Massacre (26 page)

While elite Parisians like Gustave relaxed, others left Paris to take up arms against the Commune. When the Commune began on 18 March, Albert Hans had been working in an infirmary in Paris. He was a veteran of military campaigns in the Crimean War, South-East Asia and Mexico. To his satisfaction, in his infirmary they separated those still suffering wounds from the Prussian siege and
fédérés
. To his annoyance, an ‘insurgent’ who had been wounded at Asnières benefited because, as he had been an artillery officer, he was put with the regular army officers. Hans mocked the wounded man’s lack of education and the fact that – at least in his view – he had been a ‘bad worker’ before becoming a club orator.
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Hans managed to leave Paris and join the Volunteers of the Seine, part of the Versaillais ‘National Guard of Order’ being organised in Chartres under the command of Gustave Durieu, who had fought as an officer against Mexican patriots, and who had joined the Confederate forces as a lieutenant in the US Civil War. The Volunteers of the Seine would expand to 6,000 men.
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On 20 April, the Volunteers of the Seine were attached to the First Corps of the Versailles Army. At first Hans was upset that only about 120 men of some 1,500 original Volunteers had shown up. The army had performed well during the Prussian siege, but Hans was convinced that the ‘appalling disease of indiscipline’ that had characterised the French army following the humiliation of defeat had surfaced in the regiment. But, well into the second month of the Paris Commune, morale and efficiency had returned with the enlistment of former soldiers from Lorraine who had been released by the Prussians.

Hans was ready to make war on the Communards. If the Volunteers of the Seine included a good many Parisians, most were not drawn from the ranks of ordinary residents. Hans sang the praises of the son of a banker, who proved to be ‘one of the most determined and most devoted’ of the volunteers. Increasingly, one of the tropes of ‘the war on Paris’ and its insurgent plebeians was that of battle against an inferior people. The notion, so present in the emerging colonial discourse, was now applied to Communards. In Hans’s assessment, all the Volunteers of the Seine belonged to ‘the great family of conservatism’, sharing a determination to crush the Paris Commune.

On the night of 12–13 May, the Volunteers of the Seine moved into position in the Bois-de-Boulogne, amid rumours in the ranks that the time to enter Paris was approaching. Hans’s Volunteers were sent to Asnières. Near pont de Clichy, the Volunteers of the Seine dug in across the river from ‘insurgent’ positions. After a night-time reconnaissance excursion on 14 May,
fédéré
shells landed near them from Communard cannons at a wide bend of the Seine. Hans concluded that envious hatred against those ‘who own property’ drove the Communards to take reprisals against those few remaining residents of the western suburbs.
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The Volunteers of the Seine were, along with the regular line troops, ready to take their revenge.

In Versailles, meanwhile, Thiers was more prepared than ever to brutally crush the Communards by any means necessary, including taking advantage of information from spies based in Paris. He had faced a no-confidence vote on 11 May after false rumours had leaked out that he
was considering a compromise permitting Communard leaders to escape. Thiers won by 490 to 9, and the renewed support only made him more ruthless. Thiers now spoke even more menacingly, saying that he was obliged to order ‘dreadful measures’, because at the bottom of his heart he knew that he represented what was ‘right’ against ‘the crimes’ of the Communards.
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Thiers made good use of Parisian spies, and the number of spies passing information back to Versailles seemed to have increased dramatically. Charles Lullier, a drunken, unstable National Guard commander, attempted to lure
fédéré
officers to the Versailles side with money provided to him by Thiers. A clandestine Versaillais military organisation, led by Colonel Charles Corbin, was also at work within Paris. Thiers’s efforts were not always successful, however. Versailles troops, among them Albert Hans and the Volunteers of the Seine, moved into the Bois-de-Boulogne where they were vulnerable to Communard shells, fully expecting that treason paid for handsomely by Thiers would open the gate. The gate remained shut.
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Thiers had tried to bribe General Dombrowski to sell out the Commune for a huge sum (rumoured to be 500,000 francs), asking him to free up several gates in the ramparts to let in Versaillais troops and arrest various Communard leaders. He had no luck. Dombrowski, ‘a small, thin, blond man, curt, nervous, with an energetic, thin and military bearing’, had served as secretary of the Polish section of the International and was a veteran of the unsuccessful Polish uprising against Russian rule in Congress Poland in 1863. False rumours here and there called Dombrowski a Prussian agent, perhaps because part of historic Poland lay within Prussia. Dombrowski’s friend Bronislaw Wolowski went to Versailles to meet with Minister of Interior Louis Picard, telling him that Dombrowski would never betray the Commune. The Polish general considered Thiers a friend of imperial Russia, and thus his enemy, and Dombrowski believed that he could help Poland by delivering France from ‘the wolves who exploit it’. Picard asked Wolowski to try again with Dombrowski. Hedging his bets, Wolowski asked for passports, if need be, for Dombrowski and other Polish officers, should they decide to leave Paris. In that case, a train would be waiting in Saint-Denis to take the Poles to the frontier.
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Although Thiers failed to win over Dombrowski and was therefore denied easy access to Paris on 12 May, he would not be held off for long. The Commune, having ignored Rossel’s keen advice on how to defend the city, instead focused its efforts on destroying prominent
symbols of the old order. These public destructions, while cathartic and popular among working-class Parisians, did nothing to slow or warn off the Versaillais.

