, probably believing that her execution would make her a martyr. When asked at the court-martial if she had ever had an intimate relationship with a man – the goal apparently being to see if she had been involved with Théophile Ferré – the ‘Red Virgin’ replied, ‘No, my only passion is the revolution.’25

  Disguised as a woman, Ferré had managed to avoid arrest for several days after the Commune fell, before being taken prisoner in a house on rue Montorgueil. He refused to answer interrogators’ questions and was condemned to death and shot that same day on the plain of Satory. Gustave Genton and Jean-Baptiste François were both condemned and shot there. The following summer, prisoners were still being dispatched at Satory. Communard General Louis Rossel was recognised in disguise on boulevard Saint-Germain on 7 June. He, too, was shot at Satory in November. Before dying, he wrote, ‘I shall never regret having tried to demolish that bastard oligarchy, the French bourgeoisie.’ On 29 June 1872, in a perfect display of show trials at work, a court-martial sentenced Raoul Rigault to death, although he had actually been executed thirteen months earlier. Another court-martial in November sentenced Eugène Varlin to death, although he, too, had already been brutally killed eighteen months before.26

  The official government inquest into the Commune predictably blamed socialists (and specifically the International), anarchists and the weak-ening of the influence of the Church for the ‘moral disorder’ of the Commune. It exuded conservative hostility to Paris, noting that immigration brought together masses of people ready for revolution and suggesting that the city should cease to be the capital of France. Paris would not again have the right to have a mayor for over a century, until 1977. The government dissolved the National Guard and the next year banned the International. Thiers insisted that the strength of France was inseparable from ‘a nation that believes’ in God. The government report saluted the repression as ‘a painful necessity. Society is obliged to defend itself.’ But this was not enough. France had to ‘again rejoin the path of civilisation’. The elimination of the ‘unhealthy’ parts of society had an important role in this effort. A massacre was a good start.27

  Between the end of the Commune and 1873, some 300 books appeared that supported the official version of events. These accounts saluted the Versaillais victory and castigated the ‘Vandals’ and ‘barbarians’ of the Commune; Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Daudet and other literary figures published their attacks on the Communards. The Versaillais interpretation of the Commune, seeking to justify the bloody repression, remained dominant through the time of the ‘Republic of Moral Order’, which lasted until 1877. Twenty-one years later, an anti-Semitic priest, horrified by the advent to power in France of people who had once supported the Commune, argued that the repression in 1871 had been ‘perhaps still too mild!’28

  It is not surprising that the government account became the predominant one in the years immediately following the Commune during the conservative ‘Republic of the Moral Order’. In fact, Communards were still being persecuted: twenty-four military courts continued to meet, some as late as four years after the Commune fell. In all, an official government report noted 36,309 arrests and 10,137 condemnations, including those sent to New Caledonia, the French penal colony in the south-west Pacific Ocean. ‘Deserters’ – that is, former soldiers who fought with the Commune who had not already been shot – faced particularly harsh sentences. Again, specific quartiers identified with the left were targeted; military courts condemned to deportation more than 700 Communards who lived in Montmartre. Many more than that were shot or simply disappeared.29

  Thousands of prisoners endured long, miserable trips in animal wagons to fort and ship prisons and pontoons – floating prisons – at Brest, La Rochelle, Rochefort, Cherbourg, Oléron, Lorient or Ile-de-Ré. Prisoners received only a piece of bread to eat and water from two tin cans, and no opportunity ‘to get down in order to take care of the most legitimate need!’ This was better than being gunned down, but prisoners still suffered greatly, and not all believed they were lucky. A song the prisoners sang included the line: ‘Prison is worse than death.’30

  Louise Michel and Nathalie Le Mel were among more than 4,500 people deported to the South Seas. After two years of incarceration in prison, they were transported in August 1873 from Paris to Rochefort, where they boarded the Virginie to be kept kept in steel cages, along with as many as 150 prisoners, who had neither natural light nor fresh air, and were weighted down by a suffocating tropical humidity. Some of the prisoners had small children, including one child born in the Versailles prison of Les Chantiers. The prisoners received little in the way of rations and were limited to a litre of water per day. Le Mel was among those violently ill on the long voyage to Hell. Michel penned poetry describing the awful trip of more than five months.

