Seven Ages of Paris (49 page)

Late that night, Dombrowski was brought under arrest to the Hôtel de Ville by the National Guard, allegedly attempting to escape through the Prussian lines. He was the second of the Commune’s few competent military commanders to fall.

PARIS BURNS

Dawn on Tuesday the 23rd broke on another glorious May day. The Versaillais Generals de Ladmirault and Clinchant were already assaulting the bastion of Montmartre from two directions. Up there, about the only Communard detachment which showed spirit was a squad of twenty-five women from the Women’s Battalion, headed by the redoubtable Louise Michel, who had orders to blow up, if necessary, the Butte Montmartre. Now began the “expiation” for which Thiers had called. Some forty-nine captured Communards were collected at random and summarily shot in the Rue des Rosiers, scene of the lynching of the two generals back in March. When the Madeleine was taken that day, Dr. Herbert recorded:

we saw the insurgents retreat from the different barricades and cross the Place. The troops then came in. A few scenes of horrid massacre and bloodshed, and then the streets were occupied by the regular troops … I fear there is a very revengeful disposition amongst the regular troops, which is much to be regretted.

Garnier’s still unfinished Opéra was soon hemmed in on three sides. Marine sharpshooters positioned in the top storey of the surrounding buildings directed a devastating fire down on to the Communards exposed behind their barricades. By 6 p.m., after both sides had suffered heavy losses, the Opéra was carried; and a soldier clambered up on to the statue of Apollo at its entrance and tore down the red flag. Near the Bibliothèque Nationale, Edmond Goncourt saw a Communard across the street killed by a bullet. His companion:

threw off his sword behind him, as if with scornful deliberation, bent down and tried to lift the dead man. The body was large and heavy and, like any inert object, evaded his efforts and rolled about in his arms from left to right. At last he raised it; and clutching it across his chest, he was carrying it away when a bullet, smashing his thigh, made the dead and the living spin in a hideous pirouette, collapsing one upon the other …

I retained in my ear for a long time the rending cries of a wounded soldier who had dragged himself to our door and whom the concierge, through a cowardly fear of compromising herself, refused to let in.

All through that Tuesday the 23rd, Paul-Antoine Brunel and his men had continued to hold out with extraordinary tenacity at the barricades in the Rue Royale and the Place de la Concorde. Turning movements from the direction of the Opéra were threatening their rear, and now deadly rifle-fire from sharpshooters on top of the high buildings along the Rue Royale mowed them down behind their barricades. Swiftly Brunel—justifying the nickname of “The Burner” gained during the First Siege—ordered the firing of these buildings.

That evening, away in the darkness, Parisians saw the glow of a great fire. It looked as if the Tuileries Palace might be burning. Commander Jules Bergeret, one of the more incompetent Communard leaders who had just been released from a well-deserved spell in prison, had carried out a desperate action, dictated, apparently, more by vengefulness than by military necessity. Inside the Tuileries Palace, where only two days previously the last of the famous concerts had taken place, he stacked barrel after barrel of gunpowder. With a colossal roar the central dome housing the Salle des Maréchaux vanished in a conflagration that dwarfed any fireworks display laid on by either past Emperor.

By the night of the 24th, to Edwin Child lying low in the Marais of eastern Paris, “it seemed literally as if the whole town was on fire and as if all the powers of hell were let loose.” The list of buildings already incendiarized was extensive: the Tuileries, a large part of the Palais Royal, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police and the Conseil d’Etat. Whole sections of streets, including the Rue de Lille and much of the Rue de Rivoli, were ablaze; so was the Ministry of Finance, housed in one wing of the Louvre, and the priceless treasures in the museum itself were gravely threatened. At Notre-Dame, which had escaped destruction by so narrow a margin during the Great Revolution, National Guards built up a large “brazier” from chairs and pews; they were prevented just in time from setting it on fire. But the superb medieval building of the Hôtel de Ville, the focus of so much Parisian history from Philippe Auguste onwards, was also consigned to the flames, despite the protests of Delescluze.

