The Last Barricade
26. ‘Let us kill no more’
FROM the execution of the Archbishop, one important figure had been conspicuously absent—Raoul Rigault. That day, exchanging his civil garb as Public Prosecutor for the uniform of a National Guard major, he had gone off to help direct the fighting in his old hunting-grounds of the Latin Quarter. In the afternoon of the 24th, Cissey’s corps had broken through and it looked as if the whole Panthéon district on the Left Bank would shortly fall. At about 3 p.m. Rigault withdrew to seek refuge in a hotel on the Rue Gay-Lussac where he kept lodgings, which he shared with an actress, under an assumed name. It was not long before the street was reached by Versailles troops, and they appear to have been informed that a National Guard major had been seen slipping into the hotel. Rigault’s landlord was dragged out and threatened with instant death. On the entreaties of the hotelier’s wife, Rigault intervened to save him, revealing his own identity. He was seized, so it was said, shouting ‘Vive la Commune!’; a regular sergeant then shot him several times through the head. For two days the Procureur’s body lay in the gutter, partly stripped by women of the district, kicked and spat upon by passers-by, until one of his mistresses came to throw a coat over it.
For the best part of two terrible days Varlin and Lisbonne had put up a spirited defence based on Montparnasse’s Rue Vavin, against enormous odds. By midday on the 24th, it was clear they could hold out no longer. They now fell back, blowing up behind them the huge powder magazine at the Luxembourg Gardens. The Versaillais followed closely on their tracks, shooting batches of surrendered Communards as they went. At Varlin’s rear there were just three barricades protecting the strategic Panthéon heights, and no longer any organized reserves. By evening Cissey’s troops had captured the Panthéon and cleared most of the Boulevard St.-Michel. Varlin escaped, still fighting. On the Left Bank the struggle had all but come to an end. The sole exception was out on the extreme left flank where Wroblewski, though isolated from the rest of the Commune forces, was still keeping up a tough and professional defence from a stronghold atop the hill of the Butte-aux-Cailles, near the Porte d’Italie. He was supported by fire from the forts of Ivry and Bicêtre which—in disobedience of orders from Delescluze—he had stubbornly refused to evacuate.
During the 24th, MacMahon’s forces on the Right Bank had captured the Gare du Nord, the Porte St.-Denis, the Conservatoire, the Bank, and the Bourse. At the Bank they were greeted with more than enthusiasm by the Marquis de Plœuc and his four hundred employees, who during the last hours had been holding the buildings more or less in a state of siege. Rescue had not come a minute too early, for there had been serious talk of removing the Deputy Governor to add to the hostages held at La Roquette. The building itself was undamaged, as was the nearby Bibliothèque Nationale, which the retreating Communards had fortunately not had time to burn. In the markets of Les Halles, a bitter fight had gone on around the Church of St.-Eustache, converted into a Red Club, which the Communards had fortified with cannon and mitrailleuses. The way was now open to the Hôtel de Ville, the red-hot ruins of which were occupied at 9 p.m. that night. Delescluze, the remnants of the Committee of Public Safety, and the Comité Central all converged on the Mairie of the 11th Arrondissement, half-way up the Boulevard Voltaire, which became the temporary seat of the Commune. There Delescluze addressed the survivors, in a voice little stronger than a whisper: ‘I propose that the members of the Commune, wearing their sashes, should parade all the battalions that can be mustered, on the Boulevard Voltaire. We can then lead them to the points that have to be reconquered.’
MAP 5. Paris: north-east
Only the eastern part of Paris still remained in the hands of the Commune; but it would henceforth be fighting on home ground, surrounded by a sympathetic population. Elsewhere, in the parts of Paris already captured by the Government troops, Colonel Stanley was astounded to note the first little signs of life returning to normal; outside his hotel in the Rue de la Paix an ‘active Frenchwoman had swept the pavement and door clear of rubbish’. That same day he was taken to see Pyat’s house, where he found only the sabre and greatcoat of the vanished leader.
