Massacre (42 page)

Few could forget what they witnessed at Père Lachaise. Denis Arthur Bingham went to look at the cemetery after the massacre, and found tombs that had been broken open by shells. Bodies of those summarily shot lay fully exposed for all to see. Bingham estimated that there were 800 lying in one long trench and 300 in another, many near one of the cemetery’s walls. ‘Most of them’, he noted, ‘wore an expression of anger and hatred which rendered their faces perfectly hideous. It was a ghastly spectacle, from which I turned away with horror, and which long haunted me.’
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A young American woman described the cemetery as ‘the ghastliest sight’. The bodies of dead Communards shot against a wall filled ‘a natural hollow’. Among them were ‘many women. There, thrown up in the sunlight, was a well-rounded arm with a ring on one of the fingers; there again was a bust shapely in death; and there were faces which to look upon made one shudder, faces distorted out of humanity with ferocity and agony combined. The ghastly effect of the dusky white powder on the dulled eyes, the gnashed teeth and the jagged beards cannot be described.’
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Journalist and Commune member Pierre Vésinier recalled the final moments of the Communard fighters at Père Lachaise and elsewhere, describing thousands of bodies that ‘strewed the avenues and tombs. Many were murdered in the graves where they had sought shelter, and dyed the coffins with their blood … terrible fusillades, frightful platoon fires, intermingled with the crackling noise of
mitrailleuses
, plainly told of the wholesale massacre.’ Vésinier reflected on the Versaillais’ rationale with justified sarcasm: ‘Property, religion and society were once more saved.’
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News of the mass executions of priests and gendarmes at the rue Haxo kept Thiers’s troops’ hatred of the Communards burning. The Versaillais quickly went there to see the piles of bodies ‘horribly mutilated, blue, swollen, black, totally in the state of decomposition’. This sight stoked the murderous frenzy of some of the Versaillais troops, angry that many prisoners had been taken and not immediately gunned down. A priest accompanying the convoy tried to calm them, telling them that they should forgive their enemies. Such advice fell on deaf ears. The good priest was fortunately able to convince the soldiers not to chase and kill a man who had refused to bow his head as the wagons filled with corpses passed by.
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By Sunday, the fighting was almost over. The Communards held only a small area between Père Lachaise, where the Versaillais were still killing prisoners they had first incarcerated in Mazas and La Roquette prisons. Early in the morning, Varlin and Ferré were among those leading a desperate column in an attack on Versaillais forces near place du Château d’eau. They were soon running for their lives. The Versaillais had taken
Belleville, the last Communard stronghold, by 11.00 a.m. Goncourt went there to view the
quartiers
of the conquered enemy: ‘Empty streets. People drinking in cabarets with faces of ugly silence. The appearance of a vanquished but unsubjugated district.’
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Hearing that 2,000 Communards had just surrendered in Belleville, Hans hurried to catch a glimpse of them. That most of the Communard prisoners there appeared to be deserters from the French army accentuated the anger of the Versaillais forces. ‘So, here are the heroes of 18 March!’ they shouted. ‘Ah, scoundrels, I guess you won’t be turning upside down your rifles now!’ ‘Vengeurs de Paris’, a few sailors and
gardes mobiles
were among the glum group of young men under heavy guard. Prisoners were herded inside a church; others began the long, painful, humiliating trek to Versailles, fortunate, for the moment, to have survived.

Hans and the other Versaillais soldiers expected no welcome in Belleville, but the bourgeois there greeted them with ‘energetic’ excuses for their neighbourhood – protesting that it had been the radicals of Charonne, faubourg du Temple and adjoining Ménilmontant who had given Belleville its undeserved reputation. Some shopkeepers seemed particularly pleased with the outcome; during the last days they had confronted increasing Communard requisitions, including civilian clothes that some
fédéré
fighters needed to don quickly after tossing away their compromising uniforms. Shoes were a major problem for the Communards, being far less easy to find than basic clothing, and combat boots (
godillots
) provided by the Commune were a dead giveaway (‘Okay,
les godillots
, to the wall!’ was an oft-heard command). Yet the welcome that Hans and the others were met with in the neighbouring
quartiers
was anything but warm: ‘Written all over the men was utter hatred, constrained only by fear. Women had red eyes; more than one of these awful women gave us a look of burning, concentrated rage.’ Their hatred was not always constrained, however; isolated attacks on Versaillais sentinels, soldiers and guards did occur.

