Massacre (30 page)

Later that day, Cissey’s army reached Gare Montparnasse on the Left Bank, an important point left defended by only twenty-six men. Troops moved through the outer districts of the Fifteenth, Fourteenth and even the Thirteenth Arrondissements, beginning to encircle the central Left Bank. Clinchant’s army continued a similar strategy on the Right Bank, moving along the ramparts. By nightfall, the Versaillais held half of the city, including all or most of ten
arrondissements
. They held a line that stretched from below Montmartre to rue de la Paix and the Opera on the Right Bank and much of the Sixth Arrondissement on the Left Bank.

The battle drew closer and closer to Edmond de Goncourt’s apartment. Workmen arrived with orders to block the boulevard at rue Vivienne, and they began to construct a barricade under his very windows. But they worked slowly, not putting ‘much heart into it. Some move two or three paving stones; others, to satisfy their consciences, give two or three blows at the asphalt with their picks.’ When shots rang out, they quickly left, replaced by national guardsmen who were soon carrying bodies away. In a few minutes only a few boys were left to defend the barricade, as ‘bullets make the leaves of a little tree spreading over their heads rain on them’. A guardsman bravely ventured out to try to retrieve the body of a woman killed in the fighting, but was hit as he insulted the line troops firing at him. A second guardsman also tried, and he, too, was shot, falling on the woman. It was now nightfall, and someone in an adjacent building foolishly lit a pipe, drawing fire from the Versaillais. Goncourt could barely see from his windows in a ‘dark Paris night without a glimmer of gas’.
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With the Versaillais in complete control of the western neighbourhoods, wealthy residents who had taken refuge in Versailles began to return. Paul Martine described them as they followed safely behind the columns of troops, ‘as in Africa, where the hyena and the jackal follow the caravans’. One returned denizen bragged about the unlikely exploit of having killed fourteen people who were not his tenants whom he found in his building.
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Gustave des E. had remained in Paris and was relieved when his servant told him that she had seen that a tricolour flag had replaced the red flag flying on the Arc de Triomphe. The Communards still managed to annoy him, however, interrupting his sleep and confining him to his apartment. Soon Versaillais troops could be seen on the roof of a house at the corner of the boulevard Haussmann and rue Auber, across the street from the Printemps department store. National guardsmen were firing at that building and Communards were hurriedly putting up a barricade across Gustave’s very street at night while he tried to sleep. Gustave could
not leave his apartment to go to his club. Out of caution, he slept on the floor. After lunching on a cutlet, ham and potatoes, he took a nap, at least until a shell struck the roof of his building. He sent his servant to the roof to pick up a piece to show him. The nearby barricade below on rue Auber fell and sixty Communards were executed on the spot. A Versaillais lieutenant was killed, and so were eight national guardsmen, whom Gustave had seen below the previous evening. Gustave was never in any danger, despite all the noise. He even dared open the windows to look outside.
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Speaking from a window at the Hôtel de Ville on Monday, Jules Vallès tried to whip up the defensive effort, greeted by confident applause. Down below, women dressed in black with black crepe tied around their arms and red cockades in their hats went off to help the wounded. Children filled cloth sacks with dirt for barricades and loaded rifles. National Guard officers dashed here and there, and men suddenly left café tables to head towards the battle. A woman rushed up to a youth who lagged behind and berated him, ‘Well, and you, are you not going to get yourself killed with the others?’
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By now the Communards had fallen back to the Church of the Madeleine. In the western districts, which the Versaillais had taken, tricolour flags went up.

