Massacre (36 page)

François insisted that he required more specific instructions listing the names of all those to be executed, along with a copy of the official judgment. Genton returned to the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement to clarify the matter, leaving the execution squad at La Roquette, rifles readied. The
juge d’instruction
returned at about 7.00 p.m. with an order that François again did not find explicit enough. It was virtually the same order for the execution of six hostages, signed by Ferré, who now added ‘and notably the archbishop’, the most prominent hostage of all. Fortin and Genton came up with the list of the others to be shot, in addition to Darboy. At the bottom of the document were three stamps of the Commune. Genton scratched out the name of Swiss-born Bonapartist banker Jean-Baptiste Jecker, replacing him with Deguerry, the
curé
of the Church of the Madeleine.
²⁷

Finally accepting the order, François sent a guard to get the six men. The guard had no idea why he was to bring down these hostages until he came upon the execution squad, commanded by a certain Captain Vérig who had selected its members from men of the neighbourhood. They were for the most part young volunteers (some eighteen years old or even less) who wanted to avenge the death of their relatives at the hands of the Versailles forces. Two-thirds of them were from the 66th battalion; others probably came from the Vengeurs de Flourens, or were simple defenders of the Republic.
²⁸

Ferdinand Évrard, who described himself as ‘only a Parisian bourgeois’, was in a cell next to Darboy’s. An officer in the army, he had been arrested on 6 April after being taken off a train as he attempted to get to Versailles. He heard the ‘chief of these wretches’ shout ‘I need six!’ Two officers commanded the execution squad. Some prisoners saw an officer enter the prison courtyard and bark out, ‘Are the soldiers ready?’ Vérig went to cell number 23, to which the archbishop had been transferred the day before, and asked, ‘Citizen Darboy?’ ‘Present’, came the reply. Bonjean, in the adjeacent cell, did not hear his name called, but his neighbour l’Abbé Surat told him they wanted him. He started out, then turned back to get his overcoat. ‘It is useless’, replied the guard Antoine Ramain, ‘You are very well as you are!’ Ramain told another who had to go to the toilet, ‘It’s not worth it!’ Two of the priests swallowed the last two Communion hosts before the six hostages – Darboy, Bonjean, Deguerry, Michel Allard (a missionary priest who had been a frequent presence in the
quartier
of Saint-Sulpice), Léon Ducoudray, a Jesuit and director of the school of Sainte-Geneviève, and Alexis Clerc, another Jesuit priest – were marched out.
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A Polish guard from La Roquette’s infirmary heard someone say to the hostages, ‘You are going to die. You have done nothing for the Commune. You have always been hostile to it. You are going to die!’ A guard who saw the execution squad remembered that many of them showed sangfroid; he did not see any who were drunk. When the gate was opened and the hostages were taken out, he heard other prisoners shout obscenities at them and denounce them as ‘papists’ and ‘traitors’.
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Clearly poorly prepared for the task, the execution squad discussed, in the presence of the hostages, the best place to shoot them. The first plan was to shoot them in the small exercise yard, but this could be seen from the infirmary windows, which they decided would be bad for morale. In the end, they decided to execute them on the Chemin de ronde, the ‘Gate of Death’ that led to the guillotine.

The hostages passed through two lines of executioners, waiting ten awful minutes while the keys could be found for the gate. Darboy asked if there were many barricades in Paris. ‘Ah! If I could only go and die like my predecessor! I envy the fate of Archbishop Affre.’ When a guard asked Darboy why he did not do anything for the Commune, the archbishop said that he had been arrested after the first real fighting. ‘In God’s name, at least spare us such insults.’ One young
fédéré
asked Darboy of which party he was a member. The archbishop replied that he was ‘in the party of liberty’, adding that he and the others would die for freedom and for his faith. The response: ‘Enough sermons!’ An officer intervened, telling the executioners in no uncertain terms to shut up: ‘You are here to carry out justice, not to insult the prisoners!’
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Following Ramain, Allard led the prisoners, singing prayers in a low voice. They passed along the wall of the infirmary, until the gate of the second
chemin de ronde
. Darboy could barely walk and a guardsman pushed him along. Bonjean offered his arm for support. Another guard discreetly held out his hand to the hostages as if to say goodbye. Ramain stopped at the corner of the wall which ran along rue de la Folie-Regnault and rue Vacquerie. From his cell, Perny could see Darboy below, raising his arms to the heavens as he called out, ‘My God! My God!’ The archbishop and the others knelt down and said a short prayer. Darboy stood with the others and blessed them, amid shouts from the Communards of ‘enough prayers’.

