Massacre (28 page)

Moving past the remains of Communard barricades at place Pereire, Hans and other Volunteers of the Seine came upon some very sad-looking prisoners. Then when a shot was fired from a nearby house, soldiers poured into it, finding a Communard sergeant. The commander grabbed him and ordered his immediate execution. The sergeant begged for mercy, and suddenly bolted from the wall against which he had been placed, reaching a door, aided by shots arriving from somewhere. The Volunteers fired, but he made good his escape.

As the Volunteers of the Seine passed along the avenue de Saint-Ouen on the northern edge of Paris, residents expressed anything but good feeling to the Versaillais, particularly the women, ‘strong in their weakness’ as Hans liked to say. One of them who was greeted informed them with pride that her husband was fighting with the
fédérés
not far away, and that he would break their heads. Hans had to admit that some of the Volunteers arrested people in the
quartier
for no particular reason, angered by such defiance.
⁶⁶

Edmond Goncourt spent Sunday ‘in fear of a setback for the Versailles troops’. From his window he could hear in the distance ‘the regular tramp of marching men who are going to replace others, as happens every night.
Come now! It is the effect of my imagination. I go back to bed, but this time it really is the drums, it really is the bugles! I hurry back to the window … Above the shouts of “To Arms!” rise in great waves the tragically sonorous notes of the tocsin, which has begun to ring in all the churches – a sinister sound which fills me with joy and marks the beginning of the end of hateful tyranny for Paris.’
⁶⁷

That morning, Élie Reclus awoke to the news that Versaillais troops were moving rapidly inside the walls of Paris. While walking down rue Saint-Pères on the Left Bank, a bullet whizzed past his head. He suspected that this was the work of ‘some good bourgeois, attached to “order”’. In the Seventh Arrondissement, it was not difficult to see ‘secret jubilation of all the concierges, shop owners, merchants of holy articles, and the religious men and women who make up the base of the population there. Their eyes follow you so that they can denounce you as soon as possible to the first gendarme or policeman’ who represents their cause. Reclus could see that Communard resistance lacked a well-developed plan to defend the Left Bank. Moreover, around the École militaire and Les Invalides, Bonapartists abounded and the noble faubourg Saint-Germain still had its niche of Legitimists, with the residence of the Jesuits not far away at Saint-Sulpice, along with other religious congregations. Medical students also marched under the clerical banner. Enthusiastic calls for heroic resistance and the stirring sounds of the tocsin signalling grave danger, the roll of drums and the alarmed cry of trumpets were one thing; effective organisation, another.
⁶⁸

National guardsmen were now rushing about preparing to fight, although Delescluze still denied that the Versaillais were inside the city walls. British subject John Leighton asked a guardsman if the news was true. Yes, he replied, ‘we are betrayed’. The red trousers of line troops had been seen in the distance. He heard the heavy sound of rolling wheels and beheld a ‘strange sight’: ‘a mass of women in rags, livid, horrible, and yet grand, with the Phrygian cap [of the French Revolution] on their heads, and the skirts of their robes tied round their waists, were harnessed to a
mitrailleuse
, which they dragged along at full speed; other women pushing vigorously behind’. He followed along, to the point where a barricade was under hurried construction, when a boy confronted him: ‘Don’t you be acting the spy here, or I will break your head open as if you were a Versaillais.’ An old man with a long beard told the boy that that would be a waste of needed ammunition, and turned to Leighton and politely asked ‘Will you be so kind as to go and fetch those stones from the corner here?’ Leighton complied, and, when the barricade was completed, the guardsman told him, ‘You had better be off, if you care for your life.’
⁶⁹
A Parisian
living near Porte Saint-Denis awoke at 6.00 a.m. on 21 May to hear newspaper vendors announcing the ‘Great Victory of Dombrowski at Neuilly’. He stayed in his room all day, smoking his pipe and reading Communard newspapers. After going to bed, he was awakened about midnight by the tocsin from the bells of the churches of Paris. Below, national guardsmen were moving along the boulevards. He did not think much of it. The next morning, the same newspaper vendors were out early, but shouting the same news as the day before. He sent out the concierge to buy more papers, who returned with the news that Versaillais troops had entered Paris. Parisians on the boulevard below seemed ‘worried and stupified’.
⁷⁰

