The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (74 page)

That afternoon Edwin Child read a proclamation by Marshal MacMahon, addressed to the ‘Inhabitants of Paris’:

The Army of France has come to save you. Paris is delivered.
¹
At four o’clock our soldiers captured the last position occupied by the insurgents. Today the struggle is ended; order, work, and security will be reborn.
The whole operation, including the preliminaries from April 3rd onwards, had cost the Government forces 83 officers and 790 men killed. In the fighting of ‘Bloody Week’ alone the Communards had lost somewhere over 3,000 in dead and wounded. But it was only a beginning. At Père-Lachaise cemetery Vinoy’s troops had found the unburied corpse of the murdered Archbishop. That Whitsun morning they marched 147 of the captured Communards out to the cemetery, lined them up against a wall in its eastern corner, and mowed them down.

When the last of the Communards had surrendered, the ‘expiation’ promised by Thiers began in earnest. The insurgents were given forty-eight hours in which to surrender all weapons; for Parisians found with any in their possession after that, justice was summary. Society clamoured for merciless measures. Wrote
Le Figaro
, ‘Never has such an opportunity presented itself for curing Paris of the moral gangrene that has been consuming it for the past twenty years. The Parisians must submit to the laws of war, however terrible they may be. Today, clemency equals lunacy….’ Little exhortation was needed. Dr. Jules Rafinesque wrote to his brother-in-law, Louis Hack, in England that—in the emotional atmosphere prevailing at the end of May—not ‘a single young girl has been upset by the sight of people shot up against a wall, summarily and justly. Everyone had wanted to kill a scoundrel, and for the time being the statue of Pity has her face covered with a very thick veil.’ The mood was catching; even a young Englishman, Edward Noble, who had spent most of the past week under his bed, commented on hearing that five hundred prisoners had been shot down by
mitrailleuses
: ‘That is the only way to deal with these wretches.’ There was a positive orgy of denunciations, more than 350,000 of which were received by the authorities within the first fortnight of June. As was to happen again after the liberation of France in 1944, many denunciations proved to have a lamentable element of personal revenge. The shibboleths applied to suspects as the Commune collapsed were crudely simple; a discoloration of the right shoulder that might have been caused by a rifle butt, or the wearing of a pair of Army boots—these were enough. But the favourite one, the hand test, was simplicity itself. Anyone with blackened hands was assumed either to have been involved in incendiary operations, or to have been firing a
tabatière
rifle which had a habit of leaving tell-tale powder stains. One well-known French writer told the author how his grandmother, longing with all the instincts of a houseproud Frenchwoman to get her home in the Rue St.-Honoré cleaned up after the long months of neglect, employed a chimney-sweep even before the fighting at the far end of Paris had
actually ended. As the soot-stained sweep left, before her horrified eyes he was seized by the Versailles troops, hands examined, put up against a wall close to where the elegant shop of Hermès now stands, and shot. It was a memory that haunted her throughout her life.

How many innocents like the wretched sweep perished during the first hysterical days of repression can only be guessed at from the numbers of Communard ‘leaders’ falsely reported to have met their end. A man denounced by a crowd as Billioray promptly had his brains blown out by a Versailles patrol, and was even sketched in death by a passing artist; the real Billioray was arrested a short time later, and the victim turned out to be an unfortunate hosier called Constant. At one time or other Cluseret, Vallès, Ferré, Longuet, Gambon, Lefrançais, Ulysse Parent, and Courbet were all said by
Le Figaro
to have been executed; in fact none of them had been. The death of Jules Vallès (who had already escaped across the frontier) was reported no less than three times, and one British correspondent claimed to have seen both Vallès and Longuet shot, having been seized at a barricade. Karl Marx heard one or two versions of how ‘Burner’ Brunel also had been shot, with his mistress, in the Place Vendôme; but Brunel too was well on his way to the enjoyment of a ripe old age in England.

