Massacre (15 page)

Courbet celebrated his new-found artistic freedom as he ate and drank. Louis Barron paid a visit to the ‘master of Ornans’ in his apartment on rue Serpente in the Sixth Arrondissement. He found the painter seated before a pungent platter of
choux
and
saucisses
, which he consumed with glass after glass of red wine. They went down to boulevard Saint-Germain. The café terraces were full of students and loving couples, while the usual
flâneurs
strolled by, breathing in the sweet smells coming from the flowers of the nearby Jardins du Luxembourg. Yet, in the far distance, the sound of gunfire could be faintly heard. Courbet seemed briefly preoccupied and hoped that the Parisians would not let themselves be taken, noting ‘it’s true that the French in the provinces are celebrating the carnage inflicted on the French of Paris’.
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Courbet moved quickly to organise and codify freedom for and promotion of the arts in Paris. The artist announced a proposal of fifteen points on 7 April. His fiery speech insisted that Paris had saved France from
dishonour. He called upon artists, whom Paris had ‘nursed as would a mother’, to help rebuild France’s ‘moral state and rebuild the arts, which are its fortune’. In the amphitheatre of the Medical School, 400 artists elected a committee of forty-seven members drawn from painting, sculpture, architecture, lithography and the industrial arts. Thirty-two were to be replaced after one year. Besides Courbet, who was elected president of the new Artists’ Federation, Jean-François Millet, Corot, Édouard Manet and Eugène Pottier (author of the
International
) were members. The establishment of the Federation and the large number of artists who participated in its assembly reflected the dramatic increase in the number of artists in Paris: 350 in 1789; 2,159 by 1838; and 3,300 in 1863. Parisian artists, like other professions, had feared for their livelihood under Louis Napoleon. In the arts, too, the Commune offered hope.
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The Federation took on the responsibility of the conservation of monuments, museums, galleries and relevant libraries and put forward the idea that the Commune would pay for the training of exceptionally promising young artists. The Federation would soon abolish the Academy of Beaux-Arts, long considered an appendage of ‘official’ taste. A week later, the Federation produced a blueprint for the future administration of the arts in Paris. The Federation’s committee would soon cashier the directors and associate directors of the Louvre and the Musée Luxembourg, believed sympathetic to Versailles. The Federation became increasingly concerned with protecting the artistic treasures of the Louvre from being damaged by Versaillais shells; indeed, some paintings had already been sent to Brest for safety. Courbet ordered that windows in the Louvre be secured, and placed guards around the museum.
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The Commune appointed Courbet to the Commission on Education on 21 April, in part because it was nominally responsible for overseeing the Federation. Courbet described his work: ‘To follow the wave that is the Paris Commune, I do not have to reflect, but only to act naturally.’
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On 29 April, the Commune named the Protestant pastor Élie Reclus director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, who, as Courbet with the Louvre, sought to ensure that no harm came to its rich collections from Versaillais shelling. When he arrived at the great library on 1 May, he had to summon a locksmith to open the office of the previous director, who had bolted for Versailles. Twelve days later Reclus notified all employees that he would fire anyone who did not sign a paper pledging allegiance to the Commune.
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While the fine arts seemed poised to flourish under the Commune, the theatres of Paris staggered on as best they could given the severity of the
situation facing Paris. The Commune had abolished monopolies and subsidies to the theatres of Paris, seeking to encourage the creation of cooperative associations instead. The Comédie Française had shut down on the evening of 18 March, the day the people of Montmartre had succeeded in keeping the National Guard cannons from troops, but reopened ten days later with the help of a loan. In the immediate confusion, some other theatres also closed for a time. A reduced troupe of actors (some having left the city) put on fifty-one performances during the Commune, closing for some reason on 3 April (causing a brief panic in the neighbourhood, because it seemed that something dire had occurred), though also performing during Holy Days later that week. However, fewer tickets were sold, the takings barely covering the cost of light and heating. The most relevant production may have been one staged at Gaité in late April. It portrayed in unflattering terms men who managed to avoid serving in the National Guard.