Scattered groups of Communards continued to fight back on Sunday morning. The Versaillais took the remainder of boulevard Voltaire and crushed the last resistance in Belleville, ‘the revolutionary den’ in the eyes of the middle classes. Soldiers executed fifty Communards at one barricade on rue Voltaire, then amused themselves by scrawling ‘Murderer’, ‘Thief’ or ‘a Drunk’ near bodies. Near the Gare d’Orléans along the Seine, where two Versaillais had been shot in the final hours of the Commune, Julien Poirier and his company came upon a woman with a
chassepot
and a sword standing on a stump of wood; they killed her.
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That morning, 28 May, Louise Michel could sense ‘the raging band of wolves approaching’. All that remained of the Commune was a stretch of Paris from rue du faubourg du Temple to boulevard de Belleville. Soon at rue Ramponneau at the corner of rue Tourtille, a single man defended the last Communard barricade until he had fired his last remaining bullet.
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The Versaillais killed Eugène Varlin that day after the fighting had ended. He was seated at a café on rue Lafayette when a priest denounced him to a Versaillais officer. An officer ordered him shot. Varlin was battered by a hostile crowd and beaten with rifle butts by soldiers until, according to one witness, ‘his face was smashed to jelly, one eye out of the socket’. Dragged to the wall of a garden on rue des Rosiers where Lecomte and Clément had been killed on 18 March, he was shot as he tried to shout ‘Long live the Commune!’ Forty-two men, three women and four children were forced to kneel in repentance for the shooting of the generals, and met their ends there after Varlin.
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Communards who tried to escape Belleville that Sunday had little chance of succeeding. The Versaillais held the rest of Paris, and any attempting to flee the city ran into the Prussian army. German troops had expanded their cordon around northern Paris, preventing Communards from getting out. They escorted several hundred
fédérés
to the fortress of Vincennes, thinking it held by government forces. Realising their mistake, they instead turned them over to the Versaillais at Montreuil, where many were executed.
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Convoys of prisoners continued to be marched to Versailles, some dying on the journey. When a young woman collapsed, unable to go on, a soldier cut her stomach open with his bayonet and threw her into a store, shouting ‘Go die in there!’ In another convoy, an officer saw a woman carrying a very sick child, who he took from her, but the child died along the way. When a pregnant woman, a prisoner from Montmartre, managed to free herself from the cords that bound her, it was rumoured that a soldier cut her down with his sword.
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Troops forced prisoners to kneel as they passed the church of Saint-Augustin ‘in expiation for their crimes’ and others had to do the same at the Chapel of Expiation of Louis XVI, which the Commune had planned to level. Prisoners died along the way because, in addition to experiencing heat, fatigue and fear, many had not eaten in well over two days. W. Gibson, a British Protestant minister who generally found the Communards distasteful, related that ‘one of our local preachers saw a man coolly [stabbed] to death by a soldier, and then lifted up on the point of the bayonet for the inspection of the lookers-on. No sympathy was evinced for
the poor old prisoner, and the two ladies suggested that the soldier should “chop the rat’s head off!”’
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As the world of the Commune collapsed, Maxime Vuillaume hoped to escape with his life. Replacing his National Guard
képi
with a little round hat, the journalist avoided
brassards
who were turning two men over to a platoon of soldiers. At place de la Sorbonne, Café d’Harcourt was full of patrons very different from a few days earlier. Vuillaume thought of a possible place of refuge, however temporary: Benjamin Flotte’s apartment in rue Saint-Séverin, where a day earlier he had taken Archbishop Georges Darboy’s letters. Vuillaume headed there, avoiding looking at the bodies of three women, half covered with straw.

With Versaillais troops now virtually everywhere, Vuillaume had to go to great lengths to avoid arrest in the Latin Quarter on 24 May. He encountered a medical student friend who provided him with a Red Cross armband, which, according to the Geneva Convention of 1864, assured his protection, at least in principle. As Vuillaume and his friend walked up rue Tournon to rue de Vaugirard, near the Senate, several soldiers asked where they were going, then took them to the
prévôtal
court in the Senate. Vuillaume could hear the volleys of a firing squad beyond some trees. An officer asked him about his armband. Vuillaume replied that it represented protection by the International Geneva Convention. ‘The International! The International!’ came the furious retort; ‘So then, you are of the International! Oh, God damn it!’ Then Vuillaume made a potentially fatal gaffe: he called a gendarme ‘citizen’.

