Massacre (33 page)

The young Montmartre resident Sutter-Laumann, who had gone to work at the
mairie
of the Eighteenth Arrondissement the day before, was among those drawing fire near place Clichy. He quickly noticed that a good many guardsmen had exchanged their uniforms for civilian clothes in a last-ditch effort to avoid capture and certain death. A barricade at rue Lepic had only about a dozen defenders, and another further up the street only five or six. Resisters seemed either old or very young, with few in between. Twenty women marched towards rue Lepic behind a red flag. However, the guns at Moulin de galette were again quiet, thus offering Communard fighters no encouragement. After an exchange of gunfire between the defenders of the larger barricade further down rue Lepic, the Versaillais swept into nearby buildings and fired from above. Within a few minutes, about half the guardsmen and women had been killed or wounded.

Sutter-Laumann managed to escape the Versaillais attack, moving quickly from place Clichy via rue Véron to reach a barricade further up rue Lepic. The Communard cannons there had no shells. There were still five or six
fédérés
in position, but they soon retreated. The young Communard went to place Saint Pierre, where Versaillais shells were falling. He learned that line troops had taken boulevard Ornano and that place du Château d’eau was completely surrounded, ravaged by a ‘cyclone’ of shells. From rue Tholozé Sutter-Laumann could see troops in red trousers below at Moulin de galette. Shouts here and there of ‘Long live the Commune!’ and ‘The Versaillais are cowards!’ were not going to be enough. Now came time to think about getting out. At the home of a friend he carefully cleaned his National Guard uniform and waxed his shoes, in the hope of eliminating any trace of combat.
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Suddenly shots resounded outside. Hoping against hope, the father of Sutter-Laumann’s friend assumed that they had been fired by
fédérés.
But they were not national guardsmen. Almost immediately, Versaillais officers ordered from the street that all widows be shut and one of them demanded to know if there were guardsmen inside. There were eleven in the cellar, including Sutter-Laumann and his friend. When they emerged from the basement they were confronted by the rifles of line troops. An officer barked, ‘Did you serve the Commune?’ ‘No, my lieutenant’, came the reply. ‘Then why are you wearing a National Guard uniform?’ Sutter-Laumann’s response came quickly. He was so dressed because if he had gone out without a uniform that morning he would have risked arrest. Then why had he not gone to Versailles? He told the officer that he was only nineteen years old and lived with his parents. They had not been able to get out of Paris. The interrogator said that he had managed to get to Versailles. Desperate, Sutter-Laumann asked how he could live there with no resources. When the Versaillais replied that his expenses would have been paid, Sutter-Laumann asked hopefully how he could have known that?

Sutter-Laumann made a point of answering the Versaillais officer ‘in good French, without the accent of the faubourg’, which could have got him shot immediately. Suddenly, nearby volleys could be clearly heard: ‘Those are your comrades whom we are shooting.’ The young man repressed a shudder. What grade of officer were you? ‘None’, came the reply. When asked the same question, his friend Alcide admitted that he had been a sergeant. The officer told them to go and get their guns and bring them down, which luckily bore no traces of having been fired. When the officer told them to change their clothes, they replied that they had no others. This brought the officer’s loaded pistol to Sutter-Laumann’s head. The latter sputtered that they had sold their clothes during the siege.

Sutter-Laumann and his pal Alcide were incredibly lucky. Many others were not. The officer of the Volunteers of the Seine knew that often the Versaillais were not taking prisoners. Summary executions were becoming routine. He rather liked the two young men. The officer suddenly told them that he had lived in the same
quartier
for a long time. He advised them to go home, stay there, and get rid of uniforms and anything – buttons, military decorations of any kind – that suggested a connection with the Commune. The officer assured them that the soldiers who were behind them would not be as understanding. The two young men hurried to the apartment. The other national guardsmen emerged finally from the cellar, as had Sutter-Laumann and Alcide a few moments earlier,
having been fortunate that no search of the building had been undertaken. They too quickly transformed themselves into civilians and may have survived.

