Massacre (45 page)

Little more than two months earlier, line troops taken prisoner by the insurgents on Montmartre had been well treated. Now, thousands of Communards taken prisoner by the Versaillais were gunned down. A few men were shot because they had the misfortune of somewhat resembling a prominent figure from the Commune. Such was the case of a shoemaker called Constant who lived in the bourgeois
quartier
of Gros-Caillou in the Seventh Arrondissement. He resembled the painter Alfred-Édouard Billioray, a member of the Commune. A certain Martin, taken to be Jules Vallès, was killed near Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, while a crowd roared its approval.
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The Versaillais discourse openly encouraged the policy of killing Communards, comparing the insurgents and those who supported them with brigands or wild animals, thus dehumanising them and justifying mass executions. Watching the lugubrious procession of prisoners on the way to Versailles, Augustine Blanchecotte castigated ‘these wild beasts, savage, raging … these are monsters who should be classified by zoologists. These are not men.’ According to
Figaro
, ‘One cannot have any
illusions. More than 50,000 insurgents remain in Paris … What is a republican? A wild animal.’
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Théophile Gautier agreed: ‘In all the great cities there are lion pits, caverns closed with thick bars where all the wild beasts, smelly animals, venomous snakes and all the perverted resisters who civilisation could not tame are to be found; those who love blood and adore fire as one does holiday fireworks, all those delighted by theft, those for whom attacks on decency represent love, all those who are monsters to the core, all those with deformities of the soul, a filthy population, unknown to this day, who swarm ominously in the depths of underground darkness.’ One day, he went on, a guard loses the keys to the zoo ‘and the ferocious animals scatter throughout the terrified city with terrifying savage shrieks. Their cages now open, the hyenas of 1793 and the gorillas of the Commune rush out.’
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Female Communard prisoners resembled, for Gaultier, ‘the bearded and moustached sorcerers of Shakespeare, a hideous variety of hermaphrodite, formed by ugliness drawn from both sexes’. He mocked ‘the horrible, inextinguishable, burning thirst of these scoundrels, infected by alcohol, combat, their journey, intense heat, the fever of intense situations and the torment of their coming death … crying out with husky and hoarse voices now lubricated only by saliva: “Water! Water! Water!”’
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Henri Opper de Blowitz, a German journalist who after becoming naturalised worked for Thiers, visited a Versailles prison during the Commune. He became obsessed with a young woman he observed from a safe distance beyond the fence, describing what he saw as if he had returned from visiting a zoo. She was ‘one of the most beautiful women’ he had ever beheld: ‘Her long black tresses fell over her bare shoulders, and as she had torn her dress to shreds, not to wear the clothes of the ‘accursed Versaillaise’, one could see her naked body through the rents. She was tall and graceful, and on the approach of visitors she reared her head proudly, like a horse about to neigh … her bright eyes glisten[ed]; a blush teint took over her face. She compressed her lips, ground her teeth, and burst into a shrill, defiant, vindictive laugh when she recognised the officer of the prison who accompanied us.’ In the final hours of the Commune, the young woman had apparently fought alongside her lover. When he was killed, or so the Versaillais story went, she attacked a Versaillais officer and ‘furiously stabbed him, plunging her weapon again and again into her victim. Before she could be removed from his body, she had cut, bitten and torn it with all the fury of a hyena.’ The young woman had been taken to Versailles covered with blood and ‘she had to be bound and gagged before she would allow the blood to be washed off. Hideous!’
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Maxime Du Camp, writer and friend of Gustave Flaubert, nuanced this biological discourse. The Commune, he explained, had been caused by ‘furious envy and social epilepsy’. It reflected conditions that had always existed, ‘a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil, civilisation and barbarism, order against anarchy, and intelligence opposed to stupidity … work and finally the very idea of the elite of society against the jumble of all that is evil, perverse and bestial’.

