Artillery duels were fought at close range, the concussion carpeting the streets with sucked-out window-glass, and where the shells struck they holed and gutted multi-storey blocks, bringing down roaring avalanches of rubble. Sharpshooters in upper storeys and on rooftops made the open streets murderous, and the echoing noise even of rifle-fire was deafening. The crossfires clipped off showers of leaves and scored the trunks of trees, and wounded men left blood-trails as they dragged themselves towards doors that remained stubbornly closed. The cost was not only in human lives: under the howl and crash of gunfire, mounted couriers were constantly clattering back and forth, and the main streets were crowded with horse-drawn gun-teams, ambulances, and infantry being moved around in horse-buses. The troops sometimes had to inch past maimed horses screaming and kicking in pools of blood and excrement on the cobbles.
Forced back from the Place Vendôme, the Communards set fire to any building that they could not hold. When they finally retreated down Rue de Rivoli towards the Hôtel de Ville during the long spring dusk, the blazing Rue Royale and Tuileries palace were lighting up the sky like a rival sunset; most of the Palais Royale and many other historic buildings also caught fire from wind-blown sparks or were deliberately torched, and the Louvre and Nôtre Dame were only barely saved.35 Meanwhile, Rigault’s henchmen started killing hostages, with slow and horrible inefficiency, at the St Pelagie prison. As Paris burned, the myth of the petroleuses put any woman seen carrying something in the street in peril of summary execution; both sides indulged in a spiral of vengeful killings, goaded on by civilian mobs.
On Wednesday 24 May, the Hôtel de Ville was abandoned and burned by the Communards; in the afternoon, Rigault became trapped in the Latin Quarter and was killed. That morning General Lefèbvre’s 2nd Brigade of Montaudon’s division had come in through the Porte de Clignancourt in the northern ramparts; by noon they had captured the Gare du Nord, and by 7.30pm, the Gare de l’Est (see Map 2). Some of his soldiers slept that night in the Gare du Nord, though fitfully: Federal shells from the Buttes-Chaumont smashed through the high glass vaults and exploded inside, driving them from the concourse and platforms where today’s British travellers alight from Eurostar trains. 36 During the evening Rigault’s creature, Théophile Ferré, had the Archbishop of Paris and five other prominent hostages murdered at La Roquette prison. That night the Foreign Regiment were warned, as they gazed from the village of Asnières outside the ramparts at the huge red glow in the eastern sky, that their brigade would enter the inferno before dawn. 37
IN THE EARLY HOURS of Thursday 25 May, Montaudon brought Dumont’s 1st Brigade marching in through the Porte Maillot in the west and clockwise around the inside of the ramparts. After a long trudge under a blazing sun they reached the North railway freight and coal yards; the 30th Light had to outflank and capture a barricade blocking the upper Rue de la Chapelle, but that evening Dumont linked up with Lefèbvre’s 2nd Brigade. The division spent the night of 25/26 May more or less along the line of the East railway, with the Legion in rear reserve between the North railway and Boulevard Ornano.38 The great fires were not much more than a mile away now, and sometimes a dull rumble could be heard as some seven-storey block collapsed into itself, sending huge gouts of flame licking into the sky. That evening, old Delescluze found the bullet he sought when he tottered up an abandoned barricade across the Boulevard Voltaire. Under cover of night, perhaps 5,000 remaining Communard fighters were falling back to sell their lives dearly in their eastern heartland – the industrial squalor of La Villette, and the narrow slums of Belleville and Ménilmontant.
They had a strong perimeter to defend, especially in this northern sector. Passing in through the northern ramparts, the Canal St Denis ran south to join the Canal de l’Ourcq coming in from the north-east. The latter made a straight, broad moat through the warehouses and quays of La Villette, all the way south-west to the Rotunda customs house at the junction of Boulevard de la Chapelle and Boulevard de La Villette.39 South of that crossing, the dog-leg of the Canal St Martin ran all the way down to Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Well behind these water obstacles, the Federal artillery on the hill of the Buttes-Chaumont covered the northern and western approaches to Belleville. The Versailles corps were now converging: Ladmirault’s I Corps, including Montaudon’s division, from north to south; Clinchant’s V and Douay’s IV from west to east; Vinoy’s Reserve closing the bottom of the bag and pushing northwards, while behind them Cissey’s II Corps mopped up in the south-east.
