Massacre (21 page)

Gaspard Deguerry lived on rue Saint-Honoré, near his Church of the Madeleine, where he served as
curé
. A group of
fédérés
knocked on the door of the presbytery and, at least according to the concierge, came in and helped themselves to wine. Deguerry managed to slip out of his house after putting on civilian clothes and hiding in a nearby house. But he was found and immediately arrested, accused of having resisted the Commune’s decree of 2 April separating Church and State. One of the national guardsmen allegedly told him, ‘We are soon going to procure for you your paradise.’
¹⁵

Within the Commune, the hostage decree accentuated tensions between republican moderates, who still hoped for some sort of compromise with the Versailles government, and Rigault and the hard-core (‘
les durs
’). Rigault had already ordered the arrest of a number of moderates who displeased him. Eugène Protot, the son of Burgundian
paysans
and a lawyer who was now the Delegate for Justice, had demanded a full explanation of the reasons for arrests. He was outraged that prisoners were not allowed visitors – even members of the Commune could not see them. Rigault remained adamantly opposed to prisoners receiving visitors, but he was defeated in the end.
¹⁶
Over his objections, the Commune voted on 7 April that prisoners could see visitors.

On 8 April a bitter exchange occurred between Rigault and more moderate Communards. Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune who was for the abolition of the Prefecture of Police, denounced Rigault. He was supported by Charles Delescluze and Jean-Baptiste Clément, who accused Rigault of moving the Commune towards a dictatorship. When the meeting upheld, by a vote of twenty-four to seventeen, the previous day’s declaration permitting members of the Commune to see prisoners, Rigault and Ferré tendered their resignations from the Commission for General Security. These were not accepted. However, the Commune voted to replace Rigault as Delegate for Security with Frédéric Cournet, a moderate. Rigault still maintained his status as a member of the governing body of the Commune, head of the police at the Prefecture of Police, and three weeks later was also named public prosecutor. The uncompromising Rigault believed that by dispensing ‘revolutionary justice’ he would help save the Commune.
¹⁷

*

The arrest of Darboy, Deguerry and other priests followed the summary executions of Flourens and Duval and were, nominally at least, a reaction to them. But the arrests would never have occurred had the Commune not unleashed a wave of popular anti-clericalism in Paris. As Darboy himself realised soon after he arrived in Paris, anti-clericalism had been building over the past decades in France. Religious practice continued to decline in Paris and other large cities, as well as in a good many regions. Moreover, the Catholic Church remained closely identified with its opposition to the French Revolution and support for a monarchy. The construction of an essentially secular society was an overarching goal for Communards. Reclus, himself a man of the cloth, a Protestant minister, did not mince words, capturing on 8 April the popular mood: ‘Plot or no plot, it is certain that the enormous clerical establishment stands as an even more threatening army than that of Versailles, more dangerous in that it operates in the shadows’, allegedly working against the Commune.

From the outset, the Commune had done everything in its power to undermine the power of the Church and the clergy. The day after its arrival in power, the government of the Commune had on 29 March proclaimed free and obligatory primary education, but that was not all. A New Education Society and the Friends of Instruction soon sent delegates asking that the Commune consider ‘the necessity … of preparing youth to govern itself by means of a republican education’, and demanding that religious teaching be eliminated from schools. In the Third Arrondissement, a poster bragged that lay education was a ‘
fait accompli
’. Paul Martine went around with an
arrondissement
delegate to check on schools in the Fourth Arrondissement, but admitted that the idea of tossing out clerical personnel repelled him. In the militant Twentieth Arrondissement, however, a Freemason oversaw ‘a muscular program of laicisation’.
¹⁸

On 2 April, Palm Sunday, the Commune had formally voted the separation of Church and State, ending government subsidies for religious institutions. It also decreed the confiscation of the property of religious orders (
congrégations
). The battle between Red Flag and Cross was on. On rue de Grenelle, a crowd stormed into a school taught by a congregation and shut it down.

Within several weeks, many members of religious orders had left their teaching posts and asked for the appointment of lay teachers to replace them. The Commune raised the salaries of teachers and their assistants, and awarded equal pay to male and female teachers. Schools for girls run by lay teachers sprang up in several neighbourhoods.
¹⁹

A proposal later submitted suggested that new, secular nurseries for infants and young children ‘should be scattered throughout the working-class areas, near the large factories’, each accommodating up to a hundred babies and young children. Several such nurseries had already been established.
²⁰
A professional school of industrial arts started up, with a young woman as director.

By mid-May, the Commune had banned all religious teaching in lay schools. All religious markers were promptly removed, including crucifixes in schoolrooms (some had already been taken away during the Government of National Defence), whose presence clearly identified the once-central role of the Church in French education.
²¹
Édouard Moriac watched with horror as, on rue des Martyrs, a ‘band’ of about 200 ‘toddlers’ marched behind a drum and a small red flag: ‘They sing at the top of their lungs “La Marseillaise”. This grotesque parade celebrated the opening of a lay school organised by the Commune.’
²²

The Commune also took measures to secularise hospitals and prisons. By a decree of 22 April, all religious symbols were to be removed from medical facilities. Moreover, it forbade members of the religious congregations ministering to patients. Four days earlier, religious brothers had been expelled from the now quite busy medical facility at Rond-Point de Longchamps, despite the opposition of wounded guardsmen. Augustinian sisters continued to help out at the Hôtel-Dieu, wearing red belts over their black cassocks, altars and crucifixes covered over by flowers. Chaplains were in principle kicked out of prisons and hospitals, but allowed to return to visit patients and prisoners during the day. They continued to sign official documents, including baptisms. Nuns were removed from charitable institutions in some places, but elsewhere continued their work.
²³

For the most part, the Commune was not forcing secularisation upon the people of Paris. The Church’s close association with people of means had long drawn popular ire; the birth of the Commune merely unleashed it. Many ordinary Parisians now saw priests as ‘a particular type of bourgeois’. If humble priests laboured away in plebeian
quartiers
where churches were increasingly empty, flamboyant processions, ostentatious ecclesiastical accoutrements, and the elegant faithful characterised churches such as Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and Curé Gaspard Deguerry’s Church of the Madeleine in western Paris. Letters written to
Père Duchêne
denounced the Church for ‘social parasitism’. Irenée Dauthier, living in the Tenth Arrondissement, first asked editors and readers to excuse her writing mistakes and spelling errors and then asked why bishops and abbeys had such enormous revenues. Was this not so they could have
‘a more gourmand table than that of the king?’ In a city where about a quarter of all couples were unmarried, the Church, which normally charged 2 francs to register a birth, demanded 7.50 francs (about two days’ wages for many) to register an ‘illegitimate’ birth. A Parisian commented bitterly, ‘Baptisms, marriages, burials – you have to pay for everything.’
²⁴

Anti-clerical discourse abounded in political clubs, which in early April again began to meet in at least twenty-four of the fifty-one churches in Paris. Not only were churches by far the largest places where large numbers of people could meet indoors – as had been the case during the French Revolution – but their use represented the appropriation of public space by the Communards, fully sanctioned by the government of the Commune. Some of the clubs had their origins after the establishment of the Republic on 4 September 1870 and had been banned by General Vinoy on 11 March. Others started up during the Commune. Parisians listened to speakers debating the themes of the day, including the high cost of food, the rights of women and of workers, the state of primary school education, the role of the clergy, and the leadership of the Commune.
²⁵

The transformation of churches into clubs sometimes brought confrontations with the faithful. At Club Saint-Ambroise, a woman loudly protested against a meeting being held in the church and militants led her to the door amid laughter. On 6 May, local residents showed up with official orders that Saint-Sulpice was to be used for a club. Expelled, some of the faithful vigorously protested and a brawl erupted. National guardsmen from Belleville, camped nearby, responded to protect ‘
clubistes
’ singing the
Marseillaise
.
²⁶

Unsurprisingly, the faithful resented the presence of political clubs in their churches.
Clubistes
were overtly critical of the Church and persistent in their attacks. Club speakers demanded the seizure of property belonging to the congregations, insisted that the clergy pay rent to the Commune for use of ecclesiastical buildings ‘to stage their comedies’, and ordered that the proceeds go to helping widows and orphans of the Commune. The club of faubourg Saint-Antoine asked that church bells be melted to make cannons, as during the French Revolution.

