Massacre (22 page)

Entering the church of Saint-Eustache, the Englishman John Leighton was ‘agreeably surprised to find the font full of tobacco instead of holy water, and to see the altar in the distance covered with bottles and glasses’. In a lateral chapel, someone had dressed a statue of the Virgin Mary in the uniform of a
vivandière
(a woman supplying national guardsmen with provisions), and placed a little pipe in her mouth. Leighton was ‘particularly charmed’ by the ‘amiable faces of the people I saw collected there … It was quite delightful not to see any of those elegant dresses and frivolous manners, which have so long disgraced the better half of the human race.’ As for the men, ‘It was charming to note the military elegance with which their caps were slightly inclined over one ear: their faces, naturally hideous, were illuminated with the joy of freedom.’

Edmond de Goncourt encountered the smell of garlic when he entered a church, as the bells, which usually announced Mass, intoned for the opening of a club meeting. Goncourt listened as one speaker demanded the institution of the Terror, ‘so that heads of traitors may roll immediately
on the square’. Another related that 10,060 bottles of wine had been found in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and a third asked, ‘What do I care whether we are successful against Versailles if we don’t find solutions for social problems, if workingmen remain in the same condition as before?’
³⁴

In most clubs, however, those in attendance respected the establishment in which they were meeting. For instance, Communards were told not to smoke pipes in the church in Saint-Eustache. Goncourt noted that men took their hats off as they entered. Yet some ‘visitors’ to churches behaved in provocative ways. At Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Communards imbibed wine from chalices previously reserved for Mass. National guardsmen and prostitutes may have amused themselves in Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. In Saint-Leu on 14 April, thirty or forty
fédérés
put on ecclesiastical robes and mocked the Mass, singing ‘filthy songs … accompanied by the most grotesque gestures’. A certain Kobosko offered ‘communion’ to the ‘faithful’, replacing hosts with brioche, and at the accompanying dinner revellers downed 130 bottles of wine. In another church a man bathed his dog in a holy water vessel and a few Communards relieved themselves in such places. Such acts shocked practising Catholics. The Commune and most Communards defiantly rejected organised religion.
³⁵

Occasional pillaging did occur. Twelve convents reported damaged or lost property. In Saint Médard, paintings were ripped, the organ and ornaments broken. Confessionals were overturned. In Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, Communards beheaded what was left of the relics of a saint. However, overall there were surprisingly few such cases, nothing in comparison with what occurred during the radical phase of the French Revolution. Items taken from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame on Good Friday and piled into wagons to be taken away were saved when someone ran to notify members of the Commune at the Hôtel de Ville, who ordered them returned to the sacristy.
³⁶

Parisian ecclesiastics saw their role decrease dramatically during the Commune. Baptisms and first communions fell off. Marriages declined in number, in part because so many men were in the National Guard and so many better-off Parisians had fled the city. During the Second Empire, civil burials had not been very common. Now they took place almost every day, complete with red flags. Mass attendance fell off and fewer coins were tossed into the collection basket as it was passed.
³⁷

The orders to close their doors affected thirty-four of sixty-seven churches in Paris. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was transformed into a barracks on 13 May and six days later into a jail for those arrested for avoiding service in the National Guard. Saint-Pierre-de-Montmarte
became a workshop for the manufacture of uniforms, then a storage place for munitions, and, briefly, a school for girls. The Church of Saint-Merri was transformed into a medical facility.

The Communard press kept anti-clerical discourse in full throttle.
Père Duchêne
led the way, accusing the clergy of being parasites with an inordinate passion for ‘the good life’, borrowing the image of the overfed priest or monk using the sacrament of confession to ‘coax’ women. The Church stood accused of bringing young girls into convents – ‘places full of vice’ – where they suffered exploitation as their wages undercut those of working women. Implicit in the anti-clerical tirades were suggestions that the kidnapping of minors, rapes and homosexuality threatened the families of ordinary people. Allusions to secret passageways beneath convents and monasteries abounded, contributing to the obsession during searches of convents with what was to be found in their cellars.
La Sociale
reported that 2,000 rifles and considerable munitions had been found in that of Notre-Dame, and
La Montagne
claimed that monks had been arrested following the discovery of gunpowder in the tabernacles of their churches. None of this was true, but rumours generated headlines and animated street discussions.
³⁸

