Massacre (19 page)

Édouard Vignon’s confidence in the French army was renewed after Courbevoie. Once it had reached full strength, Édouard was sure it would show the Parisians a thing or two. The bourgeois was not disappointed that attempts at conciliation or some sort of negotiated settlement had failed. Yet Édouard assured his wife that she should not be afraid for Paul and Henri – they would not be forced to march. Édouard was sure that, when the Versaillais launched an assault on Paris, ‘the brave National Guardsmen of order’ would rise up and the rout of the ‘bandits’ would be complete: all that would remain would be ‘to re-establish order with severity’. He had heard that the National Guard fighting at Châtillon and Clamart had encountered not gendarmes, but rather regular French troops, who could not be missed because of their red trousers. National Guardsmen had reason to be discouraged.

Henri excitedly related to his mother news of a successful Versaillais attack on the barricades at pont de Neuilly on 6 April, one of which had included an overturned omnibus, another a railway carriage. The Army of Versailles crossed the Seine and occupied the first houses of Neuilly. Communard defenders taken prisoner had been killed; as Henri explained, ‘the
mot d’ordre
[watchword] is to take no prisoners, to shoot everyone who falls into their hands’. He assured his mother that ‘foreigners’ were playing a major part in the Commune, and repeated propaganda reports that the British government had informed the Versailles government that 5,200 pickpockets were on the way across the English Channel to add to the chaos in the capital.
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Henri amused himself by once or twice joining the Versailles troops as they went on expeditions near the walls of Paris. He found such excursions a little dangerous, but ‘truly admirable’. He could judge for himself the effectiveness of the artillery duels between the two sides. As the Communards returned fire from Point-du-Jour, he and his friends decided it would be prudent to return to Versailles. But he was convinced that his exile in Versailles would soon end. After all, Thiers had announced that soon his troops would be inside Paris.
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In early April, it remained fairly easy to get in and out of Paris. Céline de Mazade remained in Paris for the first six weeks of the Commune to oversee the operation of her husband’s textile manufacturing company,
which had factories in Oise, north of Paris, and a warehouse in the capital. Her husband Alexandre stayed away from the capital to avoid being conscripted into the National Guard. The couple supported Versailles and complained that the Commune was hurting business. Good labour had become difficult to find. Céline de Mazade managed to leave Paris regularly and to ship silk out to the company warehouses, sometimes with the help of bribes. She was not the only one to rely on their method to move in and out of the city.
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But as Thiers’s propaganda continued to flood into Paris, accompanied by wounded soldiers returning from battle, wealthy and foreign-born Parisians – even those who had held out – began to see the appeal of escape.

