The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (61 page)

If there was one issue over which the Communards instinctively and almost unanimously sympathized with Rigault, this was his violent anticlericalism. Left wing Paris had a long tradition of hating and distrusting the Church. At the door of the priesthood it laid the blame for much of the city’s miseries, suspecting it of all manner of medieval malpractices.
²
When the Commune later entered various convents by force, incredible tales were circulated—and eagerly believed—to the
effect that orthopaedic irons found there were in reality instruments of torture; that bones found in the nuns’ burial-vaults were the remains of victims done to death; that mad women had been confined in little boxes. On the bookstalls obscenely irreligious literature, bearing titles such as ‘Confessions of a Breton Seminarist’ or ‘The Revelations of an Ex-Curé’, began to replace scurrility at the expense of the former Empress. One of the Commune’s very first acts had been to decree the disestablishment of the Church, together with the confiscation of its property, and subsequently a number of well-known churches were taken over, to be ‘converted’ into Red Clubs. St.-Nicolas-des-Champs—in which a red sash now adorned the crucifix—became the ‘Club Montparnasse’; while at St.-Eustache Washburne listened to a
tricoteuse
ranting from the pulpit, in favour of the abolition of marriage. Then, on April 4th, Rigault had initiated the deed by which his name will be longest remembered. He arrested the Archbishop of Paris Mgr. Darboy.

With the Archbishop were also arrested his Vicar-General, Abbé Lagarde, and the Empress Eugénie’s confessor, the seventy-five-year-old Abbé Deguerry of the Madeleine, who was apparently seized in the act of trying to escape over his garden wall. The arrests were later followed by the wholesale round-up of priests.
¹
Between a Jesuit and the atheistic Rigault, acting as interrogator, a famous interview took place:

Rigault
. What is your profession?

Priest
. Servant of God.

Rigault
. Where does your master live?

Priest
. Everywhere.

Rigault
(to a clerk). Take this down:
X
, describing himself servant of one called God, a vagrant.

An English schoolmaster, Benjamin Wilson, was outraged at witnessing the arrest of one of the unfortunate priests, who, ‘surrounded by half a dozen armed men and followed by a mob of hooting boys, was being taken to Mazas.
²
He was tall and distinguished-looking with an intellectual cast of countenance and he evidently felt the humiliation of his position keenly. His face gave signs of suppressed emotion and was as pale as a sheet of paper. To see one presumably a gentleman and a Christian in the hands of the vilest mob in Europe was enough to set one’s blood boiling. Alighting from the omnibus I inquired of the bystanders what he had done. It was they said “
Une arrestation de prêtre—voilà tout
”’. As the priest was about to disappear through the forbidding gates of the Mazas Prison, Wilson ‘pressed through the crowd and shook him by the hand’; within a matter of minutes he too found himself in custody in the Mazas.

Excuses of varying transparency were given for the arrests. It was said (with complete truth) that the Archbishop was ‘hostile’ to the Commune. It was also claimed that the priests, acting on the Archbishop’s instructions, had offended the Disestablishment Decree of April 2nd by smuggling out to Versailles church valuables which were now the property of the state. Closer to the truth, however, was the intent revealed in one Commune journal: ‘This is a simple security measure taken by the Commune to avert such tragedies as that of which General Duval was the victim.’ The arrests coincided closely with the passage of the ‘Hostages Bill’, which had received strong support from Rigault against the judgement of Delescluze and other Commune principals, and although it was denied that the Archbishop and his brethren had been seized as hostages, the link was unmistakeable. The choice of the ‘hostages’ was emphatically Rigault’s, and while a few Communards bleated feebly at the facility with which Rigault had been permitted to effect the arrests, the great majority in their rabid anticlericalism did not oppose them. But in his choice Rigault had a motive deeper even than mere hatred of the clergy. From the beginning of the insurrection he had believed that, in order to survive, the Commune must, above all else, get hold of Blanqui to lead them. ‘Blanqui’, said da Costa, Rigault’s twenty-one-year-old ‘secretary’, ‘was his constant obsession. Without Blanqui, nothing could be done. With him, everything.’ Blanqui alone could resolve the Commune’s squabbles. And Blanqui languished in one of Thiers’s gaols.

