Massacre (34 page)

One resident living near Porte Saint-Denis who supported the Versaillais watched from his window as guardsmen hurriedly reinforced the barricade below and hauled a cannon toward the Church of the Madeleine; they too seemed determined to keep up the defence. Early in the afternoon on Wednesday, a National Guard company appeared. Sentinels who appeared at the intersections of the boulevard Saint-Denis forced passers-by to add a paving stone to the barricade. More
fédérés
appeared, threatening to ‘blow the brains out’ of anyone who fled. After sleeping badly, the resident went down the next morning to get a closer look. He strolled about, as on an ordinary day, seemingly oblivious to the danger, and calmly asked his neighbour, ‘And so! Things are heating up?’ He must not have noticed the
fédéré
riding by, his horse carrying the body of a fallen Communard.
⁷⁴

Edgar Monteil, a journalist for
Le Rappel
and a National Guardsman, survived the battle and executions, but witnessed first-hand the hatred that enabled the Versaillais to kill so many Communards – men, women and children alike –
en masse
. He and a colleague called Lemay returned to their office to sleep. Soldiers broke through the office door. The Versaillais searched the office, finding only a gun not in service since the Prussian siege, but copies of
Le Rappel
were enough to assure arrest. An officer asked about these new prisoners and was told ‘They are from
Le Rappel
.’ The commander turned towards the journalists: ‘You are the ones who lit the fires of this civil war!’ But for the moment no rifles clicked into readiness. Monteil and Lamy were locked in an old guard post, hungry and thirsty. While hiding compromising documents, Monteil had thought to take along some money. They pounded on the door, asking a guard outside for bread and water. He asked if they had money, and Monteil gave him ten francs. They never saw the bread or water, the guard, or the money.

Monteil and Lemay were taken to Versailles as part of a convoy of 500 prisoners. An officer told them as they passed near the ramparts that Communards were being killed there, but not all of them, for ‘we will make a choice, that’s for sure’. Monteil realised that he certainly had never detested the Versaillais as much as the anti-Communards hated them. In contrast to the Parisian middle classes, the inhabitants of outlying villages seemed sympathetic to the plight of the prisoners. But at the gates of Versailles it started up again: ‘Dirty Parisians!’ yelled a captain, ‘Heap of rabble. You are going to enter the capital of the good, worthy and honest rural people! Take off your hats, vermin, hats off!’ He hit those who refused with the flat of his sword. At place des Armes, the well-dressed hurled mud at the ragged prisoners and a lady struck at them with her cane. Another captain ordered them to salute the palace of kings, raising his sword in warning. When they reached the prison camp of Satory at Versailles, line troops shouted out, ‘Do you see the pepper-mill [
la mitrailleuse
]? … Nothing to fear!’
⁷⁵

CHAPTER
7

Death Comes for the Archbishop

M
ONTMARTRE, THE GREAT STRONGHOLD OF THE
C
OMMUNE STANDING TALL
above Paris, had fallen on Tuesday 23 May. Wednesday would be another critical day. The task of Thiers’s troops now seemed easier. The Committee of Public Safety – a couple of members had already fled the city – now met in permanence in the Hôtel de Ville. The Commune on Wednesday issued a proclamation to the Versaillais troops: ‘Do not abandon the cause of the workers! Do as your brothers did on 18 March!’ The Committee of Public Safety followed with its own message, hoping against hope that the Commune might still endure: ‘Like us, you are proletarians … Join us, our brothers!’
¹

The Versaillais did not slow down. There would be no repeat of 18 March. Communard fighters readied their weapons. When Paris awoke, the skies were red and black from smoke rising from the Palace of the Legion of Honour, Palais-Royal, and houses on rue Royale – where the clock had stopped at 1.10 p.m. the previous afternoon.
²
In the Hôtel de Ville, national guardsmen slept where they could, among wounded men resting on bloody mattresses. Two men arrived carrying an officer who had lost most of his face and jaw to a Versaillais shell. Barely audible and clutching the remnants of a red flag, he encouraged his compatriots to keep on fighting. Gabriel Ranvier, a member of the Commune from the Twentieth Arrondissement, ordered two men to return to their
arrondissements
and lead the fight, threatening to have them shot if they failed to do so.

