Massacre Read online

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  Revolutionary music and symbols could not gloss over great differences in the political inclinations of those men leading the Commune. Former 48ers (that is, those who were active in the 1848 Revolution) were prominent among leaders in the Commune. Such Jacobins tended to be older than the others, including Félix Pyat, Charles Delescluze and Charles Beslay, the most senior at seventy-five years of age. A Breton from Dinan, Beslay had begun a factory producing machines in Paris during the July Monarchy. He supported workers’ rights, unlike Thiers, whom he had joined in opposing the Bourbon regime in its last years. Pyat, the son of a lawyer from Vierzon, had studied law, but devoted himself to politics and writing political pamphlets and plays. The pompous Pyat was anything but a man of courage, having hidden on a coal barge during the demonstrations that followed the funeral of Victor Noir. Pyat had a ‘rasping laugh’ and the ‘bilious eyes of a man whose childhood had been unhappy’.18

  Devoted republicans, Jacobins seemed to romanticise a return to previous revolutions – hence their symbols of the colour red and of the Phrygian cap, associated with the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. Rigault referred to them disparagingly as ‘the old beards of [18]48’. Jacobins tended to assess the situation facing Paris in terms of the politics of previous revolutions, particularly that of 1789 when foreign invasion and civil war threatened revolutionary gains. Both Jacobins and Blanquists continued to respect centralised revolutionary authority. However, unlike the Blanquists – and above all, Raoul Rigault, who had been obsessed with seizing and exercising power – Delescluze and other Jacobins remained committed to retaining essential freedoms despite the threatening military situation. As we have seen, Rigault also made constant reference to the French Revolution and was obsessed with militants of the extreme left during those heady days. Jacobin and Blanquist militants were prominent in the governing body of the Commune and in the Central Committee of the National Guard; indeed, about fifteen members following the elections of 16 April were members of both bodies.19 Therefore, when the members of the ‘Commune’ – its elected governing body – began to meet, the political divisions immediately and contentiously surfaced. Unlike the Jacobins, the Blanquists did not want the sessions of the Commune’s Council to be publicised, fearing that within an hour or so Thiers and his entourage would know everything that had been discussed, particularly military strategy, which, as professional revolutionaries, the followers of Blanqui considered their speciality. Moreover, Rigault proposed that Blanqui be named honorary president, but Delescluze and others protested vigorously. He could not stand Rigault’s authoritarian posture and denounced the proposition as ‘monarchical’.20

  In an effort to reconcile political tensions and make clear that the judicial abuses of the Second Empire would be left behind, the Commune asked Eugène Protot, once a delegate to the congress of the International in Geneva and now Communard delegate for justice, to move civil and criminal proceedings along more rapidly, and to undertake measures to guarantee ‘the freedom of all citizens’. But Protot’s efforts had little effect on the deep divide between Blanquists and Jacobins, in no small part thanks to Rigault’s obsession with perceived threats to the revolution. Gustave Lefrançais and some other delegates wanted the abolition of the Prefecture of Police, in order to put an end to what seemed arbitrary arrests undertaken by Rigault. The Blanquist fought against this measure tooth and nail, insisting that Thiers might well have a thousand spies in Paris.

  Rigault’s fears were not unfounded, however. Conspiracies against the Commune were afoot from the beginning. Within a couple of weeks, anti-Communard organisers began to distribute armbands (brassards) – conservative rallying marks that were at first white, the colour of the Bourbons, and later tricolour – in conservative neighbourhoods. Those who had them awaited the day they could come into the open and crush the Commune.21 On one occasion the militant Internationalist Jean Allemane, a printer by trade, got through the lines to Versailles in a failed attempt to somehow infiltrate Thiers’s government. Upon his return, he related his short trip in the company, by chance, of two loose-tongued Versaillais secret agents. When one of them observed that entering revolutionary Paris was as easy as slicing butter with a knife, Allemane quickly realised his mistake and had them arrested upon their arrival. Thiers and his entourage also tried to bribe well-placed Communards, apparently with some success.22

  In an effort to counteract this threat, Rigault, named Civil Delegate for General Security on 29 March, appointed committed young Blanquist disciples to fill the empty offices of the Prefecture of Police. Rigault’s team compiled files, following up reports of their agents, and oversaw policing. One young Blanquist, Théophile Ferré, a twenty-five-year-old Parisian, ‘a dark little man, with black, piercing eyes’, seemed omnipresent. A detractor referred to the former clerk as strange-looking, ‘but what is funnier is when he speaks; he rises up on the points of his feet like an angry rooster and emits sharp sounds, which constitute what one can improperly call his voice’. P.-P. Cattelain, head of security, tried to understand how political passion could be transformed into such enormous hatred in Ferré, who ‘inspired respect by his honesty and fear by his temperament as a ferocious friend of the revolution’. He could be unforgiving of those he believed stood in the way of political change. Cattelain said that, despite Ferré’s small size, he was afraid of him and believed that he would kill someone himself if he suspected treason. When several men robbed a house on Champs-Elysées, he told Cattelain to have shot ‘these wretches who dishonour the Commune!’ But then he changed his mind and sent them into battle with the National Guard; one was wounded and later died.23

  Gaston Da Costa – ‘Coco’ – served as Rigault’s faithful assistant, chef du cabinet of General Security. Da Costa was a tall and pleasant young man twenty years of age with long tousled blond hair who had studied mathematics, earned the baccelauréat, and had once considered applying to the elite École Polytechnique – as had his mentor Rigault. He had asked Da Costa, known in the Latin Quarter in the late 1860s as ‘Rigault’s puppy’, to reorganise the Prefecture of Police. He was among those who tried, with limited success, to convince Rigault that the reorganisation should be carried out in a less incendiary way. But Rigault’s fear of the enemy within had taken hold. Every Communard military setback was greeted with shouts of ‘Treason!’ Now ‘a single sign of [Rigault’s] hand [was] sufficient to cause anyone’s arrest, while no one knew what might become of his prisoners’.24

  Already unpopular among Jacobins as well as Parisians with ambivalent attitudes towards the Commune or hostility to it for their uncompromising policing efforts, Rigault and his companions’ raucous lifestyle did little to soften their image and provided fodder for propagandists in Versailles. In their free moments they guzzled food, wine and eau-de-vie, having contrived to move one of their favourite brasseries from the boulevard Saint-Michel into the Prefecture of Police. Nor had Rigault’s appetite for female companionship faded with the coming revolution: he was often in the company of Mademoiselle Martin, a young actress. All this gave rise to rumours in Versailles of ‘orgies’ at the Prefecture of Police. The long workday finished – not without breaks for food, drink and frivolity – Rigault and the others would go out to dine, and drink some more. His critics howled at restaurant bills he had allegedly run up with ‘Coco’ Da Costa. One 75.25-franc breakfast on 10 May allegedly included two great Burgundies and Chateaubriand aux truffes; five days later, 62.85 francs bought them Pommard, Veuve Clicquot, Nuits-Saint-Georges and cigars.25

  Communard General Gustave Cluseret described Rigault’s obsession with the police: ‘He could not knock down a bock – and he drank many – without talking about the police.’ US citizen Lili Morton was enthusiastic about the Commune, but soured slightly when she met Rigault. She needed a pass to leave Paris, and went to see him carrying a letter of introduction, but the head of the police received her rudely and she was interrogated ‘diabolical[ly]’. The American got
her passport, but left repulsed by the ‘wicked expression … [in] his cunning eyes’.26

  Rigault, for all his faults, was devoted to the cause and aided communards whenever he could. Cattelain remembered his boss as an ‘ardent revolutionary, sometimes brutal, but always subject to sentiments of humanity’, emphasising ‘the extreme instability of his character’. He could be vicious, but also compassionate. Every day people showed up asking to see him. Women came to beg for help; their families did not have proper lodging and were hungry. Some even turned up asking for help even though their men were fighting on the side of Versailles. The Commune provided spouses of national guardsmen with seventy-five centimes per day, but this was not enough. Rigault provided some of them with rooms in the Lobau barracks. And, having been been aided by Renoir when he was on the run from imperial police several years earlier, he also made it possible for the Impressionist to get out of Paris to paint in the countryside.27

  Maverick journalist Henri Rochefort was no fan of Rigault. But he admitted that he was ‘made of the stuff from which veritable revolutionists are cut out’. He sacrificed all for the cause of revolution. Rigault was fearless – no danger caused ‘his face to pale’. Rigault was the kind of man who could tell someone, ‘I’m very fond of you, but circumstances unfortunately compel me to have you shot. I am, therefore, going to do so!’28

  Rigault set up eighty neighbourhood police offices and had at his disposal a brigade of 200 agents given the task of sniffing out Versaillais spies. In the morning, at least when he was awake, Rigault convoked a sort of council which went over the reports that had come in during the previous twenty-four hours. Political policing remained, predictably, Rigault’s central focus. About 3,500 people were arrested during the Commune, among them 270 prostitutes. The prisons of Paris were full. Rigault had ordered the arrest of over 400 people between 18 and 28 March, even though many, including Georges Clemenceau, were quickly released.29

  As the weeks passed, the arrests of those accused of working for Versailles increased, and included a member of the International who had been an imperial police spy. Rigault’s political opponents within the Commune objected to his dictatorial methods. Tensions mounted between Rigault and the Central Committee. Rigault responded memorably to a critic, ‘We are not dispensing justice, we are making revolution.’30

  On 13 April, Rigault drew more fire when he ordered the arrest of Gustave Chaudey, former deputy mayor, follower of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and a friend and former editor of Le Siècle. Chaudey was also a friend of Courbet, who had painted a portrait of him in 1870 and who protested about his arrest. Chaudey had ordered Breton guardsmen to fire from the Hôtel de Ville on demonstrators on 22 January, killing several people, including Rigault’s friend Théophile Sapia. Élie Reclus, who described Chaudey as haughty and something of a mediocrity, suggested that the journalist had been incarcerated by the Commune, to which he had rallied, because he had forcefully opposed all ‘who do not appear to be acting in good faith’.31

  Who were the Communards? British journalist Frederic Harrison assessed the Communards in Paris, writing that the ‘“insurgents” … are simply the people of Paris, mainly and at first working men, but now largely recruited from the trading and professional classes. The “Commune” has been organised with extraordinary skill, the public services are efficiently carried on, and order has been for the most part preserved.’ In Harrison’s view, the Commune was ‘one of the least cruel … [and] perhaps the ablest revolutionary government of modern times’.32

  The average Communard was the average Parisian, young, between twenty-one and forty years of age, the largest number being men between thirty-six and forty years. Three-quarters had been born outside of Paris and were part of the waves of immigration, above all from north-eastern France but also from the north-west, along with seasonal migrants from Creuse in the centre. Some 45 per cent of Communards were married and 6 per cent widowers, although many workers lived in union libres (common-law marriages), which the Commune legitimised. Only 2 per cent had received secondary education. At a time of increased literacy, only about 11 per cent were illiterate, although many ordinary Parisians enjoyed only basic reading and writing skills.33

  Most Communards were drawn from the world of Parisian work, including artisans and craftsmen who produced articles de Paris and jewellery. Their numbers included skilled and semi-skilled workers, many working with wood, shoes, printing, or small-scale metal production, and construction workers, as well as day-labourers and domestic servants. Shopkeepers, clerks and men in the liberal professions were also well represented. They were part of ‘the people’ who had suffered during the siege and felt threatened by monarchist machinations.34 Some 70 per cent of female Communards came from the world of women’s work, particularly textiles and clothing trades. Some courageously provided food and drink to Communard fighters or served as doctors’ assistants, tending wounded Communard fighters. Louise Michel saw nothing against the incorporation of prostitutes into the corps of women helping the wounded: ‘Who has more right than these women, the most pitiful of the old order’s victims, to give their lives for the new?’ The Commune accorded pensions to widows and children, whether ‘legitimate’ or not, of men killed fighting for the Commune.35

  But however average or ordinary most Communards were, many observers – foreign and local alike – saw the Commune as a pitched conflict between classes. In his relatively short time at the US Legation, for instance, Wickman Hoffman took note of ‘the class hatred which exists in France’. For the American, it was ‘something we have no idea of, and I trust that we never shall. It is bitter, relentless and cruel; and is, no doubt, a sad legacy of the bloody Revolution of 1789, and of the centuries of oppression which preceded it.’36

  Hippolyte Taine, a conservative historian, was sure that the Commune was a proletarian revolution. On 5 April he wrote that, most fundamentally, the ‘present insurrection’ was socialist: ‘The boss and the bourgeois exploit us, therefore we must suppress them. Superiority and special status do not exist. Me, a worker, I have abilities, and if I want, I can become the head of a business, a magistrate, a general. By good fortune, we have rifles, let’s use them to establish a Republic in which workers like us become cabinet ministers and presidents.’37

  Edmond Goncourt and his brother Jules had assessed shortly before the latter’s death a year earlier that ‘the gap between wages and the cost of living would kill the Empire’. A workman had indeed reason to ask, ‘“What good does it do me for there to be monuments, operas, café-concerts where I have never set foot because I don’t have the money?” And he rejoices that henceforth there will be no more rich people in Paris, so convinced is he that the gathering of rich people into one places raises prices.’38

  The economic and political divisions in the Parisian quartiers did seem to bear out the Commune’s origins in class conflict. The more plebeian neighbourhoods of Paris led the way in support for the Commune. The social geography of Paris reflected a divide between the more prosperous western half of the city and the People’s Paris of the eastern districts; and between the centre and the proletarian periphery. The divide had only been intensified by Baron Georges Haussmann’s massive urban projects during the Second Empire, but, with the uprising on 18 March, the periphery had arguably conquered the beaux quartiers. This is not to say that there were not some who opposed the Commune in poorer areas such as the Eleventh, Twelfth, Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements, or devoted Communards in the relatively more privileged Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Arrondissements. Social geography, however, counted for much.

  The Second Arrondissement embodied the social and political divide that could be found even within a relatively prosperous district. The western parts were more bourgeois, more anti-Communard, and highly suspicious of proletarian Belleville and its national guardsmen and the ‘Vengeurs de Flourens’ who came down to parade in the conservative quartiers below. In the earlier weeks of the
Commune, many residents were for conciliation and a negotiated settlement, and voted for moderate representatives in the election of 26 March. The more plebeian eastern neighbourhoods of the Second Arrondissement sent delegates to the Commune, which was not the case for the middle-class residents to the west. Some 12,000 people required living assistance in the arrondissement and were more likely to be guardsmen because they depended on the 1.50 francs a day payment for their families. A mechanic put it this way: ‘I have seven children and my wife was ill. I had no other means of feeding my family.’39

  Given the needs of its plebeian supporters, the organisation of work remained a significant goal for Communard militants. The ‘Déclaration du peuple français’ of 19 April called for the creation of institutions that would provide credit for ordinary people, facilitating the ‘access to property’ and the ‘freedom of labour’. Ideas and even concrete projects for the ‘organisation of work’ were in the air, amid confidence that the defence of the National Guard cannons on 18 March had inaugurated a new era, full of possibilities that would make Paris and the world a better place.40

  Thus the ‘social question’ – the condition of the poor and reforms that could be put in place to help them – remained important to many ordinary Parisians. The idea that revolution could bring about reforms that would reduce or even eliminate the considerable differences in conditions of life, opportunities and expectations remained entrenched in the collective memory of Parisian workers. Eugène Varlin put it this way: ‘We want to overthrow the exploitation of workers by the right of labour [le droit au travail] and the association of workers in corporation.’ Workers hoped that newly established cooperatives would reflect the organisation of the Commune itself: decentralised and locally governed. The anarchist Proudhon’s influence could be seen in many workers’ organisations in many trades. The Proudhonists and the Blanquists imagined that France, like Paris, would evolve into a federation of communes, becoming a free country just as Paris had become a ‘free city’ (ville libre). Such echoes could be heard at the meeting of women in the Church of the Trinité on 12 May when a speaker thundered, ‘The day of justice approaches with giant strides … the workshops in which you are packed will belong to you; the tools that are put into your hands will be yours; the gain resulting from your efforts, from your troubles, and from the loss of your health will be shared among you. Proletarians, you will be reborn.’41 This was a time of big dreams.