Versaillais troops now moved along the inside circumference of north-western Paris, as well as beyond the ramparts, preparing an attack on Montmartre. They were already well ensconced on the Champs-Elysées and rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, and moved rapidly to seize strategic locations and take prisoners on their way to Montmartre. Versaillais troops took the Palais-Royal (which Communards had set on fire to slow down the enemy’s advance), place Vendôme, rue de Richelieu and the Bourse. Line troops seized the Bank of France. The Church of Saint-Augustin and Gare Saint-Lazare fell, along with place Saint-Georges, the site of the ruins of Thiers’s house. On rue Richelieu next to the Théâtre Français, two ditches were piled with corpses of Communard defenders. When Versaillais troops surrounded the church of Saint-Eustache, 500
fédérés
inside the church were forced to surrender. The troops didn’t bother to take prisoners – the prisoners were executed
en masse
.
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On a narrow street behind the Louvre, Englishman Denis Bingham saw a young man shot by ‘some infuriated soldiers, who had evidently been drinking deeply’. They then stopped a student, accusing him of being an incendiary and also of trying to poison soldiers. The young man protested his innocence, and was twice put up against a wall and twice wriggled away, ‘only to be seized and pulled back again. It was a terrible struggle to witness.’ He was finally taken away to a court-martial and probable death.
In the barracks on rue de la Pepinière, near Gare Saint-Lazare, men who had been imprisoned by the Commune because they had refused to fight were shot by the Versaillais, assumed to be deserters. ‘What struck me as deplorable in these days’, Bingham remembered, ‘was the conduct of the population, which, after having shown the most abject submission to the Commune, now clamoured for blood. No sooner was an arrest made than the cry, ‘
À mort! À mort
!’ was raised’ by anti-Communards. Bingham, who could not return to his home near the Arc de Triomphe, with bullets flying in every direction, and had taken a room on rue Saint-Lazare, finally found his wife, who had assumed he had been killed.
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As the Versaillais troops pushed forward, the
fédérés
took to setting fire to buildings to slow down the attack. In some cases the fires were started by Versaillais shells, but, regardless of the cause, houses went up in flames, leaving residents scrambling to find safety. The Cerfbeer family huddled in their apartment on rue Saint-Honoré in great anxiety. Neither news nor provisions were generally to be had, although the family cook had been able to purchase bread. They could not leave, for the
fédérés
were organising resistance right outside their door. Soldiers ordered doors and windows shut. Some residents who went out into the street were sent back in rudely. When an imposing cannon placed below their windows fired from time to time, the entire building shook.

Monday night, an officer knocked on the concierge’s door in the building where the Cerfbeer family lived in a neighbourhood that formed a secondary line of defence between the place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées. The concierge and his family were Alsatians, their strong German accents noticeable to any Parisian. They had two sons. The Communard told them to leave immediately, because the house was to be set on fire: ‘No comments. Get out right now!’ They gave everybody ten minutes to get out, saying that houses nearby were burning.

Twelve-year-old Gaston Cerfbeer’s father told him that their family must leave their home immediately, saying that he would follow once he had gathered up some important papers. Gaston left with the Alsatian concierge, his wife and their two young sons, twelve and fourteen years old. Disoriented people poured into the street. The boy found the faubourg Saint-Honoré ‘completely covered by a wall of flames, because its old houses burned like straw – the scene was terrifying, but strangely beautiful’. Gaston, his mother and the concierge’s family plunged into the night. A half-destroyed barricade blocked their way, but they managed to get through the corner of rue Richepance, with Gaston pulling one of the
concierge’s sons, Fritz, by the hand as they scaled stacked paving stones. Then they heard shots, and Fritz suddenly let go of Gaston’s hand and slid to the ground. He was bleeding from the head. His mother cried out as she reached him, but her husband, seeing that nothing could be done, pulled his wife towards the presumed safety of the place Vendôme. Their son was dead.

Further down rue Saint-Honoré, shots came from rue de Castiglione, where the Versaillais troops had just appeared. Seeing a shadow move, they quickly blasted away in its general direction. Gaston stopped, frozen. Risking her life, a domestic servant waved to him from a balcony that they should enter the building, the door of which was half open. He entered the total darkness of the stairway with his mother and the rest of the concierge’s family. The only sound heard was the concierge mourning his son’s death: ‘
Mein Fritz! Mein lieber Fritz!
’ Someone in the building gave them a candle, as the shooting had stopped. A young girl told them that more fires had been set nearby. Gaston wanted to see for himself, and the two went up to the sixth floor. From the roof they could see ‘an immense red inferno, with columns of smoke filling the air with burnt paper’. As the Ministry of Finance burned – set ablaze by Versaillais shells – they could see ‘a swarm of black things fleeing rapidly’ – rats from the ministry, taking refuge in nearby houses.

The next day uniformed line soldiers dressed in blue and red opened the door telling them it was now safe to leave. Gaston and his family, as well as the concierge and what remained of his relatives, walked quickly towards rue Royale, asking soldiers news of their house. The responses varied. Number 414? Yes, it is burning – no, wait, rather 410 and 414 are ablaze. As everyone could see houses of the faubourg Saint-Honoré aflame, ‘a frenzied, irresistible panic took over everyone’. Rumours arrived that the
quartier
had been mined, all ready to be blown up. Luckily, Gaston and his mother found their building intact. His very worried father was waiting for them.

