The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (70 page)

The list of buildings already incendiarized by the night of the 24th was appallingly impressive; it included the Tuileries, a large part of the Palais-Royal, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police, the Cour des Comptes, the Légion d’Honneur, and the Conseil d’État. Whole sections of streets like the Rue de Lille and much of the Rue de Rivoli were on fire, or already gutted. The Ministry of Finance
housed in one wing of the Louvre was ablaze, having either caught fire from the Tuileries or been deliberately ignited. It was from here that the burnt fragments of bureaucracy descended on Goncourt; outside it one Parisian encountered a frantic civil servant dragging out vast leather boxes who requested him to keep an eye on them as they were ‘the taxation files’ (to his annoyance the following month he received a tax claim!). Already, early that morning, the Commune added to the flames one of the finest and most historic buildings of all Paris—the Hôtel de Ville itself. At 8 a.m. some fifteen members had met there to discuss its immediate evacuation, and only Delescluze and one other had protested. In its despair a scorched-earth policy had now become the retreating Communard’s automatic response, and by 11 a.m. the Hôtel de Ville was a sea of flames.

It was perfect weather for arson. For the past month there had been an almost unbroken drought; the day of the 24th was one of midsummer heat, and just to make matters worse the next day a wind approaching hurricane force had got up. With heartbreaking speed the fires jumped from one block to another, often before Thiers’s forces could occupy the incendiarized area and put in hand fire-fighting measures. When they did, the equipment available would prove pathetically inadequate, ‘Fancy putting out a house of 7 storeys’, Edwin Child wrote his father, ‘with pails of water.’ Just as in the past days the Communards had impressed passers-by to help build barricades, so the Government troops called on all at hand to join in the work of saving Paris. Making his way from the Rue de la Paix to the British Embassy on May 24th, Colonel Stanley was ‘requisitioned’ three times by
pompiers
. From London, Mr. Gladstone inquired via Lord Lyons whether he could in due course send over some British firemen to help, and out in Chantilly the Rev. Gibson read notices pleading for young men of ‘
bonne volonté
’ to come to Paris to man the fire-engines.

There is little doubt that many buildings would not have been burnt down but for the dry weather, others were probably set on fire fortuitously by
Versaillais
shells, whereas, among the acts of pure vengefulness carried out by the Commune, some—such as Brunel’s initial operations on the Rue Royale—could possibly be excused on tactical grounds.
¹
Yet now new rumours of mass terror began to spread among the Government troops and the anti-Communard
inhabitants of Paris alike, rumours that agents of the desperate Commune were planning deliberately to raze the whole of Paris. The rumours fell on fertile ground, for Parisians could remember vividly all the wild talk about Greek fire emanating from the Red Clubs as far back as the first Siege, and more recently there had been constant threats by various Communards to mine the sewers of Paris. On May 19th, Washburne had reported to Fish the
canard
he had picked up to the effect that ‘the Committee of Public Safety is decided to blow up Paris and bury everyone under its ruins rather than capitulate’ and, indeed, only two days previously there had appeared in the
Journal Officiel
a sinister decree ordering all owners of petroleum products to register them with the Hôtel de Ville. Word went around the Army that instructions for the burning of Paris had emanated from that twilight body in London, the
International
, while as early as the day after the fire Colonel Stanley heard it being said: ‘The foreigners generally are accused of firing the Tuilieries, as the vanity of the French will not accept of its being possibly the act of a Frenchman.’ Edward Noble, an English silk-merchant who had spent most of the days of fighting in his bedroom, crouched behind an upturned bedstead, claimed to have been given ‘a small bit of the electric wire which was laid with the intention of blowing up the whole of the Faubourg St. Germain’.
¹
After the Civil War had ended, quantities of ‘instructions’ marked either ‘
Bon pour Brûler
’ or ‘
Maisons à incendier
’, and franked with a Commune stamp, came to light; but these appear to have been forgeries designed to blacken still further the Commune’s name.

No legend was more widely believed than that of the
pétroleuses
; fearful mænads from some infernal region who crept about the city, sometimes accompanied by their offspring, flinging fire-balls or bottles of petroleum into basement windows belonging to the bourgeoisie. On the 25th, Stanley recorded:

Last night three women were caught throwing small fire balls down the openings of the cellars in the street. There was no doubt of it of course. Already smoke was coming from some of them. They were driven into a corner and shot then and there through the head.

The previous day a woman was reported to have been arrested on the Rue du Bac with several bottles of petroleum slung round her from a belt fastened under her dress. M. Chastel of the Roquépine Methodist Chapel agreed that ‘It is specially the women who are setting fire to
the houses. Many have been taken in the act and shot at once.’ A ‘Special Correspondent’ of the
Daily News
described at great length the
pétroleuses
and their three different techniques. ‘The part which the women play in this business is remarkable. It was no idle boast of M. Allix when he proposed to create a legion of Amazons of the Seine ready to fight.’ Waxing to his theme, the journalist declared that in the Madeleine quarter these harpies enticed soldiers of the Line to drink with them, and then, ‘it is said, poisoned their cups’. (
The Times
, though sceptical of the
pétroleuses
legend, repeated an almost equally improbable story; that unknown saboteurs working the fire-engines pumped petrol on to the flames instead of water.) Even the normally disbelieving and un-bloodthirsty Edwin Child wrote to his father that ‘the women behaved like tigresses, throwing petroleum everywhere’; he added that 40 soldiers had been poisoned by them, commenting that ‘shooting is far too good for these devils’.

What started the
pétroleuses
legend remains a mystery. Most of the wretched women seized were shot out of hand, and no acceptable evidence was ever subsequently produced before a court. Probably there was some basis of truth; in the feverish state of mind that prevailed in blazing Paris, one genuine case of women incendiaries caught
in flagrante delicto
(such as that cited by Stanley) might easily have sufficed to give birth to the whole legend. Certainly there was no shred of truth in one belief current among the Versailles Army; that the Communards had ‘brigaded’ together no less than 8,000
pétroleuses
for their fell mission. To begin with, this degree of organization had always proved beyond them. Such eminently sensible witnesses as Washburne, Wickham Hoffman, and Dr. Alan Herbert remained sceptical. To Hoffman, petroleum was ‘the madness of the hour’;

Every woman carrying a bottle was suspected of being a
pétroleuse
…. I do not believe in the petroleum story, and I do not think that one-third of the population believed in it. Yet such was the power of suspicion in those days, and such the distrust of one’s neighbour, that every staid and sober housekeeper bricked up his cellar windows, and for weeks in the beautiful summer weather not an open window was to be seen on the lower stories….

But the burning of Paris had begun to drive the loyalist troops to a new excess of rage against the insurgents; a rage that swept away the restraints of reason and justice. In a dispatch to Secretary Fish of May 24th, Washburne reported how one of his assistants had ‘counted this afternoon, on the avenue d’Antin, the dead bodies of eight children, the eldest not more than fourteen years of age, who had been seized while distributing their incendiary boxes, and shot
on the spot’. The summary executions multiplied. How many innocent old women thus met their deaths while returning empty milk bottles to the
laitière
will never be known. To Fish, Washburne cotinued: ‘The state of feeling now existing in Paris is fearful beyond description.’

