Massacre (39 page)

News of the courts-martial reached the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement, which now served as the headquarters of what was left of the administration of the Commune. Leaders spoke gravely to one another, while one of them dispensed written orders. Bitter disputes and recriminations echoed through the building. Surprisingly, there was little palpable sense of panic; leaders, instead, became increasingly enraged, as more and more reports related the summary executions of prisoners by the Versaillais troops. Wagons full of munitions and cartridges stood in the courtyard. The dead and wounded lay here and there amid general confusion. All night long, messages arrived from the remaining points of defence asking for men and cannons, without which fighters would have to abandon their positions. The Commune could offer neither.

Tricolour flags floated above boulevard Saint-Michel. The
quais
had been taken. At place Saint-Michel, the Fountain of the Médicis was full of corpses, their eyes still open. Although the final outcome of the struggle could not be doubted, some national guardsmen continued to fight, despite the lack of effective or even apparent leadership. Reclus admired the fact that ‘they don’t give ground little by little. They hold on to it as long as they are living; they still occupy it with their bodies’.
²⁷

CHAPTER
9

Massacre

O
N
B
LOODY
T
HURSDAY
, 25 M
AY
, É
LIE
R
ECLUS REFLECTED ON WHAT HE
saw around him. Paris had been transformed into ‘a workshop, an immense workshop … but a workshop in which machine guns are at work, a workshop in which the work of destruction is accomplished on such a great scale … It is a horrible cacophony, this infernal charivari of hatred and passion.’
¹

That evening, Communards mounted a sturdy defence at pont d’Austerlitz, with a half-circular barricade stretching between the
quai
on the Left Bank and the boulevard de l’Hôpital. In an artillery battle, the Commune lost twenty-six people, and had to abandon the first barricade. Soon the Versaillais had crossed the bridge and taken the quai de la Râpée and then Bercy. Losing ground, Communards set fire to the Grenier d’Abondance beyond Gare de Lyon, a measure to prevent the Versaillais from going around the sturdy defences of the place de la Bastille and firing down on
fédérés
from the imposing structure. Its smoke filled the skyline, giving off an awful stench of burning oil and codfish.
²

Not far away, Émile Maury ditched his weapon and National Guard uniform. He walked down boulevard Mazas (now Diderot) towards the Seine. A few barricades were still going up, including one in front of his apartment building. An enormous barricade still stood on rue de Charonne. But not many people were left to defend these improvised defensive structures. Maury saw what was coming: ‘The noose is getting
tighter
… the Commune begins its agony.’
³

And, although randomness and serendipity continued to be features of the killings, the violent repression was increasingly organised, especially in and around north-eastern Paris, where the fighting continued. The army
had become ‘a vast execution squad’ as it continued to move towards the last bastions of Communard resistance in northern and eastern Paris. There Communards had had more time to prepare their defence.
⁴

All Communard discipline had evaporated. Improbable suggestions surfaced in the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement – to form an entire column of remaining
fédérés
and recapture Montmartre, or march into the centre of Paris and take it again. Charles Delescluze was prepared to die. After an unsuccessful trek to Porte de Vincennes to convince the Prussians to intervene to save lives by arranging a truce,
⁵
he now sat quietly at a small table in the
mairie
on boulevard Voltaire. His continuing insistence that all was not lost belied what he knew. He calmly wrote out a few orders. At one point he held his head in his hands, repeating, ‘What a war! What a war!’ His only hope was that he would die without shame, that ‘we also, we will know how to die’. His
mot d’ordre
remained duty. Delescluze said simply, ‘I don’t want any more. No, everything is finished for me’. He wrote to a friend to say that he would await the judgement of history on the Commune, and to his sister to say goodbye, confiding the letters to a friend.

