Massacre Read online

  The willingness, even eagerness of the Versaillais troops to carry out summary executions of captured Communards marked an early turning point in the history of the Paris Commune. It left little doubt in the minds of determined Communards that the government and armies of Adolphe Thiers were capable of unrestrained violence and that Paris had to be defended at all costs.

  The Commune’s leadership quickly assembled a force that may have numbered 20,000 but was probably fewer. At 5.00 a.m. on 3 April, four columns marched out of Paris towards Versailles, two from the right side: one, commanded by Jules Bergeret, was to go around Mont-Valérien and the other, under Gustave Flourens, to go across pont d’Asnières. A third column, under the command of Eudes, was to march through Issy and Meudon, while a fourth, commanded by Duval, would move through Châtillon. Thiers’s line troops were ready, having been informed by spies in Paris.65

  One Parisian who was on his way out of the city took note of the disordered and paltry forces that were marching towards Versailles. A colonel in the French army, who had managed to go back and forth to Versailles, had decided that it would be ‘prudent’ to return definitely to the capital of the Bourbons. He had heard someone refer to him as a mouchard (police spy) and believed that his comings and goings were being noted. As the colonel prepared to leave Paris, a ‘great rumour’ swept down the boulevards that Communard forces were going to move on Versailles. The colonel watched the national guardsmen leave in near-total disorder, each carrying some sausage, bread and a litre of wine. Some were drunk and singing as they went along. Resourceful merchants plunged into their ranks, selling strong eau-de-vie. He could hear some guardsmen shout out that ‘Père Thiers’ should be hung. National guardsmen assured him that they would be 100,000 in number. They seemed far fewer than that.66

  Communard leaders had reassured the National Guard that the Versaillais soldiers would not fight and that they would point their rifles to the ground, as some troops had done on 18 March on Montmartre. But now every sign indicated that the line troops would indeed fight. Once beyond the ramparts, Communard fighters faced incessant shelling by Versaillais cannons firing from the heights of Mont Valérien. Only the column commanded by Eudes had any success, but then had to fall back on Clamart late in the afternoon because of insufficient artillery cover.67

  Emile Duval and Gustave Flourens were captured during the fighting. Flourens had taken refuge in an auberge. Gendarmes burst in and (falsely) accused him of having shot a gendarme who had come earlier looking for Communards. A gendarme who recognised Flourens dragged him outside and hacked him to death on the banks of the Seine. The loss of Flourens, a highly educated and energetic force within the Commune, was disastrous. A general had promised that Communard fighters who surrendered would be saved. But when Vinoy arrived and asked who commanded the fédérés, the general barked out orders that Duval and his chief-of-staff should be immediately shot. A soldier removed Duval’s boots from his body and yelled ‘Who wants Duval’s boots?’ as he rode away. As the Communard columns fell back, Galliffet ordered at least three other prisoners shot.68

  Sutter-Laumann, the young socialist living on Montmartre, heard in Paris that Vinoy’s forces had moved against the rond-point of Courbevoie and that captured national guardsmen had been executed. He returned hurriedly to Montmartre to see if his battalion had been summoned to action and found his neighbourhood in a state of alarm. Drums and trumpets were sounding ‘with a lugubrious air that made one shudder’. He learned that his unit, which included his father, a corporal, had left two hours earlier. Sutter-Laumann caught up with them along the Seine. No one seemed to have the slightest idea where they were heading. Yet rumour had thousands of guardsmen moving on Versailles. Could the taking of Versailles not be assured?

  In the distance, they could see the silhouette of Mont-Valérien. Suddenly its cannons opened up. They approached Meudon, its château and park stretching behind it, with Fort d’Issy off to the left. Amid fighting and losses, they reached the village of Clamart and were greeted with machine-gun fire. The National Guard battalion retreated as it had arrived, in chaos, and then was ordered to march to Châtillon. Sutter-Laumann decided to return to the village of Issy. Absolutely exhausted, he came upon guardsmen amusing themselves with target practice, even as Versaillais troops seemed headed in their direction. It was there that Sutter-Laumann learned of the fiasco at Châtillon, and the killing of Flourens and Duval.69

