Massacre (23 page)

Lagarde, however, remained in Versailles. Even though Darboy had instructed him to return to Paris at once, he asked for more time. The
vicaire général
finally sent news from Versailles that a delay was inevitable. Darboy wrote to him on 19 April insisting that he remain in Versailles no more than another day. But Lagarde stayed on. An article in
Le Cri du people
on 23 April revealed attempts to negotiate an exchange and criticised Lagarde for having betrayed his promise to Darboy by remaining in
Versailles.
La Sociale
denounced Lagarde as a liar, a coward and a traitor, which did not enhance the image of the clergy to Parisians. The Commune’s
Journel officiel
on 27 April published the correspondence.
⁴⁹

US Ambassador Elijah B. Washburne had remained in Paris, trying to assist American citizens still in the capital. He now found himself ‘plunged into the most terrible events of the century’.
⁵⁰
Washburne, whose residence had been hit twice by Versaillais shells, was aware of Archbishop Darboy’s plight. On 18 April he had received letters from various ecclesiastical authorities, including the Papal Nuncio Flavius Chigi and Lagarde, asking him to intervene to obtain the archbishop’s release. The ambassador had obtained the release of several Sisters of Charity by going to the Prefecture of Police, so he must have believed he would have similar luck with Darboy. When he arrived to ask permission to visit Darboy, Cluseret accompanied him to the Prefecture of Police at 10.30 a.m. and asked to see Rigault. An employee there responded with a smile that Rigault was sleeping, having just returned from a long night out. When Rigault was awakened, he signed a document – without even looking at it – authorising Washburne ‘to communicate freely with citizen Darboy, archbishop of Paris’. Cluseret commented, ‘So here is the man to whom the proletariat has given one of its most important posts!’
⁵¹

On 23 April the American ambassador – the first person from the outside to see him since his arrest – took the archbishop a bottle of Madeira. Darboy expressed no bitterness towards his captors, adding that the Communards ‘would be judged to be worse than they really were’. He would await ‘the logic of events’. On 22 April, the Commune enacted a decree specifying that juries drawn from among national guardsmen would consider the cases of individual hostages; it also ordered the prosecutor of the Commune – this would be Rigault four days later – to take more.
⁵²

Five days later, Darboy sent Largarde another message, this via Ambassador Washburne: the vicar must return to Paris immediately. Five days later, Washburne wrote to a US official to inform him that he considered the archbishop’s life ‘in the most imminent danger’, relating that a group of national guardsmen had gone to Mazas intending to shoot Darboy before a Communard official intervened. Lagarde may have had real reasons for delaying in Versailles. He may have believed that his return to Paris would lead directly to the execution of Darboy and the other hostages. He may also have been in contact with Félix Pyat, who thought that the payment of a large sum of money might bring the archbishop’s freedom. Lagarde may have written to Jules Simon about
these possibilities several days earlier, expressing hope for a return to moderate influence in the Commune. Moreover, General Cluseret seemed in favour of releasing the hostages, which would have given Darboy’s supporters hope. On 2 May, Lagarde promised to leave Versailles but two days later was still there. Whatever his reasons for staying, he never communicated them to Washburne or Darboy. Several days of optimism quickly evaporated.
⁵³

On 11 May, Archbishop Darboy penned a ‘memorandum’ to Thiers, which reached him through Chigi. He confessed that he did not know as yet what answer Thiers had given to Lagarde, who had sent ‘only vague and incomplete reports’. Darboy described the possible exchange, which would be guaranteed by Ambassador Washburne, adding that ‘the resistance of Paris is a military resistance entirely, and the presence of M. Blanqui could add nothing to it’. For his part, the American ambassador assured Thiers that they had nothing to lose with such an exchange, and that Darboy’s life probably depended on it.
⁵⁴

Lagarde did take some action to aid Darboy. He contacted the lawyer Étienne Plou, who would plead the archbishop’s case directly to the Commune. Rigault allowed the lawyer to see the hostages twice. But on 11 May Plou wrote to Ambassador Washburne to complain that Ferré prevented him from seeing Darboy.
⁵⁵
Two days later, Flotte, still in Paris and visiting Darboy, was allowed to see Thiers, who again insisted that the exchange was simply not possible; the question of a possible exchange had twice ‘agitated’ his Council, and he did not believe Darboy’s life to really be in danger. He told Flotte that he would raise the subject the next day with the Commission des Quinze, his advisory group.
⁵⁶