A sizeable barricade went up at the base of rue Saint-Denis. The Parisians living near Porte Saint-Denis at the other end of the street watched as Communard fighters who had been fighting at the Church of the Madeleine and place Vendôme returned to their neighbourhoods, some wounded. In the evening a delegate of the Commune for the
arrondissement
, a large man about fifty or sixty years of age, turned up. Looking around, he ordered the construction of several barricades, instructing several people standing nearby to help out. A paver seemed to be overseeing the work, and about a dozen children joined in. Soon a National Guard platoon of a dozen men showed up. They parked their rifles and slept on the pavement. By now shells had begun to scream above the building at Porte Saint-Denis. One witness began to wonder if the barricades below would keep him and his neighbours from getting out if the shooting drew nearer. Yet he went out to dine. Returning home, he heard shouted orders to turn off the lights and close windows. Then all fell still.
⁷¹

Soon 50,000 line troops were within Paris and within seventeen hours of the first breach of the ramparts 130,000 Versaillais soldiers, along with artillery, had entered the city.
⁷²
Soldiers moved easily down avenue de Versailles and then along the
quai
, sweeping aside a single barricade that stood between them and Trocadéro. That no Communard cannon fire greeted them reflected the ultimate lack of coordination and inadequacy of the Commune’s military defence. Versaillais line troops reached Trocadéro before daybreak on 22 May. The Marquis de Compiègne stood there, ‘Paris stretched out beneath our feet. Joy took over all our faces.’ The Versaillais had taken the barely-defended Trocadéro along with 1,500 prisoners. The fall of Trocadéro shattered the illusion for many Communards that they could hold off the Versaillais.
⁷³

There were more signs during the assault of the violence that was to come. Near Trocadéro, a Versaillais officer called Filippi came across a
wounded National Guard officer lying on a stretcher. He ordered four soldiers of the 79th regiment to carry the man to an improvised care facility. When they grumbled, Filippi reminded them that a wounded combatant was ‘sacred’ and insisted they carry out the order. He had just begun to walk away when he heard shots that told him that ‘the unfortunate wounded man had been finished off’.
⁷⁴

Versaillais forces moved towards Champs-Elysées. They took the vast Palace of Industry, used by the Communards to store supplies and as a hospital, which Thiers’s forces transformed into a prison. The capture of 30,000 rations reduced food available to the
fédérés
. Early that morning, the tricolour flag fluttered above the Arc-de-Triomphe. Hundreds of Communards had simply abandoned their posts in western Paris, so the Versaillais faced little or no resistance. A large column moved along boulevards towards Porte de Clichy, thus preparing for an ultimate attack on Montmartre.

It quickly became apparent – to Versaillais forces and Parisians alike – just how unprepared the Commune was. At daybreak on Monday, Archibald Forbes could easily see Versaillais forces advancing. Heading towards the Champs-Elysées he came upon newly arrived line troops in their red trousers. The Versaillais faced not cannon fire but only rifle shots and now held boulevards Haussmann and Malesherbes and the entry to rue Royale. Beyond stood imposing Communard barricades, the only Communard defences that slowed the Versaillais down. Built of furniture, omnibus, carriages and mattresses, as well as stones and sandbags, one blocked rue Rivoli and the other rue Saint-Honoré. Communards forced Forbes at bayonet point to add chunks of pavement to the barricade, despite his insistence that he was British. His immediate goal was to reach his hotel on Chaussée d’Antin and have breakfast. Back in his room, he discovered a bullet hole in his tobacco pouch.
⁷⁵

On the Left Bank, a force commanded by Joseph Vinoy moved along the
quais
, nearing the Seventh Arrondissement, while another under General Ernest de Cissey duplicated the strategy on the Right Bank by moving along the exterior arteries towards Porte de Vanves. Both were protected by Versaillais guns now pounding away from Trocadéro, where MacMahon set up his headquarters. Already 1,500 national guardsmen had been taken prisoner.
⁷⁶

