The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (72 page)

Reaching the Rue Scribe, he found the jeweller’s shop undamaged. His own rooms appeared to be safe too, although he could not actually enter them as the adjoining houses were still blazing.

At the other end of Paris, after three days of painful waiting, M. Paris had managed to find a carpenter to make coffins for his dead wife and brother-in-law. No hearse was available, but on the 25th a funeral cart had arrived at the door. It already contained three corpses and was due to pick up another three in the same street. As the cemetery was outside the walls and the Versailles authorities were now strictly forbidding any Parisians to leave the city until the work of repression was completed, M. Paris was not allowed to accompany the forlorn little cortège. Situations like this were happening all over Paris as the Commune staggered to its end. At his rooms near the Château d’Eau, Paul Verlaine, the Commune Press chief, who had spent the past few days of battle ignobly toying with the seduction of
Mme Verlaine’s maid, was suddenly confronted by Edmond Lepelletier and another Communard, ‘black with dust and powder, who had escaped from a barricade quite close by and were asking me for asylum’:

Naturally, I let them in and began the cremation of trouser belts and the destruction, also by fire, of képis. The metal buttons we threw down the lavatory, and took other precautions against a probable search. There was no longer any question of arms and ammunition; they had discarded those in the street.

The three men then settled down to a hearty meal, and all joined in teasing the pretty maid. That night they heard the approaching sound of MacMahon’s
mitrailleuses
, and from the window they watched the deployment of a battalion of the
Vengeurs de Flourens
; ‘youths of fifteen or sixteen, clad as light infantrymen of the Imperial Guard, with black-and-green trousers like Zouaves, and a broad white sash; they swaggered, they swaggered too much, but they were killed to the last man, next day, at the barricade of the Pont d’Austerlitz….’ At 4 a.m. the next morning, the doorbell rang and Verlaine found his mother, who had spent the whole night traversing Paris from the Batignolles. ‘A short time ago, right nearby in the Rue de Poissy, she had witnessed a massacre of “insurgents”, man, women and children.’

Friday, May 26th, was a day of savage killings on both sides. It was the day the struggle for Paris changed from a full-scale battle to a mopping-up operation, and it was also the day the rains came. ‘Pouring wet day’, Edwin Child noted in his meticulous fashion. Seldom can Parisians have greeted rain with quite such rapture. Swiftly it halted the spread of fires which the exhausted Versailles fire-fighters were beginning to get under control. The blaze in the Ministry of Finance was extinguished, and by a very narrow margin indeed the Louvre Museum had been saved. The world sighed with relief. But the rain could not quench the rage and hatred which had built up over the past five days in the hearts of the conquering army, many of them provincials with an instinctive loathing for the Parisian. The Versailles communiqué of the 25th had repeated the grim warning that ‘justice will soon receive satisfaction’. Already the commanders in Paris had shown little heed for the various instructions of Thiers and MacMahon—that repression should abide strictly by the law—and Washburne was shocked by one officer he met who claimed to have orders ‘to shoot every man taken in arms against the Government’. According to Wickham Hoffman, ‘any lieutenant ordered prisoners to be shot as the fancy took him, and no questions were asked’. It was decreed that all windows must be kept
closed, the shutters open, and the inhabitants of any house offending these regulations were liable to summary treatment for harbouring snipers. A friend of Wickham Hoffman ‘saw a house in the Boulevard Malesherbes visited by a squad of soldiers. They asked the concierge if there were any Communists concealed there. She answered that there was none. They searched the house, and found one. They took him out and shot him, and then shot her.’ Little time was wasted in weighing evidence; as Benjamin Wilson, who watched small squads of
Versaillais
search houses for hiding insurgents, noted, ‘they were not at all particular as to whom they took, for, as several of them remarked to me, the ‘
triage
’ or sifting could be done at Versailles’.