The US Legation was jammed with French citizens asking for passports. By late April, Ambassador Elijah Washburne had provided more than 1,500
laissez-passers
(diplomatic passes) to Alsatians, who could now claim to be German subjects. He became increasingly pessimistic about the entire situation, reporting on 20 April, ‘Fortune, business, public and private credit, industry, labour, financial enterprise, are all buried in one common grave. It is everywhere devastation, desolation, ruin. The physiognomy of the city becomes more and more sad … and Paris, without its brilliantly lighted cafés, is Paris no longer.’
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But for those who could not claim foreign citizenship in order to escape the city and avoid service in the National Guard, bribery was the best, if not the only, option. The ongoing fight with Versailles troops meant that the National Guard was in dire need of men to fight, so they did everything in their power to round up those shirking their duty. National guardsmen demanded information from concierges on who lived in the buildings they tended, and they searched apartments, looking for men trying to avoid service. Those men between twenty and forty years of age who were discovered hiding and who resisted were hauled off, and told that they would be put up front during the next skirmish. The Commune cut off their daily wage, in the hope that spouses might pressure them to serve. Yet some men still managed to leave by bribing guards to look the other way. John Leighton noted that one could go to the Gare du Nord and claim to be seventy-eight years old, and a guard might well reply in playful jest, ‘Only that? I thought you looked older.’ Leighton heard that some residents of Belleville and Montmartre were earning ‘a nice little income’ helping people get out, even by clambering over the walls.
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Wickham Hoffman, secretary of the US Legation, also managed to go back and forth to Versailles, where he had found lodgings, thanks to his embassy. (Versaillais shells hit his Paris apartment building eight times.)
Hoffman travelled to and from his office with passes easily obtained from both sides. But as he had to go through German-held Saint Denis in order to get back into Paris by train, the journey grew from twelve to over thirty miles, taking three hours each way. Friends asked him to travel out of Paris by road, using their horses and carriages so as to bring them to Versailles. Hoffman wryly noted that ‘if the Communist officers at the gates were close observers, they must have thought that I was the owner of one of the largest and best-appointed stables in Paris’. His principal complaint during the Commune was that his landlady had run out of his favourite champagne.
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Paul Vignon, like 200,000 other upper-class Parisians who had already fled, realised in mid-April that the time had to come to leave Paris. In his apartment building on rue de Seine, the concierge took Paul aside and told him that a junior officer in the National Guard had come by with a list of names in a notebook, asking about people living there who were less than forty years old. When the concierge hesitated, the officer mentioned that he knew he had earlier provided information that he had known to be false, adding that the Commune wanted to make examples of this kind of thing in order to reduce the number of draft-dodgers (
réfractaires
). The concierge took a real chance, saying that there were indeed two brothers normally residing there of the age to serve,
les citoyens Vignon
, who had been in the 84th battalion during the war, but that they had left for the provinces. The National Guard officer departed, saying he would find out whether this was true or not. Paul Vignon profusely thanked the concierge, but knew he could delay no longer.

The challenge now was to get out. Increased Communard security had made it more difficult to leave Paris. The gates were closely guarded and only civilians with passes stamped by the Commune could leave. Paul had heard that some young men had managed to leave hidden beneath laundry in the wagons of washerwomen, or even, somehow, encased in giant slabs of meat, thanks to sympathetic butchers. But guards had heard about that one and were stabbing meat being transported with their bayonets. Several young department store clerks got away by jumping a guard at the customs barrier post and quickly fleeing. A few other hardy souls had thrown down ropes from the top of the ramparts and climbed down at night.

The Vignon family’s devoted servant had heard that a young Swiss man had loaned his papers to a Parisian, and that she could get hold of them. Paul and his father accepted the proposition. Soon Paul was in possession
of a Swiss birth certificate in the name of Schmitt, approximately his age, along with a passport stamped at the Swiss embassy.

Early the next morning Paul Vignon, his father and the domestic – who would return to Paris with the papers once they had arrived in Saint Denis – went to the Gare du Nord, armed with Paul’s new identity. Guards would not stop Paul’s father because of his age, nor the domestic servant, as women could pretty much come and go as they pleased. Paul went up to the window to buy three tickets, indeed second class tickets so they could (for once) ‘travel democratically’ in order not to attract unusual attention. Communards did not travel first class. They registered their two crates of belongings without any problem, and walked into the waiting room.

The travellers showed their papers to a guard at the door, and he stepped back to let them pass. But a young National Guard lieutenant suddenly appeared and asked politely to see their documents. He announced that Paul’s papers were not in order because they had not been stamped at the Prefecture de Police. Paul replied that this was not necessary because they bore the stamp of a representative of Switzerland – ‘my country’, he lied – and no such requirement had been in place when his brother had left. Indeed this was true, the lieutenant replied, but with so many men trying to leave Paris in order to avoid military service, a new regulation had been decreed. Paul reminded him that, as a ‘foreigner’, he should be allowed to go, but the young lieutenant would not relent. Paul told his interrogator that he would find the head of surveillance for the railway station, who would presumably take care of the matter.