On Thursday the 25th, the fourth day of operations in Paris, MacMahon’s plans were for Cissey to attack the Butte-aux-Cailles; Vinoy the Bastille; Clinchant and Douay the Château d’Eau area near the Gare de 1’Est.1 With the 101st Battalion, which had proved itself probably the Commune’s most impressive fighting unit, Wroblewski was still holding the Butte-aux-Cailles, despite fresh orders from Delescluze to fall back on the 11th Arrondissement. One by one the supporting forts had fallen or been abandoned, the survivors of their garrisons trickling back to join Wroblewski on his hilltop. From dawn Cissey began hammering away at the narrow perimeter with a powerful concentration of fifty cannon. All morning the bombardment continued. Still Wroblewski held out; there was something about his stand that evokes the suicidal courage of the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Realizing by mid-afternoon that the enemy pincers were about to close behind him, he decided to carry out a fighting withdrawal through the Left Bank and across the river. As the remnants of the 101st pulled out, another tragic and senseless crime took place, for which it seems Wroblewski could probably not be held directly responsible. At Battalion H.Q. were held a score of Dominican monks, arrested by Rigault during his round-up of the priests. An officer now came to tell them that they were free to go, but as the bemused monks walked out of the building, they were shot down, one after the other, by some National Guardsmen, enraged at the summary execution of their comrades who had surrendered.
Miraculously Wroblewski reached the Pont d’Austerlitz, nearly a mile and a half away, and crossed into safe territory. With the handful of survivors that remained to him, he reported to Delescluze at the Mairie of the 11th. Delescluze offered him the over-all command of what remained of the Commune forces. ‘Have you got several thousand resolute men?’ inquired Wroblewski. Delescluze, having that morning inspected the troops in hand, replied ‘at most several hundred’. Wroblewski decided he could not accept the responsibility of command in these conditions, and demanded to be allowed to fight on as ‘a simple soldier’. Picking up a rifle he disappeared towards the barricades.
One by one the leaders of the Commune were falling. From the barricades defending the Bastille, a wounded Frankel came back supported by Elizabeth Dimitrieff, herself wounded. Lisbonne fell with a bad wound, later resulting in an amputation. ‘Burner’ Brunel, who had continued to fight tenaciously ever since his stand at the Concorde and was now covering the Château d’Eau district at the head of a ‘Youth Battalion’, was crippled by a bullet through the thigh. Loyally his young boys bore him off to a place of safety at the rear. All that day Delescluze, looking more than ever like a man under imminent sentence of death, had hurried from barricade to barricade, supervising, encouraging, exhorting. But with the overwhelming pressure that the vastly superior Versailles forces were now bringing to bear he knew that it was only a question of time before any pretence of a co-ordinated defence came to an end, and the Communards were split up into isolated packets. He sat down to write a last letter to his sister;
Ma bonne soeur
I do not wish, and am unable, to act as the victim and the toy of a victorious reaction. Forgive me for departing before you, you who have sacrificed your life for me. But I no longer feel I possess the courage to submit to another defeat, after so many others. I embrace you a thousand times with all my love. Your memory will be the last that will visit my thoughts before going to rest…. Adieu, adieu….
Shortly before 7 p.m. that evening, Lissagaray saw Delescluze—dressed as always like an 1848 revolutionary in a top hat, lovingly polished boots, black trousers, and frock coat, a red sash around his waist, and leaning heavily on a cane—move off towards the Château d’Eau with some fifty men. Just before reaching the barricade across the Boulevard Voltaire, Delescluze met Pyat’s old enemy, Vermorel, who had been mortally wounded. After gripping his
hand and saying a few words of farewell, Delescluze walked on alone to the already abandoned barricade, some fifty yards further on. Before the eyes of Lissagaray and the detachment he had brought with him Delescluze slowly, painfully clambered up on top of the barricade. He stood there for a moment, silhouetted in the sinking sun; then pitched forward on his face. Four men rushed to pick him up; three of them were shot down too. In the moment of defeat, the old Jacobin had achieved a certain nobility denied to either Louis-Napoleon at Sedan, or Ducrot at the Great Sortie.