Communards had been calling for the destruction of Adolphe Thiers’s house in Paris since mid-April, and it finally came tumbling down on 15 May. When John Leighton walked by workmen had already begun to knock down the right side of the building: ‘a pickaxe was leaning against a loosened stone; the roof had fallen in … The fire rose higher and higher.’ Twenty wagons were required to carry away books and
objets d’art
from the house before it crashed to the ground. Gustave Courbet picked up some small statues and other items of artistic value from the floor, transporting them to safety. He reproached the workers for not having taken an inventory. Courbet opposed a proposal to sell Thiers’s art to the British, while estimating the value of objects in the house at an incredible 1.5 million francs.
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The destruction of the Vendôme Column was by far the most spectacular Communard attempt at exorcism through demolition. Courbet, in particular, hated the Vendôme Column because it represented Napoleon’s empire and thus also that of his nephew. In 1860, he had suggested to the government that it be dismantled. Three years later, Napoleon III dressed his uncle at the top of the column in Roman garb. Since the Franco-Prussian War Courbet had again called for the column to be toppled, arguing that the base of the column could be saved, with the bas-reliefs relating the history of the Republic carted to the Invalides (then still a hospital and retirement home for former army officers, as well as the final resting place of Napoleon). Since the proclamation of the Commune, the painter had suggested that the column with Napoleon standing at the top could be replaced by a more artistic construction representing the glorious events of 18 March. As for the ‘block of molten cannons’ it would simply be destroyed in its fall. Pyat had proposed the column’s destruction to the Commune on 12 April and the Commune voted against the proposal.
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Thousands of people gathered at place Vendôme to witness the destruction at first hand on 16 May. Tickets were in principle required for the event. From the first floor of the Hôtel Mirabeau on place Vendôme, a party of Americans watched the column fall. They sang ‘Hail Columbia’ while ‘some Yankee girl’ pounded ‘violently’ on a piano. A US resident paid $80 for the privilege of being the last person to go up to the top.
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Members of the Commune were prominent in attendance, adorned with red belts and scarves. National guardsmen stood by and musicians played songs of revolution. Cannons were readied to fire celebratory
rounds. Precautions were taken so that the falling column did not crash into nearby buildings. The ceremony was scheduled to take place at 2.00 p.m.
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Cables attached to the column finally began to pull. But they snapped and had to be replaced with stronger cables. At 5.45 p.m. a ‘dull cracking sound’ echoed around. The column began to lean, then snapped into two huge pieces that crashed to the ground, shattering Napoleon. The globe that he carried rolled briefly on the ground below. Several people managed to get past the guards and carried off pieces of the column as souvenirs.
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Brief, triumphant speeches followed, and then people began to drift away through the thick dust.

