Massacre (11 page)

Thiers realised that the army did not have enough troops to crush the insurrection. He first ordered Vinoy to pull his troops back behind the Seine and occupy the bridges on the Left Bank, and then ordered a complete evacuation of Paris by all government officials, followed by troops. Of about 4,000 policemen, more than 2,500 joined line troops heading for Versailles. Paris was left with virtually no officials or functionaries, no magistrates, no police. Many Parisians of means had already begun to desert their city. The next day, Thiers cut all correspondence between Paris and the provinces.
¹⁷

During the February Revolution of 1848, Thiers had advised the Orléanist regime to move the army outside of Paris, regroup, and then return to crush the working-class insurgents. Prince Alfred Windischgraetz had done the same thing that same year in Vienna. With several hundred thousand French troops in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, and the potential unreliability of many line troops, Thiers could not contemplate an immediate assault on Paris. He wanted time to rebuild his forces.

Thiers ordered the evacuation of troops from the forts of Mont Valérien, Issy, Vanves and Montrouge, each well beyond the ramparts of Paris. Soon after, he realised that giving up Mont-Valérien, south-west of Neuilly, had been a grave mistake, and it was reoccupied; troops turned back a half-hearted assault by National Guard forces. The officers of the
now twice-defeated army gathered in Versailles, shocked by events and utterly humiliated.

Raoul Rigault had returned to Paris on 18 February, the day after the National Assembly elected Thiers head of the executive authority. The police were looking for him and he lay low until mid-March. Having dined late in the Latin Quarter at the
Brasserie
Glaser the evening before, Rigault woke up late on 18 March to hear the news that the people of Montmartre had prevented the troops from carrying off the National Guard cannons, and had shot generals Lecomte and Thomas. The fervent disciple of revolution had missed the whole thing! Rigault ran to the Prefecture of Police, and, finding that Émile Duval had already assumed police functions there, pushed him out of the way and began to set up shop. Rigault then began to sign orders for the liberation of political prisoners. Blanquists were chomping at the bit, eager to organise a military march on Versailles. However, the Central Committee of the National Guard hesitated, as did Jacobins and many members of the International.

Montmartre, Belleville and other peripheral plebeian neighbourhoods took the victory on 18 March as their own, a revolution that would challenge the existing conservative provisional government. They poured down from the heights to parade triumphantly on the place de l’Hôtel de Ville and the boulevards of central Paris. Organisation and militancy would remain firmly based in the context of neighbourhood action.
¹⁸

Edmond de Goncourt witnessed the explosion of popular joy and energy that erupted on 18 March: ‘All around me people are talking of provocation and making fun of Thiers … The triumphant revolution seems to be taking possession of Paris: National Guards are swarming and barricades are being put up everywhere; naughty children scramble on top of them. There is no traffic; shops are closing.’ The next day he walked near the Hôtel de Ville. No friend of ordinary people, he snarled:

Ernest Vizetelly described the most prosperous neighbourhoods of Paris as being invaded by men ‘with faces such as were only seen on days of Revolution’.
²⁰

Yet life in Paris in some ways went on as if nothing had changed. Shops opened the next day as usual, and in some neighbourhoods people simply walked around remaining barricades. Eugène Bersier, a Protestant pastor, recalled that no one could really believe that they were in the middle of an insurrection. He watched National Guard battalions from Belleville, Montmartre and the southern suburb of Montrouge, ‘poor lost souls who believe that they have saved the Republic’, parade through central Paris. A week later, Auguste Serraillier, a thirty-year-old shoemaker and member of the Council of Marx’s International, reported that the only abnormal occurrence was the closing of the workshops – employers appeared to be organising a lock-out in order to undercut the Commune. Even the conservative historian Hippolyte Taine had to admit that nothing scary or dramatic had followed the people’s victory of 18 March. He watched National Guardsmen playing
boules
and passing the hat for money to buy some sausage and a little wine.
²¹

