Massacre Read online

  From the place Clichy, soldiers commanded by Susbielle, led by gendarmes who knew the streets of Montmartre, moved to secure the cannons standing near the Moulin de la Galette and Château Rouge, as well as to occupy the Tour Solferino. General Lecomte’s soldiers were to take control of the cannons standing near the large dance hall at Château Rouge. Troops blocked entry to the church of Saint-Pierre, preventing the ringing of the tocsin that would have alerted Parisians and republican National Guard troops to the threat. By 6.00 a.m., General Lecomte’s force held the Butte of Montmartre. Soldiers set up posts on the eastern and southern slopes of the hill to facilitate the descent of the cannons in case of trouble, pushing aside National Guardsmen assigned to protect them. They posted a proclamation from Thiers explaining that taking back the cannons was ‘indispensable to the maintenance of order’. The proclamation stated that Thiers wanted to eliminate the ‘insurrectionary committee’ that he insisted existed, whose members were almost all unknowns, representing ‘communist’ doctrines while preparing to turn Paris over to pillage.6

  In the meantime, residents of Montmartre got into several churches, climbing into steeples to ring the tocsin, the stirring sound of alarm. Parisians poured into the streets. At place Saint-Pierre, soldiers filled in small trenches that had been dug to keep the guns from being easily moved, while onlookers, including men in work clothes, expressed their hostility. Although troops had arrived several hours earlier, the guns were still in place. About 2,000 horses were needed to haul the cannons down from Montmartre and they had not arrived, nor had enough coupling attachments with which to hitch the horses to the cannons.7 In Belleville, word spread that line troops had come to take the cannons, including some standing in the park of Ménilmontant. Several strongly republican National Guard units were already afoot, arriving at rue Puebla as troops were hauling cannons towards rue de Belleville. Belleville residents and national guardsmen began to construct impromptu barricades to prevent troops from moving the cannons through the streets. Many of the soldiers had turned their rifles upside down, a sign that they were not about to use them. When government drums began to beat, summoning National Guard units considered reliable, no guardsmen came to join their commanders.

  At the mairie of Belleville, an English correspondent for the London Times came upon a platoon of cavalry looking like it intended to fight, armed with three mitrailleuses, and stationed near the cannons, with horses standing nearby. But hostility quickly evaporated into fraternisation, as nearby residents began building a barricade and the troops made no move to stop them. Finally at about eleven o’clock the small detachment headed towards Buttes-Chaumont, where it stopped. Going back to Montmartre, the Englishman noticed that ‘there was not a red trouser [i.e. French soldiers’ trousers] to be seen, excepting here and there a straggler making a fraternal speech to an admiring audience … These streets, so deserted in the morning, excepting here and there a slinking warrior, were now swarming with them, drums were beating, bugles blowing, and all the din of victory.’8

  The uneasy peace between soldiers and guardsmen did not last long. A confrontation occurred after troops surprised guardsmen, who opened fire, wounding a cavalryman. One National Guardsman, a man called Turpin, challenged gendarmes and was shot and mortally wounded. Several other guardsmen were captured and held in the Tour de Solferino. A few managed to get away and spread the alarm. Soldiers and horses managed to begin hauling two convoys of guns down the hill from Montmartre. A crowd stopped a third on rue Lepic, but soldiers managed to clear the way and the convoy made it all the way down and across the Seine to the École Militaire on the Left Bank. Elsewhere, nothing went smoothly for the troops. A detachment moving towards the Moulin de la Galette found its way blocked by National Guardsmen who called out to the troops to join them. One guardsman gave an officer a blow of a rifle butt to the head, while some soldiers made their way quickly down the hill. At Place Pigalle, shots from National Guardsmen killed a captain who ordered his troops to clear the area.9

  When Clemenceau went to the National Guard headquarters at about 7.30 a.m., he came upon Louise Michel, who had been active in the Eighteenth Arrondissement vigilance committee. She left hurriedly, and ran down the hill: ‘I descended the Butte, my rifle under my coat, shouting Treason! … believing that we would die for liberty. We were risen from the earth. Our deaths would free Paris.’10

