Massacre (31 page)

Leighton believed a rumour that
pétroleuses
were paid 10 francs per house that they sent up in flames. According to him, the
pétroleuse
‘walks with a rapid step, near the shadow of the wall; she is poorly dressed; her age is between forty and fifty; her forehead is bound with a red check handkerchief, from which hang meshes of uncombed hair. The face is red and the eyes blurred … Her right hand is in her pocket, or in the bosom of her half-unbuttoned dress; in the other hand she holds one of the high, narrow tin cans in which milk is carried in Paris, but which now … contains the dreadful petroleum liquid.’ He heard that one had been caught in the act in rue Truffault, and fired six shots with a pistol at the Versaillais before being killed. ‘Another was seen falling in a doorway of a house in rue de Boulogne … a young girl; a bottle filled with petroleum fell from her hand as she dropped.’

US Ambassador Washburne believed the rumours, too, and gave the astonishing figure that 8,000 incendiaries had been at work in Paris, adding that ‘of all this army of burners, the women were the worst’. Children, it seemed, were equally culpable. He related that an employee of his Legation had counted the bodies of eight children, the eldest not yet fourteen years of age, shot after being caught with petroleum.
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One rumour claimed a household search on rue des Vinaigriers had turned up thirty small containers (‘
oeufs à pétrole
’) filled with nitroglycerine.
Woe – and thus death – to women found carrying bottles with anything that looked suspicious, or oil for heating.
Le Siècle
reported that on 31 May a woman ‘was practically cut into pieces’ because she had purchased olive oil. Among women accused of being
pétroleuses
was a twenty-year-old carrying her baby. An officer ordered her to be shot on the spot. Asked what to do with the baby, he supposedly barked, ‘Shoot it too, so that the very seed disappears!’ Denunciations for incendiarism flowed more freely than water to put out the fires.
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It is without question that Communards set some of the fires. Like barricades, fires both served as a means of defence and represented an appropriation of space on behalf of the Communard cause. There is clear evidence that Communards started fires in houses on rue Royale and rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, trying to create a ‘barrier of flames’ that would slow down the onslaught and eliminate the possibility that Versaillais troops could climb to the upper reaches of the buildings and fire down on barricade defenders.
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As the Versaillais advanced and killed, Communard leaders ordered the burning of a number of monumental Parisian buildings, all in the fancy parts of town. Émile Eudes ordered the burning of the Palace of the Conseil d’État and the Committee of Public Safety the Palais-Royal. Théophile Ferré signed the order (subsequently found in the pocket of a Communard who fought at a barricade on rue Royale, dated ‘4 prairial an ’79’) to burn the Ministry of Finance. Courbet remained at the Louvre to try to protect its invaluable collections, but fire broke out or was set on a roof. Paintings and sculptures still in the great museum were saved when passers-by extinguished the conflagration. General Paul-Antoine Brunel ordered fire set to the Naval Ministry next to Gaillard’s giant barricade on place de la Concorde to prevent Versaillais troops from taking it and shooting down on defenders, but the fire did not catch.
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Could Communards in defeat actually intend to burn down their own city? The Versaillais siege had pushed the Communards to despair and intense anger. Some among them could imagine the entire destruction of Paris – anything was better than ceding it to Thiers. Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray insisted that it was better to burn down ‘our houses rather than to turn them over to the enemy’. And Louise Michel did warn that ‘Paris will be ours or cease to exist.’ However, she went no further than insisting that Communards defend Paris ‘until death’. After finishing his meal on the Terrace of the Louvre on Tuesday, Communard General Jean Bergeret ordered the Tuileries Palace set ablaze. Watching the conflagration consume the palace where Napoleon III and his entourage had romped,
Gustave Lefrançais admitted that he was one of those ‘who had shutters of joy seeing that sinister palace go up in flames’. Two days later, seeing fires in the distance a Montmartre woman asked Nathalie Le Mel what was burning. Le Mel replied, ‘it’s nothing at all’, only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, ‘because we do not want a king any more’.