Ramain arranged them in front of the wall, with Allard first, followed by Darboy. The names of the hostages were read out loud. Deguerry
opened up his shirt to expose his chest to the rifles. Several minutes later, Vérig raised his sabre and commanded the squad to fire. Two quick volleys followed. Darboy fell. One of the men reportedly said, ‘This old bastard Darboy did not want to die. Three times he got up, and I began to be afraid of him!’ Vérig, to whom Fortin had loaned Ferré’s sword to command the execution, later claimed to have given the archbishop the
coup de grâce
. Vérig proudly showed a prison warden his pistol, still hot from firing. From his cell above, Abbé Laurent Amodrou could hear ‘first a long volley, then a pause, and then several single shots, and finally a last salvo’.
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With silence engulfing the inside of the prison, the bodies lay where they had fallen for six hours, until 2.00 a.m., before they were taken to Père Lachaise cemetery, where they were dumped in a ditch. Darboy’s sapphire ring, cross and even the silver buckles of his shoes had disappeared. Up in their cells above the scene,
Pères
Perny and Amodrou and the other hostages assumed that they would be next to hear the steps of guards coming down the corridor, even as the forces of Versailles drew nearer and nearer.
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Since 4 April the fate of the hostages had hung in the air. The Communards’ ploy to take Archbishop Darboy and other clerics hostage in hopes of discouraging the Versailles government from carrying out further summary executions, had backfired. Now, the shooting of Darboy and the other hostages gave Thiers an excuse to escalate the killing, both during ongoing fighting in the streets of Paris and in hastily organised courts or tribunals dispensing Versaillais ‘justice’ in the name of the upper classes.

With Versaillais troops moving up rue de Rivoli that Wednesday, the Hôtel de Ville itself was no longer secure. Remaining members of the Commune decided to move to the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement, at the intersection of boulevard Voltaire and rue de la Roquette. Théophile Ferré ordered the building set on fire and it was in flames by 9.00 p.m. At Ferré’s order the Prefecture of Police was also set ablaze. That same evening the Palace of Justice burnt. Ferré’s goal was to slow down the advance of the Army of Versailles and to ensure that, if they captured it, nothing would be left for them to celebrate. Another reason was certainly to burn compromising documents.

One Communard believed that the Versaillais gained two days because the destruction of the Hôtel de Ville, which was symbolic as much as strategic, and the fall of barricades blocking rue de Rivoli and avenue
Victoria compromised defences across the Seine and the forts beyond the southern ramparts. Thus the Commune lost a line of defence that had stretched across to the Latin Quarter. Communard resisters continued to retreat to their neighbourhoods in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements, leaving no one to defend central Paris against the Versaillais troops.
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Chaos reigned along with death. Many Communards still believed they could hold out. Edgar Monteil and Ferré were among the few Communard officials still giving orders. In one case, in the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement, they signed a
laissez-passer
for Edmond Mégy, authorising him to move about Paris and around ‘all barricades’. It is unlikely the
laissez-passer
did him any good. Some Communard leaders had disappeared into the night,
sauve qui peut
(everyone for himself). In the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement, the remaining Communard leaders began to debate whether to move up to Belleville and make a last-ditch stand from its heights.
³⁵

Elizabeth Dmitrieff was still fighting at barricades in eastern Paris ‘encouraging the federals in their resistance, distributing ammunition, and firing’. She said that she was prepared ‘to die on the barricades in the next few days’. Dated 23 May, her final written communication to Communard leaders at the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement was, ‘Gather all the women … and come immediately to the barricades.’
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CHAPTER
8

