The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (68 page)

At about 3 o’clock that morning, Ladmirault had opened another long flanking operation, moving along the inside of the city ramparts to take from the rear all the gates as far as the Porte de St.-Ouen.
Reaching the Porte de Clignancourt at the northernmost point of Paris, he wheeled right to face Montmartre from the north-east. At the same time, Clinchant moved frontally on Montmartre by smashing through the barricades at the Batignolles. Soon his troops had reached the Place Clichy, while Ladmirault’s right wing occupied the Montmartre cemetery; thus confronting the Commune’s most imposing fortress with an assault on three sides. As the Government troops moved beyond the Batignolles, a personal tragedy was recorded that was perhaps typical of what was being suffered wherever civilians found themselves caught between two fires. Just off the Boulevard Péreire lived a couple, M. and Mme Paris, who—according to their colleague, the Rev. Gibson—had been noted for their work of evangelization among the rag-pickers in this part of Paris. Throughout Monday fighting had raged about their house, dead and wounded had fallen all around them, and it was with immense relief that Mme Paris awoke the following morning to see the barricades outside abandoned. ‘In her joy of seeing the fighting finished in our quarter’, recorded the husband, ‘she woke me up to come and watch the arrival of the soldiers who were taking possession of the station [Batignolles]. Everybody was at their window…. Unfortunately my brother-in-law, goaded by a fatal curiosity approached from the left side and lifted a corner of the curtain; at the same instant there was a rifle shot and hit in the lower stomach he fell backwards into the room.’ Passing through his body, the same bullet then went on to kill Mme Paris too, who happened to enter the room at that moment carrying a cup of chocolate.

Benoît Malon, having conducted a vigorous rearguard action in the Batignolles, now found himself all but encircled in the Mairie of the 17th. Slipping through the
Versaillais
cordon, he managed to fall back on Montmartre, where he was greeted by a dismal spectacle of discouragement, half-completed barricades and unserviceable guns. Many of the defenders had faded away during the night, leaving only a hundred or so to man the defences on the northern slopes upon which Ladmirault was advancing with more than a division. About the only Communard detachment which showed spirit was a squad of twenty-five women from the Women’s Battalion, headed by the redoubtable Louise Michel. Back along the Boulevard de Clichy they fought from barricade to barricade; past the Place Blanche, past the site of some of the more sordid night-haunts of modern Paris, back to the Place Pigalle, where most of them were forced to surrender. By this time only about fifteen of the women were left, including Louise Michel and Elizabeth Dimitrieff. Louise had orders to blow up, if necessary, the Butte-Montmartre. But it was too late. Near the Boulevard Barbés
she met Dombrowski, falling back from Clignancourt, at about 2 o’clock that afternoon. ‘We are lost!’ he told her, and a few seconds later he fell mortally wounded in the Rue Myrha. As the Polish exile’s body was carried back to the Hôtel de Ville, men at the barricades presented arms with un-Communard precision.

Up in Burty’s belvedere with Goncourt, ‘someone thought they perceived, through opera glasses, the
tricolore
flag floating over Montmartre. At that moment we were chased down from our glass observatory by the whistling of bullets.’ The observation was accurate. By 1 p.m. Clinchant’s
Chasseurs
hoisted the flag at the Tour Solférino, where the insurrection had first broken out on March 18th, recapturing more than a hundred of the original cannon. Now, at Montmartre, the repression of the Commune assumed for the first time a grimmer quality. ‘I gave strictest orders’, claimed Thiers
ex post facto
in his
Notes et Souvenirs
, ‘that the rage of the soldiers was to be contained….’ But this was not how the Versailles Army interpreted his proclamation of the previous evening, calling for ‘complete expiation’. In terms of bloodshed, the ‘expiation’ imposed upon the Commune was to eclipse by far either the ‘Terror’ of the first French Revolution, or even the St. Petersburg revolution of 1917. Immediately on the capture of Montmartre, some 49 Communards (including, Lissagaray claimed, three women and four children) were collected at hazard and marched to No. 6 Rue des Rosiers, the scene of the killing of Generals Lecomte and Thomas. There they were made to kneel down in front of the same wall and were shot without any semblance of a trial.