The Commune was now leaderless. Under cover of night it abandoned most of the Bastille area and the present Place de la République (then Château d’Eau), retreating back into the womb from which it had sprung—the narrow streets and squalid slums of Belleville. Behind it the Seine still gleamed red with the reflection of burning Paris. After nearly four days of card-playing incarceration with his friends, the Johnsons, Edwin Child had at last been liberated in the Rue Rambuteau. Throughout the previous day they had heard a ‘terrible din that never ceased for an instant, not knowing at what moment our own time might arrive’. His grammar deserting him in the heat of the moment, he recorded that on the night preceding the 25th he
did not dare slept upstairs, bombs having fallen upon nearly every house in the voisinage. Fortunately part of the maison was occupied by a dealer in skins who kindly offered us asile (10 women 5 men). Slept upon bearskins almost as well as in my bed, much to the astonishment of the others who could not close their eyes for the sinister whistling of the bombs. Lovely day.
On being liberated the following afternoon, Child’s first thought was to discover whether his shop and his lodging, were still safe:
… but had not gone far before I was stopped to work at the pumps, and what a sight met my eyes; destruction everywhere. From the Châtelet to Hôtel de Ville, all was destroyed, not a room left; worked about half an hour, then proceeded on my way. Saw three waggons of dead Communists [sic] taken out of one yard….
Reaching the Rue Scribe, he found the jeweller’s shop undamaged. His own rooms appeared to be safe too, although he could not actually enter them as the adjoining houses were still blazing.
At the other end of Paris, after three days of painful waiting, M. Paris had managed to find a carpenter to make coffins for his dead wife and brother-in-law. No hearse was available, but on the 25th a funeral cart had arrived at the door. It already contained three corpses and was due to pick up another three in the same street. As the cemetery was outside the walls and the Versailles authorities were now strictly forbidding any Parisians to leave the city until the work of repression was completed, M. Paris was not allowed to accompany the forlorn little cortège. Situations like this were happening all over Paris as the Commune staggered to its end. At his rooms near the Château d’Eau, Paul Verlaine, the Commune Press chief, who had spent the past few days of battle ignobly toying with the seduction of Mme Verlaine’s maid, was suddenly confronted by Edmond Lepelletier and another Communard, ‘black with dust and powder, who had escaped from a barricade quite close by and were asking me for asylum’:
Naturally, I let them in and began the cremation of trouser belts and the destruction, also by fire, of képis. The metal buttons we threw down the lavatory, and took other precautions against a probable search. There was no longer any question of arms and ammunition; they had discarded those in the street.
The three men then settled down to a hearty meal, and all joined in teasing the pretty maid. That night they heard the approaching sound of MacMahon’s mitrailleuses, and from the window they watched the deployment of a battalion of the Vengeurs de Flourens; ‘youths of fifteen or sixteen, clad as light infantrymen of the Imperial Guard, with black-and-green trousers like Zouaves, and a broad white sash; they swaggered, they swaggered too much, but they were killed to the last man, next day, at the barricade of the Pont d’Austerlitz….’ At 4 a.m. the next morning, the doorbell rang and Verlaine found his mother, who had spent the whole night traversing Paris from the Batignolles. ‘A short time ago, right nearby in the Rue de Poissy, she had witnessed a massacre of “insurgents”, man, women and children.’
Friday, May 26th, was a day of savage killings on both sides. It was the day the struggle for Paris changed from a full-scale battle to a mopping-up operation, and it was also the day the rains came. ‘Pouring wet day’, Edwin Child noted in his meticulous fashion. Seldom can Parisians have greeted rain with quite such rapture. Swiftly it halted the spread of fires which the exhausted Versailles fire-fighters were beginning to get under control. The blaze in the Ministry of Finance was extinguished, and by a very narrow margin indeed the Louvre Museum had been saved. The world sighed with relief. But the rain could not quench the rage and hatred which had built up over the past five days in the hearts of the conquering army, many of them provincials with an instinctive loathing for the Parisian. The Versailles communiqué of the 25th had repeated the grim warning that ‘justice will soon receive satisfaction’. Already the commanders in Paris had shown little heed for the various instructions of Thiers and MacMahon—that repression should abide strictly by the law—and Washburne was shocked by one officer he met who claimed to have orders ‘to shoot every man taken in arms against the Government’. According to Wickham Hoffman, ‘any lieutenant ordered prisoners to be shot as the fancy took him, and no questions were asked’. It was decreed that all windows must be kept closed, the shutters open, and the inhabitants of any house offending these regulations were liable to summary treatment for harbouring snipers. A friend of Wickham Hoffman ‘saw a house in the Boulevard Malesherbes visited by a squad of soldiers. They asked the concierge if there were any Communists concealed there. She answered that there was none. They searched the house, and found one. They took him out and shot him, and then shot her.’ Little time was wasted in weighing evidence; as Benjamin Wilson, who watched small squads of Versaillais search houses for hiding insurgents, noted, ‘they were not at all particular as to whom they took, for, as several of them remarked to me, the ‘triage’ or sifting could be done at Versailles’.