The Courts-Martial at Work

T
HE
V
ERSAILLAIS KILLING MACHINE HAD NOW REACHED ITS ZENITH
. B
Y
22 May, some twenty military courts were in operation, with bloody consequences. A decree of the Government of National Defence issued on 2 October 1870, during the war and Prussian siege, permitted courts-martial during times of war and granted them the power to condemn to death both soldiers and civilians. Thiers took advantage of this decree after his forces had overrun Paris, using it to insist that Versaillais military courts did indeed fall within the law. It helped, too, that Thiers and the Versaillais continued to assert that the Communards were not political opponents, refugees or legitimate belligerents, but rather ordinary criminals. As such, he considered them to be under his jurisdiction and deserving of no special treatment.
¹
The senior Versaillais commanders were not interested in legal precedents for the martial law tribunals they set up or, in a few cases, presided over, which failed to act within the law. The right to appeal convictions was systematically ignored.
²

The Lobau barracks became the most infamous Versaillais abattoir. The
prévôtal
court (court-martial) was set up at Châtelet on Wednesday 24 May and operated night and day for seven straight days. Following rapid and sometime instantaneous judgments, prisoners were divided between ‘travellers to Lobau and travellers to Satory’ (a plateau near Versailles where Communard prisoners were held). Those headed for Satory might live, but travellers to Lobau were almost certainly to be executed. A British journalist estimated that between 900 and 1,200 were killed at Lobau in twenty-four hours under the supervision of Colonel Louis Vabre of the Volunteers of the Seine, a murderous friend of Thiers. The massacre was carried out ruthlessly, efficiently. As Victor Hugo wrote
in ‘Les fusillés’, ‘A lugubrious sound permeates the Lobau barracks: it is thunder opening and closing the tomb.’ Thus at Châtelet, ‘it was by batches [
fournées
] that the victims were sent to the slaughterhouse’. On 25 May, at the Lobau barracks, after troops marched victims past the smouldering ruins of the Hôtel de Ville, execution squads did not bother to line them up, gunning them down in groups of about twenty, sometimes with machine guns, after they were forced through the door.
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The
Standard
, a conservative British newspaper, reported matter-of-factly that 50–100 ‘insurgents’ were being killed in groups. The army would subsequently claim that officers could not find the names of those executed. Crowds of anti-Communards, now confident enough to pour into the streets of relatively fancy neighbourhoods, shouted for more deaths, and
La Patrie
reported that soldiers had a tough time trying to keep onlookers from assaulting
ces misérables.
Abbé Antoine-Auguste Vidieu of Saint-Roch watched the prisoners ‘as one would look at the ferocious animals at the Jardin des Plantes’. He saw wounded men arriving as at Châtelet. Their crime was their wounds.
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On 25 May, by which time the Versaillais held well more than half of Paris, anyone living near the Jardins du Luxembourg heard the work of execution squads. Henry Dabot, a lawyer, was pleased to relate that many of the Versaillais victims accepted the consolation of priests willingly, but others refused obstinately to kiss a crucifix or to say a prayer. A priest named Hello was the chaplain ‘of those to be shot’. Abbé Riche carried out the same lugubrious duties, ‘more moved than any other by his awful task’.
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As Versaillais execution squads were at work killing prisoners, the fighting in Paris continued, resulting in even more Communard deaths. National guardsmen still held part of the Thirteenth Arrondissement, but increasingly those who had been defending the Left Bank had retreated back into the Eleventh, Twelfth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements, the heart of People’s Paris on the periphery of the capital. Against all odds, they kept up resistance.

Parisians loyal to Thiers eagerly greeted the Versaillais troops who cleared their neighbourhoods of guardsmen. Gustave des E. watched a convoy of prisoners taken at La Villette pass by on the way to Versailles. Now that a Versaillais victory seemed assured, Gustave’s portly neighbour from across the street returned to his apartment, installing his mistress in his Parisian abode (he had left his wife and children in the provinces). Gustave and his friends were eager to tell each other their horror stories. A well-heeled man with whom Gustave dined at the club related a story
about being asked by Versaillais troops to assist in taking down a barricade. He had enthusiastically joined them, as ‘reactionary number 1’, that is, until his kidneys began to ache and he was forced to excuse himself. Another club member with whom Gustave dined related at least seventeen times that a shell had fallen above a room in which his maid – but not he – had been standing several hours before.
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