At the other extremity of their front, the Communards—under Varlin, Wroblewski, and Lisbonne—were now offering much tougher resistance. Varlin, firmly turning a blind eye to the conflicting orders that emanated from the Hôtel de Ville, had organized the nearest thing to a co-ordinated defence in his section on the Left Bank. At the Croix Rouge intersection between the Boulevards Raspail and St. Germain, he had set up a stronghold containing reserves which could be switched between the strongly manned barricades across the Rue de l’Université near the river, or at the Rue Vavin in Montparnasse. For the next two days there was bitter fighting, with heavy damage to property in this quarter, resulting in little progress by the Government troops.

As the day went on, it was the critical centre of the line that saw the severest fighting. Sweeping downhill from Montmartre and Pigalle, Clinchant’s corps rolled up the Commune’s flank towards the Opéra as it went. On his right Douay was reinforcing his efforts of the previous day in the direction of the Madeleine, as well as keeping
up the heaviest frontal pressure on Brunel’s position in the Place de la Concorde. Early that morning the tide of battle had finally surged past the Methodist Chapel in the Rue Roquépine; ‘Midnight… We hear the bombs passing over the building. We
feel
the uncertainty of life, and that our existence hangs on a thread which may be broken at any moment’, recorded M. Chastel, adding later:

God has kept us safely through the night… one bullet has just struck my window, pierced the glass, broken off a piece of stone in its course, and has fallen at the foot of my bureau… happily I was not there. At five o’clock the soldiers have driven away the insurgents from the barricade, and we could put our noses outside. I saw several soldiers lying dead, and others wounded…. At six o’clock the soldiers evacuated our street, and advanced towards the Madeleine.

With the Versailles forces pressing towards it on two sides, the Communard position at the Madeleine became a key bulwark to the Rue Royale and Brunel’s stronghold. ‘The sentries watched all night just opposite my house’, said Alan Herbert,

and at early dawn the firing recommenced on both sides, and lasted all the morning, but less violent than the day before. Nothing whatever was known of passing events; we only knew just what we saw through the bars of my window. The monotony and the suspense was very great, and we felt that the barricades ought to be taken, as the force defending them was evidently small. I began to think that the capture of these barricades would be much like the rest of the war, and last ten times longer than anyone anticipated.

Towards evening, however, the firing became harder and harder, and after an hour and a half watching we saw the insurgents retreat from the different barricades and cross the Place. The troops then came in. A few scenes of horrid massacre and bloodshed, and then the streets were occupied by the regular troops…. I fear there is a very revengeful disposition amongst the regular troops, which is much to be regretted….

While Douay’s troops were closing in on the Madeleine, Dr. Powell, still working at his temporary first-aid post nearby on the Rue St.-Honoré, was sought out by some ‘high officers of the Commune’ who said they wanted to use his ambulance as a ‘point of retreat’ when the Madeleine barricades fell. He remonstrated with them, pointing out that they would all be put to death for violating the Geneva Conventions. ‘The answer given to me was “well citizen, in that case we shall all go to hell together….” ’ The Communard officers were evidently persuaded, however. Suddenly the cannonade ceased, and Powell peered out of the window to see men in red trousers taking position at the captured barricades. Some of the women with him ‘fainted with joy’. Emerging into the open, he
noticed all the columns of the Madeleine had been chipped and splintered, ‘the figures in the Tympanum being sadly mutilated and railings twisted about and the street lamps also, into fantastic figures’.

Moving up the Boulevard Haussmann to join hands with Clinchant’s right wheel, Douay also captured a barricade opposite the famous Printemps stores and with a few rounds of cannon dislodged the National Guards from the Trinité. Haussmann’s still unfinished Opéra was soon hemmed in on three sides. Marine sharp-shooters mounted themselves in the top storey of the surrounding buildings, and directed a deadly fire down on to the Communards exposed behind their barricades; but here they fought back with desperate courage. At 6 p.m., after both sides had suffered substantial losses, the Opéra was carried; and a soldier climbed up on to the statue of Apollo at its entrance and ripped down the red flag. One of the
Daily News
correspondents was there to witness the event, and about the same time he watched another regular, ‘a little grig of a fellow’, run to take up position behind a tree, whence he began firing down the Boulevard Haussmann:

He fired with an air; he loaded with an air; he fired again with a flourish, and was greeted with cheering and clapping of hands. Then he beckoned dramatically for he meditated firing up the Rue Lafayette, but changed his mind, and blazed away again up Haussmann. Then he turned and waved on his fellows as if he were on the boards of a theatre, the Federal bullets cutting the bark and leaves all around him.