  Finally, the Virginie arrived in the Bay of Nouméa, which had, like Rome, Michel noted with irony, seven bluish hills. Those prisoners condemned to forced labour were taken to the island of Noua four kilometres away, where they suffered from exhausting work and punishments inflicted by brutal guards. Louise Michel was taken with a group of prisoners who had been condemned to deportation within a fortified compound to the island of Ducos, six miles from Tomo, New Caledonia. Guards made the conditions of the prisoners even worse, depriving them of bread and inflicting other calculated cruelties upon them. There they did the best they could, digging small gardens and building a small school. They were forced to survive without a doctor and lacked even the most basic medications and bandages to care for wounds and injuries. By the end of 1873, forty of them had died.31

  Michel’s complaints about the conditions and relating the suffering of Le Mel brought no improvement. She took the side of the Kanaks, the indigenous people of New Caledonia, who rebelled against French rule in 1878. A year later Michel won the right to move to Nouméa, the capital of the largest island, and teach the children of prisoners there. During her seven years in New Caledonia, Michel, having seen the repressive might of the French state up close in France and in New Caledonia, became an anarchist.

  The number of Communards who perished at the hands of Versaillais force
s is still a matter of debate.32 Conservative accounts accuse the Communards of mass murder, estimating that 66 or perhaps 68 hostages had been killed. The Versaillais, on the other hand, summarily executed without any real trial as many as 17,000 people, a figure given by the official government report that followed. The municipal council paid for that number of burials after Bloody Week. But some estimates have reached as high as 35,000.

  Bodies were left in vacant lots, piled into immense ditches, construction sites, and abandoned or torched buildings, tossed into the Seine or into mass graves, including those at the Square Saint-Jacques, near the Caserne Lobau, or beyond the city walls. Thousands of bodies simply disappeared, covered with lime, burnt or disposed of in other ways, for example hauled to cemeteries outside of Paris, or buried at the gas factory. Others ended up in the cemeteries of Montparnasse, Montmartre, or Père Lachaise. Many bodies were burnt, as at Buttes-Chaumont. More than 1,500 corpses were buried in the Nineteenth Arrondissement. Montmartre, along with Belleville, was prominent among quartiers specifically targeted because of its identification with Communard militancy – at least 2,000 people were killed in the Twentieth Arrondissement alone.33

  When newspapers asked to publish lists of those executed on the orders of prévôtal courts, they were told that this was not possible because these instant courts-martial kept no records. Many people simply disappeared, nameless victims. When the bodies of Communards who had been shot could be identified, authorities refused to allow their families to place flowers or anything else on their graves for four months.34

  A subsequent survey carried out by members of the municipal council of Paris concluded improbably that more than 100,000 workers had been killed, held prisoner, or taken flight. The estimate may have been much too high, but the working class of Paris was inarguably depleted. Comparing the 1872 census with that of 1866, half of the 24,000 shoemakers were not to be found, nor were 10,000 of 30,000 tailors, 6,000 of 20,000 cabinetmakers and 1,500 of 8,500 bronze workers, with only somewhat less striking figures among plumbers and roofers, and other trades from which militant Communards were drawn. Well after the Commune, industrialists and small employers complained about the paucity of artisans and skilled workers.35

  Maxime Vuillaume got it right when trying to assess the number of those massacred by the Versaillais, asking, ‘Who will ever know?’ Louise Michel wondered, ‘But how many were there that we know nothing of? From time to time, the earth disgorges its corpses.’ Paris had become ‘an immense slaughterhouse and … we will never know the names nor the number of victims.’36 This remains true today.

  Soon after the crushing of the Commune, class hatred intensified. The social question came to dominate politics in France and in other countries, and contemporaries attributed this to the short-lived Paris Commune. From London Karl Marx concluded that the Paris Commune was not the anticipated social revolution that would free the proletariat. That, he insisted, would come. Yet workers had risen up spontaneously, so he was reassured. Lenin would add the leadership of the avant-garde of the proletariat, ultimately the Bolsheviks, thus turning away from an emphasis on the revolutionary spontaneity of workers. For his part, the British positivist Frederic Harrison, writing just after the Commune had fallen, concluded that, for the first time in modern European history, ‘the workmen of the chief city of the Continent have organised a regular government in the name of a new social order’, in opposition to the rich and powerful who benefited from state centralisation to consolidate ‘vast and ever-increasing hoards of wealth, opening to the wealthy enchanted realms of idleness, luxury and waste – laying on the labourer, generation after generation, increasing burdens of toil, destitution and despair’. To Jean Allemane, the massacres during Bloody Week sadly demonstrated ‘that the bourgeois soul contains egotism and cold cruelty’. A short history of the Commune published after its demise noted that for the victorious bourgeoisie, ‘extermination’ had been ‘the only word with them’. British authors argued that history would ultimately salute the overall humanity of the Communards, which still today seems true enough. For sixty-four days, ordinary Parisians had been ‘masters of their own destinies’.37 But their dream was not to be.