Reckoning upon the impact that news of the Archbishop’s arrest would have on the predominantly Catholic Assembly at Versailles, Rigault dispatched da Costa on April 6th to obtain from the Archbishop and the Abbé Deguerry letters protesting at the summary executions carried out by Vinoy and Gallifet. Ready by the 9th, these were then entrusted to one of the other hostages, Abbé Bertaux, who was given a safe conduct to Versailles, where—having delivered the letters to Thiers in person—he was to offer to trade the Archbishop for Blanqui. It was a ruthless but daring gamble. Thiers, however, would have none of it. The tough old politician later claimed that he had been ‘profoundly moved, and shaken’ by the Archbishop’s letter. But to hand Blanqui over to the Commune was, he calculated, ‘to send it a force equal to an Army Corps’. The deal could not be contemplated.

As the war raged with ever-increasing fury around Paris, accusations of atrocities committed by the Versailles troops provoked repeated demands for the immediate execution, or even handing over to the mob, of the hostages. On April 25th, a Versailles cavalry officer shot down three surrendered National Guardsmen, of whom one survived to tell the tale. The next day there were loud calls for reprisals in the Hôtel de Ville, but moderation triumphed after one member insisted ‘the Commune must live by its acts’. For the time being, the Archbishop seemed safe; and Rigault for one would not allow him to come to harm so long as there seemed the slenderest chance of freeing Blanqui.

* * *

For all the energy and sense Rossel had attempted to inject into the military conduct of the war, things did not go much better under him than they had under Cluseret. On May 4th there was another heated session of the Commune in which personalities and the usual irrelevancies had whittled away the time needed for serious discussion. Once again Pyat had taken the centre of the stage, complaining pathetically that the enemies he had made as a journalist were now sabotaging his work on the Committee of Public Safety. One of the latest of these enemies, the insulted Vermorel, intervened to ask whether Pyat had the right to characterize him a ‘spy’, and so it went on until suddenly the debate was broken up by an emissary of Rossel who burst in to announce the fall of the redoubt of Moulin-Saquet. Lying due south between Villejuif and the Communard-held fort of Bicêtre, the disquieting thing about Moulin-Saquet was more the manner of its taking than its strategic significance. Some 800 National Guards had been caught in their sleep by a surprise attack; 50 were slaughtered on the spot and a further 200 captured, at a cost of 36 casualties to the Versailles forces. There were ugly rumours (never substantiated) that the commander of the 55th Battalion of the National Guard had ‘sold’ the password.

But it was around the crucial position of Fort Issy that the most important fighting continued. In response to Colonel Leperche’s call to the fort to surrender, Rossel, on taking over from Cluseret, had sent back the following message:

My dear Comrade,

The next time you send a summons so insolent as that contained in your yesterday’s letter I shall have the man who brings it shot, according to the usages of war.

Your devoted comrade,
Rossel.

More than any other factor, Rossel’s riposte was destined to bring him before the firing-squad when Versailles had its day of reckoning; but, for the present, there was no doubt that this display of spirit, coupled with his reforms, was bearing fruit. At Issy, the National Guards were fighting better than they ever had. There were bitter odds against them. On the night of May 1st, Government Marines and
Chasseurs
had seized Clamart railway station—little more than 300 yards distant on the fort’s left flank. The Communards, rallied and driven on by Louise Michel, recaptured it, then lost it again. All the time Fort Issy was subjected to a bombardment resembling something out of 1916; it was, claimed survivors, far more intense than any artillery fire brought to bear upon the Prussians during the Siege. One by one the fort’s guns were knocked out by the Versailles fire; its prison was said to be packed with more than three hundred corpses, piled six feet high; there were no doctors and provisions were running out. In Paris, Goncourt watched troops relieved from Issy re-enter the city, ‘preceded by cheerful bands and a show of gaiety which formed a contrast with the pitiful appearance of the men, and the exhaustion with which they marched…. Behind follow two vehicles full of rifles. It was said in the crowd that these are the weapons of the dead and the wounded….’

