Massacre (38 page)

A story about the death of a beautiful
fédérée
when a barricade fell quickly made the rounds. Arrested, she had pressed against her chest a red flag carrying the words, ‘Don’t touch it!’ Her determination, and probably also her stunning appearance, was such that at first none of the soldiers wanted to be the one to kill her. They got over their hesitation, however, and gunned her down along with forty-two others. Augustine Blanchecotte came upon the bodies of three boys who had been shot on boulevard d’Italie: one was a portly worker in a blue smock. He may have had a toothache, as a bandana enveloped a cheek as he lay with his head on the ground, a hand to an eye, making him look like he was sleeping. The other hand had held a revolver. Little was left of another boy’s head, his extended arm, rigid in death, recalling his last defiant gesture. A Versaillais had at least had the decency to place a handkerchief over what was left of his head. As the fighting moved on, women slowly emerged from nearby buildings, looking for their men. Wagons rolled by, their drivers asking if there were more bodies to be carted away.
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Defeated Montmartre had been ‘pacified’. Once the shells and bullets no longer crashed and crackled, the neighbourhoods of the Butte appeared deserted, as if all the residents were dead – and a good many were. But
others had taken refuge. Rifles lay in the streets, tossed aside in haste by Communard fighters so as not to be compromised.

The victorious army rubbed the Parisians’ faces in their defeat: ‘Parisian rabble, slackers, good-for-nothings, you won’t be bellowing any more. If you move, to Cayenne! And it will be your turn to see what misery really is!’ They would show those Parisians. Montmartre’s reputation as a centre of left-wing activism determined the fate of many prisoners taken by the army – they were more likely to be killed because of where they had been taken.
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Yet Albert Hans had to admit that, on Montmartre, ‘errors’ were committed in house-to-house searches and subsequent arrests. Indeed, one of Hans’s colleagues had been arrested by line troops because his uniform suggested he was a Communard officer. As they were escorting their own comrade to a very uncertain future, the soldiers came upon others from the prisoner’s battalion who vouched for him.

Then Hans found himself under arrest for intervening when two soldiers and a Volunteer of the Seine had seized a man they believed had shot at them from a house near place Pigalle. When they apprehended him, they found a recently fired rifle nearby, though the man claimed it was not his weapon. Hans convinced the testy captors to take him to his house and ask his neighbours about him, but they did not have much good to say about him. The Volunteers of the Seine then turned on Hans, accusing him of being a Communard and trying to protect a guilty man. A junior army officer shouted to put him up against the wall, but, fortunately for Hans, a captain came by and ordered Hans taken to a commander. The captain, too, wanted to have Hans shot, but, luckily, a more senior officer was willing to send him to his nearby apartment so that his personal papers could be inspected. Hans was freed.

Having returned to the Volunteers of the Seine, Hans came upon one of the women who had been taken prisoner at the barricade at place Blanche, thus the barricade was defended ably – at least in legend – by Nathalie Le Mel and the ‘battalion of Amazons’ until finally overwhelmed. She was escorted by a corporal and two line soldiers. She had the trousers of a national guardsman, with a small Tyrolan hat low on her head, walking as quickly as her captors, her face fixed as she stared straight ahead. A small, hostile entourage followed, yelling insults and shouting for her immediate death. A ‘bourgeois’ strode up and knocked off her hat. Another Volunteer of the Seine picked it up and handed it back to her. Nothing is known of what happened to the woman. For his part, even
Hans was shocked: ‘How the spirit of the Parisian bourgeoisie was completely demonstrated in this act of cowardly and useless brutality!’

Near the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in the Tenth Arrondissement, most residents seemed to welcome the Versaillais. Yet even in a relatively conservative neighbourhood, house-to-house searches turned up copies of Communard newspapers such as Félix Pyat’s
Le Vengeur
, among others, preaching ‘pillage’, in Hans’s words, as well as a decree signed by Delescluze authorising requisitions to assist in the defence of Paris. These small discoveries seemed to confirm how widespread allegiance, and in many cases devotion, to the Commune had been. Hans and the others then reached Gare du Nord, where several of the prisoners being held were killed on a nearby lot, among them a delegate of the
quartier
‘who died with dignity’.

