The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (73 page)

He was wrong. The killing still had a long way to go.

* * *

During the 26th, the Prussians had obligingly moved up 10,000 troops behind the Communards’ rear, to seal off their line of escape eastwards; also neutralizing their last remaining fortress at Vincennes. But, despite the hoplessness of the Commune’s predicament, that day MacMahon in fact made less territorial progress than on any other. By the evening he held the Commune in a semicircle, stretching from the Ourcq Canal in the working-class district of La Villette in the north, down along the Boulevard Voltaire, to the Porte de Vincennes at the eastern extremity of Paris. Within this semicircle, the only
arrondissement
still wholly in Commune hands was the 20th, embracing Belleville and Ménilmontant. Here the Communards were truly at home. As at Warsaw and Leningrad in the Second World War, a whole population was now fighting. Every man, woman, child in the district was ready to serve and die on the barricades. The honeycomb of dingy narrow streets and tortuous alleyways, untouched by the reforming hand of Haussmann, made it ideal terrain for a last-ditch stand. Barricades here were not so easy to turn as they had been on the
grands boulevards
. Also, on the prominent features of the Buttes-Chaumont and the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery there was artillery, which, though greatly inferior to MacMahon’s, still possessed a strong nuisance value. But, above all, the defenders—knowing that they could now expect no quarter—were fighting with all the despair of trapped animals. At Belleville, an English medical student observed in admiration the performance of a woman’s battalion (probably Louise Michel’s); ‘they fought like devils, far better than the men; and I had the pain of seeing fifty-two shot down, even when they had been surrounded by the troops, and disarmed. I saw about sixty men shot at the same time.’ He overheard one woman, taken alive and accused of having killed two of the attackers, tell her interrogators that she had two sons killed at Neuilly, two at Issy, and that her husband had died at the barricade she had been defending. She too was put to death forthwith.

Despair, coupled with the Communards’ fury at fresh reports of atrocities being committed by the Government forces, had placed the lives of the hostages still remaining inside Commune prisons in the gravest jeopardy. That morning a posse of five National Guards had forced their way into La Roquette and at pistol-point ordered Governor François to hand over Jecker, the Swiss banker whose financial
manipulations were reputed to have been among the causes of Louis-Napoleon’s disastrous Mexican adventure. Jecker was led into an alleyway off Père-Lachaise, called Rue de Chine; there he was shot and left in a ditch, a note with his name scribbled on it pinned to his hat. It so happened that Émile Gois, president of one of Rigault’s ‘courts’, and now presumably the next in succession to the dead
Procureur
, was lunching nearby and was drawn to the scene of the execution by the shots. Gois was piqued to learn that ‘justice’ should have been carried out behind his back, and determined not to be outdone. Commandeering from Eudes a squad of his
Enfants Perdus
, Gois now marched to La Roquette himself and ordered a thoroughly frightened François to hand over fifty hostages. These included thirty-six gendarmes, most of whom had been under arrest since March 18th, ten priests, and four assorted civilians—loosely described as Imperial ‘police spies’. Accompanied by a mob as vicious and blood-lusting as any that was rending the columns of captured Communards, the hostages were taken to the Mairie of the 20th
Arrondissement
. Here Ranvier, the Mayor of Belleville, had set up what passed for the Commune’s last headquarters following the death of Delescluze. Varlin pleaded forcefully against resorting to any desperate measures, while Ranvier feebly washed his hands of the whole business. In any case, the surviving remnants of the Commune legislature no longer exercised much power over its last fanatical adherents. The final, and greatest, killing carried out under the reign of the Commune, as at the beginning when the two generals were lynched and at every other crime since, did not recive the official stamp of the Commune as a bod.

Gois and his fifty hostages marched on, still trailed by their terrible escort of drunk and jeering rabble, clamouring for immediate carnage. At the top of a long hill approached by what is now the Avenue Gambetta, they stopped in the Rue Haxo. Here they were so close to the city walls that they could hear snatches of waltz music being played on German accordions, a few hundred yards away beyond the wall. Again Varlin attempted to intercede on behalf of the hostages, and but for his popularity might well have shared their fate, such was the mood of the mob. In a small courtyard the massacre took place, hideous in its disorganized butchery. There was no co-ordinated execution-squad. Anyone who had a weapon appears to have fired it into the huddled group of priests and gendarmes. Several of Eudes’s
Enfants Perdus
were themselves wounded in the haphazard volleys, and when the killing was done fifty-one corpses—not fifty—were picked up. ‘Definitely one too many’, Gois was said to have remarked mildly. The supernumerary victim was probably a National
Guardsman who came too close; as it was, one body was later discovered to have been hit by sixty-nine bullets in the fury of the moment, another to have received some seventy bayonet thrusts.