On both sides passions were rising to a dangerous pitch, and on the night of the 24th they culminated in the most heinous and senseless crime committed by the Communards; the murder of the Archbishop of Paris. As noted previously, on May 22nd Gaston da Costa, Rigault’s twenty-one-year-old Deputy
Procureur
, had been entrusted with the transfer of Archbishop Darboy and fifty other. hostages from the Mazas Prison to the more secure La Roquette. Some of the poor bewildered priests evidently rejoiced, thinking they were about to be set free. As the hostages crossed the Faubourg St.-Antoine in the sordid Bastille area, a mob had crowded round the wagons shouting ‘
A mort! À mort!
Hand them over! Let them be shot here and now!’ Da Costa recalled that, ‘as always, it was the women who were the most bloodthirsty’. However, guarded by a detachment of fifty men, he succeeded in shepherding his charges safely inside the La Roquette Prison. By the 24th this particularly tough and insalubrious area was occupied by its own native 66th Battalion of the National Guard. The previous day the 66th had fought a desperate action behind a fragile barricade near the Opéra; several of its men had been captured and shot on the spot. Tempers were high and the battalion was out for blood. Now, on the morning of the 24th, the battalion
cantinière
—a virago known as ‘the woman Lachaise’—denounced a Captain de Beaufort as having been responsible for the massacre. She had, she claimed, overheard him declare his intention of ‘purging’ the battalion; and this was the result. De Beaufort, an elegant young man of about thirty, was a renegade count whose motives for throwing in his lot with the Commune remains obscure; he was a natural target for the rampant suspicions of the hour. The Count was arrested and taken to Battalion Headquarters, outside which ‘the woman Lachaise’ mustered a coterie of fellow
tricoteuses
, howling for de Beaufort’s head, and threatening to lynch the officers holding him if their demands were not satisfied. In much the same way as the National Guards had acceded to mob pressure for the killing of the two generals on March 18th, de Beaufort was taken out and shot in the street.

All the time the threat of the advancing Versaillais was increasing, and with it came ever-fresh reports of more summary executions. The 66th Battalion and its tigerish, goading female adherents had the taste of blood in their mouths. ‘Exasperation was reaching its peak’,

M
AP
4. Paris: south-east

explained da Costa. ‘This first killing accomplished, the survivors of the 66th Battalion did not judge themselves sufficiently revenged. They knew that prisoners “of note” had been transferred to La Roquette….’ As the day went on and the grim wounded men staggered back from the ever-approaching front, emotions mounted. The defence of the area now centred around the shop in which was located the H.Q. of the 66th Battalion. Here Théophile Ferré had arrived to co-ordinate operations. As Clemenceau’s deputy on March 18th, the extremist Ferré had arrived done much to undermine the Mayor of Montmartre’s authority at the time of the shooting of Lecomte and Thomas. Since May 14th he had been Rigault’s successor as Prefect of Police, for which post—as the purest kind of terrorist—he was admirably fitted. About twenty-five, he had a shock of black hair and heavy whiskers that surrounded a bird-of-prey face of extraordinary pallor and unmitigated melancholy. On his great hooked nose sat thick glasses through which peered black eyes full of all the myopic mildness of a Himmler. In relation to his upper body, his legs were almost deformedly short; he walked on tiptoe with a nervous tic of the shoulder. He envied Rigault his powers of attraction for women, while his own physical deficiencies—coupled to a youth of grinding misery as an impoverished clerk—filled him with misanthropy. In his capacity for taking ruthless, decisive action he and Rigault were as rare as each other in the Commune; McKean of the American Legation claimed that he ‘never had seen a man who could dispose of matters so quickly and so readily’. An opportunity to display his talents to the full was now granted him.

As evening drew on, members of the 66th Battalion began to press Ferré for the execution of the hostages. Although the ‘trial’ at which Rigault and his supporters intended to designate the priests officially as ‘hostages’ had never taken place, Rigault’s henchman Ferré needed little persuasion. He dispatched two officers, Fortin and Genton, with a terse note to the Governor of La Roquette ordering the execution of six unspecified hostages. On the way they were intercepted by ‘the woman Lachaise’ in tears of remorse over the morning’s killing, and vainly imploring the officers not to pursue their mission. At the prison Fortin and Genton handed the order to the Governor, François, and then there ensued a discussion as to which of the prisoners should be selected. Fortin, it appears, insisted that the Archbishop head the list, but François, fearful of accepting the responsibility, declined to hand him over without specific authorization from Ferré. Fortin then returned to Ferré, who, declaring casually, ‘All right, if they want the Archbishop they shall have him’, took back the original order and wrote across it in large letters ‘and particularly
the Archbishop’. Outside in the street, Fortin gathered together a score of volunteers from the 66th, and set off again for La Roquette.