  Thiers had managed to destroy the Commune. But the massacre perpetuated by Thiers’s troops during and after Bloody Week would cast a long shadow over the following century. Despite the execution of hostages and the massacres of the Dominicans – totalling about 66 or 68 – these tragedies perpetrated by the Communards pale in comparison with the approximately 12,000–15,000 executions carried out by the Army of Versailles. Indeed the Communards were overall – despite their level of verbal violence – very careful to show they were not going to behave like the Versaillais. State violence was organised and systematic, as would be even more the case in the twentieth century.38 For the ‘hommes d’ordre’, as a Versaillais magistrate memorably thundered, ‘In Paris, the whole population was guilty!’ One could hear shouts of ‘The brigands! We must exterminate them to the last one!’ Another anti-Communard dreamed of ‘an immense furnace in which we will cook each of them in turn’.39 There would be nothing like the slaughter perpetuated by the Versaillais until the atrocities against the Armenians in 1915 during the First World War and such language would not be heard again until the Nazi genocide and other mass murders with victims chosen by race or ethnicity, including the tragic events in the Balkans during the 1990s towards the end of the cruel, bloody twentieth century.

  Adolphe Thiers, whom the National Assembly named the first president of the Third Republic on 31 August 1871, got back most of his works of art that had been taken to the Tuileries, as well as a huge sum the government paid him for the loss of his house. Jules Ducatel, who had signalled to Versaillais troops on 21 May that no one was guarding the Point-du-Jour, received government honours. In 1877 he lost a job when accused of theft. Colonel Louis Vabre, who oversaw mass murder at the court-martial at Châtelet, was decorated with the Legion d’honneur.40

  Thiers died in 1873. Paris remained under martial law until early 1876. Workers’ associations struggled in the repression that followed the Commune and only slowly revived. The Third French Republic survived the attempt by the monarchist President Marshal Patrice de MacMahon to bring about its destruction by parliamentary coup d’état, the so-called Crisis of 16 May 1877. He dismissed the moderate republican Prime Minister Jules Simon, but the Chamber of Deputies refused to support the appointment of a prominent monarchist to head the new government. New elections brought a republican majority.

  Gradually the Third French Republic took root in provincial France and statues celebrating it were inaugurated in villages squares. In Paris the place du Château d’eau became the place de la République, with a grand monument celebrating the new government. The Hôtel de Ville purchased one of Gustave Courbet’s paintings. La Marseillaise became the French national anthem in 1879. A highly contested partial amnesty for Communards came in 1879, followed by a complete amnesty on 11 July 1880. Thousands of French men and women returned from exile and imprisonment in distant places, including many of those who had been condemned for years to impossibly harsh conditions in New Caledonia.41

  That year, 14 July, Bastille Day, was celebrated as a national holiday for the first time. Thousands of people greeted Louise Michel at Gare Saint-Lazare when she returned to France in November 1880. The first French mass socialist parties took shape during the following two decades. French unions grew in strength following their legalisation in 1881. Gradually the dominance of the Versaillais discourse in the collective memory of the Paris Commune ebbed. With the rooting of the Third Republic, above all with the national elections of the early 1880s, the Commune gradually began to be seen as a founding moment, however contested, in its history.42 It has become a major, positive event in French national history.

  But, even after these developments, there were still moments of bloody repression. On 1 May 1890, Louise Michel led the first demonstration of French workers on what
became an international holiday. A year later, French troops gunned down demonstrators supporting a strike in the small northern working-class town of Fourmies. Ten people were killed, including four young women, the youngest sixteen years of age, and twenty-four people were wounded, including children. The ‘rafle’, or police roundup of ‘suspects’, took shape in working-class neighbourhoods during the 1890s. By 1900 Paris was presented in guidebooks as ‘pacified’ and well policed – the ‘forces of order’ stood ready to intervene at any instant. The power of the centralised French state endured. It maintained its capacity for extreme violence, in France and in its colonies. If the Paris Commune of 1871 may be seen as the last of the nineteenth-century revolutions, the murderous, systematic state repression that followed helped unleash the demons of the twentieth century. This is sadly perhaps a greater legacy of the Paris Commune than that of a movement for freedom undertaken by ordinary people.

  The Wall of the Fédérés in Père Lachaise cemetery, where so many Communards were gunned down, emerged as the site of memory that symbolised the massacres of Bloody Week. The wall drew visitors on 14 July 1880, the first time that date could be celebrated as a national holiday under the Republic, some leaving commemorative wreaths. Gradually small crowds defied police by marching silently up to the wall, leading to confrontations. Eugène Pottier’s revolutionary song The Monument to the Fédérés recalled what had occurred there, and in many other places in Paris: ‘Here was the slaughterhouse, the charnel house. The victims rolled down from the corner of this wall into the great ditch below.’ Police increasingly tolerated demonstrations at the wall on 1 May. A simple marble plaque went up in 1908: ‘To the dead of the Commune, 21–28 May 1871.’