One of the searches led to a shocking story that spread rapidly through Paris. In the basement of the convent of the Dames de Picpus, guardsmen came across what to them looked like instruments of torture and human remains. The sisters explained that they had cared for three of their own suffering from mental problems. The rumoured ‘instruments of torture’ were in fact nothing more than several ‘orthopaedic beds’. A doctor established that the nuns had died of natural causes, and for whatever reason, their remains had been kept in the convent, awaiting a final destination. Yet newspapers continued to offer ‘revelations’ of clerical misdeeds at Picpus and elsewhere, as suggested by headlines like ‘The Confessions of a Breton Seminarist’, ‘The Revelations of a former
Curé
’, ‘Tonsured Sadists’ and ‘The Corpses of the Church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires’.
³⁹

The National Guard took reports of hidden stashes of weapons seriously. Laurent Amodru, the fifty-four-year-old
vicaire
of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, had just finished hearing confessions at about 4.00 p.m. on 17 May when he learned that the church had been surrounded by men from the 159th battalion of the National Guard. He asked a young officer what they were doing and the reply was that they had authorisation to search the church and look for weapons. The priest replied that there were certainly none of those to be found and asked that if a search must indeed be done, that it be finished before Mass at 7.00 p.m. The guards glanced
apprehensively at the women in the church. Amodru claimed later that he was lucky not to have been killed by a drunken guardsman who was assigned to watch him in the sacristy during the search; two other guardsmen protected him. Although he survived the search, Amodru was promptly arrested and taken to the Conciergerie, then to Mazas prison near the Gare de Lyon, and finally to La Roquette prison.
⁴⁰

Not all Communards were prepared to denounce the Church. Some people loyal to the Commune expressed their opposition to anti-clerical measures, particularly the removal of nuns from medical facilities and searches of some convents of religious orders. On Good Friday, 6 April, National Guardsmen entered the church of Saint-Eustache and demanded that Abbé Simon go with them to the neighbourhood police station. There a young magistrate questioned the priest, assuring him that he knew of his good reputation in his
quartier
. The priest’s nephew complained to members of the Commune about the arrest. Upon hearing that their priest had been arrested, the market ladies of Les Halles went to Rigault to insist that Abbé Simon be freed. Slightly taken back by their anger, the former asked ‘And if I refuse to release your papist (
calotin
)?’ The response reflected the earthy toughness of the market ladies: ‘Then we will gut you on the first possible occasion on a block at the market, like the fine top-round that you are!’ Rigault ordered the priest released. Abbé Simon returned to his church in triumph and at the next Mass preached a sermon on forgiving one’s enemies. In
Le Cri du peuple
, Jules Vallès thundered that when he was arrested during the Second Empire, he did not have a nephew to ask that he be pardoned.
⁴¹

Despite rumours of opulence and high living (which, in any case, focused on male ecclesiastics), some ‘visitors’ were impressed by the poverty of the nuns and their work for the poor, for whom, after all, the Commune had come to power. And when national guardsmen searched the residence of the Fathers of Saint-Esprit, the exchange quickly became cordial, with the guardsmen helping the priests distribute to the poor what meagre resources were available.

On occasion guardsmen sent to search a church ran into a priest they knew in their
quartier
. Communards walking into Saint-Roch may well have been hostile to organised religion, but they recognised the priest because he had given them first communion. Some Communards helped priests escape or tipped off religious institutions that a search was coming. Others provided ecclesiastics with identification papers. And for all their criticisms of the Church, many did not reject their personal faith. Some
fédérés
, for instance, put on religious medallions before going into battle.
⁴²

In Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, a priest said Mass every day in a chapel and a club met in the main part of the church most evenings. The clergy thus ended up comfortably sharing space with the
clubistes
, with Masses, baptisms and funerals held at different times from the club meetings, most of which took place at night. The church of Saint-Pierre in Montrouge, where a warning had been posted outside church that ‘churches are the lairs of those who have murdered the morals of the masses’, was split into two sections, one for the clergy, the other as a meeting place for a club, over which a hairdresser presided. Masses were celebrated in Saint Roch although the Englishman Vizetelly reported that ‘they were more than once disturbed by the insurgents, as on one occasion when a band of inebriate Guards rushed into the church while some forty young girls received first Communion’.
⁴³

With increased tension stemming from the military situation, popular anti-clericalism became more determined. In the face of such opposition, the clergy remained united, helping each other out when possible and taking the place of imprisoned colleagues. Ecclesiastics kept religious ceremonies low-key. In the church of Saint-Merri, bells were not rung, the organ remained silent, singing disappeared or was muted, and flowers were not put in place. The Carmelites on rue d’Enfer stilled their bells and the nuns of Marie-Répartrice suspended catechism. The parish of Saint-Pierre du Petit-Montrouge held services clandestinely in a nearby house.
⁴⁴

After three days in a holding cell in the Prefecture of Police, Archbishop Darboy was transferred to Mazas prison, along with Abbé Deguerry. They were joined by Louis Bonjean, who had served as president of the imperial Senate and as president of the Court of Appeals, and was identified with the repression of political opponents during the empire. He had been one of the first Rigault ordered arrested.
⁴⁵

The Mazas prison was an enormous compound resembling a fortress. It consisted of twelve buildings, each with 100 cells, with a large central pavilion that stood in the middle, capped by a dome, which housed the administrative office and a chapel. The cells were small, each with an iron bed attached to the wall. Strict rules were posted forbidding singing, talking loudly, or trying to communicate with other prisoners.
⁴⁶

The immediate goal of the incarceration of such high-profile hostages was to discourage the Versaillais from carrying out further executions of Communard prisoners. Following Darboy’s arrest, Rigault sent Gaston Da Costa, his right-hand man, to ask Darboy and Deguerry to send letters to Thiers protesting against such killings. Within days after Darboy and
the others had been taken as hostages, the leadership of the Commune decided to try to arrange an exchange of prisoners with Versailles. Auguste Blanqui, in prison in Morlaix in Brittany, still seemed just the kind of revolutionary leader who could galvanise Paris. For his part, Rigault was obsessed with bringing ‘the Old One’ back to Paris.
⁴⁷

On 8 April, Darboy wrote to Thiers stating that ‘humanity and religion’ demanded that he ask for the exchange of hostages for Blanqui. The archbishop directly referred to ‘barbaric acts … the atrocious excesses’ of the Versailles troops, including the execution of wounded fighters. He asked Thiers to use his influence to put an end to the civil war. Deguerry had the previous day written to the members of the Versailles government asking them to stop the execution of prisoners, which could only lead to the taking of more hostages and perhaps the retaliatory killings the Commune now threatened.
⁴⁸

When Thiers did not respond, Rigault asked Benjamin Flotte, a veteran of the 1848 revolution and friend and disciple of Blanqui, to visit Darboy and propose that he write a second letter. On 10 April, Flotte and Lagarde, Darboy’s
grand vicaire
(vicar-general), went to the archbishop, who immediately raised the subject of his sister’s arrest. Flotte promised she would be freed (although this did not happen until 28 April). Darboy wrote to Thiers again on 12 April, proposing the release of Blanqui in return for his, Deguerry’s and Bonjean’s freedom. Rigault refused to let Deguerry leave prison to personally carry the letter to Thiers. It was instead entrusted to Lagarde, who arrived in Versailles on 14 April.

Thiers had no intention of permitting the exchange of Darboy for Blanqui, fearing that this would provide his Communard enemies with a leading figure around whom to rally. Thiers denied that his troops were carrying out executions, adding that all insurgents who turned over their weapons would be spared. He expressed doubt that the archbishop’s letters were really his own. When Lagarde returned to see him a third time, Thiers informed him that the Versailles Council unanimously opposed the exchange. He instructed Lagarde by a hand-delivered message to carry a sealed letter to Darboy, presumably with his decision.