Massacre (35 page)

To Edmond de Goncourt, the dark smoke hanging aggressively above his city gave the impression of ‘a day of an eclipse’. The acrid smell of gasoline permeated the air. The apocalypse had come to Paris. As clouds of smoke poured into the air, wild stories spread that new and terrible means of destruction were imminent. Baron de Montaut, an agent of Thiers working inside Paris, insisted that Communards had mined the sewers of Paris, which was not true.
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Versaillais troops encountered pockets of Communard resistance that Wednesday in the Sixth Arrondissement. Line troops overwhelmed the barricade at Carrefour de l’Observatoire above the Jardins du Luxembourg, and soon the neighbourhoods around the Jardins du Luxembourg, Saint-Michel and the Panthéon were besieged. A Communard warning was posted that in, the interest of defending Paris, the Panthéon would be blown up in two hours. Those living in the
quartier
were asked to ‘move away a reasonable distance from the area of the explosion’. The neighbourhoods around the Panthéon became a battlefield. Versaillais soldiers drove the Communards out of the Jardins du Luxembourg, attacking the barricade defending rue Soufflot, beneath the Pantheon and the Sorbonne. Communard defenders retreated towards the Seine, leaving behind barricades on rue Royer-Collard and rue Gay-Lussac, which fell when the Versaillais outflanked the resistance by taking side streets. Troops commanded by Cissey moved towards the Panthéon but were stalled when Maxime Lisbonne ordered the munitions storage facility in the gardens destroyed.

Still, the Versaillais had utterly destroyed what little Communard resistance remained. That day about 700 Communards were shot in the vicinity of the Panthéon, including 40 on rue Saint-Jacques. Local Communard officers met for the last time in the
mairie
at place du Panthéon.
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They rejected a suggestion that they surrender. Surviving Communards headed down the hill and over the Seine to the Eleventh Arrondissement.

Alexander Thompson, a young Englishman, lived with his parents on boulevard Saint-Michel across from the Jardins du Luxembourg, so he witnessed the fighting there first-hand. Two barricades stood before their house, ‘under the command of a pretty Amazon whose beauty, charming ways, and always ready revolver convinced each passer-by to lend a hand’. Several hours later, he saw the woman, clutching a rifle, lying dead on the barricade of rue Soufflot. A soldier tore open her clothes with his sword for the amusement of the other troops.
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Reclus watched the sun set from pont de Bercy behind the Gare de Lyon, ‘the green waters flowing slowly and quietly: the beacons, their masts and the arches of the bridges are clearly reflected in their peaceful mirror’. In the distance he could see ‘a golden and silver rain of opaline, iridescent pearls, an orange dust, (as) the monuments stand profiled in lightly violet fumes’. A red flag still flew from the top of the Panthéon, but it would soon be replaced by the tricolour. He could hear ‘the distant sounds that float in the luminous sky, the song of the trumpet, the whistling of bullets and the crackle of machine guns’.
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Unfortunately for Raoul Rigault he was near the Panthéon just before it fell. Earlier that day, he had gone to his beloved Prefecture of Police with the ever-faithful Théophile Ferré. Rigault freed the few political suspects and several common criminals still in custody, shouting ‘Let’s go, bandits, we’re going to burn this place down! We don’t want to roast you!’ A man called Veysset who had been arrested ten days earlier as a presumed spy for Versailles accused of trying to bribe General Jaroslaw Dombrowski was also in a cell there. Seeing him, Rigault turned the man over to Ferré and Georges Pilotell, mediocre artist and Communard policeman, who took him with soldiers from the Vengeurs de Flourens to the statue of Henri IV on the western tip of the Ile-de-la-Cité. There they shot him.
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Rigault, wearing his uniform as a commander of the 114th battalion of the National Guard, went to the Panthéon, in his old
quartier
, to encourage resistance. One of his friends reminded him that wearing this uniform was not perhaps a good idea, should he be captured. ‘
Mon vieux
,’ he replied,
‘better to die like this! This will be useful for the next time!’ After the barricade on rue Soufflot fell, Rigault entered a hotel on rue Royer-Collard. He had rented a room there under the name of Auguste Varenne. Now, he perhaps wanted to rest and await his fate. Not far away, several line troops, one a corporal who had seen a guardsman open the door and enter, ran to the hotel and stormed in. They accosted the hotel’s owner, a certain Monsieur Chrétien.
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Rigault, hearing the commotion, ran up the stairs to the sixth floor. The soldiers ordered the hotel owner to go after him and tell him that the soldiers would shoot him – Monsieur Chrétien – if he did not come down. They did not know the man they wanted to capture was Raoul Rigault, who proposed to the hotelier that the two of them make their perilous escape across the rooftops. When Chrétien refused, Rigault replied, ‘I am neither an idiot nor a coward. I will go down.’ The soldiers were waiting for him on the second floor. They took him in the direction of the Jardins du Luxembourg, where execution squads were at work. Rigault announced to his captors: ‘Here I am! It’s me! [
Me voilà!
]’, surrendering his pistol. Unsure of whom they had captured, they found an officer who asked the prisoner his name. Rigault, a prize catch, identified himself. When he shouted ‘Long live the Commune! Down with the murderers!’ the soldiers put him up against the wall and shot him dead.

