The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Later that afternoon, a Versaillais sapper entered the Roquépine Chapel to inform M. Chastel that ‘they have surrounded Paris, and they are about to deliver us from the Commune. After having drunk a glass of wine, he took his post at our chapel door and began firing….’

  The fighting soon reached Alan Herbert’s house, about a quarter of a mile further to the east. At one moment the Communards erecting the barricade outside had threatened to search all the houses for able-bodied men to fight, but ‘events were too rapid to allow them

  MAP 3. Paris: north-west

  to do so’. Dr. Herbert had then offered his services—which were not accepted—to a first-aid station set up in the Place de la Madeleine market; the proximity of which ‘was very useful, as I was able to get some food sent to me through a window in my house, which looks upon it’. Two of the National Guards stationed outside declared to Herbert ‘their intention of running away, taking off their regimentals and hiding themselves’. Then, at about 10 a.m.,

  the firing became very bad, and cannon were brought up to be planted on the boulevards…. No one dared to stir out, and the sentries knew nothing. Towards the afternoon the fighting in the streets assumed another character. The troops had succeeded in taking posession of a house at the end of my street, Rue Chauveau Lagarde, and made their way from house to house by holes in the walls, till they arrived at the end of the street, and then they fired down on the barricade. The insurgents answered their fire from the Place de la Madeleine, but could not enter into the street.

  Alan Herbert now found himself in an exceptional, but uncomfortable, position, as witness of the struggle that ensued. As the regulars worked their way through the houses on his side of the street, the only point whence the Communards could fire back at them under cover was from the opposite corner of the street, immediately facing Herbert’s door. For the rest of the day Herbert watched, fascination and anxiety vying with each other:

  The first who fired was a grey-headed, grey-bearded old man, who was the most bloodthirsty old fellow I ever saw. He hounded the others on, and had hot discussions, even with his own officers, so great was his determination to kill everyone he could see at the window, whether a soldier or not—so at least I interpreted through the bars of my prison. There were in all about twenty or thirty firing, and it was a horrible sight. They quarrelled as to who should have the most shots, whose turn it was to shoot, and from time to time one heard such expressions as these: ‘Oh, that caught him!’ It was just like boys rabbit-shooting. I do not believe, however, they killed many, but it would not have been possible to pass into the street, so hot was the firing. I was expecting every moment that one party or the other would endeavour to take possession of my house, but it was too much exposed to the firing. This fighting continued until night; no gas was lighted, and it was a very dark night, so we had a short respite.

  At the Hôtel de Ville, something of the heat, confusion, and excitement of the March days had been recaptured. The Comité Central of the National Guard, the Artillery Committee, and all the various military services had concentrated there and were busy issuing contradictory orders. Noisy, anxious suppliants besieged the Committee of Public Safety and the War Commission, while the Comité Central inveighed in every direction against the incompetence of different members of the Commune. Early that morning some twenty Communards gathered around the venerable figure of Félix Pyat, whose Le Vengeur had just emitted stirring cries of ‘Aux armes!’ It was very much Pyat’s moment. ‘Well my friends,’ he intoned in an heroically avuncular manner, ‘our last hour has come.’ It distressed him to see the ‘fair heads’ of so many young men around him; but ‘for me, what does it matter! My hair is white, my career is finished. What more glorious end could I hope for than to die on the barricades!’ To prove to posterity, that he Félix Pyat, had done his duty he now called for a roll-call of all those present. Then, in his familiar fashion, he disappeared. His white hair was not seen on any barricade—in fact, not seen again at all until Pyat turned up safely in exile in London; far from his career being ‘finished’, he survived to be amnestied and elected Senator of France sixteen years later.