THE STIFLING HEAT BROKE in a torrential downpour on Friday 26 May, stopping the spread of the great fires even if it did not put them out. Part of Dumont’s 1st Brigade, stretched between the Gare d’Orléans freight sheds and Bastion 30 on the ramparts, was launched eastwards at the Canal St Denis, but they only captured a bridge at about 3pm. The battalions of the Foreign Regiment seem to have been separated, with one element fighting alongside the 39th Marching up on the East railway; there Dumont’s left wing went on to clear several bastions down to the Canal de l’Ourcq, and stopped for the night in the noisome shelter of the huge city abattoirs.
At the same time, down to the south-west, another Legion element was on the right flank of 2nd Brigade, struggling to overcome barricades at the eastern end of Boulevard de la Chapelle and to clear an approach to the major Federal stronghold in the Rotunda.40 They captured ten cannon and a mitrailleuse, and Private Gagneux was cited for the Military Medal for killing a Federal officer and seizing the flag of the 124th Battalion. (His captain had four of the prisoners shot. This was not a case of mercenaries bringing African habits to the streets of Paris; Metropolitan units routinely shot prisoners during Bloody Week and, given that the Communards were trying to kill as many fellow Frenchmen as possible with artillery and machine guns, this cannot be surprising. Versaillais atrocities such as the massacre of wounded and doctors in dressing stations are more so.)41 On the left of these légionnaires, a rush by a battalion of 2nd Brigade’s 119th Line finally forced the Federals back from barricades on three sides of the Rotunda, allowing troops to get across the square into the mouths of several streets south of it, though still under fire from the customs house itself.42 During this fighting a sugar refinery and canal warehouses full of grain, alcohol, tar and timber caught fire, blazing with explosive ferocity despite the rain and forcing the evacuation of several streets. At some point during the night of 26/27 May the last Federals abandoned the Rotunda and fell back to the east, though many of the streets round about were still blocked and defended. (By that night the last 50 hostages from La Roquette prison had been murdered in the Rue Haxo.) 43
According to General Montaudon’s memoir, Dumont’s 1st Brigade spent what must have been a comfortless night on the division’s left flank, in the stinking abattoirs and stockyards beside the Canal de l’Ourcq. During the night Montaudon received new orders from I Corps: Grenier’s division would come down from behind his left shoulder to clear the eastern ramparts towards the south, down to the Porte de Pantin. Montaudon was to shift his weight to the right, maintaining contact with Grenier but ‘acting depending upon circumstances’, to clear the way for an attack on the hill of Buttes-Chaumont on Sunday the 28th. Operations would commence at 11am on the 27th, and commanders were reminded to make the maximum preparatory use of their attached artillery and engineers.44
Montaudon’s 2nd Brigade (Lefèbvre) were already facing eastwards across the Canal St Martin, and at first light on the 27th the divisional commander ordered Dumont’s 1st Brigade down from the abattoirs to link up with Lefèbvre’s left flank. The Foreign Regiment must have marched south-west down the Canal de l’Ourcq, since they got into action close to the Rotunda in today’s Place de Stalingrad. They took a barricade at the bottom of Rue de Flandre, rounded the end of the barge-harbour at Basin de La Villette, crossed the square past the Rotunda, then captured more barricades at the ends of Rue d’Allemagne and Rue de Puebla. On the afternoon of the 27th they worked their way south down the latter street.45
>
The drill was automatic by now. Scouts went first, dodging from doorway to doorway and shooting at any suspicious windows to draw fire. Orders had been shouted to householders to keep their shutters open but their windows closed; anyone showing himself at an open window paid the fatal price of stupidity, and any sniper instantly revealed himself by the thick puff of powder-smoke. The sapper squads came next, to demolish any abandoned barricades or to circumvent any defended ones by breaking into flanking houses and yards with the leading infantrymen. A gun team then rumbled up, unlimbering at the corner of a block to shell the barricade if it was in the line of sight, prevent movement across the street if it was not, and command the sidestreets; firefights in this heavy weather filled the streets with clouds of choking powder-smoke, unsighting the riflemen of both sides. Inside the houses, meanwhile, the sappers with their heavy axes and crowbars, and infantrymen with their boots and rifle-butts, smashed ‘mouseholes’ through the flimsy plank or lath-and-plaster partition walls, working their way along the row from house to house until they could fire down on the barricade from an upper storey. After a last blast from the cannon, their comrades below could rush what remained.
