Massacre (32 page)

At this point, forced to acknowledge that there was little hope of victory, most Communards began to prepare themselves for the end. As the battle drew nearer to the Latin Quarter, Maxime Vuillaume went to his apartment on rue du Sommerard to burn papers that, if seized by the Versaillais, would surely mean big trouble. He had copies of the letter Archbishop Darboy had written to Thiers on 12 April and another to Vicaire Lagarde on the same day – these he gave to Benjamin Flotte, who lived nearby. They went together to have a drink chez Glaser, which they found totally empty. After that brief meeting, Vuillaume never saw Flotte again.
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Jean Allemane, like so many other Communards, also now had few illusions about what lay ahead. He pulled everything out of his pockets: a pocket-knife, sixty centimes, some papers, and a card indicating that he worked for the
Journel Officiel.
He began to try to imagine how he would die. Walking towards boulevard Saint-Germain, he ran into a friend called Treilhard, who was going home to put the accounts of Assistance Publique (Welfare Assistance) in order, as he had promised. Allemane advised him that he should go with him to the Eleventh Arrondissement, where the remaining Communards intended to hold their ground, and that, if he did not, Treilhard risked being captured and shot. Treilhard declined, was soon after arrested, put up against a wall, and gunned down.

Allemane managed to get down boulevard Saint-Germain, where various undercover Versaillais policemen were making arrests. One stopped him on the
quai
and asked what he was doing out at 1.00 a.m. Allemane replied that he was going to boulevard de l’Hôpital to check on his aged parents. He got through but passed a young boy, Georges Arnaud, he knew from the neighbourhood being marched along by soldiers. The boy did not give him away by nodding, which could well have cost him his life. A neighbour who ran the bistro Au Chinois told a Versaillais officer that he knew the boy very well and he did not fight and he was released (but later to die of tuberculosis aged twenty-four). Georges’s parents took Allemane in. From their apartment they could hear the sound of line troops searching the building. Allemane barricaded the door of the room where he was hiding, preparing to defend himself, but the soldiers were looking for someone else. He resolved to leave and take his chances so as not to jeopardise his rescuers.

After a quick dinner, Allemane headed for the apartment of his brother who lived in the Twentieth Arrondissement. But not long after arriving at rue Levert, police and troops surrounded the building and arrested him. He had no money and no papers that could get him out of Paris. Moreover, ‘denunciations rained down on Paris … where the police spy was king’. After giving his name as Monsieur Roger, the next day he admitted that he was Jean Allemane. There had been little chance of escaping arrest. He was soon imprisoned in Versailles.
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The Army of Versailles and the Volunteers of the Seine had in little more than two days taken more than half of Paris. The only hope now seemed to be for Communard fighters to fall back to their neighbourhoods in eastern Paris and organise the defence of the ‘
quartiers populaires
’.
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A sergeant in the National Guard, who might have got out, related: ‘I can’t
leave, because what would my comrades from the
quartier
say?’
⁵⁰
For the Communards, neighbourhood solidarity became even more essential to survival. The defence of Paris withered into the defence of
quartiers
. The role of women became even more important. One of the strange things about the conflict was that, in the street fighting, ‘you were sometimes certainly surprised to came upon a childhood friend’ fighting for the Versaillais.
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Montmartre, where the Commune had begun little more than two months earlier, remained potentially the strongest point of defence. The Commune sent General Napoléon La Cécilia there. Of ‘sad and solemn appearance, without charm, with a cold and proper air’, La Cécilia’s abilities were far below what was required and he had difficulty communicating because he was Corsican and did not speak French well. The task before him was daunting. La Cécilia found defences on Montmartre disorganised and National Guard battalions demoralised. Communard fighters instinctively resisted his authority because he was virtually unknown in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. But, more importantly, it was too late for anyone, even the most savvy general, to make any difference. Some of the barricades that had gone up on 18 March were still there, and while they could provide some resistance to attacks from the south they could not help if the Versaillais attacked from other directions. By 5.00 a.m. on 23 May line troops had reached Porte de Clignancourt, to the north beyond the Butte, a distance of about three kilometres from Batignolles in the Seventeenth Arrondissement.
⁵²