  Sutter-Laumann and other colleagues found themselves under attack between Vanves and Issy. Their numbers fell from fifty to thirty, and then to about eight, as guardsmen scurried off to safety. By miracle, he managed to meet up with his father, separated from his own battalion. They made it back to Paris together. For his part, Sutter-Laumann was now convinced that the defeat of the Commune was inevitable. The sortie of perhaps as many as 20,000 national guardsmen, supported by the forts of Issy and Vanves, had been unable to dislodge two or three regiments of Versaillais line troops.70

  The result was an overall disaster and the Communard forces retreated into Paris. On 4 April, the Versaillais launched a counter-attack against the columns of Duval and Eudes, capturing the plateau of Châtillon and the pont de Neuilly. For the moment Communard forces still held the forts of Issy, Montrouge, Bicêtre and Ivry. But, as of the evening of 12 April, the Versaillais held Sèvres, Châtillon, Meudon and Saint-Cloud. The Commune had lost about 3,000 fighters killed or captured.

  Despite its defeat at the hands of Versaillais troops and the unforeseen challenges of governing Paris, Communard confidence still abounded in the early weeks of spring. Louis Barron remembered: ‘The Parisian movement … is carried along purely by its own momentum … I recklessly allow myself to be swept along in its current … I hardly ever think of the dangers of the morrow.’ Barron had to ‘admit that the cheerful bravado of the participants, their frivolous chatter, their wildly ostentatious dress, their taste for brilliant colours, plumed hats and impassioned speeches all help to distract me from my brooding fears’.71 With Thiers reconstituting the French army in the royal château at Versailles, there was lots indeed to fear.

  CHAPTER 3

  Masters of Their Own Lives

  PARIS WAS FREE. ORDINARY PEOPLE FROM QUARTIERS POPULAIRES strolled through western Paris’s fancy neighbourhoods, which many of them had never seen before unless they had been employed as domestics or day labourers. Some working families who had been expelled from central neighbourhoods by Haussmann’s grand projects reappropriated streets they had once known very well. But with Thiers readying his troops in Versailles, how long could it last?

  On Easter Sunday, the Jardins du Luxembourg seemed as crowded to Ernest Vizetelly ‘as in the calmest days of peace’. And so were the principal boulevards of Paris, at least until cafés were ordered to shut at 11.00 p.m. In many ways, during the first half of April, life in Paris seemed to go on very much as before. The Louvre and Bibliothèque Nationale reopened. The Bourse carried on, despite the fact that most of the big investors had left Paris. The Café de Madrid, Vizetelly observed, was ‘swarming with delegates and staff officers’.1

  Concerts held in the Tuileries Gardens celebrated the Commune. Louis Barron noted the gatherings’ social mix, bringing together elderly proletarians and ‘the white and fat figures of well-nourished bourgeois, along with the little, laughing faces of young women’. He was amused seeing people from all social classes greeting each other enthusiastically ‘Ah! Citoyenne … Ah! Citoyen!’ More surprisingly, the Tuileries Palace, where Napoleon III and his family had lived so recently, had been opened to the public, with the entry fee of fifty centimes going towards the care of those wounded fighting the Versaillais. Women flocked to the apartments of the Empress, imagining the luxurious life Eugénie led there. Those hostile to the Commune were likely to miss the continued laughter of young children as they watched the Guignol puppets at the lower end of the Champs-Elysées.2

  The Commune was something of a ‘permanent feast’ of ordinary people
who celebrated their freedom by appropriating the streets and squares of Paris. Revolutionary songs echoed, well entrenched in the collective memory. Le peuple (the people) of Paris sang La Marseillaise, La Chant du départ and La Carmagnole. The Commune placed enormous importance on political symbolism, and the destruction of several symbols of ‘reaction’ and ‘injustice’ took place in a festival-like atmosphere that made it possible for some to forget about an increasingly grim situation. Édouard Moriac remembered ‘everyone wanted to see the spectacle of the day’ as Parisians rushed to see the cannons being hauled off to battle, forgetting, perhaps, that a clash with Thiers’s troops was all but inevitable.3