A few seconds later the British journalist saw the ‘little grig struck down with a bullet through his head’.

Clinchant’s flanking right wheel was soon traversing the recently renamed Rue du 4 Septembre. The sound of the approaching rifle-fire brought hopes of early redemption to both Goncourt, still incarcerated with Burty behind the Bibliothèque Nationale, and an anxious Marquis de Plœuc in the Bank of France. Around Goncourt the signs of retreat began to multiply. First horse-drawn ambulances came past; then a bus filled with National Guards, followed by staff officers arriving at the gallop to warn the Communards stationed near Burty’s house not to let themselves be cut off. Next came the artillery, followed by the stretcher-bearers. Some men began half-heartedly to start a barricade outside, but gave it up and sloped away. Shortly before 6 p.m., a mass of retreating National Guards came into sight, bearing with them ‘a dead man with his head covered in blood, whom four men were carrying by his arms and legs like a bundle of dirty washing, taking him from door to door—none of which opened’. Soon
Versaillais
bullets were flying around Burty’s
house. Goncourt’s curiosity was still unquenchable and, down on his knees in the dining-room, he peeped out through a corner of the curtain:

On the other side of the boulevard there was a man stretched out on the ground of whom I could see only the soles of his boots and a bit of gold braid. There were two men standing by the corpse, a National Guard and a lieutenant. The bullets were making the leaves rain down on them from a little tree spreading its branches over their heads. A dramatic detail I was about to forget; behind them, in front of the closed doors of a closed
porte-cochère
, a woman was lying flat on the ground, holding a peaked cap in one hand.

The National Guardsman, talking at the top of his voice, with violent and base gestures indicated to his fellows that he wanted to remove the corpse. Bullets continued to bring the leaves raining down on the two men. Then, the National Guardsman, whose face I could perceive was red with rage, flung his rifle on to his shoulder, butt upwards, and stepped out into the fusillade, an insult on his lips. Suddenly I saw him halt, put his hand to his forehead, lean for a second with his hand and his head against a small tree, then turn about and fall on his back, spreadeagled.

The lieutenant had remained motionless beside the first corpse, as tranquil as a man meditating in a garden. A bullet that had knocked down a small branch on to him, which he brushed away with a flick, did not draw him out of his immobility. For an instant, he contemplated his killed comrade. Then, without any hurry, he threw off his sword behind him, as if with scornful deliberation, bent down and tried to lift the dead man. The body was large and heavy, and, like any inert object, evaded his efforts and rolled about in his arms from left to right. At last he raised it; and clutching it across his chest, he was carrying it away when a bullet, smashing his thigh, made the dead and the living spin in a hideous pirouette, collapsing one upon the other. I think it is given to few people to to be witnesses of such a heroic and such a simple contempt of death. They told me that evening that the woman lying on the ground was the wife of one of the three men.

For all his loathing of the Communards, Goncourt could not withhold admiration for the courage and comradeship—senseless, perhaps—demonstrated in this small incident, nor could he stifle his compassion for the suffering of their wounded. As the
Versaillais
approached, ‘I retained in my ear for a long time the rending cries of a wounded soldier
¹
who had dragged himself to our door and whom the concierge, through a cowardly fear of compromising herself, refused to let in.’ By nightfall the street was in the hands of the Versailles troops. ‘We took the risk of looking at them from our balcony, when a bullet struck just above our heads. It was that imbecile of a lodger who had decided to light up a pipe at his window.’

Even British correspondents accompanying the Versailles troops were struck by the joy with which this part of Paris greeted its ‘liberators’. People sang and danced in the exhilaration of the moment. Bottles of wine and money were pressed upon the soldiers; women embraced them. Yet still Douay’s forces could not frontally break Brunel’s resistance in the Concorde and the Rue Royale; and, well after the capture of the Opéra and after Clinchant had swung round across the Rue du 4 Septembre, Colonel Stanley continued to find himself isolated in a pocket of Communard resistance in the Place Vendôme, the former H.Q. of the National Guard. At 3 p.m. he had jotted down for his mother’s eyes: