Massacre (24 page)

As wounded Communards began to stream into Paris, the city scrambled to find places to house and treat them. Within Paris, each
arrondissement
had a medical facility, such as that at Porte Maillot, swamped with wounded Communards because it was near the fighting beyond the western walls. Civilian hospitals cared for the wounded, as well, although many fighters simply wanted to be carried home. A medical facility occupied a lecture hall at the Sorbonne. Bodies were stacked in the Medical School, which was also empty of students, primarily because most of the students were against the Commune, although some teaching took place elsewhere. British and American organisations also helped care for the
Communard wounded. Near the faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Union Jack and the flag of the Red Cross flew at the English medical facility with its fifty beds. A British Protestant organisation had 600–800 beds in Paris. An American facility also helped out.

The wounded faced the horrors of inadequate care. At Beaujon Hospital, all fifteen men who had had limbs amputated died of pyaemia or gangrene. Hospitals and medical clinics were grossly overcrowded and lacked suitable dressing and sterilisation supplies. Despite all this, British doctor John Murray insisted that the Commune was looking after the population as best it could. Yet Murray feared that poverty and hard times would exacerbate cholera, ‘which is assuredly approaching’.

Dr Murray recalled the sad case of a woman mortally wounded by a shell while caring for the Communard injured at Issy. She passed away after thirty-six hours of suffering. Her friends wanted to arrange a funeral service presided over by a priest, which the Commune hesitated to allow, but then permitted. No priest, however, could be found. A Protestant minister was present and performed the service instead.
¹⁰

In one large facility, Dr Danet cared for between 1,500 and 2,000 men. It was difficult to find enough people to help care for the wounded and he complained that in some cases the Commune’s leaders hindered rather than helped doctors. One day, Delescluze, Jules Miot, another Jacobin member of the Commune’s administrative council, and Gustave Courbet came along. Danet had been denounced for having the wounded trade their National Guard uniforms – because they were so filthy – for more simple hospital garb. But some national guardsmen had somehow concluded that this measure was to prevent them from visiting wounded comrades in other facilities. Danet complained that some Communards did not seem to realise that a hospital is not a restaurant, and people came there to eat and drink. He had thrown some out, and they had denounced him. Courbet told Danet that he was too ‘severe’ and raged at him with ‘his booming voice’.
¹¹

With the number of casualties increasing daily, the Commune began to rally women to the defence of the city. On 11 April, Parisians awoke to find in their newspapers an ‘Appeal to
citoyennes
’ calling on women to take up arms in defence of the Commune: ‘the decisive hour has arrived’. Élisabeth Dmitrieff and seven other female organisers of the Union des femmes proclaimed that women should be prepared to fight and, if necessary, to die for the cause. A group of women formed their own fighting legion, the Amazons of the Seine. Ernest Vizetelly went to their recruiting office to see these ladies for himself. His account, like others essentially
hostile to the Commune and the role of women in it, emphasised what were considered to be unfeminine physical characteristics – at least as he interpreted them. He described them as ‘mostly muscular women from five-and-twenty to forty years of age, the older ones being unduly stout, and not one of them, in my youthful opinion, at all good-looking’.
¹²

Women conducted public demonstrations intended to rally flagging spirits in the struggle against Versailles. A mobilisation of some 800 women took place in early April at place de la Concorde in front of the statue of Strasbourg, a city that had already been incorporated into the German empire. Women in Belleville proposed to march towards the armies of Versailles to see whether soldiers would really fire on them – the answer would prove to be that they would do so eagerly.
¹³

During skirmishes in April women battled the Versaillais army outside the ramparts. In several cases, female fighters shot at and sometimes hit and killed troops of the line. Atop the city walls a crowd of onlookers supposedly applauded a woman supplying food to Communard fighters who shot and killed a gendarme chasing her. If rumours and Versaillais reports of entire battalions of women engaged in the fight were not true, the participation of ordinary women in the battles is undeniable.

