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  Copyright © 2014 John Merriman

  Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Merriman, John M.

  Massacre : the life and death of the Paris Commune of 1871 / John Merriman.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-17452-6 (alk. paper)

  1. Paris (France)—History—Commune, 1871. I. Title. II. Title: Life and death of the Paris Commune of 1871.

  DC316.M47 2014

  944′.3610812—dc23

  2014027077

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Don Lamm

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Prologue

  1War and the Collapse of the Empire

  2The Birth of the Commune

  3Masters of Their Own Lives

  4The Commune Versus the Cross

  5The Battle Turns Against the Communards

  6Bloody Week Begins

  7Death Comes for the Archbishop

  8The Courts-Martial at Work

  9Massacre

  10Prisoners of Versailles

  11Remembering

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  AS LONG AS I REMEMBER, I HAVE BEEN FASCINATED BY THE PARIS Commune of 1871. My previous book was a study that focused on Émile Henry, a young intellectual and anarchist who threw a bomb into the Café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare in the French capital in February 1894. His goal was to kill as many people as possible. Henry’s targets were ordinary bourgeois having a beer and listening to music before they returned home. My argument was that Henry’s bomb represented the origins of modern terrorism. But there was a subtext: that of state terrorism. The French state, like that of Italy and Spain, used the fear of anarchists – and most anarchists were not terrorists at all – to repress political opponents. Émile Henry was the son of a militant in the Paris Commune of 1871, condemned to death in absentia by the French provisional government of Adolphe Thiers. Fortuné Henry had seen state terrorism up close. Soldiers fighting for the government of Versailles gunned down or executed thousands of ordinary people.

  About six or seven years ago, the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris organised an exposition of photos taken during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 (in which Prussia and its other German allies crushed the Second Empire of Napoleon III) and during the Commune. One of these photos stuck in my mind: that of elegant upper-class Parisians returning to the French capital after their armies had crushed the Paris Commune during Bloody Week, 21–28 May 1871. They applauded the terror organised by the French state, which had crushed Parisians who wanted to be free.

  One day, while walking to my office in Branford College at Yale, I decided to research and write a book about the life and death of the Paris Commune, focusing on the representative experiences of Communards, but also some of those who opposed them.

  The MacMillan Center and the Whitney Griswold Fund at Yale University offered research support for this book. Bertrand Fonck, with whom Caroline Piketty put me in touch, made it possible for me access dossiers in the Archives de la Défense in Vincennes when they were otherwise unavailable.

  Writing about the Paris Commune of 1871, I have benefited greatly from the important studies of Laure Godineau, Éric Fournier, Carolyn Eichner, David Shafer, Gay Gullickson, Quentin Deleurmoz, Marc César and Stewart Edwards. I have long admired and in particular learned from the superb scholarship of Robert Tombs and Jacques Rougerie, essential for anyone interested in the Commune. Tom Kselman, Colin Foss and Joe Peterson also offered suggestions drawn from their knowledge of the period. Thanks also to someone I have never met, Olivier Marion, whose fine unpublished mémoire de maîtrise on the Catholic Church during the Commune (available in the Archives Départementales des Hauts-de-Seine) merits wider exposure. In Fayl-Billot, Haute-Marne, where Archbishop Georges Darboy was born, I would like to thank Philippe Robert, until recently curé of that parish, and Jean-Remy Compain.