But a large proportion of the captured Communards were never to reach Versailles, and for a great many others the process of ‘
triage
’ was carried out arbitrarily on the spot. From Montmartre, one of the Rev. Gibson’s local preachers reported how he had ‘just witnessed the execution of 25 women who were found pouring boiling water upon the heads of the soldiers’. On the morning of the 26th, a left-wing Deputy called Jean-Baptiste Millière was dragged in front of some officers in Cissey’s corps who were breakfasting near the Panthéon. Millière was one of the Paris Deputies who had voted in the Assembly against both the peace treaty and the law of Maturities. He had been involved in the October 31st uprising, but had never participated in the Commune and had in fact been one of Clemenceau’s associates in his various attempts at conciliation. Cissey’s provost, a Major Garcin, declared however that he had read articles written by Millière, and they ‘revolted’ him; which was enough. Millière was marched off to the Panthéon, forced to kneel down on its steps (‘to demand pardon of society for the evil he had done’, Garcin explained later), and shot. Nearby, at St.-Sulpice, Dr. Faneau, a twenty-seven-year-old non-Communard, was in charge of a clearing-station full of National Guard wounded. Interrogated by Versailles troops, he explained that he ‘only had casualties, whom I have had for a long time’. According to the (somewhat unconvincing) Versailles account, the regulars were then fired at by one of the wounded; they retaliated by killing Dr. Faneau, as well as a number of his casualties. The dispatching of Communard wounded was also corroborated elsewhere by Dr. Powell who noted with distress that, of the few casualties he had managed to save under the appalling conditions at the Beaujon Hospital, ‘most of them were shot’ when the Government troops arrived.

As more and more thousands of Communard prisoners, or suspects, fell into Versailles hands, the long dejected columns marching westwards through Paris, guarded by General Gallifet’s cavalry,
became a saddeningly common sight. Walking in Passy on the 26th, Goncourt encountered one batch of ‘four hundred and seven, including sixty-six women’:

The men had been split up into lines of seven or eight and tied to each other with string that cut into their wrists. They were just as they had been captured, most of them without hats or caps, and with their hair plastered down on their foreheads and faces by the fine rain that had been falling ever since this morning. There were men of the people there who had made themselves head coverings out of blue check handkerchiefs. Others, drenched to the skin by the rain, were carrying a hunk of bread. They came from every class of society; hard-faced workmen, bourgeois in socialist hats, National Guards who had not had time to change out of their uniforms….

There was the same variety among the women. There were women wearing kerchiefs next to women in silk gowns. I noticed housewives, working girls, and prostitutes, one of whom was wearing the uniform of a National Guard. And in the midst of them all there stood out the bestial head of a creature whose face was half-covered with an enormous bruise. Not one of these women showed the apathetic resignation of the men….

Goncourt was moved to pity, and admiration, by one of the women,

… who was singularly beautiful, with the implacable beauty of a young Fate. She was a girl with dark, curly hair, steely eyes, and cheekbones red with dried tears. She stood frozen as it were in a defiant posture, hurling insults at officers and men from a throat and lips so contracted by anger that they were unable to form sounds or words…. ‘She’s just like the girl who stabbed Barbier!’ a young officer said to one of his friends.

Some of the women tried to protect their heads from the beating rain with their skirts. As the column prepared to move off, a colonel took up a position on its flank and shouted in a high voice with a brutality that Goncourt felt was affected to create terror:

‘For any man who lets go of his neighbour’s arm, it’s death!’ And that terrible
‘it’s death’
recurs four or five times in his brief speech; during which one heard the sharp sound of the escorts loading their rifles.

To Dr. Powell, the sight of the first convoy of about a thousand prisoners setting off on foot for Versailles was something ‘I can never forget’. It extended:

from the Place de la Concorde to the Round Point of the Champs Élysées, nearly a quarter of a mile, rather more, and consisted of old men, women, girls and boys… some nearly in rags, and all being urged on by squadrons of cavalry—how they ever got to Versailles is a mystery, some must have died on the way, or fainted and there were no ambulance carts following… near the Tour St.-Jacques I saw a procession coming along of soldiers escorting two young men, who were being hissed by the crowd, and suddenly the soldiers knocked them down with the butt-end of their rifles and dispatched them by letting off a pistol placed in their ears.

