Massacre (44 page)

General Gaston Galliffet showed up, heaping abuse on the prisoners. He ordered an elderly man to step out of the line: ‘Step out of that line, you old bastards! And you … you’re wounded! Well, we’ll take care of you!’ – leaving no doubt about what would happen next. A young man waved an American passport: ‘Shut up, we have more than enough foreigners and rabble here. We have to get rid of them.’
¹⁰

Some old men and wounded prisoners were shot, and more volleys in the distance signalled that men in that convoy had fallen and could not go on. The Englishman and the others reached Versailles and then Satory at 8.00 p.m. There, the crowds calling for their death were elegantly dressed: ‘Ah ha! We have some of those petrol bombs that you know so well reserved for you. There are [also] machine guns, miserable scoundrels [
sacrés coquins
]’. The young foreigner was finally released. He had been lucky. What he had seen changed his view of the Communards, for whom he now had sympathy.
¹¹

Some 35,000–40,000 prisoners made the awful trek from Paris – most from eastern districts – to Versailles. Prisoners who refused to move any further, or who were unable to do so because of wounds, other infirmities or age, were gunned down. In one incident, a prisoner sat down, unable to go on. After being prodded by soldiers with bayonets he was placed on a horse, from which he immediately fell. The troops then attached him to the horse’s tail, and he was dragged until unconscious from loss of blood. The soldiers showed a little mercy: instead of simply shooting him, they tossed him onto a wagon for the remainder of the journey.
¹²
Many women and no small number of children, most from twelve to sixteen years old, but some even younger, were among those in the convoys. A Versaillais crowd assailed the editor of
Journal des Débats
who dared express some sympathy for the prisoners chained together in the sun. Troops had to rescue him.
¹³

Most of the ‘voyagers’ to Satory were not combatants at all – many of those had already perished. Rather, they were Parisians who happened to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were rounded up by Versaillais troops. Some women carried their children in their arms or on their shoulders as they walked; others had their arms so tightly tied that they bled. They were escorted by ‘gendarmes already become hangmen’. In Camille Pelletan’s opinion, the worst abuses along the way came in rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, where ‘the aristocratic hangers-on came down into the streets to insult, threaten and mistreat prisoners’. In some other neighbourhoods, observers were more respectful, some making the sign of the cross as the prisoners were taken by. This was not the case of rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where a furious elderly woman threw herself on a convoy of prisoners, flailing away at them with her umbrella.
¹⁴

In Versailles, ‘
tout Paris
’ awaited the arrival of prisoners, preparing for the spectacle as if waiting for the start of a horse race. Officers told one convoy to stop so the fancy folks could have a good look at them. One well-dressed woman, carrying a prayer book, demanded that a young
cantinière
salute God. When she refused, the woman hit her, breaking a tooth. Here was Christian charity at work in Versailles.
¹⁵

A journalist for
Figaro
, a pro-Thiers newspaper, focused on the ‘disrespect’ for hostile onlookers shown by several prisoners among the ‘hideous troops’ being transported to an uncertain future. A
cantinière
waved what was left of her bloody hand (having lost several fingers in the fighting) in the direction of those heaping insults on her and the others. Fashionable women struck at Communards with their parasols, shouting for their execution. Prisoners in at least one convoy were forced to take off their hats or caps if they had one: ‘Let’s go! Rabble! Hats off before
les honnêtes gens
!’
¹⁶

Eager upper-class people peppered soldiers who had returned from Paris with questions. One Versaillais line soldier bragged that he had killed a woman. Another went for what was for him one better: ‘Me, I killed a child incendiary with my bayonet.’ A ‘respectable’ lady, her Mass missal still in her hands, interrupted to say, ‘Really, my friend?’ She reached into her purse and gave him money. Some soldiers reportedly sold as souvenirs objects taken from the bodies of Communards.
¹⁷