Although photographs of the famous toppling show Courbet and other Communards of note, most of the people there were ordinary, large numbers of them from the People’s Paris. Before the Commune, the vast majority would have had no reason to go to place Vendôme, unless they were domestics employed by fancy folk living in the vicinity. They risked being stopped and questioned by the police as to why they were in a neighbourhood in which their appearance and way of speaking seemed out of place. Now some of them had appropriated the
beaux quartiers.
After the column fell, they were photographed in silent triumph, or at least hope. In the early days of the medium, being photographed alone or in family portraits was the province of the bourgeoisie. But now there were numerous photographs of ordinary Communards standing heroically before barricades.
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By 17 May, the Army of Versailles had moved even closer to the walls of Paris. Three days later, line troops forced Communard fighters out of Auteuil and back within the walls. Versaillais troops had taken over remaining Communard posts in the villages of Issy, Vanves and Malakoff. Shells rained down on western Paris and many national guardsmen abandoned the ramparts.
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Many in the Commune still held out hope that help would arrive from Lyon, Marseille, or other militantly republican cities in which movements for local ‘communes’ had occurred. No such help came.

At 5.45 p.m. on 17 May all of Paris was shaken by a frightening explosion: the munitions factory on avenue Rapp blew up, killing dozens of workers, most of whom were women. Parisians mistakenly believed that the explosion was the work of a Versaillais attack. The Protestant minister and anarchist Élie Reclus noted that the ‘exasperated population’ shouted for vengeance – ‘one or two more of such days and a return to the September Massacres [of 1792] could become possible’.
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Three days later, Reclus observed that the hostage situation ‘now takes centre stage with an imposing clarity and a dreadful urgency’. At the meeting of the Committee of Public Safety that day, Citoyen Urbain demanded that five of the hostages be shot immediately in reprisal for the shooting of a
cantinière
by the Versaillais. For its part,
Père Duchêne
denounced Darboy, ‘Good for nothing [
Jean-foutre
] number one who is raking it in … [and] who exercises the wonderful profession of archbishop of Paris and spy for Bismarck.’
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Lawyer Plou tried to convince Rigault that a grand jury (
jury d’accusation
) should be convoked and that the hostages had the right to legal representation. On 18 May, Plou requested that another lawyer defend Darboy, but on the following day the archbishop said that he would defend himself. The next day, Rigault announced the convocation of the grand jury, separating the hostages into two groups, the first consisting of Darboy and the other priests, the second former
sergents-de-ville
(municipal policemen). The jury first considered the cases of the latter, who were returned to prison not knowing if they were to be executed. Darboy and the other ecclesiastics were told that their cases would be heard the following week.
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The prisoners at Mazas could see each other briefly every day. Darboy, Deguerry and Bonjean were joined by Abbé Laurent Amodrou, arrested on 17 May, after ‘the impious’ searched Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. When Amadou spoke with Darboy, he said they should speak in Latin, as ‘Monseigneur, here the walls have ears and eyes.’
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Ambassador Washburne visited Darboy on 19 May, finding him ‘very feeble’ and quite ill with ‘a kind of pleurisy’. Yet the archbishop seemed ‘cheerful, and apparently resigned to any fate that may await him’. Plou found him lying down, ‘dressed in an old cassock … his features changed, his skin very pale’, as he repeated, ‘I am sick, very sick.’ Guards now brought him brioches and some chocolate. He said he was in no shape to go before the tribunal of the Commune, and if they wanted to shoot him, let it be right there.
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On Saturday 20 May, with the hostage situation unchanged, Reclus reflected on the state of the Commune, now clearly divided ‘into two camps’. Tensions between the Central Committee of the National Guard and the government of the Commune remained. Reclus described the fundamental contractions in trying to organise the defence of Paris, now caught between the dictatorial authority of a Committee of Public Safety and ‘the ideal aspirations towards a model Republic’. For the latter to exist, the Commune would have to survive. Although the Versaillais were still beyond the ramparts, he worried that if the Communard forces could not
fight off ‘the invading hordes … the city is massacred, the revolution is lost and everyone subject to the horrors of reprisals that could be without end’. He was right to worry; the very next day, the Versaillais would enter the city.
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