When he arrived at the police office, Paul discovered that the suspicious National Guard officer had taken a back stairway and was already there. The surveillance officer assured Paul that he did not doubt for a minute that he was Swiss, but that he had received explicit instructions that he could not ignore. There was nothing to be done. If Paul made a scene, they might well have a look at his luggage and see that as a good Parisian bourgeois, his initials ‘P.V.’ were to be found on his clothes and his cane. He could not go to the Prefecture de Police because for four years he had been attached to the appellate court and often had dealings with officials there. Someone there might recognise him. They would have to find another way out.

By good fortune, they did. As they had been pacing back and forth in the station, a railway employee had brushed past Paul. Looking the man in the face, he had asked Paul if they were being prevented from leaving for Saint-Denis. Paul started to tell his story when the man cut him off:
they were to follow him and give him a small bribe in cash. Bribing the guard on duty with 20 francs – a considerable sum – would risk Paul being arrested for bribery if ensnared. So he took out 2 francs, handed it over, and went quickly through the door to the
quai
while the railway official looked the other way.

Paul, his father and their servant entered the closest second-class train compartment they found. Paul’s heart was pounding. Their travelling companions would be six
femmes du peuple
, not the sort Paul and his father had travelled with before. One of the women suddenly warned him to be careful: before the train departed, Communard guards would pass through the cars. She remarked that he seemed too young to be leaving Paris in this situation. Paul recounted the now rather tired story about being Swiss, so Communard authorities could not prevent him from leaving, and so on. ‘Believe me!’ the worthy woman replied, telling him to slide under the bench of the compartment, and that the others could conceal him with their clothes. This he did, and an instant later a guard looked in. The train pulled out, and twenty minutes later his new acquaintance said that he could come out from under the bench. She had seen a German soldier on the quay of the train station in Saint-Denis.

Now no longer within the jurisdiction of the Commune, Paul, his father and the servant left the train, giving each of these working-class women ‘a warm handshake’. The Vignons’ domestic servant returned to Paris with the Swiss papers. Paul and his father immediately went to eat a ‘copious’ lunch upon leaving the station. They then left for Falaise. Not long thereafter, Paul Vignon was in Versailles. It seemed to him that he should show ‘some zeal’ about working again. He found Versailles full of deputies and senators, but also a bevy of jobseekers, men like him who had abandoned Paris. Still, Paul managed to find a post in Thiers’s government.
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The Paris Commune brought most Parisians, such as Sutter-Laumann, hardship but also hope. For others with more comfortable existences, like the Vignon family, the Commune was something that had to be endured until the Army of Versailles could put an end to the pretentions of ordinary Parisians. Surrounded militarily, civil war impinged on daily life, as shells fell on western Paris and casualties mounted amid growing, gnawing fear.

Gradually some Parisians who had been willing to give the Commune a chance because they were republicans or favoured the programme for municipal autonomy began to turn against it. Lower middle-class Parisians,
for one, seemed disgusted by the quarrels among Communard leaders. In an attempt to combat dwindling support, Communard propaganda, in the
Journel Officiel
and wall posters, transformed
fédéré
losses into great victories over depleted Versaillais forces taking many casualties. In their telling, battalions and entire regiments of Versailles line troops were abandoning Thiers and joining the Commune.
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There was little truth in these reports, and Parisians, even those devoted to the Commune, could not have ignored the mounting casualties from the skirmishes.

Yet growing opposition to arbitrary arrests, hostage-taking and the occasional requisition of supplies did not turn all hesitant public opinion towards Thiers. In fact, Thiers continued to do everything possible to merit the hatred of Parisians. The Versaillais leader had agreed to the devastating armistice, and his cannons were inflicting great damage on Paris – more than that caused by the Prussian siege – and killing innocent Parisians. His commitment to the Republic was at best equivocal. Charles Beslay wrote a letter to Thiers, whom he had once known fairly well, calling on him to resign. The Communard moderate saluted this third revolution of the century in Paris, ‘the greatest and the most just’, and accused Thiers of opposing in obvious bad faith the social transformation that had been occurring over the past half century in Europe. If Versailles now was stronger, Beslay and many others firmly believed, Paris at least had right on its side.
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