Women were particularly suspect in these accounts.
Le Gaulois
quoted a doctor, who insisted that the female incendiaries were acting: ‘under the epidemic influence of the incendiary mania … their brain is weaker and their sensibility more lively. They also are one hundred times more dangerous, and they have caused without any doubt much more evil.’ Some accounts emphasised that ‘female incendiaries’, as well as other female insurgents, wore men’s clothing, such as parts of National Guard uniforms. The point of such descriptions was to point out how unnatural, and thus subversive, they appeared to them.
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A bourgeois who visited the Chantiers prison distinguished between women who had ‘an honest and proper appearance’ and others whose rags and wild hair were taken to indicate ‘their moral state and social position’. Journalists and curious bourgeois seemed obsessed with the physical appearance of women, particularly when it came to unflattering characteristics.
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Louise Lacroix stared at the female prisoners. Some, who were clearly workers, ‘dressed modestly’, and some very young ones who had probably spent their childhoods in workshops or factories seemed old before their time. In her view, these were not the women ‘who would be going out preaching insanities on the rights of women’. At the head of this particular group strode ‘a large creature, about forty or forty-five years of age, with two large headbands’. To the hostile onlooker, the woman seemed more masculine than feminine, with robust arms. Next to her was a small, pale, blonde woman, about eighteen to twenty years of age, ‘slender, gracious’ in a skirt of grey silk who had to walk rapidly to keep up. On her right cheek, black gunpowder and strands of hair partially covered a smear of blood. Lacroix had certainly never before seen ‘women marching with such determination towards certain death’. A tall brown-haired woman raised her arms above her head and shouted in a voice both calm and convincing, ‘They killed my man and I avenged him. I die content. Long live the Commune!’
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The widespread belief among the Versaillais that the Commune had in part been the work of ‘uppity’ and ‘unnatural’ women may help explain the
brutal treatment some women faced after being arrested. Rapes were reported in the First, Eighth and Ninth Arrondissements. Georges Jeanneret saw women ‘being treated almost like the poor Arabs of an insurgent tribe: after they had killed them, they stripped them, while they were still in their death throes, of part of their clothing. Sometimes they went even further, as at the foot of the faubourg Montmartre and in the place Vendôme, where women were left naked and defiled on the pavements.’ Versaillais soldiers ripped away the blouses of women and corpses to reveal their breasts, to the amusement of hostile onlookers. In one instance, troops killed with bayonets a young woman about eighteen to twenty years of age, then they removed all her clothes, ‘cynically tossing her beautiful body, still throbbing, in the corner of the street, after having odiously insulted all of her charms’.
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Undressing served as the kind of humiliation some believed was required to put things back in their proper order. The fury of upper-class onlookers, particularly women, towards women assumed to be female insurgents reflected a desire to point out the potential danger of women forgetting their place.

Versaillais newspapers shouted for more vengeance to clean the contagious Communard stain from the city.
Le Figaro
demanded a complete purge of Paris: ‘Never has such an opportunity presented itself to cure Paris of the moral gangrene which has eaten away at it for the last twenty years … Today clemency would be completely crazy … Let’s go,
honnêtes gens
! Help us finish with the democratic and socialist vermin.’ Goncourt compared the repression to a therapeutic bloodletting.
Le Bien public
called for a ‘hunt for the Communards’, and that was what it got. The
Journal des Débats
reasoned that the army had now ‘avenged its incalculable disasters [in the Franco-Prussian War] by a victory’.
Le Figaro
saluted the ‘General enterprise of sweeping Paris clean’. All the guilty ‘should be executed’. Similar calls came from overseas. The
New York Herald
advised ‘no cessation of summary judgment and summary execution … Root them out, destroy them utterly, M. Thiers, if you would save France. No mistaken humanity.’
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The goal now was to protect and restore Paris so that it might once again be deserving of the
honnêtes gens
who had once flourished there. ‘Honesty’ became the word of the day.
La Patrie
, for one, made it clear that if Paris ‘wants to conserve its privilege of being the rendez-vous of the honest and fashionable
beau monde
, it owes it to itself and to its invited visitors a security that nothing can trouble … Examples are indispensable, a fatal necessity, but a necessity.’ Marshal Patrice MacMahon pointed out that, now that the Commune had been crushed, he could finally ‘address
[himself] to the honest population of Paris’, by which he meant the upper classes on whose behalf Versaillais forces were carrying out the massacre.
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Those who had supported the Commune had no illusions about Paris’s future, knowing full well that Thiers, along with his army and his government, would purge the city of any traces of the Commune or its ideals. When Henri Rochefort arrived in a convoy of prisoners in Versailles, a man ‘in a cinnamon coloured frock coat … waving a beautiful red umbrella, shouted at the top of his lungs: “It’s Rochefort! He must be skinned alive!”’ Rochefort had to stifle a laugh – the man was indeed ‘the type of ferocious bourgeois such as Daumier painted for us’. Jules Simon identified civilisation with the power of the bourgeoisie: ‘One overturns aristocracy, which is a privilege … One does not overturn the bourgeoisie, one attains it.’ Pierre Vésinier, a journalist and Communard who survived, assessed: ‘The victorious bourgeoisie showed neither pity nor mercy. It had sworn to annihilate the revolutionary and socialist proletariat for ever – to drown it in its own blood. Never had a better occasion presented itself; and it profited by it with ferocious joy.’

