Massacre (37 page)

At Porte Saint-Denis, residents in a nearby building who for whatever reason had not left Paris experienced the terrors of civilian life in a war zone as cannon, rifle and machine-gun fire outside kept them inside. Guardsmen entered and demanded that windows be closed. Then another Communard fighter entered and asked how to get to the attic so he could fire from there, using mattresses for protection against return fire. Madame Théo, who owned the building, did not want them firing from her window and offered them cognac and rum in exchange. By now the residents had gathered in two rooms as bullets tore into the building, breaking windows and shredding curtains. Another Communard fighter appeared and began to fire from an upper window. When Madame Théo asked him to do as little damage as possible, he took her hands, calling her
citoyenne
, and reassured her that there was nothing to fear. The Communard would fight until death but nothing in the house would be destroyed. It turned out that the person was really a woman, with short hair and ‘
une belle paire de Tétons
’ (a nice pair of tits). Her husband, a wine merchant, had left Paris after 18 March. When the Communards of their neighbourhood had come looking for him she had taken his place, perhaps out of shame, and had been accepted by the battalion. The female insurgent then returned to the street, yelling ‘
Vive la Commune!
Fire, citizens!’ Communard fighters followed ‘their officer’.

The residents moved up the steps to the third floor. One neighbour was not doing very well; her husband sponged her off, and she was revived by smelling salts. The others seemed calm. There was no way out of the building, as the front door led directly to the barricade. No ladder, not even a rope, could be found to help them climb out of a back window. A small door leading to the house next door could only be opened from the other side; the owner, a nasty character, had left it locked. A national guardsman threatened that he had five minutes to open the door before he burned down his ‘shack’. The door duly opened, and his neighbours found relative safety, at least momentarily, in the man’s cellar.

Soon shells and gunfire came dangerously close, forcing guardsmen to retreat to the barricade at nearby Porte Saint-Martin. A guardsman put out of service a remaining cannon so that the Versaillais could not use it
when they captured the weapon. One officer stayed behind, seemingly awaiting death. A bullet struck him and he staggered a few steps towards faubourg Saint-Denis and fell. The fighting moved away, but not the danger, as a fire broke out several doors away. A woman who had taken refuge in the building drew suspicion. She claimed that Versaillais troops would not allow her to climb over the barricade in order to return home. The residents thought her an incendiary. It turned out that she did indeed live nearby on boulevard Bonne Nouvelle. The residents of the neighbourhood, at least those who were against the Commune or now pretended to be, feted the line soldiers who had taken the barricade with ham and sausages.
⁷

That same day, Élie Reclus took refuge in the basement of a house. He found himself sharing space with about thirty-five other people of all ages and social classes. ‘In normal times, these wild beasts would chase and devour each other’, but now, in a time of enormous peril, they found themselves sharing space and an unspoken truce. Given the circumstances, any affirmation of political views, direct or indirect, was carefully avoided. Gazing upon pale bourgeois faces, Reclus reflected on what he dared not say: ‘So, it’s you, bourgeois. Now it’s those like you whose cowardly ignorance and cruel egotism have brought these horrors, past horrors, and those in the future which you will inflict on us!’ He could imagine what was going through the mind of the bourgeois as well: ‘It’s you, revolutionary of all evil, with your brothers and accomplices, through your criminal stubbornness, [who] force the friends of order to shoot you, and this I do not at all regret.’

Lost in such thoughts, everyone suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of heavy boots in the stairs. ‘Property, Order and Religion’ appeared in the person of three line troops, their faces covered with sweat and anger. With their bloody bayonets leading the way, they demanded to know ‘Where is this rabble, where are these cowards? We are going to take care of them!’ The bourgeois of the group eagerly arose and moved, beaming, towards the red trousers: ‘Oh, there you are! We are friends of Versailles!’ The soldiers inspected the others up and down, one of them proudly showing his pistol, still hot after gunning down a Communard. The Versaillais soldier quickly added, ‘Yes, we captured two hundred of them and we shot them.’
⁸

Elsewhere in Paris, Alix Payen, caring for wounded Communards, seemed surprised to still be alive. ‘Our building was shaking as in an earthquake, doors and windows blown out in splinters.’ It was impossible to flee; the boulevard on which she lived was engulfed in fighting and, in any
case, there was nowhere to go. Alix had no news of her husband Henri, who was lying gravely wounded elsewhere.
⁹