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With May came faltering morale and fewer theatrical performances. On 1 May, the Comédie Française filled only thirty-eight seats. No one likes to play to a largely empty theatre, and the director adopted the strategy of giving away tickets, so that on some nights there were 500 people in attendance. At least eleven other theatres staged performances during the Commune, including the Folies-Bergères. When Catulle Mendès purchased a ticket to a performance, the theatre was almost empty. The actors went through their lines quickly, accompanying them with slow gestures. They seemed bored, and, in turn, bored those who had bothered to be there. Cafés on nearby boulevards shut down, for lack of a post-theatre crowd.
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Musicians in Paris played on, thanks to the support of the Commune. The Commune named a commission to oversee the interests of musicians. When the director of the Opera stalled on organising performances, the Commune named a new director of the Conservatoire, composer Daniel Salvador, the son of Spanish refugees. The Commune encouraged music that would be ‘heroic in order to exalt the living, funereal to mourn the dead’. Charles Garnier’s Opera stood unfinished – it would open in 1875 – and now became a storage facility for food. The old Opera continued with barely half its musicians. On 13 May, Salvador summoned professors at the Conservatoire de Musique to a meeting at Alcazar in rue de faubourg Poissonnière, but only five turned up. One asked Salvador if he understood that he was risking his neck for casting his lot with the Commune, and he replied that he knew very well that he might be killed, but that he had to act according to his principles.
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*

Revolutionary music and symbols could not gloss over great differences in the political inclinations of those men leading the Commune. Former 48ers (that is, those who were active in the 1848 Revolution) were prominent among leaders in the Commune. Such Jacobins tended to be older than the others, including Félix Pyat, Charles Delescluze and Charles Beslay, the most senior at seventy-five years of age. A Breton from Dinan, Beslay had begun a factory producing machines in Paris during the July Monarchy. He supported workers’ rights, unlike Thiers, whom he had joined in opposing the Bourbon regime in its last years. Pyat, the son of a lawyer from Vierzon, had studied law, but devoted himself to politics and writing political pamphlets and plays. The pompous Pyat was anything but a man of courage, having hidden on a coal barge during the demonstrations that followed the funeral of Victor Noir. Pyat had a ‘rasping laugh’ and the ‘bilious eyes of a man whose childhood had been unhappy’.
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Devoted republicans, Jacobins seemed to romanticise a return to previous revolutions – hence their symbols of the colour red and of the Phrygian cap, associated with the
sans-culottes
of the French Revolution. Rigault referred to them disparagingly as ‘the old beards of [18]48’. Jacobins tended to assess the situation facing Paris in terms of the politics of previous revolutions, particularly that of 1789 when foreign invasion and civil war threatened revolutionary gains. Both Jacobins and Blanquists continued to respect centralised revolutionary authority. However, unlike the Blanquists – and above all, Raoul Rigault, who had been obsessed with seizing and exercising power – Delescluze and other Jacobins remained committed to retaining essential freedoms despite the threatening military situation. As we have seen, Rigault also made constant reference to the French Revolution and was obsessed with militants of the extreme left during those heady days. Jacobin and Blanquist militants were prominent in the governing body of the Commune and in the Central Committee of the National Guard; indeed, about fifteen members following the elections of 16 April were members of both bodies.
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Therefore, when the members of the ‘Commune’ – its elected governing body – began to meet, the political divisions immediately and contentiously surfaced. Unlike the Jacobins, the Blanquists did not want the sessions of the Commune’s Council to be publicised, fearing that within an hour or so Thiers and his entourage would know everything that had been discussed, particularly military strategy, which, as professional revolutionaries, the followers of Blanqui considered their speciality. Moreover, Rigault proposed that Blanqui be named honorary president, but Delescluze and
others protested vigorously. He could not stand Rigault’s authoritarian posture and denounced the proposition as ‘monarchical’.
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In an effort to reconcile political tensions and make clear that the judicial abuses of the Second Empire would be left behind, the Commune asked Eugène Protot, once a delegate to the congress of the International in Geneva and now Communard delegate for justice, to move civil and criminal proceedings along more rapidly, and to undertake measures to guarantee ‘the freedom of all citizens’. But Protot’s efforts had little effect on the deep divide between Blanquists and Jacobins, in no small part thanks to Rigault’s obsession with perceived threats to the revolution. Gustave Lefrançais and some other delegates wanted the abolition of the Prefecture of Police, in order to put an end to what seemed arbitrary arrests undertaken by Rigault. The Blanquist fought against this measure tooth and nail, insisting that Thiers might well have a thousand spies in Paris.