In another upper room, members of the Commune and various military officers, some in civilian clothes, sat around a large table, solemnly discussing the worsening situation. They had been meeting all night, and must have been exhausted. During the course of their deliberations, they
ordered the execution of a Versaillais spy, whose body was tossed into the Seine. As Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray observed, hope was gone but courage still remained. Charles Delescluze was there, determined, but he gave the impression of a defeated man, going through the motions as he awaited the final act. In a room near the entrance to the Hôtel de Ville lay the body of the Polish General Jaroslaw Dombrowski. The murderous thunder of cannons crept in from outside.
³

A proclamation of the Committee of Public Safety tried to reassure the population. Despite the fact that, thanks to ‘treachery’, Versaillais forces had occupied some of Paris, such setbacks should not ‘dishearten you but rather spur you to action’. Parisians should build more barricades to make Paris ‘impregnable’. But it was certainly too late for that. The absence of centralised planning for the defence of the capital was even more sadly apparent. The Central Committee appealed also to the soldiers of Versailles, urging them not to fight for ‘military despotism’, that disobedience was ‘a duty’, and asking them to ‘fraternise’ with the people.
⁴

That same day, Adolphe Thiers, fearing a hostile reaction in other parts of France to all the summary executions, sent out a telegram to the prefectures of the provinces announcing that Marshal Patrice de MacMahon had warned the Communards to surrender or risk being shot. In fact, no such notice to Paris had gone out. Thiers and his government wanted nothing less than the execution of as many insurgent Parisians as possible. The president of the provisional government assured the National Assembly that ‘Our valiant soldiers conduct themselves in such a manner as to inspire foreign countries with the highest esteem and admiration.’
⁵
At the time the members of the National Assembly may not have been unaware of the extent of the summary executions. But most of them certainly did not care.

At 9.00 a.m. the Commune’s War Delegation issued an order, dated ‘4 prairial an 79’, for the destruction of any house from which shots were fired on national guardsmen, and the execution of everyone in the building if they did not immediately hand over the ‘authors of the crime’. As the Versaillais advanced even deeper into the city, the National Guard insisted that windows be closed because some Communard soldiers had ‘treacherously’ been shot from such places.
⁶

Even though Montmartre had fallen, the fighting continued and casualties mounted. On 24 May, early in the morning, Albert Hans’s battalion went down the hill from Montmartre towards Porte Cligancourt, where barricades had also fallen the day before. Then, turning in the direction of Gare du Nord on the chaussée Cligancourt, they came upon the bodies of
a dozen Versaillais troops. They also came upon weapons hastily abandoned by Parisians, including some of the cannons seized by the population at place Wagram on 18 March, which now seemed like an eternity ago. A tricolour now floated above the Moulin de la Galette. At rue Rochechouart, bullets were still flying, fired from the barricades at the corner of rue du faubourg Poissonnière, boulevard d’Ornano and boulevard Magenta. These positions, too, soon fell. In the confusion, Hans and other Volunteers of the Seine found themselves fired on by regular Versaillais troops, before they could identify themselves.
⁷

A guardsman came to the door of the apartment where Élie Reclus was staying, asking the friend hosting him to ‘take a position at the barricade being constructed nearby’. Reclus’s friend replied that he was over forty and therefore exonerated from National Guard service, which the guardsman accepted, returning to the barricade below. He had not addressed a word to Reclus, who was in the next room with the door open. Suddenly, an explosion like thunder, all too close, enveloped everything in a huge white cloud of smoke. Communard fighters had blown up the munitions storage facility in the Jardins du Luxembourg in order to slow the Versaillais advance. From their window Reclus and his friend could see fires burning in the distance. Soon after, line troops swept through nearby barricades, leaving nothing but rubble. Reclus would not forget the scene: ‘Victorious, the tricolour flag was hoisted above a pile of cadavers, in a sea of blood.’
⁸

Reclus reflected on the hopelessness of the situation. Paris was powerless before an army of 130,000 men with 500 cannons, a giant ‘horde of Bonapartists, clergy, Orléanists and conservatives’, intent on destroying the democratic and social Republic. Poorly organised and without effective leaders, the Communards were ‘floating like the unfortunate jellyfish left aground by the ravages of a storm, our willpower is useless, our efforts in vain, our hope has become ridiculous … our little lives are engulfed by these incredible events’. All night one could hear the ‘horrifying clamour of the painful tocsin rung in Belleville and Ménilmontant, falling still, and then taking up again, followed by the desperate roll of the drums calling everyone to combat’.
⁹