Reaching Versailles, the women were put in the prison of Chantiers, the men in the hell-hole of Satory, where 3–4,000 prisoners were virtually piled one on top of another. There, with barely enough room to turn around or lie down, disease, infection and gangrene took hold while guards pointed their rifles at the prisoners, threatening to shoot anyone for any act of defiance. Some soldiers may have amused themselves by doing just that. Desperately thirsty, prisoners drank rainwater, which sometimes
had a red tint from the blood of wounds or corpses. Life – and death – at the Chantiers was almost as bad. Prisoners slept on straw, or simply on the ground, sharing space with lice. Clothing and food brought by relatives who had become aware of the location of family members remained stacked up on the outside, most never reaching the women. Some prisoners held temporarily in the Orangerie entertained themselves by taking care of plants, looking back beyond the guards at curious onlookers who came to gawp at them.
¹⁸

Louise Michel was in one of the Versailles camps for prisoners. Soldiers told her that she would be shot. As she recalled, ‘Above us the lights of the fires [in the distance in Paris] floated like red crepe. And always we could hear the cannons … In the middle of the night the soldiers would call out groups of prisoners, who got up from the mud to follow the soldier’s lantern that led their way. They’d be given a pick and shovel to dig their own graves, and then they’d be shot. The echoes of volleys shattered the silence of the night.’ Michel was ‘insolent’ to the soldiers and did not know why she was not shot. Millions of lice ‘made little silver nets as they meandered about, going to their nests that resembles anthills. They were enormous.’ Prisoners had the impression that they could actually hear the ‘noise of their swarming’.
¹⁹

As more and more Communard prisoners arrived in Versailles,
les honnêtes gens
found new ways of condemning the defeated Communards. The claim that the riffraff from Paris were drunks was a popular notion that emerged in Versaillais discourse, with references to the dependence of ‘drunken commoners’ on absinthe, which was already ravaging the French population. Enemies often described the Communards as
crapules
, a term of extreme denigration that comes from the Latin word for drunkenness.
²⁰

Versaillais lore had insurgents supposedly storming into a restaurant on boulevard Saint-Martin, plunging into fine wines and liqueurs found in the cellar. When they had had their fill, the intruders supposedly announced that they planned to shoot ‘the brave soldiers’ attacking Paris. A loyal anti-Communard stepped forward and slapped ‘one of those bastards’, or so went the story. The Communards then pillaged the house, killing the
honnêtes gens
who opposed ‘their orgies’, and set fire to the establishment. When a panicked woman managed to extract her daughter from the flames, the Communards pushed both back in, and they burned to death. This, of course, never occurred, but that was of no matter to the
honnêtes gens
. Ironically, some of the Versaillais line soldiers who killed may have been drunk, the effects of the alcohol compounded by sun and fatigue.
²¹

As thousands of prisoners awaited their fates in Versailles, ‘liberated’ Paris suffered ‘the sickness of denunciations’. Of all the horrendous statistics surrounding Bloody Week, one of the most chilling is that, between 22 May and 13 June, the Prefecture of Police received 379,823 denunciations of people accused of serving the Commune. Of these, only 5 per cent were actually signed. Of course, what makes this number so astonishing is the fact that those who denounced neighbours were very well aware that, if the Versailles authorities took the denunciations seriously and if the accusation seemed grave – simply being in favour of the Commune was taken seriously – execution could follow. To be sure, a few of these were attempts to settle personal debts or conflicts. Others may have hoped to receive the rumoured 500 francs for turning in a Communard. There were cases of denunciations leading to people being killed, as in the case of the Marquis de Forbin-Janson, who denounced some of his neighbours and tenants, leading to one of them being shot. One Parisian, acquitted by a court-martial, had been denounced seventeen times.
²²

On 1 June, two men, one wounded, turned up at the door of the house next to where Pastor Eugène Bersier and Marie Holland lived. Only the domestic was at home. They asked to be taken in, as they knew the nephew of the owner. The woman let them in and provided a bed for the wounded man. She then denounced them to the police. Soldiers arrived to take them away, one on a stretcher, the other walking head down, very pale. Marie Holland was sickened. The pastor received a visit from a certain M. Bockairy, who told her that she would be happy to learn that a Communard officer had been shot and that of his men ‘not one escaped’. The smug bourgeois seemed to her for a moment even more odious than the Communards she despised.
²³