Saturday the 27th opened on another gloomy day of torrential rain. At La Roquette Prison it matched the misery and terror that now existed in the hearts of the remaining hostages. Since Gois had marched off fifty of their fellows the previous day, the survivors had few illusions about the fate in store for them. It seemed but a matter of time; and yet, how tantalizingly close sounded the guns of MacMahon’s troops! The arrival of the dreaded Ferré on the morning of the 27th increased the hostages’ sense of despair. According to one of them, the Abbé Lamazou, Ferré ‘rushed and sprang about like a panther afraid of losing its prey’, with a revolver in one hand and a rifle slung from his shoulder. But events at the front seem to have distracted him from his quarry, and for the rest of the morning the hostages were left alone. At 3 p.m. in the afternoon, the Abbé Lamazou heard the bolts of his cell drawn back. He thought that his hour had come. In fact, by what seemed almost a miracle, freedom, not death, was in attendance outside. One of the warders, a man named Pinet, had received orders to let the prisoners out in twos for immediate execution. The killings of the recent days, however, had sickened him; he had had enough. He now hurriedly released all the hostages—some ten priests, forty gendarmes, and about eighty captured regulars—and urged them to barricade themselves within the prison. After the mental agonies to which they had been subjected, many of the hostages distrusted Pinet, reckoning that this was some kind of insidious trap. Eventually they were persuaded by him, and frantically began creating barricades out of the iron bedsteads and ripped-up floor-boards.

Later in the afternoon an execution-squad of National Guardsmen arrived. Unable to force an entry, they tried to smoke out the prisoners with burning mattresses. But the hostages fought back with a despair only equalled by the Communards dying on the last barricades outside. A few priests lost their heads and tried to run for it; they were instantly shot down. Meanwhile, the Communards’ own position was becoming desperate. Ranvier had issued what was to be the Commune’s last proclamation, its 395th: ‘Citizens of the XXth
Arrondissement
, if we yield you know what fate is in store for us! To arms! Vigilance, especially at night! I ask you to carry out orders loyally…. Forward! Long live the Republic!’ At 11 that morning a small group of all that remained of Commune leadership collected in the Mairie of the 20th. Jules Allix, more lunatic than ever, arrived beaming with pleasure at a plan he had evolved to launch a counter-attack
into the central districts of Paris, now emptied of Versailles troops, and thus take the enemy from the rear. The vapidity of the discussion made it seem just like old times at the Hotel de Ville, until Ranvier appeared. With a brusque command of ‘Go and fight instead of arguing!’, he dispatched all available hands to the Buttes-Chaumont. It was, noted Lissagaray, ‘the last encounter of these perpetual deliberators’. The Commune’s strongest remaining position at the Buttes-Chaumont was being threatened by MacMahon’s final turning manœuvre. Ladmirault had swung down from the north, through the blazing docks and the cattle-market of La Villette, with the aim of driving a wedge between the bastion defences on the city ramparts and the rear of the Buttes-Chaumont. After some progress his advance was checked by desperate resistance. On Ladmirault’s right, Clinchant now attacked the formidable Buttes frontally. Through most of the afternoon his men pressed up the steep slopes at bayonet point, suffering heavy losses; the Communards held out until their ammunition was gone, until 10 p.m. that night.

In the centre, where Vinoy had attacked after a massive dawn bombardment, the Communards were less successful. By 4 a.m. the regulars had reached the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the second of the Commune’s remaining strongholds. Possessing what is still one of the finest views in all Paris, the vast cemetery dominated all to the west of it; the whole smouldering city seemed to lie at its feet. It was defended by two batteries of guns and some two hundred National Guards. But they were an indisciplined assemblage, and in their habitual carelessness had omitted to poke loopholes or firing-parapets through the thick and high external walls. Vinoy’s men had little difficulty in infiltrating round these walls, thus encircling and isolating the cemetery. At 6 a.m. his guns smashed in the main gate from point-blank range, and the infantry surged forward. Their ammunition nearly exhausted, the Commune artillery could not prevent them carrying the barricades that protected the entrance. Amid the massive family vaults of the bourgeoisie and the less imposing tombs of France’s famous poets, painters, and musicians a terrible carnage now ensued. Bullets splintered the sanctified white marble, ricocheting off it; blood sullied the pretentious gravestones. From an emplacement just in front of the monument that had been recently erected in memory of Louis-Napoleon’s illegitimate half-brother, the Duc de Morny, cannon fired one of the last rounds to leave a Communard gun-barrel. As the merciless hand-to-hand combat drew to its close in this macabre battlefield, the last of the Père Lachaise-defenders was winkled out near Balzac’s tomb.

