Massacre (20 page)

In a grand demonstration of Parisians’ hatred of Thiers, newspapers called for the demolition of the house of the ‘bomber’ who launched destructive shells into Paris while denying doing so. On the morning of 15 April, Communard leaders with national guardsmen turned up at the door of Thiers’s house on the place Saint-Georges. The concierge almost fainted when she saw ‘grim-looking visitors’, but quickly turned over the keys. A quick search revealed objects of art, paintings and books which Thiers had so assiduously collected over the years. They found Italian Renaissance bronzes, porcelain from centuries past, ivory carvings, engraved rock crystals and Chinese and Japanese jade carvings. Courbet proposed that the
objets d’art
belonging to Thiers should be ennumerated. When Thiers learned in Versailles that his beloved house was to be demolished, he became quite pale, and fell into an armchair. He then burst into tears. Thiers, one could easily conclude, loved objects, not people.
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Destroying Thiers’s home did little to assuage the fears of Communards like Élisabeth Dmitrieff, who worried about the fate of the Commune in which she had invested so much effort. Would there be time to establish
unions for female workers as she hoped? Dmitrieff was sick with bronchitis and a fever and there was no one to replace her. She knew time was of the essence. On 24 April she wrote to the General Council of the International: ‘I work hard; we are mobilising all the women of Paris. I organise public meetings; we have set up defence committees in all
arrondissements
, right in the town halls, and a Central Committee as well.’
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Dmitrieff had worked tirelessly on behalf of the Commune, but would it be enough? Increasingly, it seemed the future of the Commune relied not on Communards like herself, but on powerful forces beyond Paris, and beyond her control. Bringing to earth Thiers’s house would have no impact on efforts to defend Paris against the Versaillais hordes. Thiers no longer had his mansion, but he had a powerful army moving ever closer to the ramparts of Paris.

CHAPTER
4

The Commune Versus the Cross

T
HE SUMMARY EXECUTION OF
C
OMMUNARD COMMANDERS
É
MILE
D
UVAL
and Gustave Flourens on 2 April changed the story of the Paris Commune. From the Commune’s point of view, the Versaillais had no right to execute any captured prisoners. It had demanded that its fighters be treated as ‘belligerents’ and thus cared for, as specified by the Geneva Convention of 1864, passed in response to the bloody Crimean War of 1853–56 and the 1859 war between France and Austria. But Thiers and his government continued to insist that Communards taken prisoner were insurgents, indeed bandits and criminals, and deserved no protection under any kind of international law.

At the meeting of the Commune on 4 April, Raoul Rigault insisted that action be taken in response to the killing of Duval and Flourens. With the support of Édouard Vaillant, he proposed that hostages be taken, suggesting the incarceration of the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, and other ecclesiastics. Four days earlier, Darboy had already received a warning that he would be arrested. When Rigault ordered the archbishop’s arrest, he barked ‘Get me two cops and go arrest the priest!’
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Born in 1813 in the small town (2,500 people) of Fayl-Billot in Haute-Marne in eastern France, Georges Darboy was the eldest of four children, whose parents owned a small grocery and haberdashery store. Their neighbours worked the land or produced baskets and other wickerwork sold in or beyond the region. The world of the Darboy family centred on the village church. Early on, the parish priest decided that Georges seemed destined for the priesthood.

Georges started at the Little Seminary in Langres in 1827 with about 200 other boys, sitting in classrooms that were so cold that the ink
sometimes froze in winter. Four years later, Darboy entered the Grand Seminary in Langres, announcing that he would always stand ready to die for his religion, which had been the fate of a good many priests and nuns during the Terror in 1793–94 during the French Revolution. Ordained in 1836, Darboy became professor of philosophy and later theology at the Grand Seminary. He was always fascinated by history and its relationship to theology, and believed that the Church had to adapt to new social and political realities.