Rigault’s body lay on the ground. The so-called ‘men of order’ who had killed him poked at it with their umbrellas and canes. The artist Georges Pillotel, who admired him, came upon the corpse and sketched it. Finally, Rigolette, who ran the café Cochon Fidèle, brought down an old blanket and covered up Rigault’s bloody head.
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Henri Dabot was bourgeois, a moderate republican, and a fervent Catholic. Fighting now swirled around his neighbourhood. Communards were killed at the barricade at rue Cujas above rue Saint-Jacques. Dabot’s cook, Marie, tried to hide a boy of about fourteen or fifteen whom soldiers were chasing, believing that he had fired a shot at a captain after the barricade fell at the corner of rue Saint-Jacques and rue des Écoles. The boy, who lived near the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont next to the Panthéon, was small enough to hide, literally, under the skirts of the cook. The soldiers found him, however, marched him to the Cluny Museum, and shot him in front of it. The boy’s friends found his body.

Now that the barricades on rue Saint-Jacques and rue Cujas had fallen, Communards began to retreat from the Fifth Arrondissement. A
fédéré
went from house to house, telling people to run for their lives. On rue
Clovis, a mother replied ‘Run! Run where? A hail of bullets everywhere! Leaving here would be the most certain way of finding death.’ She held her two young sons in her arms, saying ‘at least we can die together’, praying to Saint Geneviève for protection.
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The fighting moved down boulevard Saint-Michel and then rue Saint-Jacques to rue des Écoles and boulevard Saint-Germain. The barricade at rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève fell, followed by others on rue Ulm, rue Lacépède and rue Monge. Jean Allemane believed that there were only about 200 Communards left fighting in the Fifth Arrondissement, some of them no more than fifteen years old. After two days of bitter fighting, on Wednesday evening the last Communard defences in the Fifth Arrondissement in the Latin Quarter fell to the Versaillais on rue Monge, next to the Roman wall of the amphitheatre, dating back to the origins of Paris itself.
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When the fighting ended in the Latin Quarter, twenty bodies lay on rue Sommerard; more were scattered above at the intersection with boulevard Saint-Michel. On rue Cardinal Lemoine, soldiers roused from bed Eugène André, a mathematician and professor known for his opposition to the empire. He had not served in the Commune and had refused a position in education when offered. André, who had ignored advice to hide, was shot immediately, leaving behind his carefully calculated mathematical tables, not the kind of thing that would have interested Adolphe Thiers.

The Versaillais newspaper
Petite-Presse
informed readers in Versailles and the provinces that the soldiers refused to take more prisoners. The news almost certainly pleased many readers. A Communard remembered that all that could be heard in the Latin Quarter were ‘sounds of execution squads … at every step, bodies, every second, the sound of shots killing ordinary people’. This spelled the end for an eighty-year-old man on rue du Dragon, arrested for wearing the cap of a national guardsman.
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Thousands of other Parisians met the same fate.

Rumour now had the Communards preparing to win back lost territory by sending National Guard battalions beyond the ramparts around northern Paris and then back into the western districts of the capital. By this point, such a tactic was no longer a possibility. Most National Guardsmen would not have left their neighbourhood to have participated in such a plan. The Versaillais, who had advanced during Tuesday morning on the Right Bank as far as the Church of the Trinité, seemed to hold back, for the moment not pressing the enormous advantage that they
now held. Many Communards battled courageously, as on rue de la Ferme des Mathurins, where guardsmen constructed a barricade while under fire from the Versaillais troops. However, the only advantage they held – besides, for many, their passion – was that they were now defending their neighbourhoods.