In his diary, one of the fort’s officers wrote:

May 5th. The enemy’s fire does not cease for a minute; our embrasures no longer exist…. Rossel has been. He studied for a long time the Versailles siegeworks. The
Enfants Perdus
serving the guns at Bastion 5 have lost a lot of people; they remain solidly at their posts…. All our trenches, smashed in by the artillery, have been evacuated. The Versailles parallel is within 60 metres of the counter-escarpment. They are advancing closer and closer.

May 6th. The battery at Fleury is sending us regularly six shots every five minutes. They have just brought into the first-aid post a
cantinière
who has been hit by a bullet in the left side of the groin. For four days there are three women who go under the most severe fire to succour the wounded. Now this one is dying and begs us to look after her two small children. There is no more food. We are eating nothing but horse. This evening, the rampart became untenable….

May 7th. We are now receiving up to ten shells a minute. The ramparts are completely uncovered…. With the exception of one or two, all the guns have been knocked out. The Versailles earthworks are now almost touching us…. We are on the point of being surrounded.

Disgracefully, Eudes, the nominal commander at Issy, had found an excuse to pull out, leaving his deputies to bear the brunt. On one visit to the fort Rossel was astonished to run into Dombrowski, his Right
Bank commander. Unbeknown to Rossel, Dombrowski ‘had just received from the Committee of Public Safety an order investing him with the command of all the active forces, but leaving me the Ministry of War’. Rossel was exasperated by this further display of order and counter-order on the part of the Commune, but he and Dombrowksi—who were on the best of terms—concluded their own private arrangement, regardless of Pyat and his colleagues. On May 7th the battle had reached a point where, declared Rossel, ‘there was only one chance left of improving the position of military affairs, which was becoming very threatening, and that was suddenly to take the offensive, with the troops just as they were, to interrupt the progress of the attack by inspiring the enemy with serious anxiety’. But when that night Rossel arrived at the front to supervise the offensive, the troops were not assembled; whilst one battalion was arriving, another disappeared.

In a fury, Rossel personally punished a number of National Guards who had deserted their posts, by cutting off their right sleeves, ‘commencing with the officers. They were all sobbing, and the guard which surrounded them was, perhaps, more affected than it would have been for a capital execution.’ His action was bitterly resented, and may well have played some part in the reneguing, the next day, of a number of battalion commanders who had promised to furnish troops for Rossel’s offensive (they included the unfortunate Bergeret, now returned to duty after a spell in the cells). This was the last straw for Rossel. After writing out a final fiery order to the effect that ‘deserters and those hanging back at the rear will be sabred by the cavalry; if numerous, they will be cannonaded’, on May 8th he dictated his resignation as Minister of War:

Citizen members of the Commune, I feel myself incapable of continuing to bear the responsibility of a command which everyone discusses and no one obeys…. The Commune discusses, and has resolved nothing…. The Comité Central discusses and has not yet been able to act. During this delay the enemy was surrounding Fort Issy by adventurous and imprudent attacks for which I should punish him had I the least military force at my disposal…. The nullity of the Artillery Committee prevented the organization of the artillery; the hesitations of the Central Committee hinder the administration; the petty preoccupations of the Battalion Commanders paralyse the mobilization of troops. My predecessor made the mistake of striving against this absurd situation.… I am withdrawing, and I have the honour to request from you a cell in the Mazas.

That same day, from Versailles, Thiers issued a proclamation to the Parisians warning them of the opening of the general attack on the city: ‘The moment has now come when, to shorten your sufferings, [the Versailles Army] must attack the fortifications themselves. It will not’, he added in an aside hardly designed to impress the residents of the Passy or Étoile districts, ‘bombard Paris’. Commenting on the proclamation, Colonel Stanley wrote, ‘I am sick of the useless slaughter, poor misguided wretches, and by tonight’s paper, Versailles seems to be really in earnest….’ That this was so was at once proved by a vast intensification of shellfire all the way from Meudon to Issy, put up by over eighty heavy guns.