  Born in a village in Haute-Marne in eastern France, Louise Michel was the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant and a young man of vaguely noble title. Her mother and her father’s parents raised her in a crumbling château near the village of Vroncourt-la-Côte. There she became interested in traditional customs, folk myths and legends. Increasingly hostile to Catholicism, she was influenced nonetheless by ‘the shadowy depths of the churches, the flickering candles, and the beauty of the ancient chants’. As a child she gave fruit, vegetables and small sums to poor people; as a young adult she became a schoolteacher, first in a nearby village and then in Paris. With her oval face and ‘a long, thin and tight-lipped mouth’, she seemed to have hard, almost masculine traits. Michel is known to history as ‘the Red Virgin’. She embraced the cause of women’s rights, proclaiming that one could not separate ‘the caste of women from humanity’.11

  When more horses finally arrived, some of the soldiers began to try to move more of the guns down from Montmartre. But women who were out in the neighbourhood had returned home to awaken their men, so what had been sparse gatherings of curious bystanders had now swelled into an angry crowd. Men, women and children blocked the soldiers’ descent, trying to cut the horses’ harnesses and hurling bottles and rocks at the troops. An observer saw ‘women and children swarming up the hillside in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralysing the advance of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude.’ A National Guardsman climbed onto a milestone and yelled, ‘Cut the traces!’ Men and women cut through the harnesses with knives. The artillerymen, quickly giving up on moving the cannons, came down from their horses and some began to fraternise with people in the crowd, accepting the meat, rolls and wine offered by women. Soldiers who abandoned the cannons and broke ranks were ‘the object of frenetic ovations’ from the crowd.12

  On the eastern side of Montmartre, angry residents also prevented troops under the command of Lecomte from taking the cannons down the hill. The general was confident that a brigade commanded by General Susbielle would attack from the other side of Montmartre, trapping the insurgents between them. When sentries reported that the National Guardsmen were advancing towards them, Lecomte confidently announced that his troops would take care of them. But his soldiers, far from attempting to fight the insurgents, instead stopped and began to discuss the situation with guardsmen and other residents. An officer named Lalande even affixed a white handkerchief to his sword. At Buttes-Chaumont, troops awaited in vain the anticipated horses. National Guardsmen, however, turned out, constructed barricades, and the soldiers withdrew.

  On Montmartre, General Lecomte stepped forward to take charge. The general ordered his troops three times to fire into the crowd of men, women and children. But they did not fire. A woman challenged the soldiers: ‘Are you going to fire on us? On your brothers? On our husbands? On our children?’ Another insulted them, reminding the line troops of their defeat at the hands of the Prussians. Lecomte threatened to shoot any man who refused to fire, asking if his soldiers ‘were going to surrender to that scum’. Louise Michel recalled that a non-commissioned officer left the ranks, ‘placed himself before his company and yelled, louder than Lecomte, “Turn up your rifle butts!” The soldiers obeyed … the Revolution was made.’13

  Captain Lalande
informed Lecomte that it was he who had to surrender. The general sent an officer down rue Lepic to bring back reinforcements, but troops charging a crowd there had been greeted with shots that killed another officer and wounded several of his men. National Guardsmen rushed forward and took Lecomte and several other officers prisoner, taking them to a police post at Château Rouge.14

  Clemenceau was eager to obtain General Lecomte’s release, fearing that he might be harmed, as a furious mob had gathered outside the police post. Guardsmen took Lecomte and a few other prisoners back to the modest house that served as the National Guard headquarters on rue de Rosiers, searching for members of the Central Committee of the National Guard who could decide what to do. But no one from the committee could be found: the members had departed, believing the prisoners to be safely held by the National Guard. Guardsmen arrived there with General Clément Thomas, who had preceded Aurelle de Paladines as commander of the National Guard, as prisoner. The crowd quickly recognised Thomas, reviled by working people for his role in the slaughter of insurgents during the June Days of 1848. He was wearing civilian clothes – and therefore taken to be a spy. The crowd of men and women pulled Thomas and Lecomte into a garden behind the building. There they were both shot, Lecomte after pleading for mercy on behalf of his wife and five children.15