The Mairie of the 20th had become a refuge for untended wounded,
hysterical women, and whimpering, terrified children; but even before Père-Lachaise was completely cleared the Versailles troops were pushing on to capture it—the Commune’s terminal headquarters. At La Roquette that evening the hostages were still holding out, surrounded by a howling mob. Part of their improvised barricades had been set on fire, and it looked as if the end had come when some National Guards wheeled up two cannon and a mortar. Before they could begin to bombard the prison, however, word came that the enemy had made a breakthrough and were advancing rapidly on La Roquette. The National Guards scattered in panic, but still relief did not come. After the shooting-down of the escapees earlier in the day, no one yet dared emerge from the prison. The hostages spent a night of hideous anxiety, waiting and praying, uncertain as to whether morning would bring rescue—or only a return of the maddened Communard mob. But the life of the Commune was beginning to flicker out. When the 27th came to its close, the Communards had been pressed into a tight quadrilateral, between Père-Lachaise and the Buttes-Chaumont, and astride the boundary of the 19th and 20th
Arrondissements
. Morale was cracking. Despite the draconian treatment they knew they could expect, thousands were laying down their arms. Of the leaders, only Ferré, Varlin, Ranvier, Jourde, and Trinquet were left; they, and a few dispersed handfuls of other loyal followers, fought on.

At Champrosay some fifteen miles outside Paris, Alphonse Daudet who had escaped there on the 25th (to find still written in large Gothic letters above the door ‘5th Company Boehm,
Feldwebel
and three men’) could hear plainly the sounds of the Commune’s death agony. Whenever the wind blew from Paris it brought with it ‘that rumbling of cannon and
mitrailleuses
… shaking the horizon, pitilessly ripping up the rosy mists of morning, upsetting with its storms the beautiful, clear nights of May, those nights of nightingales and crickets’. On the evening of the 27th, the noise had seemed particularly ‘desperate’, like ‘a great ship in distress, furiously firing off its maroons’. The simile reminded him of the wreck of a ship filled with Italian mimes, which he had once seen from Bastia some ten years earlier. He could not help comparing the last moments of the Commune to the drowning of those wretched clowns and harlequins off the rocks of Corsica;

I felt that the Commune, about to go down, was firing its last distress rockets. At every minute I could see the wreck heave up, the breach in it grow bigger, and then inside I could see the men of the Hôtel de Ville clinging to their stage, and continuing to decree and decree amid all the din of the wind and the tempest. Then one final surge of the sea and the great ship sank, engulfing its red banners, its golden sashes; its Delegates dressed in judges’ robes and generals’ uniforms; its gaitered and be-plumed battalions of Amazones; its circus soldiers rigged up in Spanish képis and Garibaldian caps; its Polish lancers and fantastic Turcos, furiously drunk, singing and whirling about….

The next morning, May 28th, Thiers’s army moved in for the kill. It was Whit Sunday. For a whole week the Commune had fought back against enormous odds, but now it was the end. As the sun came up, the besieged hostages in La Roquette were horrified to see fighting recommence outside, but at 5.30 a.m. Government Marines took possession of the building. Even then some of the priests, half-crazed with the mental anguish of the past weeks, refused to believe that the Marines were not Communards in disguise, and could hardly be persuaded to leave the prison. By 10 a.m. the last survivors of the Commune, led by Varlin, were hemmed into a tiny square fragment of Paris. As the morning ended, there was only one barricade left in Belleville’s Rue Ramponneau. Here, for a quarter of an hour, a solitary unknown defender was seen to hold off the attackers with a cool and deadly aim. Having fired what appeared to be his last cartridge, he walked calmly away and disappeared. Some 2,000 Communards surrendered in the Rue Haxo alone, and the leaders still surviving tried to make their escape as best they could. Varlin, who had fought to the very last moment, got as far as the Rue Lafayette when he was recognized by a
Versaillais
officer. His hands were bound behind his back and he was marched up to Montmartre, beaten with rifle butts all along the way, and half-lynched by jeering crowds of Parisians. By the time he reached the sinister Rue des Rosiers, which had become a regular ‘expiation’ centre, his face was a pulp and one eye was dangling out of its socket. No longer able to stand, he was carried out into the garden, to be shot seated in a chair. When the collapse came Louise Michel sought refuge with a friend, then went in search of her mother. Learning that she had been seized by the
Versaillais
as a pawn for Louise herself, and that her life was in imminent danger, Louise gave herself up. She was marched out to Versailles to await trial.