Ordered the next morning to proceed to the northern fortifications, Hans and his colleagues came upon the remains of a barricade taken the previous evening. They paused to toss into a ditch the badly mutilated corpses of twelve
fédérés
, barely recognisable as humans for all the mud and blood that covered them. From Porte de Pantin, Communard troops could be seen in the distance firing from Belleville. Beyond the northern ramparts were Prussian troops, easily identified by their hats. They made their allegiances clear, turning in guardsmen who had tried to save themselves by passing through Prussian lines. The Volunteers of the Seine encountered some of their own soldiers escorting captured members of the ‘Vengeurs de la Commune’, dressed in blue-grey trousers. These men ‘tremble[d] with fear’ – and with good reason.

With the Left Bank subdued and Montmartre defeated, Hans’s unit, along with other Versaillais troops, were sent to the last stronghold of Communard resistance: Belleville. They moved from Montmartre to Belleville and the Twentieth Arrondissement as shots ricocheted off the buildings. The Carrières (quarries) de l’Amérique, where many
fédérés
were hiding, stood to the right. Straight ahead Communards fired from behind more barricades and houses, trying to knock out a
mitrailleuse.
Reaching rue des Lilas with two companies of line troops, Hans’s unit arrived at the heights of Belleville. As they approached a barricade, a civilian informed them that the cannon that stood behind it was out of service. Hans and other Versaillais entered nearby houses from which they could direct their fire on the barricade below. A shopkeeper let them in – no choice about that – asking them with a nervous smile what they might want to purchase. He quickly added that he was of no political party, adding that the concierge of his building had been shot by the Versaillais,
having been surprised wearing his National Guard uniform. The shopkeeper and his wife shook with fear; the soldiers reassured them, adding that they would indeed purchase some food. Nearby, two
fédérés
, believed to have fired at a house the Versaillais had occupied, were captured, surrendering when a soldier promised they would be spared. A colonel ordered their immediate execution, relenting grudgingly when the captor explained what he had told them.

Hans imagined at the place des Fêtes what it would be like to fall into the hands of the
fédérés.
He would be insulted, mistreated and probably killed, like Generals Lecomte and Thomas on 18 March. Prisoners could expect the Communards to ‘cut us up into pieces or burn us alive’, with officers unable to restrain their frenzied underlings. He was sure that any number of line troops had perished like that. But he assumed that Communards who were captured by the Versaillais had nothing to fear: ‘our discipline holds in check any malicious instincts, the cruelty and ferocity that sometimes can spring up in certain circumstances from the heart of the mildest man’. Officers would of course protect prisoners. Ironically, he follows these ruminations with a description of taking another barricade – ‘several
fédérés
, drunk or desperate, still refused to give up: we had to kill them!’

Hans’s pride in Versaillais discipline and moral superiority did not extend to all of his fellow soldiers. More often than not, the Versaillais were ready to shoot anyone they captured, some soldiers wanting vengeance for a few of their own who had been killed in the fighting. Several hauled along two Communards, ready to shoot them, insisting that as they were their prisoners, they could do what they wanted with them. Hans and a few others protested and made their case to a cavalry officer, who agreed that the two men should not be killed. When the most adamant of his soldiers protested, the officer broke his shoulder with several blows of his cane.

They came upon another prisoner, a Communard naval officer – the fleet was small and obviously limited to the Seine within the city – proud and resplendent in a fine uniform that sported several medals. Hans mocked the rapid promotion of this ‘officer’, but the latter’s courage impressed him – the prisoner asked only time to write a final message to his daughter. The Volunteer of the Seine overcame the objections of an eager colleague who wanted to shoot the Communard immediately. Hans provided a pencil and a piece of paper and the
fédéré
quickly penned his final message, while a line soldier barked, ‘Don’t be sentimental. This is no longer the time for it. Shoot him!’ The prisoner stepped down into the trench and was gunned down. Several minutes later, another captured
Communard, a deserter from the Versailles army, joined him in the trench, defiantly shouting ‘Go ahead, shoot me, scoundrels, bandits, murderers! Yes, I am a deserter. You will see how I am going to die! Long live the Commune!’