As the prisoners passed through the anti-Communard parts of Paris, it was often all the guards could do to prevent them from being torn to pieces by enraged crowds. The British and the Americans in Paris were particularly outraged by what they saw. ‘The cowardly way the Paris mob hoot after prisoners’, thought Colonel Stanley, ‘is simply disgusting, but one must bear in mind that their houses are half burnt down.’ What impressed itself most strongly upon him was the brutality of the women; more than once he tried to restrain them in their savagery, and there were many others in Paris during that week who came to agree with Voltaire’s famous aphorism that the Parisienne was composed of ‘half tiger and half monkey’. One future Ambassador of France never forgot the state of the wretched prisoners as they left Paris; ‘some of them bleeding, their ears torn off, their faces and necks gashed as though by the claws of wild animals’.

The main burden of escorting the Communard prisoners to Versailles fell to the cavalry commanded by General the Marquis de Gallifet. The hero of Sedan, the sparkling gallant of Second Empire days who had so shocked Lillie Moulton with the details of his wounds, the man who had studied how to treat ‘irregulars’ under Bazaine in Mexico, now established for himself a reputation for ferocity that Paris would never forget. Out at the Porte de la Muette, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, he set up his headquarters whence he operated a private ‘sifting’ process of his own. ‘I am Gallifet’, he told prisoners as they arrived; ‘You people of Montmartre may think me cruel, but I am even crueller than you can imagine.’ A
Daily News
contributor who watched the General at work confirmed that he was not making an idle boast. Walking slowly along the halted ranks, and eyeing the prisoners ‘as if at an inspection’, Gallifet ‘stopped here and there, tapping a man on the shoulder, or beckoning him out of the rear ranks. In most cases, without further parley, the individual thus selected was marched out into the centre of the road, where a small supplementary column was thus soon formed. The selected evidently knew too well that their last hour was come, and it was fearfully interesting to see their different demeanours….’ One wretched woman picked out by Gallifet ‘threw herself on her knees, and with outstretched arms implored mercy, and protested her innocence in passionate terms’. Gallifet’s impassive response was to gain enduring fame; ‘Madame, I have frequented
every theatre in Paris; your acting will have no effect on me.’ The basis of Gallifet’s selection was apparently simplicity itself; men with grey hair were ordered to step forward, on the assumption that they must also have fought at the barricades of ’48; those with watches were picked out as probable ‘officials’ of the Commune; while the balance was made up of unfortunates suffering from outstanding ugliness or coarseness of feature. Needless to say, any Communard found to have been a former member of the regular Army was automatically shot.

Just how many hundreds of Communards were thus ‘purified’ in the Bois de Boulogne by General Gallifet, on their way to Versailles, will never precisely be known. Of those who avoided the general’s attention, still many of the weaker ones—as Dr. Powell had predicted—never reached Versailles. Stragglers received little mercy. In a column of prisoners at
Montmartre
, Benjamin Wilson noticed one woman, who ‘unable or unwilling to advance any further sat down by the road side on which she was at once shot by one of the escort and her body placed within a
porte-cochère
next door to a music seller’s’. He added, ‘I have since heard that she was an Englishwoman.’ There could hardly have been a more atrocious act than the one witnessed by Alphonse Daudet on the Avenue de Clichy:

A large man, a true southerner, sweating, panting, had difficulty in keeping up. Two cavalrymen came up, attached tethers to each of his arms, around his body, and galloped. The man tries to run, but falls; he is dragged, a mass of bleeding flesh that emits a croaking sound; murmurs of pity from the crowd: ‘shoot him, and have done!’ One of the troopers halts his horse, comes up and fires his carbine into the moaning and kicking parcel of meat. He is not dead… the other trooper jumps from his horse, fires again. This time, that’s it….

Stanley, in front of whom the cavalry had repeatedly struck at stragglers, ‘and not with the flat of their sabres either’, was appalled when his friend Wingfield told him of an old couple he had spotted among the prisoners, unable to walk very well:

The woman was a cripple. She said ‘Shoot me; I cannot walk any further.’ The husband stood by her. They were shot down after thirty shots of revolvers. I am glad I did not see it; I think I should have been ill. They are a cowardly race, these French….

Stanley had just about had enough. He was disgusted by all he had seen and experienced in
la ville lumière
; in his own frank admission, ‘frightened at noting that my nerves are giving way’. On the afternoon of the 26th, he packed up and departed for England. In one of his last letters home, he wrote: ‘Five thousand people have been shot (after
being made prisoners) today. They are digging deep trenches….’ but as a final note of hope he added, ‘I really think a re-action has set in’.