It was clear, too, that Thiers’s bloody repression was not only intended to destroy the Commune, but was also meant to prevent the possibility of any future revolution in France. On 31 May, Goncourt concluded: ‘It is good that there was neither conciliation nor bargain. The solution was brutal. It was by pure force … The solution has restored confidence to the army, which learned in the blood of the Communards that it was still able to fight. Finally, the bloodletting was a bleeding white; such a purge, by killing off the combative part of the population, defers the next revolution by a whole generation.’
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For his part, Jules Ferry was not shocked by ‘the reprisals taken by vengeful soldiers, the peasant in good order dishing out punishment … I saw these things and accepted them as if I beheld the sword of the Archangel at work.’ The journalist Francisque Sarcey insisted that no compromise was possible: ‘If the scaffold is ever to be done away with, it should be kept for those who build barricades.’ The
hônnetes gens
counted on the
conseils de guerre
to finish the work.

The murderous discourse of ‘delivered’ elites during and after Bloody Week propunded the belief that the march of Versaillais ‘justice’ following ‘the red orgy’ would ‘purify’ French society – a concept, of course, with considerable bloody resonance in the twentieth century. After Bloody Week, the
hônnetes gens
were willing to go to great lengths to purify the city, even if it meant even more mass executions. Sébastien Commissaire remembered hearing groups talking on boulevards Montmartre and des
Italiens: ‘The capital must be purged. Paris needs a good bleeding. We have to get rid of 50,000 men … There are some who say 100,000.’ A policeman in Auteuil did not mince words either: ‘the soldiers of Versailles are saying … that they will spare no one, not women, not children, not old people, given that they are nothing more than Parisian scum and that France must get rid of them’.
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Some elites were even willing to destroy Paris itself – in order to save it, of course. Louis Enault, obsessed with the fires that had devastated parts of Paris, took the image of purification through fire to justify the repression: ‘They say that flames purify! Oh! If this is the case, on the funerary pyre of Paris, let’s throw all those who have cost us, all those among us who are scoundrels and evil, and all those who have brought about this dire debasement of our national character! Yes! … and then we will soon see our France, just like the phoenix of the old fable, be reborn out of the ashes that will still be warm.’
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Enault and others imagined that the restored Paris would be much like the one that had existed before the Commune, with the monumental public buildings that had been burnt rebuilt. But Paris would be without any hint of the revolutionary ideas that had given rise to the Commune in the first place. In the name of muscular religion, one could not strike hard enough. Eugène Hennebert, for one, demanded the banning of ‘this unhealthy literature that begins with
Les Misérables
of Monsieur Hugo’. Theatres where performances ‘fall into the mud’ should be shut down, as well as ‘innumerable cafés, drinking places or shady bars that have given us the reputation as a people of drunks and imbeciles’. ‘Triumphant’ atheism had to be destroyed, too, and religion would be the order of the day once more. In other words, as Élie Reclus noted wryly, ‘order, family, property again reign’ – and would for the foreseeable future.
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CHAPTER
11