Massacre (46 page)

Remembering

Little by little, Paris returned to normal, at least for people of means. The Parisian upper classes returned in style to proudly stroll the grand boulevards of their capital, thrilled with the victory of Versailles. A journalist described the scene on 28 May: ‘Along the towing path along the Seine fifty bodies of insurgents were stretched out.’ Workers were digging through the pavement to bury them, while ‘a large crowd looked on indifferently’ including ‘young, elegant and radiant girls showing off their springtime umbrellas in the sunshine’. For them, the good life began again. Yet, with decomposing bodies still strewn about, calls for getting rid of the remaining corpses in the streets of Paris came fast and furious. One could not have ‘these scoundrels who have done so much evil’ cause more harm after their death.
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Such a sight could keep tourists away. The gates of the city were reopened on 6 June, although police inspected the papers of all travellers. Barricades slowly disappeared as shops reopened. Pavements that had been covered with bodies and blood were cleared and cleaned.

Yet Paris was a city in ruins, the result of Versaillais shelling and seven days of pitched battles, however one-sided. Only gutted shells of the Tuileries Palace, the Ministry of Finance and the Hôtel de Ville remained. Other monumental buildings such as Palais-Royal, the Palace of Justice, and the Louvre had been badly damaged, the Grenier de l’Abondance and the docks of La Villette destroyed. Along the Champs-Elysées and in
other parts of western Paris, hundreds of houses were in ruins. The rue Royale, rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré, rue de Bac and rue de Lille were lined with burnt-out buildings, as were considerably less fancy streets in Montmartre and Belleville. Countless buildings still standing intact had been riddled with shells and bullets. The shattered remnants of the Victory Column still stretched across place Vendôme. Rubble from barricades lay about most everywhere in central and eastern Paris, particularly Montmartre and Belleville. The City of Light had become the City of Blood, innumerable traces of which could not be easily effaced. However, almost immediately following the fall of the Commune, Thomas Cook in London organised trips to view the ruins of the French capital. Tourists could again ‘circulate joyously in the elegant Paris of pleasures’.
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The Commune had been crushed, but public mourning for its bloody demise never occurred.
Te Deums
echoed in the churches of Paris, not for the thousands of dead Parisians, but for the city’s archbishop. Georges Darboy’s body was exhibited in the chapel of the archbishop’s palace for ten days, while streams of well-heeled Parisians passed by. Arriving at the Gare de Montparnasse for the funeral on 7 June, Vicomte Camille de Meaux, a member of the National Assembly, came upon yet another convoy of prisoners being taken to Versailles. He would never forget the angry, proud looks directed at those observing them, expressing a confidence that revenge would one day come. Even around Notre-Dame, the population seemed hostile. Meaux expressed surprise that anti-Communards were not greeted as liberators.
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The oration by the priest Adolphe Perraud would have seemed strange to the late archbishop, describing the ‘Holy Martyr of la Roquette’ as the most ‘universally loved archbishop who ever served in Paris’. In fact, as the eulogy noted, Darboy had endured the constant opposition of those Perraud referred to as ‘demagogues, Legitimists, ultra-papists’. Once he had been buried in Notre-Dame in all solemnity, attacks on Archbishop Darboy by Ultramontanes, those unconditionally loyal to the Vatican and thus determined enemies of French Gallicans, began again.
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Karl Marx was among those to insist that Adolphe Thiers was ‘the real murderer of Archbishop Darboy’. The head of the Versailles government may well have assumed that the Communards would not dare shoot the archbishop, but he had been willing to take that risk. If anything, the execution of Darboy strengthened Thiers’s position in orchestrating a vigorous repression. Wickham Hoffman, American Ambassador Elijah B.
Washburne’s assistant, concluded that, if Darboy had not been a Gallican, the extreme Right of the Assembly would ‘have exerted themselves that his life would have been saved’.
