Massacre (10 page)

On 17 March, Thiers decided to move against the Parisian militants. He would send troops early the next morning to capture the National Guard cannons, most of which had been moved to Montmartre (171 cannons) or Belleville (74 cannons), both
quartiers populaires
– predominantly neighbourhoods of workers – from which they could dominate the city. Thiers made his decision for economic reasons as well as political ones. He explained, ‘Businessmen were going around constantly repeating that the financial operations would never be started until all those wretches were finished off and their cannons taken away. An end had to be put to all this, and then one could get back to business.’ A crowd thwarted Thiers’s troops’ first attempt on Montmartre on 12 March. To the citizens of that
quartier
, the National Guard’s cannons represented the right of Paris to arm itself. They would stop at nothing to keep the guns from government troops. Thiers’s officers, meanwhile, hurriedly prepared a plan to occupy Paris.
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On Montmartre, the cannons still stood in two rows on the heights and on a plateau further down the Butte. Four days later, soldiers under Thiers’s orders tried again to retrieve some of the guns, but were countered by National Guardsmen. The next day Thiers decided to have the cannons brought down early the following day, in order to ‘disarm Paris’ and its ‘revolutionary party’. The task at hand was exceedingly difficult, requiring soldiers to seize the cannons and haul them down the steep, narrow cobblestone streets through hostile neighbourhoods.

On the evening of 17 March, General Louis d’Aurelle de Paladines, an old Bonapartist now suspected of having changed his allegiance to the Bourbons, whom Thiers had named head of the National Guard of Paris, convoked commanders of about thirty or forty conservative national guard units. He ordered them to have their men ready the next morning. At about 4.30 a.m. on 18 March, troops under Vinoy were in place to begin bringing down the National Guard cannons from Montmartre. Soldiers commanded by General Claude Lecomte also went up to Montmartre from the north. A column of about 4,000 men under the command of General Bernard de Susbielle was to set up a command post at place Pigalle. Another column was to take control of Belleville, while a division was to remain below and assure control of the neighbourhoods between the Hôtel de Ville and the place de la Bastille.
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Very early in the morning, as women in these neighbourhoods went out to buy bread, they found themselves face to face with soldiers clad in the red trousers, blue tunics, and red and blue caps of the regular army. Georges Clemenceau, mayor of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, was
surprised and angered to see soldiers when he left his apartment at about 6.00 a.m. He expressed his ‘extreme surprise and disappointment’ with the military operation to one of the commanders. Thiers had ordered the military operation without notifying the
arrondissement
mayors, who had tried to achieve the peaceful surrender of the cannons. Clemenceau had hoped that the guns could be returned without a show of force by Thiers’s provisional government. But, for the moment, all was calm, and some residents of Montmartre chatted amiably with troops in a light Parisian rain.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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