Julien Poirier, fighting for the Versaillais, remembered 25 May as ‘a real massacre’, with women carrying infants and small children in their arms gunned down by Versaillais
mitrailleuses.
Poirier fought all day, as thunder, lightning and rain swept Paris. His unit fought near the Panthéon and down towards Gobelins, searching houses as they went. About noon, they came upon two Communards loading guns, and shot both in the chest. They were only badly wounded, so they threw them out of the third floor window. In another room, they came upon two young men sharing a bed, pretending to be asleep. A lieutenant stuck them in the side with his sword. One of them suddenly leapt out of bed and attacked one of the soldiers, trying to get his pistol, and in the subsequent melée escaped down a flight of stairs. In a basement, Poirier, his captain and some other soldiers found a young woman hiding there who offered some of her wine. Rumours that women were offering poisoned drinks to Versaillais soldiers had spread. The captain advised his men not to accept her offer. Nonetheless Poirier downed two bottles, and the captain, reassured, polished off another. Then, looking around, Poirier saw a young man hiding under a mattress – it was the woman’s husband. They took him out and put him with other prisoners. Their colonel told the captain in no uncertain terms to take him to Luxembourg to have him shot. When one of about fifty prisoners tried to escape, they beat him and ordered him to march into a nearby garden to be killed. The man refused to go any further, so they shot him right there, taking the 10 francs found in his pocket for their time.
¹⁰

The American Wickham Hoffman despised the ‘communists’, but was nonetheless appalled by the reprisals: ‘There is no excuse for the wholesale butcheries committed by the troops.’ One of his friends saw soldiers enter a house on boulevard Malesherbes and demand of the concierge if any ‘communists’ were hidden there. She replied that there were none, but the troops rushed in all the same. They discovered a man, took him out and shot him, killing the concierge for good measure.

No sympathy for the Communards was acceptable. When another American witnessed the burial of a Communard, he remarked ‘Why, he hasn’t a bad face after all!’ and was advised by an officer ‘not to express any such sentiments again’. House-by-house searches brought thousands of arrests. Line troops even went down into the sewers and catacombs of Paris looking for Communards hiding there.

Even after the Left Bank’s last defences fell on Wednesday, Communard resistance remained organised, determined and somewhat effective in the
Thirteenth Arrondissement, near the place d’Italie and Porte de Choisy, and at Gobelins. Polish General Walery Wroblewski oversaw a line of defence that ran from the Butte-aux-Cailles near place d’Italie to the fortified wall and Fort Bicêtre. After four attempts, that afternoon the Versaillais troops of General Ernest de Cissey took the Butte-aux-Cailles, a neighbourhood of the rag pickers and the last Communard bastion on the Left Bank. The resistance had been stiff, but reinforcements poured in on the Versailles side. National Guardsmen abandoned Fort Bicêtre to return to defend their own
quartiers
. At the end of the day, by attacking from three directions, with the goal of isolating the
arrondissement
and taking control of the Paris–Orléans railway, the Versaillais killed and captured many demoralised Communard fighters. When the fighting ended, 400 bodies littered the ground. Wroblewski made it across the Seine to fight another day.
¹¹

However, not all deaths on 25 May were those of Communards. Members of the Dominican order housed in Arcueil just south of Paris also perished. Léon Meilliet, Communard commander of Fort Bicêtre, accused them of passing information on military strategy and Communard forces to the Versaillais. There was some evidence behind these allegations; they were not just random. Local opinion also blamed the priests for being in cahoots with the Versaillais and responsible for a fire that broke out inside a château near the Dominican school on 17 May, although this was highly unlikely.

A number of Sisters of Charity were taken into Paris and held in Saint-Lazare prison. On Thursday 25 May, national guardsmen took about forty people, including Dominican priests and several employees, to Fort Bicêtre, where Communard resisters still held out. Two of the priests demanded that they be interrogated in the hope of being freed. They were taken to a judge, Louis Lucipia, who had been an attorney’s clerk and journalist. Lucipia came to the conclusion that the prisoners were not guilty of anything, but told them that they were being held as material witnesses to the château fire.

National Guard commander Marie Jean-Baptiste Sérizier, a leather worker, member of the International, and a militant in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, that day ordered the twenty-three remaining prisoners (several had been released and a few had managed to escape) to be taken from their temporary prison at Fort Bicêtre. They were told that they would be moved into central Paris where they would be safer – Versaillais troops were advancing rapidly. Once out in the street, the prisoners faced insults hurled by passers-by. As they moved past the cemetery of
Champs-des-Navets, bullets from the nearby fighting began to whizz by them. One of the priests wearing civilian clothes managed to escape. After entering Paris through Porte-de-Choisy, they reached the
mairie
of the Thirteenth Arrondissement. Shells exploding nearby made clear that they would have to move on immediately.

The prisoners were taken at about 10.00 a.m. to a building at 38, avenue d’Italie, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, which had been converted into a disciplinary prison. Barricades covered the district, many of which had used building materials from nearby construction sites. At about 1.00 p.m., Sérizier demanded that the prisoners, including the priests, be taken to help defend nearby barricades, along with fourteen National Guardsmen who had been incarcerated for disobedience. One of the guards protested against the inclusion of the priests, demanding a written order, but an officer ignored him, shouting out, ‘Let’s go, you there in the cassocks! Get out! To the barricade!’ The prisoners gathered in the courtyard of the prison, and were moved towards the gate. When the prisoners left the confines of the prison shots began to be fired at them, some perhaps by their guards, others coming from the guns of people on avenue d’Italie. In the end, thirteen bodies lay on the street, including five Dominican clergy, a professor, three domestics, a nurse, a clerk and two guards.
¹²
This massacre had not been planned, but occurred spontaneously in the incredibly charged tension of the struggle for Paris.

Poirier and the other Versaillais troops arrived at place d’Italie soon after the prisoners were killed. They estimated – exaggerating – about 5,000 or 6,000 Communard dead. By now Poirier’s unit had captured fifty-five Communards, whom they made stand on the piles of bodies while soldiers pumped bullets into them. There was one man whom to Poirier ‘wasn’t so bad’. No matter. A sergeant killed him with a rifle shot to the head. Poirier’s company then left to join the remainder of their regiment on a boulevard about 500 metres away, their
mitrailleuses
still hot from so much firing. The Versaillais attacked a remaining barricade, with bayonets fixed. A Communard stabbed at Poirier with his own bayonet, grazing his coat. Poirier stepped back and shot him in the chest, finishing him off with his bayonet as the man struggled to get up. The barricade had been defended by eight men and three women, all of whom were now dead. All told the Versaillais may have lined up several thousand prisoners at place d’Italie. Poirier assures us this became ‘a veritable slaughterhouse’.
¹³

With the fall of place d’Italie that morning, line troops held the entire Left Bank. That same day, national guardsmen abandoned the southern
forts of Montrouge, Bicêtre and Ivry, falling back to the Right Bank, protected – for the moment – by the ramparts, the Seine and Canal Saint-Martin.
¹⁴

The Prussians had helped out the Versaillais by abandoning the zone immediately beyond the northern walls, an area that was supposed to have been neutral. However, since the German and French governments had signed the Treaty of Frankfurt on 10 May, the Germans had been increasingly helpful to Versailles.
¹⁵
Line troops now occupied territory north of Paris following the withdrawal of German troops a little further out. And, on 26 May, the Prussians readied forces to help prevent Communards from escaping out of Paris to the east.
¹⁶

That Communard commanders had somehow not bothered to protect Montmartre’s flanks within the city of Paris was catastrophic. Soldiers gunned down defenders right and left, as Camille Pelletan, a Communard participant, related: ‘As many people defending the barricades, the same number of bodies. Slaughter on rue Lepic, across from rue Tholozé. In front of the house at number 48, twenty bodies lie along the pavement. Massacre place de la Mairie.
Fédérés
there were cut up by bayonets. Carnage Moulin-de-la Galette.’ At Château Rouge, witnesses counted fifty-seven bodies, carted into the courtyard of a school. These included an elderly man, gunned down with his devoted dog barking at his side.
¹⁷