  I was incredibly fortunate at the University of Michigan to have had the chance to study with Charles Tilly, who directed my dissertation long ago, and to have had him as a friend. As is the case of so many people in many fields, Chuck’s death in 2008 remains an enormous loss. Pour leur amitié et la manière dont ils ont inspiré mes travaux, je tiens à remercier chaleureusement Michelle Perrot, Alain Corbin, Jean-François Chanet, Dominique Kalifa, Sylvain Venayre, Maurice Garden and Yves Lequin. If the research for this book took place in Paris, most of it was written in Balazuc (Ardèche). There I am fortunate to have as friends Lucien and Catherine Mollier, Hervé and Françoise Parain, Eric Fruleux and Mathieu Fruleux. Thanks also there to William Clavaroyet of ‘La Fenière’ and Lionel Pélerin of ‘Chez Paulette’, and to Paulette Balazuc. In Poland, where I have had the pleasure of spending a great amount of time over the past eight years, thanks to Andrzej Kamiński, Wojciech Falkowski, Krzysztof Łazarski, Adam Kożuchowski and Eulalia Łazarska, as well as Jim Collins; in Rouen, to Jean Sion; in Paris, to Jean-Claude Petilon and Sven Wanegffelen; in the United States, to Bruno and Flora Cabanes, Charles Keith, Mark Lawrence, Gene Tempest, Joe Malloure, Jim Read, Steve Shirley, Gil Joseph, Dick and Sandy Simon, Mike Johnson, Steve Pincus, Sue Stokes and Peter Gay. Our family owes Victoria Johnson so much.

  Peter McPhee and I have been talking about French history and much more since we first met in 1974 – ça passe vite, le temps. He read the first draft of this book and offered his usual extremely helpful comments. At the Fletcher Company, I am indebted to Christy Fletcher and Melissa Chincillo, and to Donald Lamm, who has supported this project from the beginning. Again, Don contributed his unparalleled editing skills to one of my books. Melissa, with the assistance of Anne van den Heuvel, obtained the publication rights for the images in the book, greatly helping out in a complex eleventh hour. At Yale University Press, London, many thanks to Robert Baldock, director, and to Rachael Lonsdale, editor, for their encouragement and good cheer.

  Laura Merriman has spent much of her life in France, in Balazuc, but is often in Paris, where this tragic story took place. Chris Merriman first arrived in Balazuc at the age of ten days, and was able to spend years in school in France, and thus also knows Paris very well. My spouse Carol Merriman contributed her editing skills to this book and has brought so much happiness into my life, including Laura and Chris.

  Donald and Jean Lamm have been our friends for decades. Don has always represented the very best in publishing. This book is dedicated to him in gratitude and friendship and with great admiration.

  Balazuc, 7 June 2014

  1 The Army of Versailles battling Communard resisters on place de la Concorde, 22 May 1871, by Gustave Boulanger.

  2 Communard cannons and fighters protecting the ramparts of Paris.

  3 Cannons
and a barricade erected by the Communards on Porte Saint-Ouen defend the Commune.

  4 A massive Communard barricade temporarily protects rue de Castiglione.

  5 ‘Summary executions in Paris – Shooting Down Communist Prisoners’: Harper’s Weekly depicts the execution of communist (sic) prisoners by Versailles troops after the fall of the Commune.

  6 The corpses of anonymous Communards executed by the Versailles army.

  7 Paris aflame, seen from the Solferino bridge, 24 May 1871.

  8 The Hôtel de Ville burns in Paris, 24 May 1871.

  9 A woman accused of being a pétroleuse (female incendiary) is executed by the Versaillais.

  10 Buildings burning on rue de Rivoli, 24 May 1871.

  11 The Hôtel de Ville after the fire of 24 May 1871.

  12 Execution of Archbishop Georges Darboy and five other hostages at La Roquette prison, 24 May 1871.

  13 Elegant Parisians return to their city, much of which had been left in ruins by the fighting and the cannons of the Versaillais.

  14 Édouard Manet’s ‘Civil War’, 1871.

  Prologue

  ON 18 MARCH 1871, PARISIANS LIVING ON MONTMARTRE AWAKENED to the sounds of French troops attempting to seize the cannons of the National Guard. The troops were under the orders of Adolphe Thiers, the conservative head of a provisional government recently ensconced in Versailles, once the residence of the Bourbon monarchs of the Ancien Régime. Thiers, fearing the mobilisation of angry and radicalised Parisians, wanted to disarm Paris, and its National Guard. The ranks of the Guard were filled for the most part by workers who wanted a strong republic and were angered by the capitulation of the provisional government in the disastrous war against Prussia that had begun the previous July and brought about the fall of the Second Empire.

