Massacre (48 page)

Thiers had managed to destroy the Commune. But the massacre perpetuated by Thiers’s troops during and after Bloody Week would cast a long shadow over the following century. Despite the execution of hostages and the massacres of the Dominicans – totalling about 66 or 68 – these tragedies perpetrated by the Communards pale in comparison with the approximately 12,000–15,000 executions carried out by the Army of Versailles. Indeed the Communards were overall – despite their level of verbal violence – very careful to show they were not going to behave like the Versaillais. State violence was organised and systematic, as would be even more the case in the twentieth century.
³⁸
For the ‘
hommes d’ordre
’, as a Versaillais magistrate memorably thundered, ‘In Paris, the whole population was guilty!’ One could hear shouts of ‘The brigands! We must exterminate them to the last one!’ Another anti-Communard dreamed of ‘an immense furnace in which we will cook each of them in turn’.
³⁹
There would be nothing like the slaughter perpetuated by the Versaillais until the atrocities against the Armenians in 1915 during the First World War and such language would not be heard again until the Nazi genocide and other mass murders with victims chosen by race or ethnicity, including the tragic events in the Balkans during the 1990s towards the end of the cruel, bloody twentieth century.

Adolphe Thiers, whom the National Assembly named the first president of the Third Republic on 31 August 1871, got back most of his works of art that had been taken to the Tuileries, as well as a huge sum the government paid him for the loss of his house. Jules Ducatel, who had signalled to Versaillais troops on 21 May that no one was guarding the Point-du-Jour, received government honours. In 1877 he lost a job when accused of theft. Colonel Louis Vabre, who oversaw mass murder at the court-martial at Châtelet, was decorated with the
Legion d’honneur
.
⁴⁰

Thiers died in 1873. Paris remained under martial law until early 1876. Workers’ associations struggled in the repression that followed the Commune and only slowly revived. The Third French Republic survived the attempt by the monarchist President Marshal Patrice de MacMahon to bring about its destruction by parliamentary coup d’état, the so-called
Crisis of 16 May 1877. He dismissed the moderate republican Prime Minister Jules Simon, but the Chamber of Deputies refused to support the appointment of a prominent monarchist to head the new government. New elections brought a republican majority.

Gradually the Third French Republic took root in provincial France and statues celebrating it were inaugurated in villages squares. In Paris the place du Château d’eau became the place de la République, with a grand monument celebrating the new government. The Hôtel de Ville purchased one of Gustave Courbet’s paintings.
La Marseillaise
became the French national anthem in 1879. A highly contested partial amnesty for Communards came in 1879, followed by a complete amnesty on 11 July 1880. Thousands of French men and women returned from exile and imprisonment in distant places, including many of those who had been condemned for years to impossibly harsh conditions in New Caledonia.
⁴¹

That year, 14 July, Bastille Day, was celebrated as a national holiday for the first time. Thousands of people greeted Louise Michel at Gare Saint-Lazare when she returned to France in November 1880. The first French mass socialist parties took shape during the following two decades. French unions grew in strength following their legalisation in 1881. Gradually the dominance of the Versaillais discourse in the collective memory of the Paris Commune ebbed. With the rooting of the Third Republic, above all with the national elections of the early 1880s, the Commune gradually began to be seen as a founding moment, however contested, in its history.
⁴²
It has become a major, positive event in French national history.

But, even after these developments, there were still moments of bloody repression. On 1 May 1890, Louise Michel led the first demonstration of French workers on what became an international holiday. A year later, French troops gunned down demonstrators supporting a strike in the small northern working-class town of Fourmies. Ten people were killed, including four young women, the youngest sixteen years of age, and twenty-four people were wounded, including children. The ‘
rafle
’, or police roundup of ‘suspects’, took shape in working-class neighbourhoods during the 1890s. By 1900 Paris was presented in guidebooks as ‘pacified’ and well policed – the ‘forces of order’ stood ready to intervene at any instant. The power of the centralised French state endured. It maintained its capacity for extreme violence, in France and in its colonies. If the Paris Commune of 1871 may be seen as the last of the nineteenth-century revolutions, the murderous, systematic state repression that followed helped
unleash the demons of the twentieth century. This is sadly perhaps a greater legacy of the Paris Commune than that of a movement for freedom undertaken by ordinary people.