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The Catholic Church wasted no time in trying to reassert itself in France after the Commune, using Darboy’s death to promote a more conservative brand of Catholicism. On 18 June, Pius IX denounced Catholic liberalism, after evoking the martyrdom of Georges Darboy at the hands of ‘the Commune and its men escaped from Hell’. Masses were celebrated as an expiation or even exorcism of the Communards. A marble plaque went up at La Roquette in honour of Darboy and the other hostages killed there; the following year a pilgrimage was made to the place on rue Haxo where other hostages had been killed, a church also soon being built there.
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In 1875, the Church began constructing a more permanent monument: the basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre, near the spot where Eugène Varlin was battered and then shot to death. It stood as a symbol of penance – for France must have sinned to have suffered such a crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and then an uprising by its own people. Sacré-Coeur represented the close ties between the Church, which still anticipated a monarchical restoration, and the conservative Republic that followed the Commune’s defeat. It became an object of passionate hatred to men and women of the political left.
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The Church, ironically, lost even more ground with ordinary people, who did not fill the pews of the new houses of worship being built in working-class districts on the margins of urban life.

The Ministry of War disbanded the Volunteers of the Seine, who had returned to Versailles. But first they were celebrated for their service: a banquet and a triumphant review at Longchamps on 29 June in the presence of Thiers, still carrying the title of ‘chief of executive power of the French Republic’, marked the end of the force. Albert Hans proudly believed that he and his colleagues had done their duty ‘under the eyes of an enemy which watched us agonise with a cruel joy’. The Volunteers’ losses had amounted to a few killed, including Gustave Durieu, the murderous battalion commander, with about another ten wounded.
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Hans had been eager for war against the Prussians and confident of a French victory. Now, in the wake of the Commune, he promised to fight again ‘for the national and conservative cause’ against ‘the turbulent masses’ if revolutionaries dared rise up again. He would eagerly await the day when Metz could be retaken from ‘our implacable enemies’ across the
Rhine. The victory of the Versailles forces, he believed, had restored ‘our national dignity’. For Hans, ‘
la patrie
is divinity’.
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Thiers and the Versaillais were surprised and angered by growing hostile international reaction to the repression. A Geneva newspaper denounced the massacres carried out in Paris. If so many bodies were necessary for ‘the reign of order’, it argued, then ‘the civilised world will collapse even more rapidly’. Other foreign newspapers began to describe Parisian workers as ‘martyrs’. In London,
The Times
, kept well informed throughout by its correspondents in Paris, concluded that ‘the laws of war are soft and Christian when compared with the inhuman laws of vengeance by which the soldiers of Versailles shot, stabbed with bayonets, and ripped open the bodies of men, women and children taken prisoner over the past six days. History has never seen anything like this before.’
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Executions continued at least until 7 June in Satory, the Bois-de-Boulogne and the prison of Cherche-Midi. In Père Lachaise, workers rushed to clean up, carrying away debris and signs of what had happened, but there were so many corpses they could only pile them up. Bodies had to be taken from the streets, however much Thiers might have preferred that they remain there as a warning, rather like the gallows that stood near Russian manor houses in the age of serfdom. In the Palais-Royal, bodies of women remained for days in the garden and under the arches of the structure. Decomposing corpses created a horrendous stench that permeated the air.
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The Versaillais attempted to cover up some mass graves to make it appear that fewer Communards had died. A Parisian newspaper published an official decree forbidding people from going into the Bois-de-Boulogne because there the killing went on. The notice ended with: ‘Whenever the number of condemned exceeds ten men, the execution squad will be replaced by a machine gun’ in the interest of efficiency. On 16 June, the
Journel Officiel
announced that any newspaper that republished the chilling decree would be prosecuted. But it did not deny its authenticity.
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Thiers, whom Henri Rochefort called a ‘Sanguinary Tom Thumb’, triumphantly wrote to France’s prefects about the Communards, ‘The ground is covered with their cadavers; this awful sight will serve as a lesson.’ Élie Reclus noted that the verb ‘to shoot’ had become ‘the core of our language: “we shoot, he was shot, we will be shot”’. The word had become ‘the great word of order in French society’. The Communards may have been mortal, but their cause was not.