  The Central Committee of the National Guard moved into action, albeit somewhat belatedly due to uncertainty about what was going on. By 10.00 a.m. about a dozen members had gathered. They sent representatives into neighbourhoods where National Guard battalions were known to be hostile to the provisional government. Early in the afternoon guardsmen commanded by Émile Duval, the son of a laundress, occupied the Panthéon and Prefecture of Police. Eugène Varlin, a printer and socialist, led 1,500 guardsmen from Batignolles and Montmartre down into the beaux quartiers, controlling place Vendôme, where the National Guard headquarters stood in the midst of the conservative neighbourhood. That evening, a red flag flew from the Hôtel de Ville, where the Central Committee now gathered, for the moment the de facto government of the fledgling Paris Commune. What began as a spontaneous defence of National Guard cannons had quickly become an insurrection and then a revolution. As Benoît Malon, a member of the International, put it, ‘never has a revolution so surprised revolutionaries’. Louise Michel proclaimed: ‘The eighteenth of March could have belonged to the allies of kings, or to foreigners, or to the people. It was the people’s.’16

  Thiers realised that the army did not have enough troops to crush the insurrection. He first ordered Vinoy to pull his troops back behind the Seine and occupy the bridges on the Left Bank, and then ordered a complete evacuation of Paris by all government officials, followed by troops. Of about 4,000 policemen, more than 2,500 joined line troops heading for Versailles. Paris was left with virtually no officials or functionaries, no magistrates, no police. Many Parisians of means had already begun to desert their city. The next day, Thiers cut all correspondence between Paris and the provinces.17

  During the February Revolution of 1848, Thiers had advised the Orléanist regime to move the army outside of Paris, regroup, and then return to crush the working-class insurgents. Prince Alfred Windischgraetz had done the same thing that same year in Vienna. With several hundred thousand French troops in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, and the potential unreliability of many line troops, Thiers could not contemplate an immediate assault on Paris. He wanted time to rebuild his forces.

  Thiers ordered the evacuation of troops from the forts of Mont Valérien, Issy, Vanves and Montrouge, each well beyond the ramparts of Paris. Soon after, he realised that giving up Mont-Valérien, south-west of Neuilly, had been a grave mistake, and it was reoccupied; troops turned back a half-hearted assault by National Guard forces. The officers of the now twice-defeated army gathered in Versailles, shocked by events and utterly humiliated.

  Raoul Rigault had returned to Paris on 18 February, the day after the National Assembly elected Thiers head of the executive authority. The police were looking for him and he lay low until mid-March. Having dined late in the Latin Quarter at the Brasserie Glaser the evening before, Rigault woke up late on 18 March to hear the news that the people of Montmartre had prevented the troops from carrying off the National Guard cannons, and had shot generals Lecomte and Thomas. The fervent disciple of revolution had missed the whole thing! Rigault ran to the Prefecture of Police, and, finding that Émile Duval had already assumed police functions there, pushed him out of the way and began to set up shop. Rigault then began to sign orders for the liberation of political prisoners. Blanquists were chomping at the bit, eager to organise a military march on Versailles. However, the Central Committee of the National Guard hesitated, as did Jacobins and many members of the International.