Years later, Gaston could still see the scene, ‘the deep rumble of houses collapsing in the middle of cries, falling on unfortunate residents later found burnt or asphyxiated in cellars’. At place de la Concorde, a shell had decapitated the female statue representing the city of Lille. Far more terrifying were real corpses, a pile of them in a corner of the courtyard of Assumption Church, and an even bigger one at the Tuileries Palace, where squads of soldiers were busy killing Communard resisters. A tarpaulin covered the stack of bodies there, as a veritable sea of blood formed around the pile of death. Gaston watched the sad parade of prisoners being taken
along rue de Rivoli and up the boulevards towards the horrors of incarceration at Satory near Versailles.
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Gaston’s experience was by no means unique. Monday had brought the first indication that the Communards might use fire as a means of defence. On rue de Lille in the Seventh Arrondissement, Communards told residents to leave their buildings, saying that fires would be set with petrol. One
fédéré
surmised that fire could provide a means of slowing the advance of Thiers’s troops; another retorted that Versaillais shells must have caused the fires that had burst forth.
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Both were reasonable explanations.

On Tuesday, Delescluze and Alfred-Édouard Billioray signed an order: ‘Blow up or set fire to the houses which may interfere with your system of defence. The barricades should not be liable to attack from the houses.’ The Commune threatened to burn any house from which shots against them were fired by allies of Versailles. When they were about to be overrun, Communard resisters tried to create space between them and the attackers by setting strategically standing houses ablaze. Fires were also set in vengeance, punishing traitors. Those setting fires warned residents in advance. Other conflagrations can be seen as a means of appropriating and purifying contested space. A commander of the National Guard wanted to torch the Imprimerie nationale: ‘Here is the house of Badignet [Napoleon III]: we have orders to burn it down.’
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The Versaillais soon believed that the journalist and deputy Jean-Baptiste Millière commanded a force of 150 tasked with setting fire to houses and monuments on the Left Bank. This was absolutely false. Pierre Vésinier, a member of the International as well as of the Commune, supposedly organised a band of fifty incendiaries assigned to burn houses on the boulevards from the Church of the Madeleine to the place de la Bastille. A rumour circulated that Communards had shot people on rue de Lille who attempted to put out the fires. Panic spread in the
beaux quartiers
as buildings went up in flames – including one on rue Saint-Honoré that may have killed seven residents – and the rumours of an organised plot by female incendiaries (
pétroleuses
) swept the city.
La Patrie
reported that Versaillais soldiers found the charred remains of a woman in the chic faubourg Saint-Germain, with remnants of clothing impregnated with petrol and what had once been a pipe in her mouth. To those seeking confirmation of a Communard plot to burn Paris it was clear that the pipe had been used to ignite the gasoline.
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During the battles on 22 and 23 May, Joséphine Marchais, a washerwoman originally from Blois, picked up a gun, donned a Tyrolean hat, and shouted, ‘You cowardly crew! Go and fight! If I’m killed it will be because
I’ve done some killing first!’ She was arrested as an incendiary. In fact she had worked as a
vivandière
with the battalion Enfants Perdus. Joséphine had carried laundry back that guardsmen gave her to wash, and she had carried away the body of her lover, a butcher’s apprentice called Jean Guy, after he was killed. But no one had seen her with any petrol.
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The
Paris Journal
reported that line soldiers took thirteen women to the military post at place Vendôme, most of them young, who had allegedly thrown petrol into basements. Several seconds later, ‘a lugubrious detonation indicated that justice had been done’. A woman may have been gunned down because she was seen too close to the Opéra-Comique, which was not set fire to. Another newspaper announced to eager Versaillais readers that a woman had been arrested with 134 metres of fuse line in her pocket. (This must have been an enormous pocket!) Marie-Jeanne Moussu, a laundress from Haute-Marne married to a man named Gourier, seemed to the Versaillais ‘the most perfect example imaginable of these vile creatures of the faubourgs, who provide the Commune with powerful auxiliaries to burn down Paris’. She had indeed set a fire, but was trying to burn out her former lover – her act had nothing to do with the Commune.
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