The savage, incidental killings continued for some days still in the streets of Paris; one of the Rev. Gibson’s preachers was horrified to see some wretch ‘coolly pricked to death by a soldier, and then lifted up on the point of the bayonet for the inspection of the lookers-on. No sympathy was evinced for the poor old man, and two ladies (?) suggested that the soldier should “chop the rat’s head off!”’ But it was behind the austere walls of the prisons and temporary detention-centres that the real work of repression was carried out. For the mass shootings, cemeteries like Montparnasse, parks normally frequented by Parisians on their Sunday-afternoon walks like the Parc Monceau and the beautiful Jardin du Luxembourg, and Army barracks like the Casernes Lobau near the Hôtel de Ville, and even the railway stations, were employed. As Goncourt was walking past the Lobau on the 28th, a squad of twenty-six prisoners was marched in through the gates which slammed heavily behind them. Goncourt claimed to have no idea what was about to happen, until he heard a ‘bourgeois’, who had been phlegmatically counting the prisoners, remark to his neighbour:

‘It won’t be long, you’ll soon hear the first rattle.’

‘What rattle?’

‘Well they’re going to shoot them!’

Almost at that same moment there was an explosion, like a violent noise enclosed within those gates and walls, a fusillade, with something
of the mechnical regularity of a
mitrailleuse
. There was a first, a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth murderous
rrarra
—then a long interval—and yet a sixth, and finally two rattles coming closely upon each other….

A few minutes later the gates were opened

and while two closed waggons entered the courtyard, there slipped out a priest whom one could see for a long time, moving along the outside of the barrack wall, with his thin back, umbrella, and legs unused to walking.

Maxime Vuillaume, himself a captured Communard, provides a terrible, unforgettable picture of prisoners ‘queuing-up’ to be shot in sixes in the Luxembourg. All over Paris the shots echoed out incessantly for several days more; La Roquette, with such grim memories for the hostages of the Commune, some 1,900 prisoners are said to have been shot in two days, and at the Mazas Prison another 400.
¹

The blood shed during these ferocious days of repression somehow even found its way into the Seine; wrote
La Petite Presse
(one of the papers suppressed by the Commune), ‘yesterday one could see on the Seine a long streak of blood following the current passing under the second arch on the side of the Tuileries….’ All night the waggons clattered through the streets, occupied in the gruesome task of disposing of the corpses. At the forts outside Paris and up at the Buttes-Chaumont huge funeral pyres were built, polluting the air for days on end with the hideous smell of burning flesh. Many of the executed men were hastily buried beneath levelled barricades, and the Rev. Gibson was not the only person to be shocked on returning to Paris by the knowledge ‘that there are dead men underneath the newly-laid road….’ So hasty was the liquidation and disposal of the captives that terrible stories (apparently not without foundation) went the rounds of men buried while still alive; of arms appearing out of shallow-dug graves in the Square de la Tour-St.-Jacques.

For those lucky enough actually to reach Versailles, the terror was by no means over. In their thousands the Communards were crammed into ‘reception centres’ prepared in the stables and the Orangerie at Versailles, and in the nearby military camp of Satory. They were kept short of water, food—and medical attention. A number died of suffocation in the hopelessly crowded atmosphere. Here too the shootings went on. Camp Satory, where Communard women and children slept in the open on ground that had become a clay quagmire, became a favourite outing for the ladies of Versailles, come to gaze
at the strange wild beasts held within. Not until the next century would Europe see human beings confined in such squalor; or their sufferings viewed with so little humanity. Only as the threat of widespread disease manifested itself were the inmates gradually combed out and dispersed among various fortresses and hulks throughout France, still to await their trial.

There seemed to be no end to the horror. Abroad it had already aroused bitter comment. There were meetings of protest in London, addressed by John Stuart Mill; and Thiers was not being entirely truthful when he claimed that the British Press ‘decalred that greater humanity had never been displayed towards greater criminals’. Exclaimed
The Times
on 29 May: ‘The laws of war! They are mild and Christian compared with the inhuman laws of revenge under which the Versailles troops have been shooting, bayonetting, ripping up prisoners, women, and children during the last six days. So far as we can recollect there has been nothing like it in history…’ and two days later:

