Authors: John M. Merriman
Massacre (41 page)
With only a few
fédéré
strongholds remaining, there was almost no one to challenge the Versaillais troops executing Parisians indiscriminately. Generals, left unchecked by Thiers and MacMahon, did nothing to stop the carnage.
Melchior Arnold Tribels and his wife were arrested by the Versaillais on Friday while walking on rue de Rivoli. A concierge had denounced them after the woman became ill and asked if she could enter the building to rest. Tribels, a fifty-six-year-old shabbily dressed Dutch Jew, was carrying a sack containing 15,000–20,000 florins, as well as annuity bonds worth about 50,000 francs, two gold watches and a diamond ring when he was searched by the Versaillais. They also discovered a book containing the addresses of various Parisian bankers and jewellers. The Versaillais took all this to be evidence that Tribels was pillaging the homes of wealthy families. After his wife was released, he was taken to the court
prévôtale
at Châtelet and condemned to death. The next day he marched the short distance to the Caserne Lobau, where he was shot.
40
Edmund de Goncourt, no friend of the Communards, would never forget what he saw as rain pounded down on Paris: ‘I am going along the railway line near the Passy station when I see some men and women escorted by
soldiers. I go through the broken barrier and am on the edge of a path where the prisoners are waiting to set out for Versailles. There are a lot of them, for I hear an officer say in a low voice as he gives a paper to the colonel: “Four hundred and seven, of whom sixty-six are women”.’ Men had been arranged in rows of eight, bound to each other by a rope linking their wrists. They were:
as they were when caught, most without hats or caps, their hair plastered on their foreheads and faces by the fine rain which has been falling since morning. There are men of the common people who have made a covering for their heads with blue-checked handkerchiefs. Others, thoroughly soaked by the rain, draw thin overcoats around their chests under which a piece of bread makes a hump. It is a crowd from every social level, workmen with hard faces, artisans in loose-fitting jackets, bourgeois with socialist hats, National Guards who have had no time to change their trousers, two infantrymen pale as corpses – stupid, ferocious, indifferent, mute faces.
Goncourt’s attention fell in particular on one young woman:
especially beautiful, beautiful with the implacable fury of a young Fate. She is a brunette with wiry hair that sticks out, with eyes of steel, with cheeks reddened by dried tears. She is planted in an attitude of defiance, spewing out insults at the officers from a throat and lips so contracted by anger that they cannot form sounds and words. Her furious, mute mouth chews the insults without being able to make them heard. ‘She is like the one who killed Barbier with a dagger!’ a young officer says to one of his friends.
A colonel took his place at the side of the column, ‘announcing in a loud voice with a brutality which I think [he] put on to induce fear: “Any man who lets go of his neighbour’s arm will be killed!” And that terrible “will be killed!” is repeated four or five times.’ In the background, Goncourt and the other observers could hear ‘the dull sound of rifles being loaded by the infantry escort’.
41
When a barricade defended by 180 people on boulevard Prince Eugène fell, fighters took refuge in a nearby house. An English medical student watched in horror as Versaillais immediately lined up and shot 52 captured women along with about about 60 men. The student heard an officer interrogate one of the women, telling her that two of his men had been
killed. ‘May God punish me for not having killed more of them’, she shouted. ‘I had two sons at Issy, and both were killed, and two more at Neuilly, who suffered the same fate. My husband died at this barricade, and now you can do with me what you want’.
42
Even with Versaillais troops moving rapidly into eastern Paris, remaining hostages in La Roquette prison still had much to fear. A policeman and four national guardsmen went to the prison and took away the banker Jean-Baptiste Jecker, who had been spared by chance two days earlier. They took him to a ditch near Père Lachaise cemetery and killed him.
43
About 3.00 p.m. that same day, Friday, National Guard colonel Émile Gois and about 60 national guardsmen from various battalions arrived at La Roquette prison, where some 900 prisoners were still being held. Prison Director Jean-Baptiste François, still wearing his red belt, had been at the
mairie
of the Eleventh Arrondissement. When he returned to La Roquette, he received an order signed by Ferré and brandished by Gois ordering him to turn over fifty prisoners, including ten imprisoned priests, four men accused of spying for Versailles, two gendarmes and thirty-three
sergents-de-ville
(gardes de Paris); the latter two groups were closely identified with Napoleon III and the Second Empire.