As each assault unit made progress, the battalions that followed it, accompanied by gendarmes and loyalist ‘National Guards of Order’, searched houses for hidden snipers and arms and interrogated the residents. By 27 May, many National Guardsmen had dumped their weapons and uniforms, and most were careful to have not even a belt or tunic-button in the house where they were found. God help any man caught with powder-stained hands or a bruised right shoulder; he probably would not even live to join the long, bedraggled columns of prisoners being escorted by cavalrymen out to the Bois de Boulogne, where the merciless General Gallifet’s firing-squads were busy. When prisoners were taken under arms, many were summarily executed, but most reprisals were not the work of the assault troops. Neither did they loot – beyond individual petty thefts – or rape, nor was there even much drinking; the Communards were more conspicuous for that. Always on the look-out for wavering discipline, the Versailles officers kept a tight grip on their men. The same could not be claimed for the irregular Seine Volunteers who accompanied I Corps; anti-Communards who had been forced out of the city in March, they relished the chance to settle political and personal scores.46
By 3pm on the 27th, the Foreign Regiment had got far enough down Rue de Puebla to secure the Marché de Meaux, though under shellfire from the Buttes-Chaumont that now loomed over the rooftops straight ahead of them, just 500 yards away up at the end of Rue Sécretant.47 Off to their right, 2nd Brigade had got across the Canal St Martin to attack Federal barricades in the Rond-Point de La Villette. In earlier centuries this had been the site of the huge Montfaucon gallows, a great square frame of gibbets standing nearly 50 feet high, in what was then a wasteland between the medieval city and the hilltop fields around the quiet rural hamlet of Belleville.
THE BUTTES-CHAUMONT had a colourful history over recent decades. Away from the Seine in the centre, old Paris had enclosed a surprising amount of open space, but during the prosperous reign of Louis-Philippe development had accelerated. The population of Belleville mutiplied, as odd clumps of shacks and cottages grew together; the dirt lanes were eventually paved and lit, linking boomtown developments of solid houses with rickety tenements served by a notorious area of bars and brothels.
The catalyst had been the Buttes themselves, a 150-foot hill feature where gypsum – the raw material for ‘plaster of Paris’ – was mined and processed. The quarries on and to the east of the hill were called ‘America’, either because of the destination of much of their product or (more pleasingly) because they were at the edge of the inhabited world. During the boom years, when the hill was riddled with tunnels dug by primitive capitalists, this was an uncontrolled frontier where men could make their fortunes or get killed with equal ease. Powder-blasting and the thudding of steam crushing-mills deafened Belleville from dawn to dusk, and coal-fired furnaces smoked day and night. Men frequently died in collapsing tunnels, and roadways far from the hill began to subside into the random burrows it sent out. As the unrestricted diggings were gradually abandoned, the destitute and the predatory moved in, and this wilderness of craters and spoil-heaps acquired a sinister reputation. The population of Belleville was further swollen, and radicalized, during the 1850s – 60s, when industrialization and Hausmann’s redevelopment of the central city drove the poorest classes outwards into jerry-built slums to live as best they could on starvation wages.
In 1862, Napoleon III decreed that the eyesore should be turned into a public park, and by an extraordinary effort his civil engineers, public works officials and gardeners got it ready for its grand opening in time for the Universal Exhibition of April 1867. The honeycombed hilltop was filled and carved into a landscaped horticultural garden-cum-arboretum around several artificial lakes, overlooked by a dramatic 90-foot pinnacle crowned with a shining copy of the Temple of Sybil at Tivoli. Rich and poor alike could stroll along winding paths beside waterways flanked by exotic trees and plantings gathered from all over the world, marvelling at a 60-foot grotto complete with brand-new stalactites, while waterfalls splashed down rockfaces cloaked with climbing plants.
By the afternoon of 27 May 1871, this hilltop and that of Père Lachaise cemetery a mile and a half to the south were the last two important positions that the Communards held.