The next morning, Thiers informed Flotte that no exchange would be possible, because to ‘turn over Blanqui to the insurrection would be to provide it with a force equal to an army corps’. Flotte reminded Thiers that there were seventy-four other hostages being held at Mazas, and that if he would sign an order releasing Blanqui, he would bring them all to Versailles the next day. Thiers was probably overstating Blanqui’s influence. His return to Paris would not necessarily have provided much leadership to the Communards. Blanqui was a sick, old man, whose influence arguably came from his legend and imprisonment in a distant place. Few Communards besides Rigault and Flotte had ever met him.

Back at Mazas, when Flotte related what had transpired, Deguerry called Thiers ‘a man without a heart’, believing it to be a calculated manoeuvre on his part. Thiers may well have believed that the execution of Darboy and other hostages would greatly discredit the Commune. The
killing of the archbishop would justify continued reprisals against the Communards.
⁵⁷

As days became weeks, bringing no sign that his release was imminent, the archbishop seemed almost indifferent to his earthly fate. Darboy wrote to his brother that he was doing well enough, had all that he needed, and ‘was not being treated as badly as they [his family] might have heard’. The prison doctor warned that if the archbishop’s situation was not improved, he would not last a fortnight. Darboy was transferred to a larger cell, with a small table, a chair, more air, linen brought from the archbishop’s residence, and food from the outside. He was provided with theology books. He had in his cell a cross that Archbishop Affre had given him and a large sapphire ring, the gift of Archbishop Sibour.
⁵⁸

Two proposals for escape presented themselves to Darboy. A young man, Count Anatole de Montferrier, managed to reach the archbishop and offered him a convoluted plan involving fake safe-conduct passes. The archbishop quickly declined. Then one of his guards offered to help him escape, but Darboy replied that his flight would be ‘the signal for the massacre of the priests’, and that he would rather be shot than have others killed in his place.
⁵⁹

The summary execution by Versaillais forces of Communard commanders Flourens and Duval raised the stakes for the Paris Commune, as well as for Archbishop Darboy and the other hostages being held in Mazas prison. All the pieces were in place for a dramatic military confrontation as Versaillais line troops edged closer to the ramparts of Paris.

CHAPTER
5

The Battle Turns Against the Communards

T
HE
V
ERSAILLAIS HAD BEGUN TO BOMBARD
P
ARIS ON
2 A
PRIL
. M
ETHODIST
pastor W. Gibson heard a national guardsman say the next day, ‘Soon we will be crushed!’
¹
The shelling intensified on 12 April. Five days later, Gibson concluded, ‘It appears, from what has transpired in the Assembly of Versailles, that there are many among the deputies who would be glad to see Paris bombarded and the city burnt to the ground.’ Indeed, by 21 May, Versaillais’s shells had indiscriminately killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of Parisians and destroyed hundreds of buildings in neighbourhoods in western and central districts within the reach of army artillery. Ironically many of these
quartiers
were noteworthy for being against the Commune or at least neutral. The Commune was being pushed into a corner by the might of Thiers’s army, and it seemed increasingly unlikely they would ever recover.
²

British resident John Leighton was outraged that the Versaillais, with whom he had a certain class sympathy, were ‘not content with’ battering forts and ramparts and killing not only Communard soldiers, but also ‘women and children, ordinary passers-by [including] unfortunates who were necessarily obliged to venture into the neighbouring streets, for the purpose of buying bread’. US diplomat Wickham Hoffman agreed: ‘It must always be a mystery why the French bombarded so persistently the quarter of the Arc de Triomphe – the West End of Paris – the quarter where nine out of ten of the inhabitants were known friends of the Government’.
³

For Parisians who had just lived through the Prussian siege, this was much worse. Prussians had never bombarded medical facilities. The Versaillais did just that. Thiers proclaimed to provincial France that the
Communards were pillaging property in Paris, this as Versaillais cannons were obliterating rows of houses on the Champs-Elysées. Thiers then denied that shells were falling on Paris.
⁴