But the Versaillais did not hold back for very long. Thousands of Versaillais troops attacked the barricade of rue Thévenot, which had been well defended near rue Saint-Denis. Once the barricade fell, rue Saint-Denis was overrun, opening the way to the
quartier
du Temple, a centre of Communard support and a gateway to the Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements. Few barricades now obstructed the Versaillais path, and those on small connecting streets were quickly abandoned.

Now that Montmartre and much of the Left Bank had fallen, the Versaillais were making their way through the Right Bank, getting closer and closer to La Roquette prison. The fate of the hostages would need to be decided – and soon. The prison pharmacist recommended that Archbishop Georges Darboy be transferred to the infirmary, but the archbishop refused to be separated from the others. Enormous tension hung over the
quartier
– and the prison in particular – as the Versailles troops drew nearer. Cannon fire launched against the Versaillais from the heights of Père Lachaise cemetery alarmed the hostages, and they greeted the slightest noise in the corridor with gnawing apprehension. The angry members of the Vengeurs de Flourens, a battalion of young Communards constituted in memory of the executed leader, were omnipresent in the neighbouring streets.

An example of the popular anger at the impending catastrophe in the neighbourhoods near La Roquette occurred nearby. Fear and outrage swirled around the prison in which the hostages awaited their fate. Charles de Beaufort served as captain in the 66th battalion assigned, before the Versaillais entered Paris, to guard the Ministry of War in the Seventh Arrondissement. When Beaufort tried to enter the ministry on Saturday 20 May, a guardsman had barred his way. The captain announced drunkenly that he could go where he wanted, threatening to ‘blow out the brains’ of the guard and bragging that he would purge the battalion. His behaviour won him no friends in the neighbourhoods.

Now, with Versaillais guns drawing closer and nothing but bad news arriving from other
quartiers
, Beaufort arrived to help defend boulevard Voltaire. People in the neighbourhood, increasingly anxious about their own fates, were quick to turn their ire towards this unwelcome officer. Marguerite Lachaise, who ran a small business with her husband and
belonged to the International, recognised Beaufort and denounced him as the officer who had sent men into a hopeless situation in which many men from the
quartier
had been killed. She, and soon others, mostly women, began shouting for his death. Some accused Beaufort of working secretly for Versailles. It didn’t help Beaufort that, at the same time, stretchers were bringing back more badly wounded men from the barricades, the same guardsmen Beaufort had sent into battle. Several people went to find Gustave Genton, who had recently been appointed
juge d’instruction
(examining magistrate).

A forty-five-year-old woodworker who never knew his father, Genton was in some ways typical of many working-class Communards. He lived with his wife child at 27 rue Basfroi, not far from where he had been born. Genton had spent six months in prison in 1866 for participation in an ‘illegal’ gathering at the Café de la Renaissance which had involved Rigault. During the Commune, he served as lieutenant and
porte-drapeau
(standard bearer) of the 66th battalion. A Blanquist and member of the Commune, he had served in the National Guard, but had resigned after becoming ill. His friend Ferré then nominated him to serve as
juge d’instruction
.
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Genton now set up a court-martial in order to placate the crowd. It quickly found Beaufort guilty, and sentenced him to be stripped of his rank. Delescluze was there and tried to calm things down, as did Marguerite Lachaise – although she had just called for Beaufort’s execution. The crowd paid them no mind and continued to shout for Beaufort’s death. Three men in navy uniforms grabbed him and hauled him off to a vacant lot just off the place Voltaire. There, they killed him.
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At about 3.00 p.m., apparently to calm popular agitation, Communard leaders organised another improvised court-martial, over which Genton presided, this time at the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement. On trial at this court-martial were the hostages held at La Roquette, including Darboy. They condemned six of the hostages to death, apparently in retaliation for the summary execution of
fédérés
captured at the barricade of rue Caumartin near the Church of the Madeleine. In principle the execution of these high-profile hostages required a signature of a justice of the peace. Ferré signed the order, adding the name of Raoul Rigault (killed a few hours earlier, although it is uncertain that this news had crossed the Seine) as an authorising signature, along with a third name that was illegible. Genton and his secretary, Émile Fortin, arrived at La Roquette with an execution squad of about thirty or forty men and an order instructing prison director Jean-Baptiste François to turn over to
them ‘without any explanation’ Archbishop Darboy and Louis Bonjean (the former imperial senator), in addition to ‘two or three others to be chosen’.
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