Darboy became more and more preoccupied with the growing indifference to the Church among large segments of the population and the staggering difference in religious practice between women and men, with the former more likely to attend Mass. He lamented that people were more concerned about ‘terrestrial things’. Could not the sciences, in which he had become keenly interested, help reawaken faith? And should the Church not trumpet its historical role in France?
²

Darboy’s intense study and quest for personal perfection took a physical toll, bringing even suffering, a kind of private
calvaire
(ordeal) that would bring him grace in the mission of saving himself and others. Pale and small, the priest gave the appearance of being reserved, nervous, pensive, even melancholy. His hair, prematurely greying as if coloured by worry, hung limply over his narrow temples. An English contemporary described him: ‘His nose is too big, his lips are too thick, his chin is too heavy, and he is lacking in finesse and grace.’ Yet, as one of his admirers put it, ‘a flower does not require a dazzling casing’.
³

In 1845, Denis Affre, the archbishop of Paris, summoned Darboy to the capital, where he was named chaplain of the prestigious Collège Henri IV. Darboy described himself as ‘happy, free and cheerful’ in Paris, with ‘its atmosphere, its chaos, its ideas – its all-consuming life’. Yet as he walked through the city, Darboy was appalled by the poverty of the working poor, the majority of Parisian residents.
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On a rainy 22 February 1848, Paris exploded in revolution when a movement for political reform culminated in street demonstrations and troops shot dead several protesters. The July Monarchy collapsed, and, like his Bourbon predecessor Charles X, King Louis-Philippe high-tailed it for England. Darboy immediately threw his support behind the Second French Republic. The young priest believed that the February Revolution could bring better relations between the Church and ordinary people. Then the June Days uprising rocked the capital, as demonstrations by workers turned into full-scale insurrection. As fighting swirled around the Panthéon, Darboy gave the last rites to several dying workers. In the year
that followed, as the revolutionary Left continued to grow in strength, Darboy’s enthusiasm for the Republic ended.

Darboy remained concerned about the plight of poor Parisians, however, and hoped to address the anti-clericalism stemming at least in part from the profound disparity in wealth between privileged and plebeian parishes. When the new archbishop of Paris, Marie-Dominique Sibour, assigned Darboy to undertake a survey of the parishes of the diocese of Paris, he discovered the obvious. Parishes in the wealthy western districts enjoyed virtually inexhaustible resources, their religious ceremonies taking place in splendour and pomp. Such ostentation served to accentuate popular anti-clericalism in the poorer neighbourhoods, whose churches were spartan, often almost bare, and priests found fewer and fewer faithful in attendance.
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Darboy’s primary battle, however, was with the Vatican, and his refusal to submit to Pope Pius IX pushed him closer to Napoleon III. As a young man, Darboy had accepted Gallicanism, a doctrine which held that the authority of the ninety-one French bishops should take precedence over that of the pope.

As one of the major figures in France’s most important and visible diocese, Darboy got to know one of the best-connected clergymen, Abbé Gaspard Deguerry,
curé
of the Church of the Madeleine where the marriages and baptisms of the elite took place. Deguerry was a large, imposing, outgoing man who gave the impression that he was holding court, and served as confessor to Empress Eugénie who, like her husband Napoleon III, seems to have had lots to confess.
⁶

In 1859, the Emperor named Darboy bishop of Nancy, making him the first openly Gallican bishop appointed during the first seven years of the Second Empire. The Vatican went along with the nomination, having no choice, because the Concordat signed with Napoleon in 1802 gave the French state the right to name bishops. The new bishop insisted that the Church could not exist independently of social and political conditions and that the temporal authority of the pope simply did not correspond ‘to modern realities’. In his view, ‘the great days of the Papacy as a political institution are no more’.
⁷

When the archbishop of Paris died on the last day of 1862, the Emperor selected Darboy to replace him, ignoring the opposition of the Vatican. Learning of his appointment, his mother remarked, ‘Archbishop of Paris, that’s nice, but archbishops of Paris do not last very long.’
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Since Darboy had moved to Paris, three archbishops had died – two violently.

In his new role, Darboy became even closer to the Emperor. Pleased with Darboy’s loyalty to the empire, Napoleon III named him to the Senate, the only archbishop or bishop so honoured, and to the Emperor’s private advisory council. In 1864, Darboy became Grand Chaplain to the Emperor’s residence at the Tuileries, where imperial occupants surrounded themselves with adoring wealthy people. The archbishop married and baptised members of the imperial family and oversaw the first communion of the Prince Imperial. Such flamboyant events made him uncomfortable, because it clearly identified him with fancy folk, among whom the son of provincial shopkeepers never really felt at home. When Napoleon III awarded Darboy the
Légion d’honneur
, the archbishop reassured his parents that he had not been struck by ‘the sickness’ of seeking imperial honours.
⁹