  Despite the efforts of the French army, the men and women of Montmartre, Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont courageously prevented the troops from taking the cannons. Seeing the arrival of some 4,000 soldiers on Montmartre, who halted to await the horses necessary to haul the weapons down the hill, women sounded the alarm. Working-class residents of the butte overlooking the French capital prevented the heavily armed troops from hitching the cannons to the horses and began to build barricades, that traditional act of revolutionary defiance. Soldiers began to fraternise with the people of Montmartre. The 6,000 troops sent to Belleville, La Villette and Ménilmontant fared no better. Parisians would keep their cannons.

  Thwarted, Thiers withdrew his forces from Paris to Versailles, where he planned to regroup and eventually retake the city. Thousands of wealthy Parisians joined him there. In Paris, meanwhile, left-wing militants proclaimed a ‘Commune’ of progressive self-government that brought freedom to Parisians, many of whom believed themselves ‘masters of their own lives’ for the first time. Working-class families from proletarian neighbourhoods proudly strolled into the beaux quartiers of the capital, imagining a more just society, and prepared to take steps to make that a reality. Their progressive Commune would last a mere ten weeks before it was annihilated during the last bloody week of May.

  The birth and destruction of the Paris Commune, one of the most tragic, defining events of the nineteenth century, still resonates today. In the streets of Paris, Thiers’s army gunned down thousands of ordinary men, women and, occasionally, children. Soldiers executed many for their participation in the defence of the Commune; others died because their workers’ attire, remnants of a Parisian National Guard uniform, or simply their occupation or manner of speaking marked them for death. The massacres carried out by French troops against their own countrymen anticipated the demons of the century to follow. You could be gunned down because of who you were, because you wanted to be free. This may have been the ultimate significance of Bloody Week, 21–28 May 1871, the biggest massacre in Europe of the nineteenth century. The life and death of the Paris Commune still resonates today.

  Paris was a surging city of great social contrasts and contradictions during Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–1870). On one hand, the capital led a rapidly growing French economy. Industry continued to be dominated by artisans in small workshops who produced the articles de Paris, high-quality gloves and other luxury goods that came to symbolise French manufacturing. Imperial financial institutions helped boost industrial production in and around Paris, bringing unparalleled prosperity to people of means. They attended lavish imperial social events and theatrical performances, traversing the city and the Bois-de-Boulogne in carriages while ordinary people walked to work. Powerful trains, their engines spewing steam, carried wealthy passengers from the burgeoning capital to Deauville and other increasingly elegant towns on the Norman coast.

  The economic boom and the incredible wealth it brought to Paris diverted attention from widespread poverty and divisions in the city. Napoleon III and Baron Georges Haussmann ploughed spacious boulevards through the tangle of medieval Paris. Fancy restaurants and cafés welcomed those who could afford them. In the dilapidated and overcrowded districts of eastern and northern Paris, working people living in miserable tiny apartments or rooming houses struggled to get by. For them, hard times never seemed to go away.

  By the late 1860s, Napoleon III faced mounting political opposition, so much so that many Parisians anticipated a disastrous end to his reign. France already had a lengthy history of class strife. Three revolutions had chased monarchs from the throne of France in the past sixty years. So far, none had brought to France the stability one could find across the English Channel in Great Britain.

  Napoleon III, however, was confident that he, unlike his immediate predecessors, was destined to hold onto power. Born in 1808, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the son of Napoleon’s brother and had been raised in a chateau in Switzerland amid artefacts of his uncle’s rule. He was certain that his future role would be to build upon his famous family’s dynastic heritage. Identifying his family with the fate of France, to his ambition he added a shrewd sense of political opportunism which he combined with notoriously bad judgement. The July Monarchy of King Louis Philippe of the Orléans family (a junior wing of the Bourbons, the French royal family) maintained its policy of forcing the family of Napoleon Bonaparte to remain in exile. He had attempted to invade France with a handful of followers in 1836, when he marched into a Strasbourg garrison and was arrested, and again four years later, when he landed on the coast near Boulogne-sur-Mer, with the same embarrassing result. In 1840, he was imprisoned in northern France, from which he escaped in 1846 dressed as a worker. These fiascos helped lend Napoleon’s nephew the reputation of being something of a buffoon who surrounded himself with sleazy, inept cronies. Short and increasingly corpulent, he resembled his uncle – with whom his enemies compared him, calling him ‘the [Napoleonic] hat without the head’, and poking fun at his ‘fish eyes’.