  In the midst of all this commotion, a delegation arrived from the Liberal-Democratic Congress in Lyons, which had come—via Versailles—with last-minute offers of mediation. They were hardly received with warmth. It was too late. Elsewhere in the Hôtel de Ville, Raoul Rigault was busy executing two orders of the Committee of Public Safety. One detailed him to implement the Decree on Hostages finally approved five days earlier; the second, dated ‘4 Prairial, An 79’, called for the immediate transfer of the Archbishop and the other leading hostages from the Mazas Prison to the condemned cells at La Roquette. The actual transportation of the hostages he passed on to his deputy, da Costa, who requisitioned two goods carts—like the tumbrils of another age—for the operation.

  As far as military instructions for the hard-pressed National Guards went, little of sense was being transmitted from the Hôtel de Ville. The Commune had anticipated that, when the Versailles attack began, it would be a frontal assault; not, as it developed, a series of turning movements which took elaborately prepared defensive positions and impromptu barricades alike from a flank, or from the rear, with depressing ease. There was a certain irony in the fact that the groundwork of Louis-Napoleon and his Prefect, Haussmann, was contributing as much to the reconquest of Paris as the planning of his old adversary, Adolphe Thiers. A co-ordinated, mobile defence would have been the only means of coping with these turning tactics. But the Commune no longer had a Rossel, nor even a Cluseret to dispose its forces; and in any case the National Guard was already showing an in-built, parochial reluctance to fight elsewhere than in defence of its own district. So, just as the old Jacobins had fought until they were rounded up or slaughtered in 1848, Paris would be defended piecemeal and ad lib., as it were—from barricade to barricade.

  To those of its combatants with any military background, the total lack of direction from the Hôtel de Ville made the hopelessness of the situation abundantly plain. At about 10 o’clock on that night of May 22nd, some agitated National Guards brought Dombrowski into the Hôtel de Ville. Without a command since that morning, he had been seized while attempting—so it was claimed—to escape through the Prussian lines at St.-Ouen. Brought before the Committee of Public Safety, Dombrowksi vigorously denied that he had contemplated treason. The Committee ‘appeased him affectionately’; Dombrowski shook hands all round in an unmistakeable gesture of farewell, and strode off grimly towards the fighting. ‘There were’, wrote Lissagaray, ‘nights that were more clamorous, more streaked with lightning, more imposing, when the conflagration and the cannonade enveloped all Paris; but none penetrated more lugubriously into the soul.’

  Yet despite the inertia and disarray of the Commune, already by the afternoon of the first day the main impetus of the Versailles attack had begun to slow down. In the Rue de la Paix, only a few hundred yards from where the front line was surging about Alan Herbert’s house, all Colonel Stanley had to report by lunchtime was that his friend, Austin, had been ‘slightly hit by a bullet, standing near the Louvre. A bit of shell killed a man this morning early on the Place Vendôme, and another bit fell in the yard of this hotel’. At 3 p.m. he added:

  The line have got possession of the St. Lazare station, but they don’t seem to advance very fast. I heard a citizen remonstrate with a National Guard for uselessly breaking windows. A brute ordered me to help to work on the barricade. I told him to go to the devil and insisted on passing with my friend…. Two bodies of National Guards have passed round the corner and down to the Place Vendôme, poor devils, singing ‘Mourir pour la Patrie’. A perfect silence has happened since. I suppose the Line are entrenching themselves half across Paris. It is a funny state of things. Guns and musketry are beginning again. I was ordered off from my balcony just now. I keep a jealous eye on the bronze on the Place Vendôme,1 and shall take a bit as soon as the bother is over.’

/>   At 10 p.m. that evening, he noted:

  The National Guards are more cocky than ever. I suppose it is the wine they have had. [They] will insist on firing from the houses, which will entail retaliation. I have got a huge Union Jack hanging out of my balcony. Guns and musketry going on still, horses neighing and great talking; decidedly they mean to fight more.

  The remnants of the friezes on the fallen column.