The fires that raged throughout Paris became yet another source of anti-Communard hatred. The burning of the Tuileries, a symbol of the Second Empire, particularly intensified demands from anti-Communards that prisoners be immediately shot, as they shouted ‘
pas de quartier!
Death to the burners!’
³³
The writer Louis Énault accused the Communards of wanting to burn Paris to the ground. They began, in his view, with several
beaux quartiers
, such as rue de Lille, ‘a sumptuous and aristocratic residence’, with the same cachet as nearby boulevard Saint-Germain. From a window afar, Énault marvelled at the horror of it all, as the fires were pushed along by the evening wind, the flames gathering force ‘with a violent speed … the fire took on … fantastic tones … blue, greenish, violet, deep red’. As some Parisians watched the fires spreading in the distance, they wondered which
quartier
, which monuments, which buildings were up in flames. Théophile Gautier believed he was seeing a modern Pompeii. It was as if the destruction begun under Haussmann had continued. The explosion of an occasional shell fired by the Communards from Montmartre added to the fear.
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Walking from the Church of the Madeleine to the place du Château d’Eau (now place de la République), Reclus encountered so few people that it might have been 2 o’clock or 3 o’clock in the morning, not the middle of the day. Yet at Porte Saint-Martin ordinary people formed a human chain to move paving stones to a barricade, while others stopped passers-by with cries of ‘
Citoyen
,
Citoyenne
, to work!’ Children of all ages were actively involved in building barricades, two or three struggling together to carry heavy blocks of stone. Reclus had to show his laissez-passer at each barricade. Even after carrying stones – despite his handicapped right hand, mangled in a childhood fall – he was briefly stopped at rue Lafayette by a national guardsman who accused him of concealing his Versaillais spying activities by helping out. Reclus remained calm and a police official ordered him freed.
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Reclus did not return home that night, fearing capture. He stayed with friends who lived in faubourg du Temple. ‘We are’, he assessed, ‘like sailors whose ship is taking on water during a storm and which every quarter of an hour sinks a bit further down. Leaning against the front of the ship, we
can see the against the horizon vast waves pounding towards us, howling and frothing in rage.’ Would the first big wave that came carry them away, or would it be the second, or perhaps the fourth ‘in this stormy sea that is Paris?’ Perhaps it would be that very day that ‘we would die … perhaps tomorrow … or perhaps the day after that … No matter, it will not have been in vain!’
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From Versailles Thiers proclaimed: ‘We are
honnêtes gens …
The punishment will be exemplary, but it will take place within the law, in the name of the laws.’ This was already clearly not the case, as Versaillais troops were already gunning down Communards right and left. The term ‘
honnêtes gens
’ was loaded with class connotations that had turned murderous. Many among the
honnêtes gens
were delighted to see Paris purged of lower-class insurgents who seemed intent on overturning social hierarchy and privilege.
³⁷

As Versaillais troops moved through Paris, they killed, shooting down Communards because they had been taught to despise them. Moreover, in a civil war, enemies could be almost anyone, anywhere. The effect of such summary executions probably in some cases stiffened resistance, but over the following days also served to demoralise resisters. Few could have had any doubt at this point about what was occurring in the streets of Paris and what the eventual outcome of the struggle would be.

When the Versaillais encountered resistance in narrow streets, fired upon from windows of houses, brutal searches and executions followed. Line troops had to be on constant alert, constantly checking windows on the upper floors of houses for Communard snipers. With fighting nearby, a woman living on the elegant rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré had a chimney-sweep come to work. When he left the building, he was seized by troops because his hands and face covered with soot, taken to be gunpowder, and immediately shot, as the woman looked from her window above. The soldiers did not bother to take the time to consider what was a perfectly plausible explanation.
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Fear probably made the soldiers more ruthless. The Versaillais often killed Communard insurgents they discovered, regardless of whether the fighters put up any resistance. On rue Saint-Honoré, line soldiers found thirty national guardsmen hiding in a printing shop. They had thrown away their weapons and hurriedly put on work clothes, but that would not save them. The soldiers took them to rue Saint-Florentin and shot them in the enormous ditch in front of what was left of the barricade. Nearby on rue Royal, troops came upon six men and a young woman in National Guard uniforms hiding in barrels. They were thrown into a ditch and
killed. Volunteers de la Seine shot fifteen men and a woman at Parc Monceau.
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When line troops reached place Vendôme, the fallen column further stoked reprisals against Communards who had surrendered or been captured; Versaillais shot at least thirty people there.
⁴⁰

Édouard Manet’s lithograph
Civil War
evokes the horror of death at the Church of the Madeleine, where the Versaillais gunned down about 300 Communards who had taken refuge in the church. No insurgent escaped. At first glance,
Civil War
would lead one to think that Manet was depicting the tragedy of civil war in a general, neutral way. However, the dead man is clearly wearing a National Guard uniform and is clutching a piece of white cloth, suggesting that he and others had been trying to surrender; the Madeleine appears unmistakably in the background. Manet’s
The Barricade
, another gripping indictment of the repression during Bloody Week, depicts a firing squad killing Communards.
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The killing went on, supported in no small part by Parisians who welcomed Versaillais troops. Forbes, for one, was appalled by the ‘Communard hunting’ of Versaillais soldiers, aided by some people whom he suspected had earlier shouted for the Commune and now denounced
fédérés
. Concierges eagerly informed soldiers where Communards might be hiding: ‘They knew the rat-holes into which the poor creatures had squeezed themselves, and they guided the Versaillist soldiers to the spot with a fiendish glee.’

Versaillais troops seized on any evidence they could find of insurgency. Three women were gunned down because the Versaillais came across several pairs of National Guardsman’s trousers in their apartment. A furrier on rue des Martyrs allegedly was summarily executed because he had invited Pyat to his apartment six months earlier. When the man’s wife protested, she was also killed. On place du Trône (now Nation), soldiers saw light in an upper apartment and went up to find two elderly men drinking tea. They were shot for no reason, despite the pleas of their concierge that they had had nothing to do with the
fédérés
. Social class did them in. The Versaillais paid no mind to the fact that some of the Communards they were gunning down had a few months earlier fought for France against the Prussians and their German allies.
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The Communards began frantically to organise resistance in the Sixth Arrondissement. On Tuesday Jean Allemane helped organise the defence of rues Vavin and Bréa, just below boulevard Montparnasse, thus joining defences at place de l’Observatoire, protecting the Jardins du Luxembourg. Not far away, Eugène Varlin readied defenders at the small place du Croix-Rouge. The task was imposing, with Cissey’s huge army of three
divisions attacking only three battalions of National Guardsmen. When orders came from Commune leaders that they should fall back to defend their own
quartiers
, the defence of the Left Bank became impossible. Two battalions of national guardsmen from the Eleventh and Twelfth Arrondissements refused to obey Allemane and crossed the Seine to their own neighbourhoods, saying that if they were going to die fighting, they preferred to do so in their own
quartiers
.
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Communards continued to fall. An English doctor helping wounded Communards recalled: ‘We took in only the worst cases on 21, 22, 23 May. Our garden, court, corridors and floor were crowded with wounded brought in fresh from the fight … Many did not make it.’
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Many of the barricades on the Left Bank had been built within a day, after the first line troops had entered Paris. They did not survive Versaillais attacks on Tuesday. A barricade on rue de Rennes, below Gare Montparnasse, was the largest, but no more than thirty men were there to defend it. Yet Communard cannons firing behind sizable barricades still inflicted casualties on the attackers. Barricades fell at Croix-Rouge and rue du Dragon. The
quartier
was ablaze, and the barricades at rue de Rennes fell on Tuesday, with their defenders, including the Enfants du Père Duchêne, who fell back along boulevard Saint-Germain. A Versaillais officer believed they were executing more men than had fought behind barricades.
⁴⁵

Allemane and others sought to impose some order on the defences at rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and boulevard Saint-Michel, but it did not help that, now that the fight seemed all but lost, guardsmen cared only about protecting their own neighbourhoods. Versaillais troops surrounded remaining barricades and fired down on them from adjacent buildings. Calls for reinforcements brought no response. Smoke rising from the Hôtel de Ville and other important buildings further demoralised remaining Communard fighters.
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