  Yet for all his early failures, Louis Napoleon was surprisingly optimistic and believed that economic progress under his rule could benefit all Parisians, wealthy and poor alike. With his usual modesty he wrote from prison ‘I believe that there are certain men who are born to serve as a means for the march of the human race … I consider myself to be one of these.’1

  The February Revolution in 1848, one of the many revolutions that swept Europe that year, brought an end to the Orléans monarchy, and Louis Napoleon quickly returned to Paris. He was elected president of the Second French Republic in December 1848, nine months after King Louis-Philippe was overthrown. After orchestrating the repression of the left, the ‘prince president’ ended the Second French Republic with a coup d’état on 2 December 1851 because his term as president would have come to an end the following year. Parisians awoke to martial law, with democratic-socialist members of the National Assembly, whose members were elected from the départements, under arrest.

  But some Parisians were not willing to submit to another empire without a fight. Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état sparked an ill-fated uprising in working-class neighbourhoods in central and eastern Paris. More than
125,000 people, the majority of them paysans, took up arms to defend the Republic, particularly in the south, where secret societies had built networks of underground support. But the insurgents had no chance against columns of professional soldiers and were soon fleeing for their lives. In a precursor to the aftermath of the Commune in 1871, almost 27,000 people – whether they had participated in the revolt or not – were brought before courts-martial, or ‘Mixed Commissions’, consisting of senior military officers and judicial and administrative officials. Thousands of people were convicted, receiving sentences ranging from deportation to Algeria or even Cayenne, to imprisonment in France or exile from the region where they lived. The following year Napoleon III declared the Second Empire.2

  The Emperor found his Bonapartist following among wealthy men who had supported Louis-Philippe in the name of social ‘order’ during the Orléanist July Monarchy that ruled between 1830 and 1848.3 The financial system under Napoleon III was also set up to enrich those already in power. Napoleon III’s family received a million francs (roughly £1.8 million) from the treasury each year. Random relatives also received large sums from the state for simply existing. Moreover, millions of francs in special funds went into the Emperor’s large pockets; an English mistress received a hefty sum as well. But not everyone was pleased with the new Emperor. As the rich became even richer, many people in Paris and in the provinces continued to struggle and had contempt for ‘Napoléon le petit’, as Victor Hugo dubbed him. Workers had no legal recourse against their employers, who were backed by gendarmes and troops.

  In fact, an increasing number of Parisians fell into the latter camp and benefitted not at all from Napoleon III’s regime. The population of Paris almost doubled during the 1850s and 1860s, rising from a little more than 1 million in 1851 to almost 2 million people by 1870. Each year during the Second Empire tens of thousands of immigrants poured into the capital from the Parisian basin, the north, Picardie, Normandy, Champagne and Lorraine, among other regions, mostly male labourers even poorer than the Parisians already there, attracted by the possibility of construction work. These new residents, many of whom had left precarious economic situations in the rural world, accounted for virtually all of this rapid urban growth. Many were under-employed, if not unemployed, and crowded into garnis – rooming houses – on the narrow, grey streets in the central districts or in virtual shacks in the emerging industrial suburbs. The central arrondissements, always densely packed, reached an astonishing 15,000 people per square kilometre in the Fourth Arrondissement in Le Marais, where population density was three times today’s. Tens of thousands were indigent, dependent at least to some extent on charity. Some simply slept wherever they could. In 1870, almost half a million Parisians – one quarter of the population – could be found classified as indigent.4