But a large proportion of the captured Communards were never to reach Versailles, and for a great many others the process of ‘triage’ was carried out arbitrarily on the spot. From Montmartre, one of the Rev. Gibson’s local preachers reported how he had ‘just witnessed the execution of 25 women who were found pouring boiling water upon the heads of the soldiers’. On the morning of the 26th, a left-wing Deputy called Jean-Baptiste Millière was dragged in front of some officers in Cissey’s corps who were breakfasting near the Panthéon. Millière was one of the Paris Deputies who had voted in the Assembly against both the peace treaty and the law of Maturities. He had been involved in the October 31st uprising, but had never participated in the Commune and had in fact been one of Clemenceau’s associates in his various attempts at conciliation. Cissey’s provost, a Major Garcin, declared however that he had read articles written by Millière, and they ‘revolted’ him; which was enough. Millière was marched off to the Panthéon, forced to kneel down on its steps (‘to demand pardon of society for the evil he had done’, Garcin explained later), and shot. Nearby, at St.-Sulpice, Dr. Faneau, a twenty-seven-year-old non-Communard, was in charge of a clearing-station full of National Guard wounded. Interrogated by Versailles troops, he explained that he ‘only had casualties, whom I have had for a long time’. According to the (somewhat unconvincing) Versailles account, the regulars were then fired at by one of the wounded; they retaliated by killing Dr. Faneau, as well as a number of his casualties. The dispatching of Communard wounded was also corroborated elsewhere by Dr. Powell who noted with distress that, of the few casualties he had managed to save under the appalling conditions at the Beaujon Hospital, ‘most of them were shot’ when the Government troops arrived.
As more and more thousands of Communard prisoners, or suspects, fell into Versailles hands, the long dejected columns marching westwards through Paris, guarded by General Gallifet’s cavalry, became a
saddeningly common sight. Walking in Passy on the 26th, Goncourt encountered one batch of ‘four hundred and seven, including sixty-six women’:
The men had been split up into lines of seven or eight and tied to each other with string that cut into their wrists. They were just as they had been captured, most of them without hats or caps, and with their hair plastered down on their foreheads and faces by the fine rain that had been falling ever since this morning. There were men of the people there who had made themselves head coverings out of blue check handkerchiefs. Others, drenched to the skin by the rain, were carrying a hunk of bread. They came from every class of society; hard-faced workmen, bourgeois in socialist hats, National Guards who had not had time to change out of their uniforms….
There was the same variety among the women. There were women wearing kerchiefs next to women in silk gowns. I noticed housewives, working girls, and prostitutes, one of whom was wearing the uniform of a National Guard. And in the midst of them all there stood out the bestial head of a creature whose face was half-covered with an enormous bruise. Not one of these women showed the apathetic resignation of the men….
Goncourt was moved to pity, and admiration, by one of the women,
… who was singularly beautiful, with the implacable beauty of a young Fate. She was a girl with dark, curly hair, steely eyes, and cheekbones red with dried tears. She stood frozen as it were in a defiant posture, hurling insults at officers and men from a throat and lips so contracted by anger that they were unable to form sounds or words…. ‘She’s just like the girl who stabbed Barbier!’ a young officer said to one of his friends.
Some of the women tried to protect their heads from the beating rain with their skirts. As the column prepared to move off, a colonel took up a position on its flank and shouted in a high voice with a brutality that Goncourt felt was affected to create terror:
The Fall of Paris Page 54