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François ordered Antoine Ramain, the head guard, to bring down all the gendarmes and gave him a list of twelve to fifteen other names. When Ramain asked for an explanation, François told him that, with Versaillais shells falling, better security would be available at the
mairie
in Belleville. Ramain entered the corridor of the fourth section and announced, ‘Attention! I need 15 [prisoners] … Get in line!’
45
Guardsmen piled the prisoners into wagons and around 4.00 p.m. they left, following rue de la Roquette to Père Lachaise cemetery and then boulevard Ménilmontant to boulevard de Belleville. At the bottom of chaussée Ménilmontant, they passed a barricade held by guardsmen. There a battalion commander ordered twenty-six-year-old Captain Louis-François Dalivons, a roofer from rue Ménilmontant, to lead an escort of eight men. The wagons reached rue de Puebla. A crowd formed, with curiosity turning into abuse as the escort drew near the
mairie
in Belleville. Then the wagons rattled into rue Haxo, where the crowd reached a point of fury, such that Eugène Varlin and Communard Colonel Hippolyte Parent could not hold off those calling for the deaths of the gendarmes, policemen and priests they could see in the open wagons. At the back of a small garden on rue Haxo in Belleville, national guardsmen placed the prisoners against a wall and shot them dead, helped by other men and
women who fired repeatedly into their bodies. Thirty-seven gendarmes, ten priests and two Versaillais
mouchards
(informers) perished.
46
On Saturday morning, Ferré arrived at La Roquette in the rain. According to one of the incarcerated priests, Abbé Pierre-Henri Lamazou, Ferré ‘rushed and sprang about like a panther afraid of losing its prey’, carrying a rifle and waving a pistol. There seemed to be little hope for the remaining hostages. But with the battle drawing nearer, Ferré suddenly left. In the afternoon, a prison guard began opening up the cells on the second floor. Having been ordered to send down two of them at a time to their deaths, he had had enough. Ten priests, forty gendarmes and some eighty captured Versaillais troops who he freed began to improvise barricades, using beds, chairs and whatever else they could find. National guardsmen arrived and tried to overcome the suddenly mobilised hostages with smoke, setting fire to mattresses.
Some prisoners managed to make it down to the ground floor. Abbé Paul Perny, a few priests and several others decided to take their chances and leave the prison, its big door now standing open. The risks were great. Some suspected a trap – that they would be killed upon leaving the relative safety of their now protected prison corridor. Moreover, dressed in ecclesiastical garb, they risked attack by panicked Communards, as the Versailles troops drew within blocks of the prison. Perny and some of the others did not know the neighbourhood around La Roquette. Where to go? To turn left after passing through the prison gate, or right? Perny ran out and knocked on the doors of several houses and hotels. None opened. To the priest, the ordinary Communards he encountered were ‘modern Redskins’. As for the women, they ‘surpass[ed] the men in their frenzy and determination’. Like so many others against the Commune, he reserved special contempt for Belleville and other plebeian neighbourhoods.
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Several people whom Perny encountered in the streets were kinder, asking what he was doing. Did he not hear the sound of nearby gunfire? He decided that his best chance was to return to La Roquette. Perhaps the guards, some of whom he now knew well and trusted, would protect him. Several other priests, the seminarian and a few gendarmes had made the same choice after getting a sense of the chaos and dangers outside. They hid in the infirmary, even as Communards entered La Roquette and looked for them. Within hours they were saved by the arrival of Versaillais troops.
Monseigneur Surat was not so fortunate. When he asked a woman for help, she spat out, ‘Here you go, I will give you nothing!’ The priest was shot as he tried to find his way through the maze of streets. Another
missionary also perished in the same way. In all, between 24 May and 26 May sixty-six or sixty-eight hostages died.