BY LATE AFTERNOON on 27 May the hill was surrounded on three sides, with Montaudon’s 1st and 2nd Brigades in a rough semi-circle from the centre of the north slope down to the west, and although the Buttes were supposed to be tomorrow’s objective the divisional commander decided not to wait. His flanks were secure; on his left, Grenier had taken a brigade right down to Bastion 21 behind the hill and was delivering supporting fire from 12-pounders and mitrailleuses. At 4pm Montaudon gave the signal for the assault; the details of the attack are unclear, but we do know that it did not take long. The Foreign Regiment had had enough of cautious step-by-step advances; two companies headed the central assault column, simply charging up the steep Rue Sécretant ‘under a hail of bullets’ and throwing themselves up the slopes in front of them. After a fairly brief fight they reached one of the summits and planted the tricolour, while the 36th Marching from 2nd Brigade stuck theirs at the top of the western slope, and Abatucci’s brigade from Grenier’s division then came panting up from the ‘American quarries’ to the east.
The defenders were attacked from two, later three, sides simultaneously, after being bombarded from about 1,300 yards by 120mm guns and raked by mitrailleuses; this was well within the latter’s effective range for an area target such as a gun-battery, which is exactly what they had originally been designed to shoot at. We might speculate that the two Federal batteries were neither well sited nor properly protected from fire by breastworks (these were certainly neglected at Montmartre). Whatever the reason, light Versaillais casualties confirm that the pantalons rouges cannot have had to charge gun-muzzles hurling out canister-shot. The Legion casualties are not recorded, but seem to have been less than twenty; three lieutenants were cited specifically for their behaviour here, and Lieutenant Dupont’s men were reportedly the first to reach the Federal guns.48
To the south, the two Federal batteries in Père Lachaise cemetery had also fallen, to General Vinoy’s naval troops. There was still plenty of light, and while Montaudon established his staff on the Buttes he wanted to get men down into the streets to the south – presumably to prevent the Federals consolidating a front facing the south side of the park to resist the final crushing of Belleville the following day. The légionnaires of I/ and II/RE were at first ordered to remain on the hill for the night, no doubt beginning the task of dragging corpses together for the pyres that would send stinking smoke over the city for days afterwards. The V/RE moved down out of the park and south towards Place des Fêtes, accompanied by the Seine Volunteers.
At about 6pm they reached the entrance to this large,
open marketplace and fairground, where the Seine Volunteers charged a barricade – presumably across the Rue de Crimee or des Solitaires – and lost their Major Delbos in the taking of it. He was their second commanding officer to be killed in four days (Major Duriue had fallen in Montmartre), and we may guess that they added to their reputation for shooting prisoners out of hand. The V/RE passed through into the square and towards a barricade on the far side. A group of Federal stragglers were sitting drinking in a bar close to it; when they opened fire a Wild West gunfight ensued, with shots being traded under tables and up the stairs. The légionnaires cleared the house, then burst out of it on to the barricade, taking it for the loss of two men killed. Other companies bumped into significant resistance just beyond the square, and the 5th Battalion CO called his men back; he wanted no confused firing in the dark streets, and established his unit in a ‘hedgehog’ at Place des Fêtes for the night, reinforced on its wide perimeter by three companies of II/RE sent down from the Buttes.49
THE LAST COMMUNARD FIGHTERS were mopped up on Whit Sunday, 28 May, as the cordon around the remaining blocks of the 19th and 20th Districts was pulled tight by I Corps and the Reserve. The Federals were now surrendering in large numbers, but soldiers found that it was still perfectly possible to get themselves killed that morning. From 5am there was a brisk exchange of fire between opposing positions in the streets of Belleville, until cannon on the Buttes intervened to start the légionnaires on their way. On the left, V/RE moved eastwards to the ramparts, clearing barricades along Rues du Pré St Gervais and des Bois. In the centre, II/RE ran down streets at the double; by 10am the tricolour was flying from the church of St Jean Baptiste, and the Commune’s last headquarters in the 20th District town hall soon fell. A British witness trapped at the mairie described a soldier of the Legion calling for everyone to lay down their weapons and surrender; the Englishman went forward, and made sure his name was recorded as having been taken unarmed. 50
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 8