As drama unfolded on Montmartre, Paul Vignon, the son of a magistrate and himself a lawyer who had been a national guardsman during the Prussian siege, had taken his mother to the Gare Montparnasse so that she could return to their family home in the Norman town of Falaise. Returning to the Palace of Justice, he heard shouts coming from the direction of the quai de la Mégisserie. Then he learned what had happened up on Montmartre, far from his comfortable existence. He saw two gendarmes with torn shirts who had struggled with a crowd shouting for the Commune and against the army. Within hours most conservative national guardsmen had left their ranks. What was left of his National Guard unit, Vignon claimed, was only ‘the lazy element’ – those continuing to serve for the 1.50 francs per day that they received. Vignon contended that a kind of fever had come upon ordinary Parisians. The Franco-Prussian War had wrenched them away from their normal occupations and they now seemed to believe that no leaders were necessary in a world of total equality, without a ‘ruling class’ and in which the kind of luxury to which he was accustomed would be ‘a stigma’.

Édouard, Paul’s father, reported to his wife two days later that ‘After the Prussians, now it’s Belleville and Montmartre who want to stage their political drama.’ For wealthy Parisians like Paul and Édouard Vignon, the insurgency was at first nothing to be too concerned about, just another Parisian episode with which to contend. Indeed, Paris seemed astonishingly calm, particularly their bourgeois
quartier
in central Paris, where faces were ‘sad, gloomy’.

Paul briefly set about trying to organise conservative National Guardsmen who were ‘frankly reactionary’. Édouard also believed it their duty ‘to increase the number of
honnêtes gens
’. The Vignon family quickly adopted the vocabulary of social and spatial stigmatisation. They juxtaposed the Communard ‘rabble’ – for example ‘the low-life of Belleville’ – with the ‘
honnêtes gens
’ of the upper classes in the fancy neighbourhoods. Édouard and his son would bide their time, and looked to Thiers and the National Assembly to put an end to this mess.
²²

On 19 March, Émile Duval warned the Central Committee that resistance against what had transpired was afoot, particularly in the conservative First and Second Arrondissements. He demanded that steps be taken to prevent conservative National Guard units from reaching Versailles. Members of the Committee protested that they did not have a mandate to defend Paris, and refused to transform the body formally into even a provisional revolutionary authority. Yet they agreed to order detachments of guardsmen to assure security at key points, such as the Banque de France and the Tuileries Palace. Paris had to be defended.
²³

Members of the Committee issued a proclamation ending the state of siege imposed by Thiers and Vinoy and called on Parisians to organise elections in order to assure the existence of the Republic. Although they were unwilling to formally serve as a provisional government, the Central Committee remained the only real authority, although some of its members were quite unknown to the average Parisian. François Jourde, a committee member from Auvergne who had been a clerk for a notary and then in a bank, later related the sense of surprise and confusion that had followed such a swift victory: ‘We did not know what to do: we did not want to take possession of the Hôtel de Ville. We wanted to build barricades. We were very embarrassed by our authority.’
²⁴

Édouard Moreau, a twenty-seven-year-old Parisian Blanquist who made artificial flowers, presided over the Central Committee. Moreau’s fine features, including long blond hair, earned him the nickname ‘the aristocrat’. The Committee also included the Blanquists Émile Eudes and
Duval. Rigault and other Blanquists would run the Prefecture of Police and looked to Alphonse Blanqui as a potential saviour and leader, despite the fact that he was a prisoner of the government of Versailles on an island near Morlaix in Brittany. Rigault put it this way: ‘Nothing can be done without the Old One’, Blanqui.
²⁵

The Committee, led by Moreau, put forth a list of demands to the National Assembly in Versailles. They insisted that Parisians have the right to elect mayors of each of its twenty
arrondissements
; that the Prefecture of Police be abolished; that the army in Versailles be kept out of Paris; that the National Guard should have the right to elect its officers; that the moratorium on the payment of rents that the National Assembly had arbitrarily ended be continued; and finally that the National Assembly officially proclaim the Republic. Eudes proclaimed that since 18 March Paris ‘has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free. Centralised authority no longer exists.’ The concept of the Commune as a governing entity gained ground when the first issue of the
Journel Officiel de la Commune
appeared on 20 March. A stridently worded assessment congratulated ‘the proletarians of the capital [who,] amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking the direction of public affairs into their own hands’. The term ‘Commune’, as we have seen, was in the air during the Prussian siege and after the French defeat. Now the victory of the men and women of Montmartre in preventing Thiers’s troops from seizing cannons of the National Guard encouraged insurgent Parisians to believe that the creation of a progressive and even autonomous authority in the capital – the Commune of Paris – was within reach.
²⁶