Female speakers focused their critiques on the Church’s outsized influence on women, marriages and family life, including ecclesiastical roles in education. They were particularly strident in their denunciation of marriage. At the great Gothic church of Saint-Eustache near the central market of Les Halles, a woman warned
citoyennes
that marriage ‘is the greatest error of ancient humanity. To be married is to be a slave.’ In the club of Saint-Ambroise, a woman rose to say that she would never
permit her daughter, who was sixteen, to marry, and that the latter was doing quite well living with a man without the blessing of the Church. The club in Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois approved an enthusiastic resolution in favour of divorce.
²⁷

Louise Michel presided over a gathering of women three times a week on grande rue de la Chapelle. There she proposed ‘the immediate abolition of organised religion and its replacement by a more severe morality’, which for her was ‘to treat all others and oneself with justice’. During club meetings some women mounted the pulpits to denounce the clergy with rhetorical violence. At Club Saint-Sulpice, Gabrielle, sixteen years of age, thundered: ‘We must shoot the priests … Women are harmed by going to confession … I therefore urge all women to take hold of all the priests and to burn their ugly mugs off … The same for the nuns!’
²⁸

In the eyes of most
clubistes
, the clergy and the bourgeoisie were one and the same, which made it easy to condemn both groups. Speakers denounced those with top hats and fancy ‘black suits’ as bourgeois reactionaries. At one club, a shoemaker demanded the arrest of all ‘reactionaries’ who employed domestics. At another such gathering, a woman related that near the Bourse a well-heeled lady had insisted that there were no ‘citizens’ to be found in the neighbourhood, only ‘ladies and gentlemen’. People of means, particularly property-owners, became ‘vultures’. A millenarian tone crept in, and sometimes a violent one, as at Club of the Deliverance, where a speaker saluted ‘the arrival of the day of justice [which] is rapidly coming … Proletarians, you will be reborn!’
²⁹

Paris’s churches, now adopted by political clubs, were utterly unrecognisable, to the delight of most Parisians but much to the chagrin of others. At the club meeting in Saint-Michel in Batignolles, children played while members of the Commune sat adorned in red sashes in places usually reserved for ecclesiastical dignitaries at Mass, who would have been attired quite differently. Instead of hymns the organs played ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Ça ira’, that revolutionary classic. Citizen Vicar Marguerite was assured on 17 May that the organist would be paid on the condition that he played ‘patriotic airs’.
³⁰

Early in May, Maxime Vuillaume visited the Club Saint-Séverin, a block from the Seine, with a friend. The entry to the church was almost totally dark, but some light beckoned from the middle of the nave. Gas lamps hung from the pillars. Behind a table sat those presiding over the meeting, with a red flag standing nearby. An orator suggested that brigades armed with instruments capable of shooting fire take care of the
Versaillais who threatened their city. A woman followed him as speaker, but Vuillaume and his friend were looking around and did not catch the gist of what she had to say. There were about a hundred people listening, including about a dozen women. Many of the men wore National Guard uniforms. Two of them sitting alongside a pillar ate bread and sausage and drank some wine. ‘Let’s go’, implored Vuillaume’s friend, ‘Midnight Mass would be more fun.’ As they left, the club session ended with the singing of ‘La Marseillaise’. The next morning, someone swept out the church and Mass went on as usual.
³¹

Paul Fontoulieu, a hostile visitor, found as many female speakers as male when he attended a session of the club in the Church of the Trinité. The issue for debate was how society could be reformed. Lodoiska Cawaska, known as ‘the Polish Amazon’, spoke first, her discourse coolly received. Then another female orator of about thirty called for the establishment of producers’ cooperatives. One after another, women rose to speak, and their words sometimes strayed from the intended subject. ‘Solutions’ included shooting those who would not fight. In a brief speech, Nathalie Le Mel insisted that the day of reckoning was approaching, and everyone, women included, should do their duty, fight to the end, and be prepared to die.
³²
Her speech met with lengthy applause. The final speaker drew cheers by presenting a ‘grotesque’ (in Fontoulieu’s eyes) parody of a Mass. As people filed out of the Church of the Trinité, the female president of the assembly reminded those in attendance that the neighbourhood remained full of monarchists and Versaillais.
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