The First Vatican Council began at the Vatican in December 1869, summoned to approve the pope’s planned proclamation of papal infallibility, which he assumed would mark the end of Gallican opposition to papal prerogatives. French Ultramontanes were pleased, insisting that the pope was ‘Christ on earth’. In Rome Darboy emerged as a leader of opposition to papal infallibility. On 13 July, the pope got his way: the bishops supported papal infallibility but a third of French bishops voted against papal infallibility or did not vote. Darboy left for Paris without voting, later sending in his formal acceptance to a doctrine he had vigorously opposed.
¹⁰

Archbishop Darboy’s first reaction to the proclamation of the Commune had been scathing: ‘This is a parade without dignity and a mindless parody without soul.’ In the wake of the first military defeats suffered by Communard forces, on the afternoon of 4 April, about thirty national guardsmen entered the courtyard of the archbishop’s palace. A National Guard captain, Révol, carried the official summons signed by Rigault which ordered him to ‘arrest Monsieur Darboy, so-called archbishop of Paris’. Révol told Darboy that he did not want harm to come to the archbishop and that this would only be a simple visit to see the Prefect of Police, who would inquire about some shots supposedly fired from the windows of the school of a school operated by the Jesuits – and then he could return to his residence. The archbishop’s sister asked to accompany him, but Darboy refused. Ernest Lagarde, a forty-five-year-old vicar, went with him.
¹¹

Led through various offices, some of which seemed in total chaos with an overflow of people smoking, shouting and drinking, Darboy was taken to Rigault. The Delegate for Security, renowned for his lack of sartorial
attention, now surprisingly sported a military cap replete with military decorations and sat elegantly in an elevated armchair in front of a large table covered in green cloth. The sight of men in clerical garb seemed to enrage him: ‘So, it’s you, Citizen Darboy! Well, there! Now it’s our turn!’ When the archbishop referred to the new head of the police and his colleagues as ‘my children’, the immediate, sharp response was: ‘We are not children – we are the magistrates of the people!’ The archbishop asked why he had been arrested. Rigault snapped that for 1,800 years ‘You imprison us with your superstitions!’ It was time for this to cease: ‘Your
chouans
[counter-revolutionary peasant insurgents in western France in 1793–94] massacred our brothers! Well, each one his turn. Now it is we with the force, the authority and the right; and we are going to use them.’ He promised that the Communards would not burn the clergy alive, as the Church had done in places during the Inquisition: ‘We are more humane. No … We will shoot you.’ When Darboy evinced a small smile, Rigault told him that in two days he would be shot – and would he be smiling then?

Rigault and his Blanquist friend Théophile Ferré accused the archbishop of having stolen ‘the assets of the people’. Darboy replied that the possessions used for religious services belonged to the church councils. Rigault and Ferré were utterly unwilling to acknowledge Darboy’s position as archbishop, the properties of the Church, or even the existence of God. When the archbishop was allowed to see another priest briefly, the authorisation referred to ‘Prisoner A who says he is a servant of somebody called God’. The archbishop’s sister, Justine, was also incarcerated. Darboy was transferred to the prison of the Conciergerie, which during the Revolution had hosted Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, among others, before they were guillotined.
¹²

On 5 April, following the Versaillais execution of captured prisoners, the Commune had voted on the ‘Law on Hostages’, passed by a vote of 5–4, a move that legalised the arrest and incarceration of more clergymen. Article 5 of the law threatened that since the government of Versailles had put itself outside of the laws of war and of humanity, the Commune would retaliate by ordering the execution of three hostages.
¹³

Rigault wasted no time. The next day he arrested more ecclesiastics, beginning with the
curé
of Saint-Séverin, along with several Jesuits, at their residence on rue de Sèvres. The following day he seized seven Jesuits from a school in the Fifth Arrondissement, who had unfortunately (in Rigault’s eyes) welcomed with open arms the sons of the old nobility and wealthy middle classes. The parish priest of Saint Jacques-du-Haut-Pas
was incarcerated, accused of asking the women of his congregation to try to convince their husbands not to take up arms to defend the Commune. The number of clergy arrested during the Commune may have reached more than 300, a tiny percentage of the more than 125,000 priests, nuns and religious brothers living in Paris at the time.
¹⁴