48
Now that most of the Eleventh Arrondissement had fallen, Versaillais troops attacked the two major remaining points of defence: Belleville, Buttes-Chaumont and Père Lachaise cemetery. On Friday night, Versaillais troops encountered stiff resistance near Belleville and on streets leading to Père Lachaise, where two Communard batteries and several hundred national guardsmen prepared to fight. The next morning line troops gathered at the porte de Lilas and then moved into Belleville, Ménilmontant and Charonne, isolating resisters. At the base of rue de Belleville, soldiers overwhelmed the last concentrated resistance. Versaillais troops took 1,500 Communard prisoners on rue Haxo, and at least 800 at place des Fêtes in the Nineteenth Arrondissement in Belleville. The Communard resisters had turned their attention towards a column of 1,300 line soldiers who had been captured on 18 March, who, for whatever reason, Ferré had ordered moved under guard from the barracks of Prince Eugène to the church of Belleville. When a nearby battery fell, twenty-three Communards were immediately shot. On rue de Puebla, sixty perished behind one barricade. Behind the barricade of place de la Rotonde, after the dead had been carted away, W. Pembroke Fetridge described blood running ‘in streams through the gutters’. Dead horses lay about.
49
General Joseph Vinoy’s army moved towards Père Lachaise cemetery very early on Saturday morning. Ladmirault’s army overcame Communard resistance and captured Buttes-Chaumont. That morning, 400 Communards came down slowly from Belleville to surrender, all carrying their guns upside down. They were soon on their way to Versailles. MacMahon had promised to make Belleville pay. With Buttes-Chaumont taken and Père Lachaise cemetery under attack and about to fall, MacMahon’s army did just that. Line troops fired shell after shell into the
quartier
, igniting fires. The Versaillais convinced defenders behind one barricade to surrender in exchange for their lives, then gunned them down from behind on rue de Bagnolet. On rue de Belleville, a concierge denounced several residents to line troops. An officer ordered them shot, and then shot the concierge, as well, for good measure – after all, he lived in Belleville. One resident went to find a doctor for wounded
fédérés
hiding in a cellar. A soldier grabbed him while marching a group of prisoners past and said, ‘Let’s go, you can join the dance!’ His widow did not learn for three months what had happened to him. As the London
Times
related, Versaillais troops considered ‘anyone who cared in any
way for the wounded as sympathising with them and thus meriting the same fate’.
50
On Saturday, Élie Reclus could hear around the Gare de Lyon ‘several volleys of fire from the [execution] squads, about a dozen or two dozen shots’. The victims were prisoners captured in the basements and attics of nearby buildings, or simply picked up because Versaillais soldiers, police, or spies did not like their looks. Police detachments were assigned to each army corps and they searched buildings and arrested suspected Communards. The ‘friends of order’ took vengeance on Paris. Taking refuge in a friend’s apartment, Reclus could see, as he peered out from behind a curtain, ‘these poor disarmed [Communards], bourgeois or workers, in civilian clothes or wearing some part of a uniform, marched straight ahead, with firm and proud steps, but with faces so pale. In an hour, they would be dead.’ Bodies were tossed into wagons, to be buried in deep ditches, covered with lime or burnt. Reclus had seen a convoy of ten to twelve
omnibus
filled with human remains. A red ribbon of blood ran along both of the Seine’s riverbanks.
51
After destroying the gates to Père Lachaise cemetery on Saturday evening, Versaillais troops stormed in. Many of the Communard fighters there fell among the tombs, some in hand-to-hand bayonet combat. The rest were captured and executed en masse.
Fédéré
prisoners were lined up in two rows against a wall, next to a very deep ditch. Machine guns did the rest, and most prisoners fell or were thrown into the mass grave. Georges Clemenceau later recalled that machine guns mowed down Communards for thirty minutes without pause. On Sunday, the Versaillais brought more Communard prisoners in groups of 150, 200 or even 300 to be shot, many of them falling into the same wide and deep ditch that contained the bodies of Communards killed in or after the fighting the day before.
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Albert Hans insisted that officers had not ordered the executions. The fate of the Communards thus often depended on sheer chance; a humanitarian gesture by one of the soldiers could save a prisoner, at least for a while. Some Volunteers showed mercy. They would take prisoners to the corner of rue des Lilas and rue Belleville, with the death trench nearby, and, depending on what they thought of the captives’ pleas, attitude and, in some cases, ‘their prayers’, they might spare them. Yet Hans admitted that some ended up dead in a ditch on the way. Inevitably, at Père Lachaise, ‘a
faux pas
, a protest, a pause in a step, any incident, would irritate a guard and that was the end of the
fédéré
’.
53