Louis Barron agonised over the state of the defences in Montmartre: ‘The Mont-Aventin [one of the hills of Rome] is so poorly defended! Spies of Monsieur Thiers, your task will be easy … no moats, no trenches, no dry walls at the approaches to this position, whose strength has been exaggerated, because indeed it could have been made formidable.’ Barron had a premonition of ‘the coming horrible carnage, furious massacres, uncontrolled shooting; I smell the insipid, nauseating odour of streams of blood, saturating the pavement, flowing in the streets’. Yet somehow – at least in People’s Paris – the illusion of the invincibility of the popular will persisted.
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La Cécilia wanted to know why the cannons on Montmartre were silent. He found eighty-five cannons and about twenty
mitrailleuses
just sitting there, unattended and unused for two months. Finally, under La Cécilia’s direction, the cannons fired several shells, but some of the guns then slid back into the mud, to the extent that they were unusable. Reclus reflected on the irony that when Communard shells finally were launched
from the heights of Montmartre, Belleville and Ménilmontant, they fell on ‘the rich and commercial neighbourhoods’ of western Paris, where nonetheless many good republicans were still to be found, neighbourhoods that had already suffered Versaillais shelling.
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Knowing that line troops had swept so easily through Batignolles and having insufficient numbers of national guardsmen to organise a stout defence, Polish General Jaroslaw Dombrowski now realised that there was no hope. He tried to get out of Paris, but was stopped at Porte Saint-Ouen by
fédérés
. He was then taken to the Hôtel de Ville, where the Committee of Public Safety expressed confidence in him and refused to accept his resignation. Still loyal to the Commune and having nowhere to go, Dombrowski returned to service, just like that. Despite the increasingly desperate situation, Pyat’s
Le Vengeur
kept reassuring its readers that all was well although
Père Duchêne
published its last issue that day, carrying the date ‘3 Prairial, an 79’, 23 May 1871.
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That day the Army of Versailles launched its assault on Montmartre early Tuesday. Armies attacked from three directions. The army commanded by Clinchant had easily moved through Batignolles, left virtually undefended despite the best efforts of Benoît Malon. Troops killed indiscriminately along the way. A Versaillais officer apparently ordered a soldier who refused to gun down women and children to be shot. Not far away, troops allegedly killed a man who had done absolutely nothing, shot his wife and child when they hugged him too long, and then finished off, for good measure, a doctor who tried to help the child.
⁵⁶

With rifle fire from the Butte passing well over their heads, no cannon fire to fear, and only a single
mitrailleuse
to be avoided, the Volunteers of the Seine reached Montmartre. They encountered a defended barricade on rue Marcadet on the far side of the Butte, but were protected by the curve of the street. Soldiers were sent into houses on both sides of the street to fire down on the defenders. Two cannons were brought up to shell the barricade. The fire of the
fédérés
soon weakened, and then the Communard defenders abandoned it. Albert Hans was amazed to find Montmartre, traditional hotbed of radicalism, defended with so little organisation, personnel, or energy. The Volunteers of the Seine reached two barricades at rue des Abbesses and took both quickly, along with 600 prisoners.