With the return of the old civil police, police spies were everywhere, proudly sporting tricolour armbands. Jacques Durant, a fifty-three-year-old shoemaker who had been elected to the Commune from the Second Arrondissement, was denounced and hauled off to the
mairie
. After an interrogation of not more than two minutes, he was shot in a courtyard adjoining the church of the Petits-Pères. Édouard Moreau, who had opposed burning the Grenier de l’Abondance, was arrested after being denounced while hiding near rue Saint-Antoine. At Châtelet, Louis Vabre, the provost marshal, asked him if he was indeed M. Édouard Moreau, member of the Commune? Moreau replied, ‘No, of the Central Committee [of the National Guard].’ The response came immediately, ‘It’s the same thing!’ He was taken to Caserne Lobau and shot with another batch of victims.
²⁴

The denunciations primarily targeted ordinary people, reflecting the Versaillais assumption that one’s social class was marker enough of one’s involvement in the Commune. General Louis Valentin, serving Thiers as prefect of police, said that ‘the simple fact of having stayed in Paris under the Commune is a crime. Everyone there is to blame, and if I had my way everyone would be punished.’
²⁵
Many working-class Parisians had indeed supported the Commune, but even those who had not were targeted. Those left in Paris during the Commune were overwhelmingly working-class, unable to get out and with nowhere to go.

Prisoners identified as foreigners were singled out for particular vociferous contempt, primarily because foreigners who had remained in Paris during the Commune were assumed to be part of the International. One rumour had 10,000 Poles among the Communards. Denis Arthur Bingham noted that ‘virtuous Parisians claimed that the insurrection was the work of foreigners’ such as Italians and Poles. The conservative historian Hippolyte Taine subscribed to this belief, insisting that half of the 100,000 ‘
insurgés
’ were not French. The literary critic Paul de Saint-Victor denounced ‘Polish forgers, “gallant” Garibaldians [followers of the nationalist Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi], mercenary Slavic soldiers, Prussian agents, Yankee buccaneers stampeding in from of their battalions … Paris has become the sewer collecting the dregs and scum of two worlds.’ Some of the Poles had fought courageously but futilely against Russian ‘Congress Poland’ in 1863. For her part, Louise Lacroix insisted that ‘To love France, one has to be French.’
²⁶

Two Poles were executed after shots were fired from a building on rue de Tournon. They had been arrested and accused of having ‘spread terror in the entire
quartier
of Luxembourg’ during the Commune. After their execution, Count Czartoryski, president of the Polish Committee, complained; the ‘incendiary tools’ suspected by the Versaillais were, he insisted, simply lights for the Polish library on the street. One of the men had fought for the Commune, but the other, from Lithuania, had not – he ran the library and lived in the house. In any case, the role played by General Dombrowski in the Communard resistance helped fuel anger among Versaillais against the Poles. One officer, on hearing that prisoners brought before him were Polish, said, ‘Well, they’re Polish. That’s enough right there.’
²⁷

Contemporaries were virtually unanimous that the Communards about to be shot accepted their fate with heads held high. A Belgian journalist quoted soldiers who had been part of execution squads. One related that they had killed ‘forty of this rabble’ in Passy. They all died ‘as soldiers’,
proudly, with arms folded across their chest. Some even opened their uniforms and shouted, ‘Go ahead and fire! We are not afraid of death.’
²⁸

A Versailles official went out to have a look for himself. He saw prisoners under escort and, counting twenty-eight of them, recognised some men with whom he had fought during the Prussian siege. Almost all of them were workers. Their faces ‘betrayed neither despair, nor despondence, nor emotion … they knew where they were being taken’. The Versaillais had not taken more than four steps when he heard the execution squad’s volley. The twenty-eight ‘insurgents’ fell. What he heard made him dizzy. But what made it worse was the series of individual shots that followed, the
coups de grâce
. He ran in the other direction, but ‘around me, the crowd seemed impassable’. Parisians were now used to it.

Even if the Communards died ‘as soldiers’, they were certainly not afforded the rights soldiers and even prisoners were owed according to international conventions. The Communard Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray came across young sailors in a bar on place Voltaire. He asked them, rather coyly, if there had been many dead among the ‘enemy’. ‘Ah’, replied one of them, ‘we were given orders by the general to take no prisoners.’ Young soldiers from the provinces were pushed by officers to kill anyone who had fought for the Commune. Versaillais soldiers with rural origins who might have resisted such an order had been inundated with anti-Parisian propaganda claiming that Parisians were evil, scoundrels, liars, thieves and degenerates who had turned their back on the Church.