Now where to go? Women from the neighbourhood had just found thirty-seven corpses on rue Lepic. Sutter-Laumann, Alcide and his family amounted to ten people in the small apartment. Versaillais troops arrived. They took a look at Sutter-Laumann and the others, and then moved on. Then another group came, these more determined, demanding that all weapons in the building be brought down. But they too went on. Then came more soldiers, searching each apartment. They uncovered one line uniform. But its owner could not be found and they, too, departed. How much longer could this good fortune go on?

The next group of Versaillais line soldiers who entered the courtyard below were drunk, some barely able to stand up for all the wine and eau-de-vie they had knocked down. They smashed empty bottles on the ground. Their officers were also drunk – ‘a redoubtable drunkenness – drunk with blood. Their movements are jerky, nervous. They express themselves violently,’ Sutter-Laumann recalled. Occasionally a woman’s scream could be heard outside, as someone else was being arrested. Night came. Alcide’s dog barked during the long night, to the point that Sutter-Laumann literally tried – and failed – to strangle it, fearing that Versaillais troops might come calling. Putting the animal under a blanket finally kept it quiet.

Early the next morning, Sutter-Laumann persuaded a young woman to go out with what money he had and buy him some more convincing civilian clothes. She was horrified to find bodies strewn about almost everywhere. Sounds of fighting could still be heard, but now further away. The woman returned with a small melon-shaped hat and sewed buttons on to his clothes, eliminating all traces of red trim. He was no longer a national guardsman. Early in the afternoon, a small boy knocked on the door, with a message from Sutter-Laumann’s father telling him that it was more dangerous to hide at this point than to venture out in the street. His father had also been very lucky. After being dissuaded by his wife from fighting at a barricade, he was accosted by a Versaillais while trying to give the impression that he was employed by a wine merchant. From his responses, the soldier took him to be a ‘worthy man’ and was willing to overlook the fact that he had inadvertently worn his military boots to his job at the
mairie
of the Eighteenth Arrondissement.

Extremely fortunate to have survived, Sutter-Laumann went to work at the
mairie
, taking a seat at his usual desk. As always, the room in which he worked was full of women seeking certificates authorising them to
receive additional bread: ‘destitution does not take time off’. He could not help noticing men he had never seen before observing everything very carefully. They were police spies, looking for Communards.

As father and son were leaving the
mairie
, their boss ran up to them and revealed a purported plan to shoot all the municipal employees there. ‘My poor son,’ Laumann’s father stuttered, ‘I have thrown you into the mouth of the wolf.’ A civil delegate of the Versailles government had arrested a worker who slipped into old habits and called him ‘citizen’; now the Versaillais delegate wanted them all shot. Terrified, Sutter-Laumann and his father resolved to get to work at 7.00 a.m. to demonstrate their eagerness. They shook hands with those wearing Versaillais uniforms. Each evening for eight days, employees were escorted home by an armed soldier, more to keep them from being arrested and perhaps shot than to prevent escape. Sutter-Laumann managed to get rid of compromising cartridges in his apartment by burning some of the powder and tossing the remainder into a fountain.
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In the fighting, confusion was inevitable. A laundress kindly provided onion soup to some Versaillais troops, not realising that her ‘guests’ were not Communard national guardsmen. Uniforms contributed to such errors. On one occasion Hans and other Volunteers of the Seine entered a house from which they believed a shot had been fired and came upon a Communard in the process of changing out of a cavalryman’s uniform into workmen’s clothes. Assuming that his visitors were national guardsmen, he explained that he was disguising himself in order to get closer to fire at the soldiers of Versailles. He was shot as a deserter. A woman in Montmartre heard someone pounding on her door. She found in the hallway several uniformed men, who asked where her husband could be found. The woman replied that her husband was sleeping, for he had just returned from fighting all night on the barricades. Unfortunately, the armed men were not national guardsmen, but rather Volunteers of the Seine. They hauled her husband away to an uncertain fate.
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The fall of Montmartre, with its reputation for being impregnable, was an enormous blow to Communard morale. The Versaillais were now within range of the
quartiers
below that the cannons on Montmartre could have perhaps protected. Resisters abandoned these central
quartiers
, falling back on the north-eastern neighbourhoods. The way was now open for the Versaillais forces to storm Belleville, where the Communards retained artillery and munitions. But their artillerymen were nowhere to be found.
Line troops and Volunteers of the Seine had taken 2,000 prisoners during the fighting and then through searches that moved systematically from house to house to house. For his part, the Marquis de Compiègne would be happy to see gunned down ‘all those who were leaders of the insurrection’, which they had so carefully prepared ‘with the only goal of satisfying their ambition and their vengeance’. However, the Pyats, Rocheforts and Courbets were not to be found at the barricades. Many Communard leaders simply disappeared into the night.
⁶⁸