  Montmartre, Belleville and other peripheral plebeian neighbourhoods took the victory on 18 March as their own, a revolution that would challenge the existing conservative provisional government. They poured down from the heights to parade triumphantly on the place de l’Hôtel de Ville and the boulevards of central Paris. Organisation and militancy would remain firmly based in the context of neighbourhood action.18

  Edmond de Goncourt witnessed the explosion of popular joy and energy that erupted on 18 March: ‘All around me people are talking of provocation and making fun of Thiers … The triumphant revolution seems to be taking possession of Paris: National Guards are swarming and barricades are being put up everywhere; naughty children scramble on top of them. There is no traffic; shops are closing.’ The next day he walked near the Hôtel de Ville. No friend of ordinary people, he snarled:

  You are overcome with disgust to see their stupid and abject faces, which triumph and drunkenness have imbued with a kind of radiant swinishness … for the moment France and Paris are under the control of workmen … How long will it last? Who knows? The unbelievable rules … the cohorts of Belleville throng our conquered boulevard … going along in the midst of a somewhat mocking astonishment which seems to embarrass them and makes them turn their victors’ eyes towards the toes of their shoes, worn mostly without socks … The government is leaving the hands of those who have, to go into the hands of those who have not … Is it possible that in the great law underlying changes here on earth the workers are for modern societies what the Barbarians were for ancient societies, convulsive agents of dissolution and destruction?19

  Ernest Vizetelly described the most prosperous neighbourhoods of Paris as being invaded by men ‘with faces such as were only seen on days of Revolution’.20

  Yet life in Paris in some ways went on as if nothing had changed. Shops opened the next day as usual, and in some neighbourhoods people simply walked around remaining barricades. Eugène Bersier, a Protestant pastor, recalled that no one could really believe that they were in the middle of an insurrection. He watched National Guard battalions from Belleville, Montmartre and the southern suburb of Montrouge, ‘poor lost souls who believe that they have saved the Republic’, parade through central Paris. A week later, Auguste Serraillier, a thirty-year-old shoemaker and member of the Council of Marx’s International, reported that the only abnormal occurrence was the closing of the workshops – employers appeared to be organising a lock-out in order to undercut the Commune. Even the conservative historian Hippolyte Taine had to admit that nothing scary or dramatic had followed the people’s victory of 18 March. He watched National Guardsmen playing boules and passing the hat for money to buy some sausage and a little wine.21

  As drama unfolded on Montmartre, Paul Vignon, the son of a magistrate and himself a lawyer who had been a national guardsman during the Prussian siege, had taken his mother to the Gare Montparnasse so that she could return to their family home in the Norman town of Falaise. Returning to the Palace of Justice, he heard shouts coming from the direction of the quai de la Mégisserie. Then he learned what had happened up on Montmartre, far from his comfortable existence. He saw two gendarmes with torn shirts who had struggled with a crowd shouting for the Commune and again
st the army. Within hours most conservative national guardsmen had left their ranks. What was left of his National Guard unit, Vignon claimed, was only ‘the lazy element’ – those continuing to serve for the 1.50 francs per day that they received. Vignon contended that a kind of fever had come upon ordinary Parisians. The Franco-Prussian War had wrenched them away from their normal occupations and they now seemed to believe that no leaders were necessary in a world of total equality, without a ‘ruling class’ and in which the kind of luxury to which he was accustomed would be ‘a stigma’.

  Édouard, Paul’s father, reported to his wife two days later that ‘After the Prussians, now it’s Belleville and Montmartre who want to stage their political drama.’ For wealthy Parisians like Paul and Édouard Vignon, the insurgency was at first nothing to be too concerned about, just another Parisian episode with which to contend. Indeed, Paris seemed astonishingly calm, particularly their bourgeois quartier in central Paris, where faces were ‘sad, gloomy’.

  Paul briefly set about trying to organise conservative National Guardsmen who were ‘frankly reactionary’. Édouard also believed it their duty ‘to increase the number of honnêtes gens’. The Vignon family quickly adopted the vocabulary of social and spatial stigmatisation. They juxtaposed the Communard ‘rabble’ – for example ‘the low-life of Belleville’ – with the ‘honnêtes gens’ of the upper classes in the fancy neighbourhoods. Édouard and his son would bide their time, and looked to Thiers and the National Assembly to put an end to this mess.22