  Stanley was not far wrong in his assessments. About the only advance that afternoon had been to capture the grounds of the British Embassy on the Rue St.-Honoré. And everywhere there were signs of resistance stiffening. In their scattered little packets, the Communards were beginning to fight as never before—the fight of despair. General Clinchant had anticipated that three days would suffice to occupy the whole of Paris, once the entry had been effected, but his calculations were upset by the degree of caution thrust upon the ‘liberating’ troops. Their leaders were concerned about rumours of whole streets being mined and booby-trapped; apprehensive (unnecessarily) as to the weight of artillery the enemy could bring to bear, by employing the cannon captured on March 18th; and mindful from their experiences of 1848 of what a toll could be exacted by desperate men fighting from behind barricades in the areas of Paris less friendly to the Government than Passy and the Étoile. They were still dubious, too, of just how much could be expected of the mixture of green young troops and defeated ex-prisoners of war under their command. Above all, Thiers remained determined that the work of repression should be carried out without haste, systematically and thoroughly. Announcing to a jubilant Versailles Assembly that evening that ‘the cause of justice, order, humanity, civilization has triumphed… The generals who conducted the entry into Paris are great men of war…’, Thiers added ominously, ‘Expiation will be complete. It will take place in the name of the law, by the law and within the law.’

  In the final judgement of Paris that lay immediately ahead, it might be possible to perceive ‘order’; but remarkably little of justice, humanity, or civilization.

  The Hôtel de Ville on Fire

  25. ‘La Semaine Sanglante’—II

  THE dawn of Tuesday, the 23rd, broke on yet another ravishing May day. As the front had been stabilized the previous evening, it lay roughly along a north-south axis, running from the Gare des Batignolles in the north, through the Gare St.-Lazare, the British Embassy, the Palais de I’Industrie, across the Seine to the Chamber of Deputies, and up the Boulevard des Invalides to the Gare Montparnasse. Behind it, on the one side, the western third of Paris lay solidly in Government hands, behind it on the other, no less than five hundred barricades had been started in the respite provided by MacMahon’s slowing-down. But even before daybreak, his forces were on the move again. A short while later, Goncourt, still an involuntary ‘prisoner’ at his friend Burty’s house, climbed up to the belvedere to look out upon an ‘immense battle illuminated by the bright sunshine’. It was, he thought, ‘at Montmartre that the main weight of the action seemed to be concentrated’.

  At about 3 o’clock that morning, Ladmirault had opened another long flanking operation, moving along the inside of the city ramparts to take from the rear all the gates as far as the Porte de St.-Ouen. Reaching the Porte de Clignancourt at the northernmost point of Paris, he wheeled right to face Montmartre from the north-east. At the same time, Clinchant moved frontally on Montmartre by smashing through the barricades at the Batignolles. Soon his troops had reached the Place Clichy, while Ladmirault’s right wing occupied the Montmartre cemetery; thus confronting the Commune’s most imposing fortress with an assault on three sides. As the Government troops moved beyond the Batignolles, a personal tragedy was recorded that was perhaps typical of what was being suffered wherever civilians found themselves caught between two fires. Just off the Boulevard Péreire lived a couple, M. and Mme Paris, who—according to their colleague, the Rev. Gibson—had been noted for their work of evangelization among the rag-pickers in this part of Paris. Throughout Monday fighting had raged about their house, dead and wounded had fallen all around them, and it was with immense relief that Mme Paris awoke the following morning to see the barricades outside abandoned. ‘In her joy of seeing the fighting finished in our quarter’, recorded the husband, ‘she woke me up to come and watch the arrival of the soldiers who were taking possession of the station [Batignolles]. Everybody was at their window…. Unfortunately my brother-in-law, goaded by a fatal curiosity approached from the left side and lifted a corner of the curtain; at the same instant there was a rifle shot and hit in the lower stomach he fell backwards into the room.’ Passing through his body, the same bullet then went on to kill Mme Paris too, who happened to enter the room at that moment carrying a cup of chocolate.

