Massacre (40 page)

MacMahon, the one man who might have put an end to the executions, turned a blind eye to what was happening in Paris. On 25 May, Jules
Ferry reported that three of his generals had ordered the execution of captured ‘insurgent leaders’. MacMahon claimed to have reminded the generals of his orders to send prisoners who surrendered to the courts-martial at Versailles.
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In the end, however, MacMahon simply allowed the slaughter to go on.
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Whatever MacMahon professed to Ferry, however, his commanders seem never to have received the order to send prisoners to Versailles. Commanders often ordered that Communards taken prisoner with weapons should be shot, although, to repeat, whether someone lived or died depended on individual officers. Cissey had no qualms at all – he notified General François du Barail that anyone found fighting for the Commune was to be executed. The missive reached Thiers, who knew very well about the summary shooting of prisoners and did nothing to stop it. In sharp contrast, General Clinchant, a moderate republican, may have attempted to put an end to executions at Parc Monceau.
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However, some generals, like Gaston Galliffet, ‘the star of the Tricolour Terror’, took matters into their own hands and handed down instantaneous life-or-death decisions. Galliffet bragged that he had killed seventy Communards himself. When a woman threw herself at his feet begging for her husband’s life to be spared, the general replied, ‘Madame, I have attended all the theatres in Paris; it serves nothing to put on this performance.’ The number of prisoners Galliffet ordered killed in the Bois-de-Boulogne will never be known, but he revelled in his infamy, once crowing that he would rather be known as ‘a great murderer than taken for a little assassin’. He announced, with pride, ‘Above all, to the highest degree, I have disdain for the lives of others.’ He yelled at a convoy of prisoners, including Louise Michel, ‘I am Galliffet! People of Montmartre, you think me a cruel man. You’re going to find out that I am much crueller than even you imagined!’
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Although these executions stemmed from the murderous hatred of Versaillais of all ranks, and although they could seem haphazard to those who witnessed them, the massacre was organised. Even before the Army of Versailles entered Paris, Thiers had organised courts-martial to be held there. He fully expected that his troops would be executing Communards in the city. Given this kind of foresight, there is no reason to believe that he intended his men to keep all prisoners alive and bring them back to Versailles. After his troops entered Paris, they had organised two of the main centres for executions by at least 23 May at Parc Monceau (where fifteen men and a woman had been shot the day before) and the École militaire. The killings then proceeded systematically.
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Journalist Camille Pelletan, a Communard, was convinced that the massacres were planned, and that lists of people to be arrested and killed existed. She thought that the Versailles troops encountering so little resistance, particularly upon their entry into Paris on 21 May, made it even more difficult to excuse the mass killings. ‘Most [Communards], discouraged, gave up the struggle; only a handful of men, resolute, scattered, remained to defend the Commune.’ Pelletan had it right when he insisted that the massacre was much more than ‘a ferocious repression undertaken against the
fédérés
’. It was directed ‘against all of Paris, and not just against supporters of the Commune’. Nothing like it had been seen in the capital since the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when Catholics had slaughtered Protestants. To Thiers and his entourage, Paris was the enemy and merited ‘a considerable, rapid massacre’. Thiers boasted in a speech of 24 May, ‘I shed torrents of [Parisian] blood’.
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And indeed, he did.