For the moment, however, the majority of
arrondissement
mayors and deputy mayors, and deputies representing Paris in the National Assembly, refused to meet with the Central Committee, believing that this would be tantamount to recognising it as a legitimate authority. A minority of the mayors, however, met with the Central Committee at the Hôtel de Ville, including Clemenceau, the mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Clemenceau insisted that the body did not represent Paris and tried to persuade its members to return cannons to the government of Thiers and recognise the authority of the existing mayors. He hoped that the latter could negotiate with the National Assembly. The more conservative
arrondissement
mayors limited their demands to achieving municipal autonomy.
²⁷

The monarchist-dominated National Assembly met in a secret session on the evening of 22 March to determine how to respond to the uprising
in Paris. Thiers and Jules Grévy, a very conservative republican, dominated the proceedings. The monarchist right found support for their demand that calls for volunteers from the provinces be made to defend ‘order and society’. The prevailing mood was reflected by one member, who insisted that ‘The criminals who now dominate Paris have attacked Paris: now they attack society itself.’ No concessions were to be made to ‘a riot’. Thiers and Grévy made clear that they were willing to give the what they considered to be illegal, insurgent authority time to set itself up while a ‘serious army’ could be rebuilt in order to make legitimate a bloody repression. Thiers relished the fact that the possibility of civil war hung over the gathering. When someone challenged Thiers, asking if he would push Paris to civil war, shouts came from the Assembly: ‘It has already begun! It’s here!’ The conservative National Assembly revolted against Paris, and not the other way around. Only days after the people of Paris had taken control of their city, Thiers and the National Assembly were readying for a war that they understood as ‘a class war’ between the bourgeoisie and Parisian workers.
²⁸

Meanwhile many of those elite Parisians who would proudly take the title of ‘the men of order’ followed Thiers to Versailles or retreated to safer places outside the capital. Conservative republicans in Versailles who at first seemed in the difficult position of having to choose between a monarchical restoration and the Commune could now back Thiers, who promised to crush ‘the vile multitude’ in Paris he so detested.

For conservative republicans, the word ‘Commune’ had become a synonym for ‘communism’. These so-called ‘men of order’ could convince themselves that the members and supporters of the Commune, dubbed the Communards, intended primarily to confiscate and divvy up the property of the wealthy. Thiers, like other anti-Communards, was convinced that members of the International were largely responsible for the insurrection of 18 March.
²⁹

While Thiers and the National Assembly prepared to rebuild the army, counter-revolution was afoot in Paris. Thiers appointed the conservative Admiral Jean-Marie Saisset commander of the National Guard of Paris, a decision sure to outrage many ordinary Parisians. The Bonapartist faithful, the ‘Society of the Friends of Order’, and ‘loyal’ National Guardsmen began to gather around the Bourse, the Opera, and the elegant Grand Hôtel in Paris, rallying around Saisset. On 21 March, a demonstration of about 3,000 ‘Friends of Order’ began on the boulevard des Capucines and marched through several boulevards and streets in conservative neighbourhoods. Versailles loyalists dominated the
quartiers
between the
grands
boulevards
down to the market of Saint-Honoré, and around the Palais-Royal, the Banque de France and rue Montmartre. Saisset organised another demonstration at place Vendôme the following day. The choice of location was provocative – in front of the headquarters of the National Guard. When Saisset was about to speak, shots in his general direction were fired by counter-demonstrators. Twelve-year-old Gaston Cerfbeer, living on rue Saint-Honoré near rue Royale, looked down to see ‘men of order … running like madmen, beneath our windows’.
³⁰