  Benoît Malon, having conducted a vigorous rearguard action in the Batignolles, now found himself all but encircled in the Mairie of the 17th. Slipping through the Versaillais cordon, he managed to fall back on Montmartre, where he was greeted by a dismal spectacle of discouragement, half-completed barricades and unserviceable guns. Many of the defenders had faded away during the night, leaving only a hundred or so to man the defences on the northern slopes upon which Ladmirault was advancing with more than a division. About the only Communard detachment which showed spirit was a squad of twenty-five women from the Women’s Battalion, headed by the redoubtable Louise Michel. Back along the Boulevard de Clichy they fought from barricade to barricade; past the Place Blanche, past the site of some of the more sordid night-haunts of modern Paris, back to the Place Pigalle, where most of them were forced to surrender. By this time only about fifteen of the women were left, including Louise Michel and Elizabeth Dimitrieff. Louise had orders to blow up, if necessary, the Butte-Montmartre. But it was too late. Near the Boulevard Barbés she met Dombrowski, falling back from Clignancourt, at about 2 o’clock that afternoon. ‘We are lost!’ he told her, and a few seconds later he fell mortally wounded in the Rue Myrha. As the Polish exile’s body was carried back to the Hôtel de Ville, men at the barricades presented arms with un-Communard precision.

  Up in Burty’s belvedere with Goncourt, ‘someone thought they perceived, through opera glasses, the tricolore flag floating over Montmartre. At that moment we were chased down from our glass observatory by the whistling of bullets.’ The observation was accurate. By 1 p.m. Clinchant’s Chasseurs hoisted the flag at the Tour Solférino, where the insurrection had first broken out on March 18th, recapturing more than a hundred of the original cannon. Now, at Montmartre, the repression of the Commune assumed for the first time a grimmer quality. ‘I gave strictest orders’, claimed Thiers ex post facto in his Notes et Souvenirs, ‘that the rage of the soldiers was to be contained….’ But this was not how the Versailles Army interpreted his proclamation of the previous evening, calling for ‘complete expiation’. In terms of bloodshed, the ‘expiation’ imposed upon the Commune was to eclipse by far either the ‘Terror’ of the first French Revolution, or even the St. Petersburg revolution of 1917. Immediately on the capture of Montmartre, some 49 Communards (including, Lissagaray claimed, three women and four children) were collected at hazard and marched to No. 6 Rue des Rosiers, the scene of the killing of Generals Lecomte and Thomas. There they were made to kneel down in front of the same wall and were shot without any semblance of a trial.

  At the other extremity of their front, the Communards—under Varlin, Wroblewski, and Lisbonne—were now offering much tougher resistance. Varlin, firmly turning a blind eye to the conflicting orders that emanated from the Hôtel de Ville, had organized the nearest thing to a co-ordinated defence in his section on the Left Bank. At the Croix Rouge intersection between the Boulevards Raspail and St. Germain, he had set up a stronghold containing reserves which could be switched between the strongly manned barricades across the Rue de l’Université near the river, or at the Rue Vavin in Montparnasse. For the next two days there was bitter fighting, with heavy damage to property in this quarter, resulting in little progress by the Government troops.
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br />   As the day went on, it was the critical centre of the line that saw the severest fighting. Sweeping downhill from Montmartre and Pigalle, Clinchant’s corps rolled up the Commune’s flank towards the Opéra as it went. On his right Douay was reinforcing his efforts of the previous day in the direction of the Madeleine, as well as keeping up the heaviest frontal pressure on Brunel’s position in the Place de la Concorde. Early that morning the tide of battle had finally surged past the Methodist Chapel in the Rue Roquépine; ‘Midnight… We hear the bombs passing over the building. We feel the uncertainty of life, and that our existence hangs on a thread which may be broken at any moment’, recorded M. Chastel, adding later:

  God has kept us safely through the night… one bullet has just struck my window, pierced the glass, broken off a piece of stone in its course, and has fallen at the foot of my bureau… happily I was not there. At five o’clock the soldiers have driven away the insurgents from the barricade, and we could put our noses outside. I saw several soldiers lying dead, and others wounded…. At six o’clock the soldiers evacuated our street, and advanced towards the Madeleine.