The Wall of the Fédérés in Père Lachaise cemetery, where so many Communards were gunned down, emerged as the site of memory that symbolised the massacres of Bloody Week. The wall drew visitors on 14 July 1880, the first time that date could be celebrated as a national holiday under the Republic, some leaving commemorative wreaths. Gradually small crowds defied police by marching silently up to the wall, leading to confrontations. Eugène Pottier’s revolutionary song
The Monument to the Fédérés
recalled what had occurred there, and in many other places in Paris: ‘Here was the slaughterhouse, the charnel house. The victims rolled down from the corner of this wall into the great ditch below.’ Police increasingly tolerated demonstrations at the wall on 1 May. A simple marble plaque went up in 1908: ‘To the dead of the Commune, 21–28 May 1871.’

Today the Wall of the Fédérés remains a sombre, bracing monument to those massacred by the forces of ‘the men of order’. Demonstrations there grew in size and intensity during the confrontations of May 1968 and again three years later on the centenary of the Commune. In 1983, the wall was classified as an historical monument, commemorating the ultimate victory of the French Republic for which the Communards fought.
⁴³

The former Communard Jules Vallès dedicated his
L
’
Insurgé
, an autobiographical novel,

Jean-Baptiste Clément, who managed to escape to Belgium and then London and was condemned to death by Versailles, had written
Le temps de cérises
in 1866. Parisians had sung it during both the Prussian and the Versaillais sieges. He now dedicated it ‘to valiant Citizen Louise, the volunteer doctor’s assistant of rue Fontaine-au-Roi, Sunday, 28 May 1871’:

Le temps de cérises
was now the good old days, when Parisians were free.
⁴⁶

When I go up to the Wall of the Fédérés, as nightfall approaches, the leaves are falling, and all is still, I can almost hear the words of Thomas Wolfe: ‘Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.’
⁴⁷

Notes

Prologue

1.
Theodore Zeldin,
France 1848–1945
, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 511; Roger Price, ‘Napoleon III’, in John Merriman and Jay Winter, eds.,
Europe 1789 to 1914
, vol. 3 (Detroit, 2006), p. 1590.

2.
Ted W. Margadant,
French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851
(Princeton, NJ, 1979); John M. Merriman,
Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–51
(New Haven, CT, 1978).

3.
Theodore Zeldin,
The Political System of Napoleon III
(New York, 1958).

4.
Geoffrey Warwo,
The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–71
(New York, 2003), p. 25; David Jordan,
Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann
(New York, 1995), p. 255; Jeanne Gaillard,
Paris, la ville 1852–1871
(1997), pp. 12–14, 135. Unless otherwise noted, all books cited were published in Paris.

5.
Gaillard,
Paris
, p. 14.

6.
Ibid., p. 191; Patrice Higonnet,
Paris: Capital of the World
(Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 180–1; Dominique Kalifa,
Les Bas-fonds: Histoire d’un imaginaire
(2013), p. 27, quoting Jules Janin,
L’Été à Paris
(1843) and
Mémoires de M. Claude
(1881–85), pp. 47, 52ff. See Louis Chevalier,
Dangerous Classes and Laboring Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
(New York, 1973).

7.
Jordan,
Transforming Paris
, pp. 7, 224, 259–60.

8.
See Vanessa R. Schwartz,
Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris
(Berkeley, CA, 1999).

9.
Jordan,
Transforming Paris
, p. 109.

10.
Ibid., pp. 109–10, 188–9; Gaillard,
Paris
, pp. 537–53, 568–71.

11.
Higonnet,
Paris
, pp. 174, 353.

12.
Roger V. Gould,
Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune
(Chicago, 1995), pp. 71–2; see Jordan,
Transforming Paris
, Chapter 10 (‘Money’), pp. 227–45.