  In one such display of symbolic destruction, national guardsmen from the Eleventh Arrondissement burnt a guillotine at place Voltaire on 7 April, just down rue de la Roquette where executions took place every year. Several thousand people were there. Leighton watched: ‘When nothing remained but a heap of glowing ashes, the crowd shouted with joy; and for my own part, I fully approved of what had just been done as well as of the approbation of the spectators.’4

  One reflection of popular excitement about and engagement with the Commune was the almost frenetic proliferation of newspapers, brochures, pamphlets, political posters, manifestos, wall posters and caricatures that flooded Paris. Ninety newspapers appeared during the Commune, including the Jacobin Le Vengeur and the Proudhonist La Commune. La Sociale was largely the work of André Léo, aided by Maxime Vuillaume. Other newspapers published only a few editions. Jules Vallès’s Le Cri du peuple turned out 50,000 or 60,000 copies per issue, sometimes more. Boys wearing red caps peddled Le Bonnet Rouge on the boulevards.5

  Père Duchêne, which published as many as 60,000 copies a day, was one of the more popular newspapers, though its tone, insults and sheer vulgarity offended many loyal to the Commune.6 As its namesake during the French Revolution, Père Duchêne borrowed the biting argot of working-class Parisians. It adopted the revolutionary calendar that had begun in 1792, so 1871 was the year 79. On 3 Germinal, Père Duchêne denounced ‘the reactionary good-for-nothings [jean-foutres] who spread disorder in Paris’. Yet, despite the violence of the newspaper’s denunciation of wealthy men of property, Vuillaume, another anti-imperial militant who had written his first piece for the newspaper in 1869, called for class collaboration. His articles, at least, reflected the sentiments of most Parisians, who read newspapers and wall posters while discussing politics and the current situation, but did so in good order and for the most part good humour.

  The publication of so many newspapers during the Commune must be set against the censorship of others. Just as General Joseph Vinoy had shut down a spate of newspapers less than a week before the Commune, the Central Committee in late March banned Le Figaro and Le Gaulois, closely tied to Thiers. At least twenty-seven newspapers were shut down after 18 March. On 5 May, it was the turn of France, Le Temps and Le Petit Journal, and later ten more disappeared.7

  There were signs, too, of a new efflorescence of art during the Commune. Claiming authority given him following the proclamation of the Republic on 4 September, the great painter Gustave Courbet had announced on 18 March, coincidentally, the convocation of an assembly of artists. Courbet demanded artistic freedom from constraints and tastes imposed by the state. He exuded, ‘Paris is a true paradise … all social groups have established themselves as federations and are masters of their own fate.’8

  Courbet stood in the Sixth Arrondissement as a candidate for the elections to the Commune the next day but came in sixth, falling one position short. When by-elections took place on 16 April to replace members of the Commune who had not accepted the Commune’s mandate, had been elected in more than one arrondissement, or had resigned, Courbet was elected, becoming mayor of the arrondissement a week later.9

  Courbet celebrated his new-found artistic freedom as he ate and drank. Louis Barron paid a visit to the ‘master of Ornans’ in his apartment on rue Serpente in the Sixth Arrondissement. He found the painter seated before a pungent platter of choux and saucisses, which he consumed with glass after glass of red wine. They went down to boulevard Saint-Germain. The café terraces were full of students and loving couples, while the usual flâneurs strolled by, breathing in the sweet smells coming from the flowers of the nearby Jardins du Luxembourg. Yet, in the far distance, the sound of gunfire could be faintly heard. Courbet seemed briefly preoccupied and hoped that the Parisians would not let themselves be taken, noting ‘it’s true that the French in the provinces are celebrating the carnage inflicted on the French of Paris’.10

  Courbet moved quickly to organise and codify freedom for and promotion of the arts in Paris. The artist announced a proposal of fifteen points on 7 April. His fiery speech insisted that Paris had saved France from dishonour. He called upon artists, whom Paris had ‘nursed as would a mother’, to help rebuild France’s ‘moral state and rebuild the arts, which are its fortune’. In the amphitheatre of the Medical School, 400 artists elected a committee of forty-seven members drawn from painting, sculpture, architecture, lithography and the industrial arts. Thirty-two were to be replaced after one year. Besides Courbet, who was elected president of the new Artists’ Federation, Jean-François Millet, Corot, Édouard Manet and Eugène Pottier (author of the International) were members. The establishment of the Federation and the large number of artists who participated in its assembly reflected the dramatic increase in the number of artists in Paris: 350 in 1789; 2,159 by 1838; and 3,300 in 1863. Parisian artists, like other professions, had feared for their livelihood under Louis Napoleon. In the arts, too, the Commune offered hope.11