Rigault’s fears were not unfounded, however. Conspiracies against the Commune were afoot from the beginning. Within a couple of weeks, anti-Communard organisers began to distribute armbands (
brassards
) – conservative rallying marks that were at first white, the colour of the Bourbons, and later tricolour – in conservative neighbourhoods. Those who had them awaited the day they could come into the open and crush the Commune.
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On one occasion the militant Internationalist Jean Allemane, a printer by trade, got through the lines to Versailles in a failed attempt to somehow infiltrate Thiers’s government. Upon his return, he related his short trip in the company, by chance, of two loose-tongued Versaillais secret agents. When one of them observed that entering revolutionary Paris was as easy as slicing butter with a knife, Allemane quickly realised his mistake and had them arrested upon their arrival. Thiers and his entourage also tried to bribe well-placed Communards, apparently with some success.
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In an effort to counteract this threat, Rigault, named Civil Delegate for General Security on 29 March, appointed committed young Blanquist disciples to fill the empty offices of the Prefecture of Police. Rigault’s team compiled files, following up reports of their agents, and oversaw policing. One young Blanquist, Théophile Ferré, a twenty-five-year-old Parisian, ‘a dark little man, with black, piercing eyes’, seemed omnipresent. A detractor referred to the former clerk as strange-looking, ‘but what is funnier is when he speaks; he rises up on the points of his feet like an angry rooster and emits sharp sounds, which constitute what one can improperly call his voice’. P.-P. Cattelain, head of security, tried to understand how
political passion could be transformed into such enormous hatred in Ferré, who ‘inspired respect by his honesty and fear by his temperament as a ferocious friend of the revolution’. He could be unforgiving of those he believed stood in the way of political change. Cattelain said that, despite Ferré’s small size, he was afraid of him and believed that he would kill someone himself if he suspected treason. When several men robbed a house on Champs-Elysées, he told Cattelain to have shot ‘these wretches who dishonour the Commune!’ But then he changed his mind and sent them into battle with the National Guard; one was wounded and later died.
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Gaston Da Costa – ‘Coco’ – served as Rigault’s faithful assistant,
chef du cabinet
of General Security. Da Costa was a tall and pleasant young man twenty years of age with long tousled blond hair who had studied mathematics, earned the
baccelauréat
, and had once considered applying to the elite École Polytechnique – as had his mentor Rigault. He had asked Da Costa, known in the Latin Quarter in the late 1860s as ‘Rigault’s puppy’, to reorganise the Prefecture of Police. He was among those who tried, with limited success, to convince Rigault that the reorganisation should be carried out in a less incendiary way. But Rigault’s fear of the enemy within had taken hold. Every Communard military setback was greeted with shouts of ‘Treason!’ Now ‘a single sign of [Rigault’s] hand [was] sufficient to cause anyone’s arrest, while no one knew what might become of his prisoners’.
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Already unpopular among Jacobins as well as Parisians with ambivalent attitudes towards the Commune or hostility to it for their uncompromising policing efforts, Rigault and his companions’ raucous lifestyle did little to soften their image and provided fodder for propagandists in Versailles. In their free moments they guzzled food, wine and
eau-de-vie
, having contrived to move one of their favourite
brasseries
from the boulevard Saint-Michel into the Prefecture of Police. Nor had Rigault’s appetite for female companionship faded with the coming revolution: he was often in the company of Mademoiselle Martin, a young actress. All this gave rise to rumours in Versailles of ‘orgies’ at the Prefecture of Police. The long workday finished – not without breaks for food, drink and frivolity – Rigault and the others would go out to dine, and drink some more. His critics howled at restaurant bills he had allegedly run up with ‘Coco’ Da Costa. One 75.25-franc breakfast on 10 May allegedly included two great Burgundies and
Chateaubriand aux truffes
; five days later, 62.85 francs bought them Pommard, Veuve Clicquot, Nuits-Saint-Georges and cigars.
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