Raoul Rigault was still in Paris, determined to fight to the end. On Wednesday, he rode to the prison of Sainte-Pélagie to settle a personal score. He went to the cell of Gustave Chaudey, whom he had ordered arrested on 13 April, to tell him that he would be shot immediately. Rigault had never forgiven Chaudey, once his friend, for having ordered guardsmen to fire on demonstrators at the Hôtel de Ville, killing Théophile Sapia, another of Rigault’s friends. A firing squad of eight men, commanded by Rigault, shot Chaudey, and then gunned down three gendarmes for good measure.
⁶⁹
Rigault then met with other Blanquists at the Prefecture of Police, where he had always felt at home. He proposed the blowing-up of bridges and the organisation of the final resistance on Ile-de-la-Cité, where the hostages would be taken. He now believed defeat inevitable, and that the Commune should end in such a way as to encourage its successors in further revolutions. Rigault began piling police documents into boxes.

What was left of the Communard leadership, now only twenty men or so, met (without Rigault present) at the Hôtel de Ville that evening of 23 May. They knew that Montmartre had fallen and that hope of the Commune’s survival was fading with every hour. Charles Delescluze had been there all day, signing proclamations with a shaking hand while hearing nothing but bad news. He had not slept in three days and could hardly talk due to laryngitis. The next day, Commune member Charles Beslay asked him if they should not evacuate women and children from Paris. Delescluze replied that with the streets blocked by barricades and Versaillais troops guarding the western gates, he did not see how they could. Even though all was lost, the final issue of
Le Cri du peuple
that day bravely proclaimed, ‘One last effort and victory is ours.’
⁷⁰

Sturdy Communard defences did remain in the Thirteenth Arrondissement and on the Right Bank at place de la Bastille, place du Château d’eau, and in the Eleventh Arrondissement, as well as in Belleville and much of the proletarian Twentieth Arrondissement. Thiers’s forces advanced rapidly on all fronts, slaughtering as they went.

If down below in Paris Communards were bitterly discouraged, up in Belleville they still held out hope. Reclus walked into Belleville’s neo-Gothic church around 10 o’clock that Tuesday morning. A young vicar was teaching the Catechism to boys and girls. He reminded them that Hell awaited ‘the ungodly and revolutionaries’ and related that in the two months of anarchy in which they were living, the Commune had inflicted on the Church unprecedented persecution. Even in Belleville, churchmen continued to oppose the Commune, as the fighting drew ever closer.

Looking down on Paris from Belleville, Reclus was reminded of the view of Geneva. In glorious sunshine, the city stretched out far beneath his feet, ‘a vast rocky plain, rather an immense beehive, in which straw and twigs had replaced bell towers, columns and arcs of triumph’. Below, the ‘Party of Order’ was at work with cannons, rifles and bayonets.
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In the Eighteenth Arrondissement, executions continued into Wednesday, even after Montmartre had been taken. On rue Myrha, two Versaillais soldiers followed a man into a house, where he tried to hide. They shot him on the spot. The concierge asked them as they were leaving if they were simply going to leave the body there. When the response was affirmative, he paid them to cart it away. Each took one of the man’s legs, bouncing the head off the ground as they took it to a garbage heap. Onlookers applauded. On rue Montmartre, soldiers were looking for a Communard captain. Finding only his twelve-year-old son at home, they killed him. And when a young man reproached them for their act, they shot him as well.
⁷²

The Versaillais set up a court-martial in Montmartre that same day at 6, rue de Rosiers, where Generals Thomas and Lecomte had been executed on 18 March. Forty-two men, three women and four children were shot there, some forced to kneel in front of the wall before being executed.
⁷³