Women who supported the Commune without taking up arms were equally instrumental. Those who supplied food to Communard fighters or worked as doctors’ assistants contributed enormously to the Commune’s defence. Doctors’ assistants wore red crosses and, often purchasing medical supplies themselves, cared for the wounded and dying. The Union of Women for the Defence of Paris and for Care of the Wounded actively recruited women to serve in both essential capacities. Anti-Communard commentators mocked them; for instance, one cartoon depicted a
cantinière
(a canteen-worker) as a silly, flippant creature dispensing alcohol to drunken Communards. Maxime du Camp described female doctors’ assistants handing out eau-de-vie, and not the ‘simple medication that would have healed’. Some faced the condescension of national guardsmen. Nine such women were forced to return to Paris by males who rejected their presence at the front. Louise Michel commented acidly, ‘If only they would let me take care of the wounded. You would not believe the obstacles, the jokes, the hostility!’
¹⁴

Michel cared for the wounded as an
ambulancière
, but had also volunteered her services to sneak into Versailles and assassinate Adolphe Thiers. ‘I thought that killing M. Thiers right in the [National] Assembly would provoke such terror that the reaction against us would be stopped dead,’ she later admitted. Michel was at first quite serious about carrying out her
plot. She left for Versailles, and got through, as she was respectably dressed. But she could not get near Thiers, and returned to Paris.
¹⁵

Michel, a decent shot, also fought with the 61st National Guard battalion at Issy and Clamart in early April. Nothing seemed to frighten her. She later related, ‘Was it sheer bravery that caused me to be so enchanted with the sight of the battered Issy fort gleaming faintly in the night, or the sight of our lines on night manoeuvres … with the red teeth of the machine guns flashing on the horizon … It wasn’t bravery, I just thought it a beautiful sight. My eyes and my heart responded, as did my ears to the sound of the cannon. Oh, I am a savage, all right. I love the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but, above all, I’m devoted to the Revolution.’ In one calmer moment, she and a friend were reading some Baudelaire together, sipping coffee on a spot where several of their comrades had been killed. They had only just left when a shell crashed to earth, shattering the empty cups. Later a bullet grazed her and she fell, spraining an ankle. For Louise Michel, who always gave the impression of sadness and melancholy, the Commune’s struggles ‘became poetry’.
¹⁶

The Commune sought to rally Paris’s women and nurse its wounded fighters back to health, but neither effort would be enough. Daunting problems threatened to undermine the defence of Paris, and instability in the Commune and the National Guard did little to help matters. No well-planned, sturdy network of defence had been constructed within the ramparts of besieged Paris. The confusion of competing authorities in Paris and the chaos engendered by the election and re-election of National Guard officers worked against the Commune. Some of the officers were happy to flash glittering symbols of their status, but did little more. Unreliability and lack of training within the officer corps, as well as difficulty getting often hard-drinking Communard guardsmen to accept military-type discipline, were constant problems. Jealousies and rivalries between officers contributed to the confusion. Insubordination remained chronic and the distribution of weapons and munitions erratic. Perfectly capturing the growing lack of confidence in National Guard commanders, a cartoon in a Communard newspaper depicted a hungry man in a restaurant exclaiming, ‘Waiter, two or three more stuffed generals!’ ‘We are out of them’, the waiter replies. ‘Very well, then a dozen colonels in caper sauce.’ ‘A Dozen? Yes! Directly!’
¹⁷

Furthermore, not all guardsmen were absolutely committed to the Commune and some fulfilled a minimum of their duties, their loyalty more to their comrades in their company or battalion. Émile Maury was
one of these. Born in Colmar, he now lived in the
quartier populaire
of Popincourt. He had joined the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, which he viewed as a patriotic struggle because of his Alsatian origins. Maury had turned up when the roll of the drums summoned him on the night of 12 April, after a demonstration by ‘the friends of order’. In late April, when called to service again, he instead visited his mother in her small shop. In his view only ‘the very needy, the rabid, and the curious’ in his unit actually marched out of Paris to fight – and he was none of these. From the environs of the Church of the Madeleine he could hear the explosion of shells falling near the Arc de Triomphe. On another occasion, he did venture out to Porte Maillot with part of his unit. When a Versaillais shell fell near him, he took refuge under a carriage door on the right side of the avenue and then at the Gare de la Porte Maillot. After his ‘baptism of fire’, he took an omnibus back to Paris, and then went to assure his parents that he was fine, cynically describing ‘this brilliant expedition’. At the end of April, he feared that everything would finish badly for the Communards, referring to them in the third person as though he no longer counted himself as one. Such indifference, however widespread, compromised the defence of Paris.
¹⁸

Attempts to achieve some sort of negotiated settlement briefly revived but utterly failed. The Freemasons sent a delegation to Versailles on 21 April. Thiers sent them away, telling them: ‘A few buildings will be damaged, a few people killed, but the law will prevail.’ On 29 April, a demonstration of 10,000 people, many wearing masonic symbols, moved from the place du Carrousel near the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville. Masons planted their flag on the ramparts. On 8 May, a poster appeared on the walls of Paris calling for conciliation and criticising the intransigence of the Commune’s leaders. This drew a violent response from the Union des Femmes.
¹⁹

Adolphe Thiers remained convinced that superior cannons would suffice to achieve victory. Versaillais shelling of Paris became increasingly incessant. Fifty-two guns opened fire from Châtaillon, Breteuil and the heights of Bagneux on 25 April. Thiers’s insistence that a private contractor mount eighty enormous naval guns at Montretout to increase firepower probably delayed the Versaillais assault on Paris, annoying his generals. At one point, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon had had enough of Thiers’s insistence that he knew it all and told him that it would be impossible to continue in his post because of the latter’s constant interference. Thiers backed down.
²⁰

*

Confronted by an increasingly precarious military situation and the Versaillais threat to Fort Issy, the aged Jacobin Jules Miot had suggested on 28 April the creation of a Committee of Public Safety. This was a self-conscious throwback to 1793, when the Republic was under assault from counter-revolutionary forces within France and from the armies of the crowned allies of the Bourbons. The Paris of 1871 bore some striking similarities to the city of the revolutionary era. Jacobins, including Charles Delescluze, Félix Pyat and others who constantly referred to the French Revolution, generally favoured the proposal. And so did Blanquists, including Rigault – it sat nicely alongside Blanquist ideology and his own obsession with the French Revolution. A ‘minority’, which included Lefrançais, Gustave Courbet, Éugène Varlin and Benoît Malon, opposed the constitution of the Committee of Public Safety.

On 1 May, the Commune approved the proposal by a vote of 34 to 28. The minority called such a step dictatorial, while the majority insisted that, as in 1793–94, the war necessitated such a move. For his part, Courbet concluded that the Committee of Public Safety represented a ‘return, dangerous or useless, violent or inoffensive, to a past that should teach us, but without us having to copy it’.
Le Prolétaire
echoed the ‘minority’: ‘You are servants of the people: do not pretend to be sovereigns, for the role befits you no more than it did the despots who came before you.’
²¹

Members of the Committee of Public Safety included the Blanquists Armand Arnaud, Léon Meilliet and Gabriel Ranvier – by far the most able – as well as Charles Gérardin and Félix Pyat. The Committee immediately began to butt heads with the Central Committee of the National Guard, the continued existence of which compromised attempts by the Delegates for War to centralise its authority over the National Guard itself. On 1 May, General Gustave Cluseret, who became a scapegoat for the Commune’s inability to transform the National Guard into an organised fighting force, was falsely accused of treason and arrested at the behest of the Committee of Public Safety, and incarcerated in the Conciergerie, the Gothic prison on the Ile-de-la-Cité. Three days later, the Central Committee challenged the Committee of Public Safety, demanding that it replace the War Delegation with new members. In the Commune’s view it was clear that the Central Committee sought to take over the defence of Paris.
²²

In response, the Commune chose Louis-Nathaniel Rossel to replace the imprisoned Cluseret. Born in the Breton town of Saint-Brieuc in 1844 into a military family of republican Protestants from the Cévennes, Rossel
had graduated from the elite École Polytechnique. A critic described him as speaking ‘too rapidly, the words gushing from his mouth in a most disorderly manner’. Rossel had served as chief of Cluseret’s staff, but claimed that his boss was jealous of him. He noted cynically that ‘men are soon worn out in revolutionary periods’ and that this was Cluseret’s case. The Central Committee feared its influence would be eclipsed by Rossel, who had been all for the idea of the Committee of Public Safety, in part as a way of getting rid of Cluseret. On 30 April the Commune named Rossel Delegate for War.