13.
John Merriman,
Aux marges de la ville: faubourgs et banlieues en France 1815–1870
(1994), p. 292; Éric Fournier,
Paris en ruines: du Paris haussmannien au Paris communard
(2008), pp. 22–6; John Merriman,
Police Stories
(New York, 2005); Gaillard,
Paris
, pp. 204–5, 568–71. Between 1852 and 1859, 4,349 houses were destroyed, 13 per cent of old Paris. Families forced from their apartments received little more than the equivalent of a few pounds by virtue of a law in 1841 and an imperial decree in 1852.

14.
Higonnet,
Paris
, pp. 196–7, 250–52, 268; Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA, 1999).

15.
Jacques Hillairet, ed.,
Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris,
2 vols. (Paris, 1979).

16.
Émile Zola,
L’Assommoir
(New York, 1970), p. 59.

17.
Gaillard,
Paris
, pp. 41–4, 61, 393–9; Jordan,
Transforming Paris
, pp. 206–7; Robert Tombs,
The Paris Commune 1871
(New York, 1999), p. 24.

18.
Georges Duveau,
La Vie ouvrière sous le Second Empire
(1946), p. 203; Gaillard,
Paris
, p. 47; Merriman,
Aux marges de la ville
, p. 280.

19.
John Merriman,
The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851
(New York, 1991), p. 76.

20.
Jacques Rougerie,
Paris Libre 1871
(1971), p. 19; Merriman,
Aux marges de la ville
, pp. 301–3.

21.
Louis Lazare,
Les Quartiers de l’est de Paris et les Communes
s
uburbaines
(1870), pp. 102, 243.

22.
Higonnet,
Paris
, p. 91.

23.
Olivier Marion, ‘La vie religieuse pendant la Commune de 1871’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Paris-X Nanterre, 1981), pp. 20–2; Jacques-Olivier Boudon,
Monseigneur Darboy (1813–1871)
(2011), pp. 77–80; Charles Chauvin,
Mgr Darboy, archêveque de Paris, otage de la Commune (1813–1871
) (2011), p. 86. The Church would later classify as a ‘missionary’ area any place in which less than 20 per cent of the population fulfilled their Easter obligations.

24.
Boudon,
Monseigneur Darboy
, p. 82; S. Sakharov,
Lettres au Père Duchêne pendant la Commune de Paris
(1934), p. 18; Marion, ‘La vie religieuse’, pp. 23–6; S. Froumov,
La Commune de Paris et la démocratisation de l’école
(Moscow, 1964), pp. 30–1, 86–90; Carolyn Eichner, ‘“We Must Shoot the Priests”: Revolutionary Women and Anti-Clericalism in the Paris Commune of 1871’, in Lucia Carle and Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux,
Cities Under Siege/Situazioni d’Assedio/États de Siège
(Florence, 2002), pp. 267–8.

25.
Jacques Rougerie,
Procès des Communards
(1964), p. 33; Stewart Edwards,
The Paris Commune 1871
(Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 12–13. See Duveau,
La vie ouvrière
.

26.
Eichner, ‘“We Must Shoot the Priests”’, p. 269.

27.
Laure Godineau,
La Commune de Paris par ceux qui l’ont vécue
(2010), pp. 16–18.

28.
Luc Willette,
Raoul Rigault, 25 ans, Communard, chef de police
(1984), p. 121; Gaston Da Costa,
Mémoires d’un Communard: la Commune vécue
(2009), p. 256; Tombs,
The Paris Commune
, p. 38.

29.
Maxime Vuillaume,
Mes Cahiers rouges au temps de la Commune
(1971), pp. 219–22; Auguste Lepage,
Les cafés artistiques et littéraires de Paris
(1882), p. 79; Pierre Courthion,
Courbet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis
, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1948), p. 249.

30.
Robert Boudry, ‘Courbet et la fédération des artistes’,
Europe
29:
6
4–5 (April–May 1951), p. 122; Ernest A. Vizetelly,
My Adventures in the Commune
(n.p., 2009 [1914]), p. 55; Denis Arthur Bingham,
Recollections of Paris
, vol. 2 (London, 1896), p. 117.