Massacre (43 page)

The next day, a republican family offered lodging. Élie wisely assumed another name. But he believed that now his best chance was to move from
quartier
to
quartier
, going quietly into neighbourhoods which had already been thoroughly searched for Communards, and thereby ‘slipping through the mesh of the net’. He eventually managed to escape Paris, reaching Zurich in 1872.
⁶⁶

In Versailles, Henri Vignon, who had remained in the old capital of the Bourbon monarchy during most of the Commune, watched convoy after convoy of prisoners arrive from the capital. Each time that one or two tried to escape, they were gunned down. Armed with a pass from Versailles, Henri went into Paris and reported to his mother that their building had escaped harm. When Henri saw Paris burning, he added ‘certainly death is not too much for these
misérables
’.
⁶⁷
Such a view became prevalent among the
honnêtes gens.
Communards could expect no sympathy from people whose hatred of them was unrestrained.

CHAPTER
10

Prisoners of Versailles

V
ERSAILLAIS REPRISALS CONTINUED LONG AFTER THE LAST
C
OMMUNARD
defences fell. Adolphe Thiers’s army had taken thousands of prisoners during the long Bloody Week, most of whom were marched to Versailles for court-martial. The question now was what their fate would be; that is, those prisoners who survived the reprisals. Indeed, at least 1,900 people were gunned down on Sunday alone.

An Englishman present would never forget ‘the angry ring of the volleys of execution; the strings of men and women hurried off to their doom; the curses of an infuriated populace; the brutal violence of an exasperated soldiery’. The anxious visitor saw a man supposedly caught with combustible items in his pockets being pushed along by soldiers with bayonets that had just stabbed him. Behind the soldiers and their victim a small crowd of Parisians followed in the hope of seeing him shot, which they ‘loudly’ demanded. The Englishman had every reason to believe that ‘the bitterness of the belligerents against each other is of a far more intense and sanguinary kind than that which ordinarily exists between combatants’.

As the prisoners were marched along, tied together by rope, their ‘hang-dog look’ was evident. Among them was a thin person in a National Guard uniform, ‘long, fair hair floating over the shoulders, a bright blue eye, and a handsome, bold, young face that seemed to know neither shame nor fear’. A crowd ‘howled and hooted at them’. When the women in the crowd suddenly realised that the youthful national guardsman was really female, they shouted abuse. Their target glared ‘right and left with heightened colour and flashing eyes, in marked contrast to the cowardly crew that followed her’. At a bridge not far from place Vendôme, where thirteen
women had supposedly been killed when ‘caught in the act of spreading petroleum’, the Englishman came upon twenty-four insurgent corpses, ‘laid out in a row, waiting to be buried under the neighbouring paving stones’, with the ‘gaunt shell’ of the Tuileries looming above.
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The Englishman reflected that ‘the rebels’ had neither asked nor been given quarter. They had ‘made up their minds that death, whether as combatants or as prisoners, is their only alternative, and men and women seem to be lashed up to a frenzy which has converted them into a set of wild beasts caught in a trap’. This, in his view, ‘render[ed] their extermination a necessity’.

The Englishman made his way to the neighbourhoods between Père Lachaise cemetery and Montmartre. In such places ‘it was evident from the looks and tone of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood that their sympathies were strongly with the Commune. They muttered gloomily and savagely to each other, scarcely daring to raise their suspicious glances from the ground, for they knew not which of their neighbours might have denounced them.’ Indeed, it was sad to see children among the groups of prisoners being taken away. He managed to obtain access to the court-martial, where he found a dozen prisoners, all male, ‘cowering at one end of the corridor … waiting to know their fate’. Prisoners were marched down from Buttes-Chaumont, where they had been held two days without food. The Englishman was not exactly sympathetic. They were so common: ‘A more villainous collection of faces I never beheld. There were many women, among them some in men’s clothes, some dressed as
cantinières
or
ambulancières
, and very young boys and old men.’