  The Federation took on the responsibility of the conservation of monuments, museums, galleries and relevant libraries and put forward the idea that the Commune would pay for the training of exceptionally promising young artists. The Federation would soon abolish the Academy of Beaux-Arts, long considered an appendage of ‘official’ taste. A week later, the Federation produced a blueprint for the future administration of the arts in Paris. The Federation’s committee would soon cashier the directors and associate directors of the Louvre and the Musée Luxembourg, believed sympathetic to Versailles. The Federation became increasingly concerned with protecting the artistic treasures of the Louvre from being damaged by Versaillais shells; indeed, some paintings had already been sent to Brest for safety. Courbet ordered that windows in the Louvre be secured, and placed guards around the museum.12

  The Commune appointed Courbet to the Commission on Education on 21 April, in part because it was nominally responsible for overseeing the Federation. Courbet described his work: ‘To follow the wave that is the Paris Commune, I do not have to reflect, but only to act naturally.’13

  On 29 April, the Commune named the Protestant pastor Élie Reclus director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, who, as Courbet with the Louvre, sought to ensure that no harm came to its rich collections from Versaillais shelling. When he arrived at the great library on 1 May, he had to summon a locksmith to open the office of the previous director, who had bolted for Versailles. Twelve days later Reclus notified all employees that he would fire anyone who did not sign a paper pledging allegiance to the Commune.14

  While the fine arts seemed poised to flourish under the Commune, the theatres of Paris staggered on as best they could given the severity of the situation facing Paris. The Commune had abolished monopolies and subsidies to the theatres of Paris, seeking to encourage the creation of cooperative associations instead. The Comédie Française had shut down on the evening of 18 March, the day the people of Montmartre had succeeded in keeping the National Guard cannons from troops, but reopened ten days later with the help of a loan. In the immediate confusion, some other theatres also closed for a time. A reduced troupe of actors (some having left the city) put on fifty-one performances during the Commune, closing for some reason on 3 April (causing a brief panic in the neighbourhood, because it seemed that something dire had occurred), though also performing during Holy Days later that
week. However, fewer tickets were sold, the takings barely covering the cost of light and heating. The most relevant production may have been one staged at Gaité in late April. It portrayed in unflattering terms men who managed to avoid serving in the National Guard.15

  With May came faltering morale and fewer theatrical performances. On 1 May, the Comédie Française filled only thirty-eight seats. No one likes to play to a largely empty theatre, and the director adopted the strategy of giving away tickets, so that on some nights there were 500 people in attendance. At least eleven other theatres staged performances during the Commune, including the Folies-Bergères. When Catulle Mendès purchased a ticket to a performance, the theatre was almost empty. The actors went through their lines quickly, accompanying them with slow gestures. They seemed bored, and, in turn, bored those who had bothered to be there. Cafés on nearby boulevards shut down, for lack of a post-theatre crowd.16

  Musicians in Paris played on, thanks to the support of the Commune. The Commune named a commission to oversee the interests of musicians. When the director of the Opera stalled on organising performances, the Commune named a new director of the Conservatoire, composer Daniel Salvador, the son of Spanish refugees. The Commune encouraged music that would be ‘heroic in order to exalt the living, funereal to mourn the dead’. Charles Garnier’s Opera stood unfinished – it would open in 1875 – and now became a storage facility for food. The old Opera continued with barely half its musicians. On 13 May, Salvador summoned professors at the Conservatoire de Musique to a meeting at Alcazar in rue de faubourg Poissonnière, but only five turned up. One asked Salvador if he understood that he was risking his neck for casting his lot with the Commune, and he replied that he knew very well that he might be killed, but that he had to act according to his principles.17