The French are filling up the darkest page in the book of their own or the world’s history. The charge of ruthless cruelty is no longer limited to one party or to one class of persons. The Versailles troops seem inclined to outdo the Communists [
sic
] in their sheer lavishness of human blood… They should remember that the blood shed by the Versailles troops cannot be laid at the door of their neighbours; for the Marquis de Gallifet and the other officers who have commanded in Paris are surely French…

Finally, on 1 June

Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris. The crimes of the Insurgents have surpassed the most gloomy forebodings of what would be accomplished under the Red Flag. The burning of Paris was diabolical; the shooting of the hostages ‘a deed without a name.’ But it seems as if we were destined to forget the work of these maddened savages in the spectacle of the vengeance wreaked upon them. The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘Party of Order’, sicken the soul.

Even France herself was beginning to sicken of the slaughter. There were many who shared Alphonse Daudet’s misgiving that the ‘Marats’ of Versailles were proving themselves still more terrible than those of the Commune. On June 2nd the
Paris-Journal
implored:

Let us kill no more, even murderers and incendiaries! Let us kill no more!

* * *

The work was nearly completed. Estimates on the numbers of Parisians killed in the process of ‘expiation’ during and after ‘Bloody
Week’ vary between the grotesquely wild extremes of 6,500 and 40,000. A platform figure is however provided by the French Government’s own subsequent revelation that the Municipality of Paris alone paid for the burial or disposal of 17,000 corpses. Reliable French historians today seem more or less agreed on a figure of between 20,000 and 25, 000.
¹
Whichever set of statistics is accepted, the total is still staggering. No single battle of the Franco-Prussian war cost so many French lives. The blood shed in those relatively few days far exceeded the number of heads that had rolled during the whole Reign of Terror, spread out as it was over more than a year of time, of the Great Revolution.
²
Not even Lenin’s October Revolution of 1917 in St. Petersburg (excluding the Civil War which later spread across Russia) would cause quite so many deaths. Yet, what is most difficult for the imagination to grasp is that this dark holocaust took place not in some remote African territory, or by the whim of some long-dead Oriental despot, but amid a recent age perhaps rather more enlightened than our own; and in a city which, only so short a time previously, had regarded itself as
the
Citadel of Civilization. Recalling the extreme reluctance in March of Thiers’ army to march on Paris at all, the
semaine sanglante
provided a terrible example of how swiftly a civil, urban conflict can become degraded into such unbridled ferocity.
³

Paris in Ruins: Avenue de la Grande Armée

27. Aftermath

O
N
June 29th, 1871, 120,000 troops of MacMahon’s victorious army marched past in review at Longchamp racetrack. It was only a few months since those same fields had echoed to the sounds of Germanic ‘Hurrahs’ as Kaiser Wilhelm I inspected his armies before they set forth on the triumphal entry into Paris. In the minds of those present on that magnificent June day, the occasion evoked all that had been sweetest and most bitter in the four years that had passed since that other great June review when Louis-Napoleon entertained his guests to the Great Exhibition; but at the same time it seemed to set a seal on events. At 1.30 p.m. Thiers arrived to take up his position in the stand where the ex-Emperor had once stood with the Tsar and the King of Prussia at his side, hastily redecorated to cover the scars left by the first Siege. There was none of the wild cheering that had marked each of the two earlier occasions. As General Gallifet galloped past at the head of his cavalry, foreigners present sensed a particularly uneasy silence. The glitter of the uniforms of 1867 was absent, too. As Thiers explained, the men were ‘still not fitted out in new equipment, but in the veritable panoply of war; possessed of a confident air,
and proud of having forced the walls of Paris which had halted the Prussians…’. At the head of a division marched Ducatel, the civil engineer who had opened the gate at the Point-du-Jour to MacMahon’s troops, also honoured with a decoration. After galloping past on a coal-black Arab charger, MacMahon joined Thiers in the presidential box. Silently the two men wept on each other’s shoulders. To the few Prussian officers of the army of occupation observing the parade, there was about it a soberly impressive quality which caused them tingles of indefinable apprehension for the future.
¹
Thiers described the occasion as according ‘the joy of a happy convalescence upon a day of wonderful weather’.