Communard generals and civilian leaders, meanwhile, provided little or no direction to those defending Paris. Dombrowski sent Louise Michel and a few others to warn the Montmartre vigilance committee that the Versaillais army had entered Paris. ‘I didn’t know what time it was. The
night was calm and beautiful. What did the time matter? What mattered now was that the revolution should not be defeated, even in death.’ The cannons on Montmartre were still. In any case, several weeks of neglect had left them in poor shape. By the time they began firing, at about 9.00 p.m., the Versaillais were already well ensconced.
⁷⁷

In little more than twenty-four hours, the Versaillais troops held about a third of Paris, and now paused so that their reserves could catch up. They had encountered very little resistance from residents – those who had not already left the city – in the fancier neighbourhoods of the western
arrondissements
. They held all of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Arrondissements, most of the Seventh, including Les Invalides, the École Militaire and the Quai d’Orsay, the Eighth, and some of the Seventeenth. Much of the Commune’s gunpowder had gone up in the explosion on avenue Rapp. Some unrealistic optimism remained. A National Guard officer Leighton met in a café told him that a good chunk of the Left Bank had fallen to the Versaillais. But the officer remained confident: ‘Street fighting is our affair, you see,’ he insisted. ‘In such battles as that, the merest
gamin
from Belleville knows more about it than MacMahon.’
⁷⁸
But the Commune at this point stood very little chance of surviving and some Communard fighters must have begun wondering if their only hope was not to be massacred. There was already quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.

Versaillais troops continued to gun down captured Communards. They marched sixteen national guardsmen to the Babylone barracks on rue du Bac and shot them dead. Soldier Julien Poirier saw soldiers tear into a building where they had seen a woman enter carrying a red flag. They found her in the attic, with weapons. They hauled her down the stairs, but she never reached the bottom. She was killed on the way.
⁷⁹

An American family on avenue Friedland welcomed the Versaillais troops as saviours. Several Communard barricades had been hastily constructed nearby and a few shots were exchanged, but that was about it. They watched as Communards pushed cannons down the avenue as fast as they could. A short time later, line troops arrived. The mother of the family ordered the servants to distribute wine and cigarettes to the soldiers, and her young daughter chatted with them. The woman overheard one of them bragging that he had run through five ‘communists’ that morning with his bayonet, which was bent and caked with blood.

The young girl was skipping in front of their door when she saw a Versaillais officer and several soldiers dragging along a man begging for his life. The scene made the girl’s ‘blood run cold, [her] heart stop beating, to
see that poor wretch on his knees, screaming to be spared, and the officer holding a pistol at his head’. The soldiers kicked him to make him get up. Some people watching from a window above the street called out to the officer not to shoot him in front of women and children, ‘so they pushed and kicked him till they came to the end of our street’, where they shot him dead. One of the daughters of their concierge later told her that she had wanted to see him killed, and had been disappointed because she had reached the corner a bit late. The girl had seen a lot in a very short time, more than enough for a lifetime.
⁸⁰

Summary executions had become routine, even organised. French commanders, humiliated in defeat at the hands of Prussia and its allies but seven months earlier, appeared to be taking revenge on ordinary Parisians. The Marquis de Compiègne recalled that too: ‘The orders to shoot anyone taken prisoner were formal, and the soldiers were exasperated by the fires in Paris’ and by resistance they encountered, ‘without hope and without goal’.
⁸¹
The Versaillais troops, many if not most of them of rural origin, had been told that the Communards were lawless insurgents and criminals. As a result, many of the soldiers believed that they could kill captured Communards with the blessing of their officers, who would at least turn a blind eye. Would the killings become a massacre?

CHAPTER
6

Bloody Week Begins

W
ITH
V
ERSAILLAIS TROOPS POURING INTO
P
ARIS THROUGH THE
western gates and much of western Paris having fallen, the next three days – the harrowing of Hell – would be crucial, determining the fate of the Paris Commune and thousands of people who believed in it. Although barricades had been constructed across narrow streets and in places blocked major squares and wide boulevards, these were not enough to hold off the Versaillais for long. Communard defences on the heights of Montmartre, where the Commune had begun sixty-two days earlier, presented the greatest challenge for the Army of Versailles, particularly as Communard fighters would increasingly be forced to fall back to their own neighbourhood strongholds, leaving the rest of Paris at the mercy of the invading troops.