Hans could never forget another Communard prisoner, hauled by two cavalrymen walking faster than the old man in a ragged uniform could manage. His face was thin, drawn, yellowed, and he wore glasses. ‘Misery’, Hans remembered, was written all over him. He was without doubt ‘honest’, a ‘Don Quixote of socialism, a madman, an old marabou of the clubs’. At each insult he endured from the Volunteers of the Seine, he politely removed his National Guard cap, revealing sparse white hair. Hans spoke favourably of him to their lieutenant, and he ensured that the old man remained with the Volunteers, and not regular troops. This probably saved his life.
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Many others were not so lucky. In a fancy western neighbourhood, Marie Holland knew well enough what was going on not far away. Her husband, the Protestant minister Eugène Bersier, came upon sixty corpses of Communards. He asked soldiers if he could at least take down their names so that he could notify their families. The answer came quickly: no. Women were being shot, too, and they got no sympathy from onlookers, who shouted, ‘Kill them! Cut them down without pity!’ If her husband would not be permitted to record the names of the murdered or dying Communards, Marie would do her best to do so where she could. She spent that afternoon working in an American medical facility, writing down the names of the dying so she could notify their relatives.
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More and more stories of the cruelty of the Versaillais, increasingly horrifying, now circulated among Parisians. A soldier allegedly raped a young girl, and then finished her off with his bayonet. Prisoners being escorted to Versailles, including a woman, never made it past Saint-Augustin; for no apparent reason, troops suddenly killed a group of them, with one soldier dispatching some prisoners with his sword. At Porte Dauphine, dead and wounded prisoners were thrown into mass graves. Near Tour Saint-Jacques, soldiers supposedly laughed and took turns throwing stones at a small arm that seemed to be moving in a pile of bodies until it stopped. A merchant did the best he could caring for two wounded Communards, but no surgeon was to be found. An officer told him that those under his command would take the men to a hospital to receive care, but the soldiers killed them.
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An awful story quickly circulated: a woman asked to see her husband, the father of their four children, who had been captured. A general replied
with a smile that this could be arranged: ‘worthy woman, we are going to take you to him’. She expressed her thanks, and several young soldiers went along with her, but no further than a wall, where they shot her. The Army of Versailles had given new meaning to the notion of ‘reuniting a woman with her husband’.
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John Leighton had little good to say about the Commune, which he insisted consisted of ‘robbers, incendiaries, assassins’. But he, too, had to admit that ‘they are fearless of death. They have only that one good quality. They smile and they die … the wounded men drink with their comrades, and throw wine on their wounds, saying, “Let us drink to the last.”’
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Communards were particularly fearless in the Eleventh Arrondissement, where they kept up the defence of Belleville even though much of the rest of Paris was occupied. They built new barricades on Boulevard Voltaire, particularly at the intersection with the place du Château d’eau. Joseph Vinoy’s reserve army had difficulty overcoming resistance there – the
arrondissement
had more effective military organisation than any other.
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But barricades at this point were utterly inadequate, and the two cannons that protected them hardly enough to ward off the Versaillais onslaught. Except for an occasional hand-delivered message, there was now no reliable way for
fédérés
to know what was transpiring elsewhere in Paris. The silence above in Montmartre was a terrible sign. Down below, the defences at Porte Saint-Denis and Porte Saint-Martin were no more. The Communards still had weapons, however, and they were prepared to use every last one against the Versaillais. The church of Saint-Ambroise had become an arsenal. Bigger batteries had been moved above to Père Lachaise cemetery, from which shells were launched down into now-occupied central Paris, flying over the heads of the Communards on boulevard Voltaire.

At the Parc Monceau, Châtelet, École Militaire and Luxembourg, courts-martial were dispatching hundreds of Communards, men and women alike, after interrogations that sometimes lasted no more than ten seconds or so. Augustine Blanchecotte remembered that ‘The noise of shells, which I believed unrivalled, are only innocent music when compared to these latest sounds. The most troubling and the most unforgettable was between the Panthéon and Luxembourg – the nightly sounds through an entire week of the incessant shots of execution squads, following the rapid decisions of human justice.’ At Châtelet, a woman was killed simply because she was wearing a red belt. Like other female victims, she had managed to survive the Prussian siege without complaint only to be shot by a French firing squad.
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