Vuillaume frantically considered what alias to give, coming up with ‘a really ordinary name: Langlois’, a student he knew. He then tried to think of exactly what his interrogators would find in his pockets; alas, he was carrying a watch on which was engraved ‘Long live the Commune!’ He managed to let it drop behind a bench without the two gendarmes noticing. At noon, the military judge passed by the prisoners, a cigar dangling from lips. ‘Hats off, miserable scum!’ Vuillaume silently went over the names of medical school professors so he could recite them if asked. He listened to interrogations, which almost always ended with one of two death sentences: ‘To the line’ (that is, ‘in line to go up against the wall’) or ‘Take him to the brigade!’ Later, a priest, summoned to give consolation to those about to die, walked in, old, thin, wearing a thin smile, the
Légion d’honneur
attached to his cassock.

The officer presiding over the court-martial returned from his meal and the interrogations went on. When Vuillaume’s turn came, the officer
asked what he had done during the insurrection. He assured them that he had done nothing for the Commune; he said he was a doctor who helped the wounded, admitting helping the wounded on both sides (as his borrowed Red Cross insignia would indicate). The sentence was unavoidable: ‘Take him to the line.’ Soldiers waited until six condemned were ready to go, bound together with ropes, and took them into the Jardins du Luxembourg to be executed. As Vuillaume waited, a soldier shouted something about ‘your
Père Duchène
’, the radical newspaper, but the target was another man. What difference did it make now?

A sergeant guarding the condemned asked Vuillaume what he did in life, and, seeing the Red Cross armband, concluded that, like him, he was a medical student. Taking pity on him, the sergeant pushed him back towards the end of the line so that Vuillaume might live an hour or so longer, and went to find the chief medical officer to plead the case of his ‘colleague’. The young guard returned an hour later, which seemed to Vuillaume an eternity with the sound of murderous volleys ringing in his ears, to say that he could not find the medical officer. He had, however, had an idea. He told Vuillaume to
tu-toi
him (to address him familiarly) – they would be cousins. The sergeant departed again, reappearing to tell Vuillaume to follow him, and quickly. Incredibly enough, with him were the two Versaillais who had arrested Vuillaume. They took him into the café L’Enseigne de la Comète, at the corner of rue Servandoni. Over a glass of wine, the sergeant-saviour gave Vuillaume a new name, and, after dining near Odéon, took him to the apartment of a female friend, who, although quite terrified, took him in. Three days later, on Saturday, the sergeant returned, describing the latest rounds of executions in detail. He advised Vuillaume to find a new place to hide, warning that if he was taken prisoner again, the sergeant could do nothing to save him.

Miraculously still alive, and now hiding in an apartment on rue Richelieu across from the fountain of Molière, Maxime Vuillaume tried to think of a way to get out of Paris. For that, he needed a passport. A friend from school whom he hoped would come through for him refused to help. Versaillais newspapers had already carried reports of him being under arrest. A search of the building seemed inevitable. He considered one move, and then another. By luck he got out of Paris on a train without being stopped. When he reached a village, a rural guard became suspicious of Vuillaume, who had clearly arrived from the capital: ‘Parisian’ probably meant ‘fleeing Communard’. But the mayor was sympathetic, urging Vuillaume to leave immediately, which he did. When he and a friend reached Troyes and boarded a train, police asked for passports of all
voyagers. They had none. Vuillaume was arrested once again but managed to slip away, thanks to an unobservant gendarme, and finally reached sanctuary in Geneva.
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With the Commune completely crushed, and with Versaillais line troops, gendarmes, police and police spies now virtually everywhere – above all in ‘suspect’ neighbourhoods – survival in Paris required finding a place to hide. Reclus knew ‘a liberal bourgeois’, who had been a friend of his family for years, and was an ‘excellent man, besides’. On Tuesday 30 May, Élie went to ask him for help, and was refused. The old family friend told him that, in his view, other than the ‘friends of order’, there were now only three types of people: those who should be shot; those who should be sent to Cayenne, the infamous ‘dry guillotine’, where death was certain, but came slowly and painfully; and those who should be sent to Nouka-Hiva in the South Seas, which, if anything, was even worse. Élie noted bitterly that a fourth category might be added – those on the run: ‘Wandering in the street, going here, going there, trying not to give ourselves away and keeping away from police spies and those wearing tricolour armbands, or young zealous officers taking me for a rabid dog.’ This was real terror.