Wearing, as always, a frock coat, patent leather boots, a silk hat, and a red sash around his waist, he walked with Commune member François Jourde and about fifty national guardsmen towards the barricades at place du Château d’eau, which were under Versaillais attack. They passed Maxime Lisbonne, who had been badly wounded during the courageous, tenacious Communard defence, being carried by Auguste Vermorel and Victor Jaclard. At a barricade, Vermorel fell wounded. Delescluze shook his hand. As the sun set and bullets whizzed by, national guardsmen urged Delescluze to take shelter. But he kept walking, straight ahead very slowly to a barricade. Jourde moved away after the two friends shook hands. Delescluze stood on the barricade, awaiting death. It came in a matter of seconds. Four men ran forward to get his body and three of them were shot. Delescluze’s body lay where it had fallen for several days, a courageous martyr for a cause whose end was approaching.
⁶

Eugène Varlin replaced Delescluze as Delegate for War, but his tenure would not be long. Jaclard and a badly wounded Vermorel were carried to a building on boulevard Voltaire, where they managed to avoid arrest thanks to the quick thinking of the person who had taken them in. But near Parc Monceau their luck ran out and they were arrested.
⁷

The Commune’s leadership was almost entirely annihilated, but still the violence persisted. Anti-Communards sporting tricolour armbands
contributed to the carnage. Organised secretly before Adolphe Thiers’s troops entered Paris, such armbands had been prepared in advance as marks of identification. Those wearing them now took on the role of military police, organising searches and setting themselves up in
mairies
that had been abandoned by the Commune. They responded to the wave of denunciations that began to arrive after each neighbourhood had been secured, carrying out arbitrary arrests. In a typical case, a concierge indicated to a man wearing a Versaillais armband that ‘Monsieur B. buys lots of newspapers, perhaps he is hiding someone, perhaps a Communard.’
⁸

Clearly Bloody Week provided French officers with a way of restoring morale and prestige after their inglorious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and their failure to hold onto Paris in March. The National Guard seemed to be the antithesis of the French army: it accepted its men from all social classes, and many, including some officers, were ordinary workers. This flew in the face of the values of the professional army and its aristocratic leadership. Members of the officer corps, many of whom despised the Commune and all who stood for it, distrusted their few republican colleagues. The arrogant Ernest de Cissey hated the Commune and was eager to take revenge. Joseph Vinoy, who had been humiliated after the surrender of France to Prussia, and had been marked as a ‘
capitulard
’ (defeatist) and identified with the failure to seize the cannons on Montmartre, awaited the chance to settle scores. He offered no apologies for the executions ‘of modern barbarians’. General Félix Douay played a lesser role in the mass killings, having turned operations at Châtelet over to Colonel Louis Vabre, who gleefully presided over the
prévôtal
court. Justin Clinchant, who had moderate republican sympathies, forbade the shooting of prisoners in parts of Paris under his control, but he was one of the few officers who did anything to hinder the executions. Lesser officers followed the instructions of those who commanded them, yet with some variation depending on personalities, attitudes towards the Communards, and circumstances.
⁹

Paul de Ladmirault was one officer who resisted the urge towards violent reprisals to which his colleagues were succumbing. He was from an old aristocratic, Catholic and military family from Touraine which had lost land during the Revolution. His father fought in 1792 against the Revolution, and there was no doubt that Paul would fight against the Commune eighty years later. Hearing the volleys of an execution squad, Ladmirault insisted that he did not like ‘summary justice’ because of the potential for errors. On seeing several pale, frightened Communards who were about to be executed, he stopped the firing squad and asked them if
the Communards had fired at the soldiers or were carrying weapons. The squad said they hadn’t, but the captives’ hands were blackened, possibly by gunpowder. Ladmirault told his soldiers that the fate of the prisoners would be up to judges and not to them. He expressed some sympathy for ordinary Communards who had joined the National Guard in order to receive the 1.5 francs per day. At one point, Ladmirault watched a badly wounded prisoner being taken in a convoy to Versailles. Barely alive, he raised his hand and fixed his eyes on his captors. With what remained of his voice, he told them, ‘The insurgents are you!’
¹⁰
Ladmirault may have been affected by the accusation, but he did not retaliate in anger as others might have. He was by far one of the least murderous of his fellow commanders.