Those interrogated were routinely asked, ‘Were you part of the Commune? You were there! It is written all over your face. Your age? Your name? Where are your identity papers? Well … Go!’ This meant death. One victim was asked if he had participated in the insurrection. ‘He’s a scoundrel [
coquin
]’, said a soldier. The presiding officer responded, ‘
Classé
[kill him].’
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There is thus truth to Pelletan’s claim that the Versaillais had all of Paris in their sights, not just the Communards. Although Thiers’s forces targeted some groups in particular, of course, some troops seemed eager to find any reason to kill those they encountered. They were by no means careful or discerning. One such unlucky victim was Jean-Baptiste Millière, who was arrested on Friday, although he had not participated in the Commune. When a captain named Garcin asked him if his name was Millière, he replied in the affirmative and said that surely the officer knew he had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Garcin said he did, but it made no difference to him. General Cissey was having a nice lunch in a nearby restaurant. When an officer interrupted his meal to relate Millière’s arrest, Cissey ordered his immediate execution, between mouthfuls of ‘the pear and the cheese’. When Millière asked why he, a deputy, was to die, Garcin said he had read some of his articles and considered him to be a ‘viper on which one should stomp’. The general ordered Millière to be shot at the Panthéon, on his knees, and forced ‘to ask pardon of the society to which you have done evil’. Millière refused to kneel and opened his shirt to receive the bullets. Garcin had two soldiers throw him to his knees. The deputy shouted, ‘Long live humanity!’ and started to say something more before shots silenced him.
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Social class could determine life or death. Middle-class Communards were more likely to talk their way out of encounters with Versaillais. Sutter-Laumann survived because he washed carefully, combed his hair, and spoke ‘without a working-class accent in good French’ when stopped by an officer of the Volunteers of the Seine. If those who were stopped spoke the argot of the Parisian street and workplace, execution usually followed. An officer interrogated a man at a barricade on rue Houdon: ‘Who are you?’ ‘A mason’, the man replied. ‘So, now it’s masons who are going to command!’ The officer shot the man dead on the spot.
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Social stigmatisation led to massacre.

Captured foreigners had little chance of surviving, because their presence in Paris corresponded to one image of the Commune as, in part, the work of good-for-nothing Poles, Russians, Germans and members of the International. Responding to a question from a Versaillais with a foreign accent could prove immediately fatal, as could having an ‘exotic’ name. Men over the age of 40, French or foreign, were particular targets. There is an infamous story of Galliffet ‘reviewing’ a convoy of prisoners on their way to Versailles and pulling several out to be shot immediately because they had grey hair – and thus had presumably fought with the insurgents in the June Days of 1848.

People were disrobed and their shoulders checked for marks left by a recoiling rifle, for which, if discovered, they were immediately shot. Men who looked ‘ragged’, were poorly dressed, who could not instantly justify their use of time or who did not work in a ‘proper’ trade, had little chance of surviving the brief audience before a
prévôtal
court. Near the Gare de Lyon, soldiers stopped two men and demanded to see their hands. Those of one were white: not the hands of someone who worked or had helped to defend a barricade. He was spared. But, according to a witness hostile to the Commune, ‘his companion did not have the same fate. His hands, his rifle, everything condemned him. A shot from a
chassepot
finished off his account with society, and our sailors continued their searches.’
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Men who had previously served in the regular army became targets, even those who had fought during the Franco-Prussian War, because they were assumed to have deserted. A few soldiers who had fought against the Commune were killed by mistake, including a wounded Breton, who had difficulty expressing himself in French. An officer took him for a deserter and shot him with his revolver.
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Despite his insistence on making all the decisions and overseeing every aspect of the civil war, Thiers insisted that the executions occurring in Paris were out of his control. On 27 May he told Ferry, who had expressed
concern about the image of the Versailles government abroad after the British and Swiss press had started to denounce the mass executions, ‘During the fighting we can do nothing.’ Still, it seems likely that Thiers or MacMahon ordered the end of such killings on 27 or 28 May. Vinoy instructed a subordinate not to have any more prisoners shot ‘without careful examination’ of each case – in other words, Versailles did not order a stop to all executions, but may have decreased their number. In districts under the authority of Cissey and Vinoy, however, Versaillais shot Communard prisoners (including an English student perhaps killed because his name was Marx) well into June, both in Paris and at Vincennes just outside the city.
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Adolphe Clémence compared the Versaillais hunt for anyone who could remotely be suspected of Communard sympathies to the ‘hunt for [escaped] slaves’ in America. Philibert Audebrand heard shouts of ‘Let’s kill them all! So that not one survives.’
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In the Jardins du Luxembourg, the carnage continued from 24 to 28 May, with perhaps as many as 3,000 men and women shot there, many as they stood against the wall in the centre part of the gardens. Unlike in the aftermath of the June Days of 1848, when prisoners were killed secretly, the massacres of Bloody Week for the most part took place out in the open. Smaller tribunals also functioned, under the authority of junior officers acting independently in various parts of the city, but with the encouragement of the major commanders. The
Paris-Journal
reported that each time the number of those to be killed exceeded ten, a machine gun replaced the usual execution squad.
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On boulevard Saint-Martin, where many Communards had fallen, appeared a hand-written poster that said it all:

At about midnight on Thursday, Gabriel Ranvier, Varlin and a few others abandoned the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement on boulevard Voltaire as the Versaillais noose tightened. They first moved their operations to the
mairie
of the Twentieth Arrondissement, then to a building
near the place des Fêtes, sending the remnants of the military authority to 145, rue Haxo in Belleville. Varlin, Delescluze’s replacement as Delegate for War, was still giving orders, but no one was paying any attention. The remaining Communard leaders decided that each would return to a barricade and do what he could. There was nowhere to go, no exit.

At 6.00 a.m. on Friday, the Versaillais launched an assault against the well-defended barricade at the intersection of boulevard Voltaire and boulevard Richard-Lenoir. General Clinchant’s forces moved along the Canal Saint-Martin and Ladmirault’s troops overwhelmed barricades on rues de Flandre, Kabylie and Riquet, reaching La Villette and the Canal de l’Ourcq.
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Line troops took place du Trône (now place de la Nation), from which their cannons could shell place Voltaire and their forces could attack the place de la Bastille from the east. They then took place de la Rotonde (now place Stalingrad).
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The well-fortified place Château d’eau fell that afternoon, forcing Communards to flee. The Versaillais then took place de la Bastille. Line troops overwhelmed two enormous barricades protecting rue Saint-Antoine; there, more than a hundred Communard resisters died. An elderly Communard being led to a pile of garbage on which he would be killed said, ‘I am a republican. I have fought bravely. I have earned the right not to die in shit.’
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Elizabeth Dmitrieff was injured but managed to get away. When Léo Frankel also fell wounded, she saved him. A hundred Communard corpses lay near a barricade on nearby rue de Charenton. Communard fighters now cried, ‘Better death than Cayenne!’

On boulevard du Prince Eugène and at places du Château d’Eau and de la Bastille, troops threw both dead and live national guardsmen from the windows of nearby buildings where they had been killed or captured. The air was foul with the stench of death. Among the corpses, many seemed relatively old, but there were also many young men. It was not uncommon to see men fighting alongside their sons, as well as grandfathers alongside grandsons. Reclus reflected bitterly that 200,000 ‘slaves’ had managed to overcome 50,000 Communards. In reality, however, only about 20,000 men and women fought for the Commune, and in the final days there were far fewer than that. The Communards were completely outmanned. Small groups of experienced, determined resisters were not nearly enough.
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National guardsmen retreated up faubourg Saint-Antoine, that traditional centre of artisanal militancy, and along boulevard Richard-Lenoir to boulevard Voltaire in the Eleventh Arrondissement.
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The Versaillais now
launched a full-scale assault against boulevard Voltaire, a fitting name for one of the last remaining targets for the forces of clerical reaction against the godless Republic. As line troops moved rapidly into the Eleventh and Twelfth Arrondissemnts,
fédérés
retreated up to Ménilmontant in Belleville. Communard defenders heard only bad news. The Versaillais shot nine employees in a gas factory at La Villette, which fell in the evening. Word reached remaining Communard commanders that Thiers had announced that 25,000 prisoners were now in Versaillais custody.
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That Friday Ranvier posted a decree, the last of the Commune, asking people of the Twentieth Arrondissement to resist the Versaillais in cooperation with their neighbours in the Nineteenth, again revealing the strategy, and the weaknesses, of organising the defence by
quartier
: ‘If we succumb, you know what fate awaits us … Don’t wait until Belleville is attacked.’ But it was to no avail. No one turned up to help defend Belleville. While the last of the
fédérés
might fight to the death, they would do so in their own neighbourhoods without any effective military authority coordinating their efforts. In the end, the remaining Communard fighters fought in their districts, hoping against hope. John Leighton put it this way, ‘Everyone gives orders, no one obeys them.’
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