As executions went on, the Englishman changed his tune: ‘It sounds like trifling for M. Thiers to be denouncing the Insurgents for having shot a captive officer “without respect for the laws of war”. The laws of war! They are mild and Christian compared with the inhuman laws of revenge under which the Versailles troops have been shooting, bayoneting, ripping up prisoners, women and children, during the last six days … So far as we can recollect there has been nothing like it in history.’
²

Up in Ménilmontant, stacks of guns stood here and there, along with piles of hastily abandoned National Guard trousers and coats. Soldiers and residents did not speak to each other. The foreigner had been able to obtain a military pass that allowed him to move about as he pleased, and, when people from the neighbourhood saw this, they made him and his companions feel ‘that we were their enemies’. In Belleville, in particular, it was easy to understand ‘the scowling looks and stifled curses of the men
and women glaring from doorways and windows at the execution of a friend before their eyes’.

When night came, Paris fell dark, in part because of the lack of gas. In the poorer neighbourhoods, people stayed at home for fear of being arrested because of how they looked. Several Versaillais roughed up the Englishman after someone claimed that he had shot at someone. Such a vague denunciation could have cost him his life, but he was undoubtedly saved by his upper-class appearance at a time when clothes told much, and his British accent was impossible to hide. Back in central Paris, he was driven from rue Royale by the stench of rotting, uncounted bodies buried beneath the ruins.
³

John Leighton went out to look at Paris on Sunday and came upon ‘corpses in the streets, corpses within the houses, corpses everywhere!’ He believed those who had been killed were ‘terribly guilty … [and] horrible criminals, those women who poured brandy into the glasses and petroleum on the houses! … [But] were those that were shot all guilty? Then the sight of these executions, however merited, was cruelly painful. The innocent shuddered at the doom of justice … An unsupportable uneasiness oppresses us.’
⁴

The streets and gutters ran red with blood. Soldiers forced residents to throw chlorine on corpses, making streets appear covered with snow. Thousands of bodies had already been tossed into mass graves or taken to the Carrières (quarries) de l’Amérique, buried in the catacombs or beyond the ramparts. The remaining bodies may have been left there intentionally, at Thiers’s orders, so as to show ordinary people the cost of their defiance.

Count Arthur de Grandeffe, who had served in the Volunteers of the Seine, passed a Communard medical facility that day. Despite his hatred of the Commune, he asked if a priest could be found to give last rites to two men who were dying, and was told that in the neighbourhood ‘there was little contact with those people’. But he insisted and a priest was indeed found. As he approached the two men, one gave the priest ‘the look of a wounded viper still looking for a way to bite you’. Both had in their eyes ‘the seeds of Hell’. Grandeffe’s sympathy for the dying Communards was limited, and he concluded that what he had seen could be blamed on ‘modern education’. He believed that the time had come to enlighten Parisians on the dangers that would lie ahead if they rose up again. Summary executions, Grandeffe decided, were a good start.
⁵

Even Edmond Goncourt was unprepared for what he saw. Nearing Châtelet, suddenly he saw ‘the crowd head over heels in flight like a mob being charged on a day of a riot. Horsemen appear, threatening, swords in
hand, rearing up their horses and forcing the promenaders from the street to the pavements.’ The soldiers were pushing along a bearded man whose forehead was bound by a handkerchief. Another in a state of collapse was practically carried along by two others. One had ‘a special pallor and a vague look which remains in my memory. I hear a woman shout as she takes herself off: “How sorry I am I came this far!” Next to me a placid bourgeois is counting: “One, two, three …” There were twenty-six. Their armed escort marches them rapidly into the Lobau Barracks, where the gate closes after them with a strange violence and precipitation.’

Goncourt still did not understand, but felt ‘an indefinable anxiety. My bourgeois companion, who had just been counting them, then says to a neighbour: “It won’t be long, you’ll soon hear the first volley.” “What volley?” “Why, they’re going to shoot them!”’ Immediately there was a violent explosion within the closed gates and walls, followed by ‘a fusillade having something of the mechanical regularity of a machine gun. There is a first, a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth murderous
rrarra
– then a long interval – and then a sixth, and still two more volleys, one right after the other.’

The shooting seemed to go on forever. When it finally stopped, ‘everybody feels relieved and is beginning to breathe when there is a shattering sound which makes the sprung door of the barracks move on its hinges; then another; then finally the last’. These were the
coups de grâce
finishing off those who were still alive: ‘At that moment, like a band of drunken men, the execution squad comes out of the door with blood on the end of some of their bayonets. And while two closed vans go into the courtyard a priest slips out, and for a long time you see his thin back, his umbrella, his legs walking unsteadily along the outer wall of the barracks.’
⁶

Paris was now placed under military rule and divided into four sections commanded by Joseph Vinoy, Ernest de Cissey, Paul de Ladmirault and Félix Douay. Searches of houses, often sparked by denunciations, continued unabated. And as Marc-André Gromier, a journalist, put it, at this time ‘each denunciation was a decree of death’. The red flags were gone. The tricolour flag had become the ‘flag of massacre’. On Monday, the fort of Vincennes surrendered, Prussian troops having isolated it from Paris. Versaillais forces promised to spare the lives of Communard fighters there, then shot nine officers, tossing their bodies into the enormous moat.
⁷

The convoys of prisoners being taken to Versailles grew longer. Gromier was arrested at 5.00 a.m. on Sunday and thrown into the basement in a barracks on rue du faubourg Poissonnière, not far from his
home. As it was for so many others, the trip there was brutal. Angry shouts and rocks greeted them and ‘a dog … dressed as a prostitute, tried to strike me with the end of her umbrella’. When several onlookers from his
quartier
saluted him, others jumped them, fists flying. A soldier took care to crush Gromier’s hat with his rifle. In the barracks, there were already about 500 men, women and children, some dead, others dying, including a man missing both legs. He saw a boy of about fifteen tied by rope to window bars. A Versaillais asked Gromier if he knew him. Before he could answer, the boy cried out that he did not know him, for he lived in the
quartier
of Clignancourt. Soldiers stabbed the boy repeatedly with bayonets.

Gromier and a convoy of twenty-six other prisoners then marched under heavy guard to Parc Monceau, starving and thirsty. Gromier saw a former surgeon in his National Guard battalion, now resplendent wearing a tricolour armband. The next trek was to Versailles. At pont Saint-Cloud, a women fell and was shot. Three older men said they could go no further, and were hit with rifles, then pushed off to the side and shot. Another five men and a woman were killed along the way. Gromier had no idea why. In Versailles, two little girls, three women and an old man were taken from the convoy. They too were probably shot. Finally, after a forced march of many hours, Gromier and the others reached Satory, a Versaillais prison area on the plateau of the same name, where they saw a machine gun ready to function. They could see two huge ditches, one full of bodies, the other a latrine. Troops occasionally fired at groups of prisoners. Not far away, ‘an intermittent fusillade. Those who protested in any way: shot. Those who demanded to be able to go to the toilet: shot. Those who a fever had made crazy: shot.’ On 6–7 June, seven out of the twenty-seven in Gromier’s group would be killed. Each morning, bodies were taken away. Some prisoners were shot if the guards did not like their responses when asked their names, or if they refused at first to give up personal items, which they feared, with good reason, would be stolen. One evening, Gromier was taken to an improvised court-martial in Versailles. He received six months in prison but at least was alive.
⁸

Another young Englishman was very lucky to escape the Versaillais rampage. In the wrong place at the wrong time, he found himself taken prisoner in a roundup. From some direction came the sound of shooting, ‘and then a whisper went around, “They’re going to shoot us all!”’ He would never forget ‘the agonised look on the faces of some … It was a complete index of what was passing in their minds. To die thus, and leave wife, children, parents, brothers, or sister, without one word of
farewell … is fearful … Soon it will be over. A rifle shot and that’s it!’ A boy of fifteen had with him documents that he said would prove his innocence. A Versaillais officer hit him: ‘Shut up, bastard!’ In contrast, a boy of about nine years ‘never uttered a word of complaint’. He took the young Englishman’s hand ‘and from that time till the close of that terrible day we marched hand in hand, he never relaxing his grasp except when absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, the executions went on.’ The convoy marched to the Church of the Madeleine and down rue Royale to place de la Concorde and up Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. The sun beat down, and the captives were given nothing to eat or drink.
⁹