Another Communard barricade awaited the Volunteers of the Seine, also on rue Marcadet. They first occupied houses on both sides of the street, mounted the stairs, and from windows above fired down on the defenders. Soon there were only four
fédérés
left at the barricade. They fell almost immediately. Commander Gustave Durieu, ‘with his savage energy’,
as Hans described him with admiration, personally killed ten men found in nearby buildings. The ‘cruel expressions’ and ‘truly strange and fearsome look’ of Durieu, who had honed his skills against rebels in Mexico, were unmistakable. The Volunteers of the Seine began searching houses before regular troops, shooting dead anyone they found wearing a National Guard uniform and carrying a rifle, or who had traces of powder on the palm of a hand. Later the same day, gravely wounded on the Butte of Montmartre, Durieu was carried to the house on rue Rosiers next to where Generals Lecomte and Thomas had been put up against a wall on 18 March. He died the next day. The officer who replaced him ordered more killings. Leighton remembered that, on that hot day, ‘all the young men who were found in the streets were provisionally put under arrest, for they feared everyone, even children, and horrible vengeance and thirst for blood had seized upon all. Suddenly an isolated shot would be heard, followed a minute or two after by five or six others. One knew reprisal had been done.’
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In the courtyard of a building, the Marquis de Compiègne of the Volunteers of the Seine came upon a horse, which he believed must have belonged to an insurgent. As he considered how to find its owner, he suddenly found himself assailed by several angry women, young and old, crying and shouting, ‘my father, my son!’ Several Volunteers of the Seine appeared, carrying in a young man about seventeen years old wearing a National Guard uniform, ‘more dead than alive’: ‘He gave the appearance of a sheep with such a stupid aspect that it seemed impossible to believe that he could commit any malicious act.’ The marquis took pity, pushing him into a small room. Each time a soldier came in, the marquis told him that he had already searched the room and had found nothing suspect. Presumably the young man survived. Others were not so lucky. The marquis took to his commanding officer, Escolan de Grandpré, a prisoner wearing a sailor’s uniform. Grandpré told the captured man that he had dishonoured his uniform and blew out his brains on the spot. On rue Marcadet, the marquis recalled, ‘the streams … ran with blood as in a street next to the slaughterhouses’.
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On the western side of Montmartre, General Clinchant attacked via avenue Clichy, avenue de Saint-Ouen and the cemetery. General Paul de Ladmirault’s troops moved along rue Blanche and rue Pigalle, south-west of the butte. The attack from the north faced little resistance, which the Versaillais commanders had already anticipated thanks to their spies.
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The Versaillais finally took the massive barricade at place Clichy on that Tuesday and would control all of Montmartre by the end of the day.
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In the meantime, Nathalie Le Mel planted a red flag on the barricade at place Blanche beneath the Butte. She and perhaps as many as 120 other Communards offered stiff resistance. In the fighting in Montmartre, those defending barricades had little in the way of reinforcements, munitions, or food. The barricade at place Blanche fell to General Paul de Ladmirault’s troops before noon. Some defenders who had survived the fighting were immediately shot. Others managed to retreat to the barricade at place Pigalle. Sebastien Commissaire saw a company of women hurry into combat. As they approached place Pigalle, ‘all of those who were part of this little troop were killed or taken prisoner. From my window, I saw several of the women, whom I had seen go down the street with their arms a few moments earlier, marched back up it, disarmed and surrounded by soldiers.’ Line troops took a Communard to a Versaillais officer. The latter asked the man who he was, and he replied, ‘Lévêque, mason, member of the Central Committee!’ The officer shot him point blank in the face with his pistol.
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The barricades at place Pigalle held on for three hours of brutal combat, but no more. A few other Communard fighters managed to get to boulevard Magenta. Others fell back on Belleville.

Well-known in Montmartre because of her work with the consumer cooperative La Marmite, Nathalie Le Mel was older than a group of young women wearing armbands of
ambulancières
and red scarves and carrying rifles who followed her. When a Communard artilleryman was wounded, Le Mel and two other women forced open the door of a pharmacy on boulevard de Clichy. She went to a concierge in a nearby building to ask for oil so she could care for a wounded woman, but none was to be found. Natalie tried to restore morale, saying ‘We are beaten, but not conquered!’ as Montmartre had not yet been taken, although Versaillais troops were overrunning it.
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Louise Michel, who had helped care for the wounded, had gone from the Montmartre cemetery where Communards were being killed to the
mairie
to try to find fifty more men for the struggle. Upon her return to one of the barricades, only fifteen were still there fighting. General Dombrowski came upon them on horseback, telling Michel, ‘We’re lost.’ She exclaimed ‘No!’ They shook hands, before Dombrowski departed. Within hours, he was killed at the barricade on rue Myrha. Dombrowski’s last words were ‘I am no traitor’. He was buried in his Polish army uniform.
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Marie Holland, wife of Protestant pastor Eugène Bersier, remembered 23 May: ‘What night of hell we spent, with cannons and machine guns all
around us.’ They awaited their ‘saviours’ and early that morning heard a shout from outside that the tricolour now graced a barricade further up the street. Bullets whizzed about. Not too long thereafter the religious couple could exclaim, ‘God be blessed! Montmartre is taken!’ Returning to their house, which had been occupied by Communards, they found all in order and a note: ‘Dear Pastor, may God protect your house, where we were!’ All signs indicated that the temporary occupants had to leave quickly. The couple wondered where they were now – fighting somewhere, or perhaps already dead. The next day, Pastor Bersier came upon more than sixty bodies of national guardsmen. He wanted to copy down their names so he could attempt to notify their families, but line troops would not have it. He became angry when he saw people yelling at troops escorting prisoners ‘Kill them, sabre them, without pity, my boys!’
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