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The Versailles government did not content itself with arresting Communards in Paris. It also sent out orders to departmental prefects calling for the arrest of Communards who had managed to get out of Paris alive. Several
départements
were placed in a state of siege. About 1,500 of those accused of being Communards managed to get to Belgium, many of them ordinary labourers, 2,000–3,000 to Switzerland, about 500 to England, and a few to Spain, the Netherlands or South America. Most would live in abject poverty. Communard leaders were far more likely to escape than the rank and file because of their connections and travel experience. Here, too, the poorest Parisians were at a disadvantage, as they were in the repression and bloodletting. Léo Frankel escaped, thanks to a coach driver who got him out disguised as a cabinetmaker. He and Elizabeth Dmitrieff reached Switzerland disguised as a Prussian couple, as both spoke German well. Returning to Russia, Elizabeth took up the cause of revolution and married the administrator of her legal husband’s estate (her first marriage being one of convenience). When he was arrested and sent to Siberia, she followed him, never learning of her amnesty in 1879 after the Third Republic had been well established. She died in Siberia in 1910.
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The French government even pressured authorities in Britain, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland to arrest and extradite those who had participated in the Commune. From Belgium, Victor Hugo, who had at first been against the Commune, now outraged Thiers and his entourage by attacking the Belgian government for its compliance with Thiers’s directives. He denounced the execution by the Versaillais of Raoul Rigault and others without trial. Expelled from Belgium on 30 May because of his condemnation of its government, Hugo found refuge in the Netherlands.
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In July 1870, Sutter-Laumann’s Communard past began to catch up with him. Technically he was a deserter, at least from the point of view of the Versaillais, because he had fought in the Franco-Prussian War. An officer who had been attached to the
mairie
of the Eighteenth Arrondissement where he had worked took him aside, telling him that it was time for him to leave Paris. The officer wrote a letter recommending him for paid service as a guard on one of the pontoons full of Communard prisoners who had been sentenced to remain in captivity there or be sent to prison in Cayenne or some other distant, tropical place. He went to Cherbourg, ironically guarding some of those with whom he had fought. For the rest of his life, Sutter-Laumann, who became a writer, poet and critic, had nightmares about the horrors of Bloody Week.
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As the Versaillais drew closer and shells began to fall near his atelier, Gustave Courbet had accepted the invitation of Demoiselle Girard, later described by the police as his mistress. She offered the painter a room in her apartment on the third floor at 14, passage du Saumon, and space in her basement for thirty-five paintings. Courbet had incurred great wrath among anti-Communards; newspapers invariably referred to him as ‘the dismantler’ of the Vendôme Column. Eugène Delessert went so far as to say that he wanted to see the painter – ‘this Prussian vandal!’ – shot.
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Police pillaged Courbet’s atelier on rue d’Hautefeuille. The painter had already lost two ateliers, one in Ornans at the time of the Prussian invasion, and another at pont d’Alma. Rumours circulated as to Courbet’s whereabouts.
Paris-Journal
claimed he had been discovered hiding in the ministry of the navy, having stuffed ‘his
grosse personne
’ into a closet, and, when he resisted, a soldier had purportedly blown him apart with a rifle.
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Shortly before Bloody Week began, Courbet, aware that he was a wanted man, made a surprise visit to Arsène Lecomte, who made musical instruments and lived on rue Saint-Gilles in Le Marais. The two men had known each other for twenty years, though not well. Lecomte knew the painter had become involved in politics, but not much about his role in the Commune. The artist said that he feared falling into the hands of the Versaillais and asked if he could stay one night in his apartment while another was being prepared for him near Charenton. Lecomte’s wife did not want him there, but Courbet simply showed up, carrying absolutely nothing with him. He hid there from 23 May to 7 June, when police raided the apartment at night.
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Courbet had cut his hair and shaved off his recognisable beard. A policeman said that his Franc-Comtois accent gave him away. When he was taken to the Palace of Justice, another policeman asked him why he had associated with ‘these bandits’. On 4 July, Courbet was imprisoned in Mazas. The municipal council of Ornans removed a statue he had done from a fountain in the square. One arm had been broken off.
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