The mentality of the soldiers themselves also contributed to the violence of Bloody Week. Negative images of Paris, particularly Montmartre and Belleville, abounded in Versailles and across France. The propaganda seemed to have had the desired effect. In late April, for instance,
Le Soir
warned its readers that, once the Commune had fallen, property in Paris would require fumigation. For its part,
Le Gaulois
related that residents of Belleville had taken over homes in prosperous Passy and that ‘all your cupboards and your wine cellar have been broken into … men and women lay in your beds’.
¹¹
Soldiers conscripted from rural areas, especially those from regions with a relatively high degree of religious practice, such as Brittany and Normandy, were particularly opposed to the Commune, which in propaganda and in reality had taken aim at the Church.

Of course, soldiers also acted on the orders of their leaders. In the view of Jules Bergeret, a Commune member from the Twentieth Arrondissement, Versaillais troops entering Paris had received orders ‘to give no quarter’. A municipal policeman related that he had proceeded with the execution of a Pole, referring to ‘the orders of the Marshal [Patrice de MacMahon] and also those of the Minister of War … [which were] definite concerning deserters and foreigners who have served the Commune’. MacMahon knew what was going on, though perhaps not the exact extent. Like Thiers, he did not forbid or denounce the shooting of prisoners, at least those taken with weapons. General Alexandre Montaudon, for one, excused the summary executions, claiming that the soldiers took the initiative, following the orders of their officers. But he had to admit that hatred existed among soldiers for ‘the agents of this awful civil war’, which they had fomented in ‘their meetings and in their [political] clubs’.
¹²

One woman bragged that her brother, a ‘distinguished’ officer in the army, had ordered the shooting of 400 ‘obstinate insurgents … at the last
barricades of Belleville’. She added, ‘The cowards! They were crying!’ Another Parisian ran into a policeman who proudly stated that he had killed more than sixty people himself and that ‘the cowards’ had asked for mercy.
¹³

Soldiers and commanders alike frequently compared Communards to colonial ‘barbarians’. Théophile Gautier described them as ‘savages, a ring through their noses, tattooed in red, dancing a scalp dance on the smoking debris of society’. Gaston Galliffet once contrasted the Communards with North African Arabs, whom the French army had been brutalising for forty years: ‘The Arabs have a God and a country; Communards have neither.’
¹⁴
Another general noted that, ‘If given the choice between Arabs and these rioters, I would easily choose the Arabs as adversaries.’ Many of the line troops had fought in Algeria, Mexico and even China, and, in their view, the Communards no more qualified as French than the insurgents they encountered abroad. Alphonse Daudet, another anti-Communard, intoned that Paris had been ‘in the power of negroes’.
¹⁵

Charles de Montrevel held that, of the Parisians who participated in ‘this immense orgy’, by which he meant the Commune, most were ‘lower-class provincials’. His view associated large-scale immigration to large urban centres with social and political turmoil, as newcomers were torn away from traditional rural roots, including family and organised religion, which might have kept them in check. The result was a collective psychosis. This and no other would be the verdict of history, Montrevel believed. Gustave de Molinari was also sure of it. In his eyes, immigration from the provinces into plebeian, peripheral neighbourhoods had made Paris into ‘a sort of interior California’. What was to be done to prevent the government becoming ‘subject to a harsh slavery’ at the hands of such people?
¹⁶

A man originally from Bourdeaux living in the capital during the Commune had little good to say about the Parisians, whom he considered to be ‘artificial creatures’: ‘The true Parisian, eternally and tiringly cheeky, [is] incapable of a serious and deep sentiment [and] laughs or is ready to laugh wherever, on any occasion: he respects nothing, believes in nothing.’ Thus the Parisian was incapable of making political decisions but, rather, quietly awaited orders from ‘stronger minds and free-thinkers, ornaments of common bars’.
¹⁷
If they could not be political actors in their own right – as the much-despised Commune made all too clear – stronger forces would have to come in and set things right, even if doing so entailed unprecedented violence.