Some Parisians flocked to the Arc de Triomphe on 6 April, to watch what was going on, as they had during the first week or two of the Prussian siege. One enterprising man charged a fee to those who wanted a better view from atop some piled up chairs. From the Arc de Triomphe, Leighton watched ‘a motionless, attentive crowd reaching down the whole length of the Avenue of the Grande Armée, as far as the Porte Maillot, from which a great cloud of white smoke springs up every moment followed by a violent explosion … suddenly a flood of dust, coming from Porte Maillot, thrusts back the thick of the crowd, and as it flies, widening, and whirling more madly as it comes, everyone is seized with terror, and rushes away screaming and gesticulating.’
⁵

The first Communard funeral for victims of the Versaillais bombardment took place on 6 April, immediately after the siege began. Horses hauled giant hearses through the boulevards of Paris. The Jacobin Charles Delescluze, a member of the Commune’s governing council, gave a funeral oration for the martyred Parisians, concluding that ‘this great city … holds the future of humanity in its hands … Cry not for our brothers who have fallen heroically, but swear to continue their work!’ Less ceremonial funerals would become a daily occurrence. The Commune awarded annual pensions of 600 francs to widows whose men had been killed fighting, and 365 francs for their children.
⁶

Among the killed and wounded were boys, including thirteen-year-old Eugène-Léon Vaxivierre, who continued to man a cannon despite being wounded. Another boy, Guillaume, was wounded by a shell while firing an artillery piece with his father. Charles Bondcritter, fifteen, was killed after remaining at his cannon for ten days.
⁷

On the avenue des Ternes, now well within range of Versaillais shells, a mournful funeral procession moved slowly along. Two men carried a small coffin, that of a young child. The father, a worker dressed in his blue smock, walked sadly behind, with a small group of mourners. Suddenly a shell, fired from Mont-Valérien, crashed down, destroying the small coffin, and covering the funeral entourage with human remains. Leighton wryly commented, ‘Massacring the dead! Truly those cannons are a wonderful, a refined invention!’
⁸

Thiers’s army was indeed ruthless. On 11 April Versaillais troops pushed Communard forces back at Asnières and moved into the plateau of Châtillon to the south of the capital. This permitted the army to move
cannons closer and bombard the exterior forts and ramparts of Paris. As Communards fled back across what was left of a railway bridge, which had been partially destroyed by Versaillais shells, Ernest Vizetelly watched gendarmes on horses as they ‘picked off men who had fallen’, some drowning in the Seine.
⁹

Alix Payen, whose husband Henri was a sergeant in the National Guard, volunteered as an
ambulancière
(an ambulance aide) because she did not want to be separated from her husband. She was with him at Fort Issy caring for the wounded during the fighting there. One of the Communard fighters found Alix something of a shelter – in a family tomb in a cemetery. The Communards Alix met while tending to the wounded were a mixed bag, representing the range of supporters for the Commune itself. With them at the shelter, for instance, was ‘a real Parisian from the faubourgs, cheerful, sarcastic, a little bit of a thug and as chatty as a magpie’. Another was a professor at the Collège de Vanves, ‘very well-educated and a poet. He improvised verses inspired by our situation.’ The man had suffered a ‘brutally unhappy love affair’, which had left him so devastated that Communard fighters considered him ‘a little crazy’.

The next day, 12 April, the Communard fighters let the Versaillais approach, then fired on them. All was quiet for a time. Henri Payen and the poet, hoping to take advantage of the lull, wanted to organise a concert to cheer up the wounded. Alix took a collection and went nearby to buy some flowers. A mulatto woman, who, like Alix, had accompanied her husband into battle, sang some songs. During the concert, someone shouted, ‘A wounded man!’ and Alix ran to help an artilleryman hit by a shell while the woman sang on. More and more shells began to rain down on Issy, killing or wounding twenty-six Communards. Their position untenable, the troops retreated to the entrance to Levallois-Perret, their flag riddled by Versaillais bullets. The period of intense Versaillais shelling had begun.