Not all Parisians noticed the bloodshed. While the fighting moved eastward through Paris, Gustave des E. slept. He bravely ventured out, ‘after a nice lunch’, of course, to go to his club, avoiding the smouldering rue Royale, where, as described by Théophile Gautier, fire had ‘continued the work of the cannon fire and shells. Gutted houses reveal their insides like gutted bodies.’ Twelve members had somehow managed to get to the club, so Gustave did not have to dine alone.
¹⁰

Georges Jeanneret watched the Versaillais tide sweep through Communard defences: ‘While the battle continues in Paris and its faubourgs, bourgeois Paris celebrates its triumph in its sumptuous neighbourhoods.’ It was impossible to ignore that this was very much a class war. The weather was beautiful. Well-dressed ladies, some carrying parasols ‘in order to protect their complexions from the bright sunshine … approach the corpses which were lying about, and with the tips of their parasols deliberately remove the caps or clothing placed over the faces of the dead’. One woman stepped up and chided one of them: ‘Madame, death should be respected.’
¹¹

Maxime Vuillaume knew full well that the end was near and that he needed to destroy any evidence that tied him to the Communards. He tore up a ticket to the toppling of the Vendôme Column and, even more compromising, an identity card given him by the Commune detailing his name, address and profession: journalist. He had no illusions: from rue Lacépède in the Fifth Arrondissement he could hear the volleys of executions in the Jardin des Plantes. Crossing place Saint-Michel, a young woman said to him, ‘Let’s go, citizen, your cobblestone!’ Vuillaume obliged, putting a large stone on the barricade intended to block the entry to the
quai
and the Pont-au-Change. At 11.30 a.m., the barricade was more or less ready, but where were the guardsmen to defend it? Hoping to get both lunch and news, Vuillaume headed to the restaurant Chez Lapeyrouse along the Seine, where Raoul Rigault often dined with his Communard colleagues from the Prefecture of Police. Five or six tables were taken. Vuillaume lunched with friends. With the bill came the news that the Versaillais were near.

Returning to place Saint-Michel, Vuillaume ran into Rigault, who suggested a drink at the Café d’Harcourt. Rigault told him that the previous evening he had had his old friend Gustave Chaudey shot. Before Vuillaume, shaken by the news, could reply, Rigault was off, saying ‘See you in a minute. At the Panthéon!’ Vuillaume walked up boulevard Saint-Michel, came upon an
ambulance
next to the gardens, and shook hands with people he knew. No one said a word. On rue Royer-Collard, he ran into Rigolette, who ran the Cochon Fidèle on the corner of rue des Cordiers. There, two Communards stood behind a barricade, ready to fight, in front of the house of one of Villaume’s former teachers, Joseph Moutier, who had taught Rigault physics. Death was in the air, intensified by the seeming normalcy of walking past the house of someone the two Communards had known and admired.
¹²

Julien Poirier’s Versaillais infantry unit had taken fifty prisoners without firing a shot, having slept the previous night with troops on the pavement
outside Les Invalides. As they neared the Jardins du Luxembourg, they faced cannon fire and several Versaillais troops were killed. As they made progress, Poirier saw a woman carrying a red flag going into a building and told his captain, who sent men in after her. At the top of the stairs, they found her in the attic, ‘armed to the teeth’. Pushing her into the middle of the room, they took turns beating her with the butts of their rifles. Poirier and some of the others then forced her down the stairs, killing her before they reached the ground floor.

Once outside again, they noticed that no more Communard shells were falling. As the powder magazine at the Jardins du Luxembourg exploded, the troops continued to advance, eyeing the buildings on either side, fearing snipers. Arriving at boulevard Saint-Michel, they faced determined opposition and for the moment could not cross one of Paris’s main arteries.
¹³
Although Baron Georges Haussmann’s boulevards helped the Versaillais by allowing them to move quickly into central Paris, they also gave Communard fighters the chance to defend themselves with cannon fire, slowing the onslaught.