Now there entered into the limelight les pétroleuses, daemonic maenads who allegedly crept about the city flinging petroleum-filled bottles into basement windows belonging to the bourgeoisie. “Last night,” wrote another Briton in Paris on 25 May, Colonel John Stanley, “three women were caught throwing small fire balls down the openings of cellars in the street. There was no doubt of it of course. Already smoke was coming from some of them. They were driven into a corner and shot then and there through the head.” Or were these women one of the grim myths that civil war produces? That night, too, the Communards committed their most infamous crime: the crude execution in an alley outside the prison of La Roquette of Monseigneur Darboy, the hostage Archbishop of Paris. Retribution was not long delayed in catching up with the Chief of Police responsible for his death, Raoul Rigault. The next day Rigault was seized on the Left Bank, at lodgings he shared under an assumed name with an actress, and he was shot in the head. For two days his body lay in the gutter, partly stripped by local women, and kicked and spat upon by passers-by.

On the evening of Thursday the 25th, as Commune resistance was beginning to crumble, Charles Delescluze decided that he would not “submit to another defeat.” Dressed as always like an 1848 revolutionary in a top hat, black trousers, polished boots and frock coat, with a red sash tied round his waist, he set off towards an abandoned barricade. He was seen slowly to climb to the top, where he stood briefly before pitching forward on his face, felled by Versaillais rifle-fire. In defeat, the old Jacobin had achieved a measure of nobility denied to Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan. But the Commune was now leaderless.

Friday, 26 May, was a day of savage killings on both sides, in which the battle became a ruthless mopping-up operation. Goncourt was moved to pity by one group of 400 Communard prisoners:

The men had been split up into lines of seven or eight and tied to each other with string that cut into their wrists. They were just as they had been captured, most of them without hats or caps, and with their hair plastered down on their foreheads and faces by the fine rain that had been falling ever since this morning.

Many never reached prison camp in Versailles. Before the eyes of Alphonse Daudet:

A large man, a true southerner, sweating, panting, had difficulty in keeping up. Two cavalrymen came up, attached tethers to each of his arms, around his body, and galloped. The man tries to run, but falls; he is dragged, a mass of bleeding flesh that emits a croaking sound; murmurs of pity from the crowd: “Shoot him, and have done!” One of the troopers halts his horse, comes up and fires his carbine into the moaning and kicking parcel of meat. He is not dead … the other trooper jumps from his horse, fires again. This time, that’s it …

One of the Versailles generals, the dashing Marquis de Gallifet, now secured for himself a reputation for barbarity that Paris would never forget. “I am Gallifet,” he told prisoners. “You people of Montmartre may think me cruel, but I am even crueller than you can imagine.” Twirling his moustaches, with his mistress on his arm, pointing out who should die and who should live, he is described as “making caustic jests as he did so.” Troops under Gallifet’s orders treated the captured Communards with particular brutality, many never surviving the journey to Versailles. The districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant alone were still wholly in Communard hands. Here, as at Warsaw and Leningrad in the Second World War, a whole population was now fighting for its life—not against a foreign army, but against its fellow countrymen. General Vinoy’s regulars were approaching one of the last of the Commune’s remaining strongholds: Père Lachaise Cemetery. Possessing what is still one of the best views of Paris, the vast cemetery dominated the whole smouldering city. There the last of the Communard defenders, firing from the cover of its elaborate family mausoleums, had to be winkled out gravestone by gravestone.

The next morning, 28 May, Thiers’s army moved in for the kill. It was Whitsunday. Within a few hours, there was only one Communard barricade left, on the Rue Ramponeau, where an unknown lone defender held off the attackers with a cool and undeviating accuracy. When he had expended his last cartridge, he strolled calmly away and disappeared. At La Roquette the unburied corpse of the murdered Archbishop had been discovered. That Whitsun morning, in revenge, the Versailles troops marched 147 of the captured Communards out to Père Lachaise and summarily shot them against a wall of the cemetery. Inside La Roquette, which held such grim memories for the hostages of the Commune, some 1,900 prisoners are said to have been shot in two days, and at the Mazas prison another 400.

AFTERMATH

The last great siege of Paris was at an end. On 1 June, the London Times declared, “Human nature shrinks in horror from the deeds that have been done in Paris … The wholesale executions inflicted by the Versailles soldiery, the triumph, the glee, the ribaldry of the ‘Party of Order’ [Thiers’s supporters] sicken the soul.” France herself was sickening of the slaughter. “Let us kill no more, even murderers and incendiaries!” the Paris-Journal entreated on 2 June. “Let us kill no more!”

Estimates of the numbers of Parisians slaughtered during the semaine sanglante vary wildly between 6,500 and 40,000. Reliable French historians today seem more or less agreed on a figure of between 20,000 and 25,000—larger by far, even so, than the bloodletting of the Terror of 1793 in Paris. The Paris Commune itself was to remain a touchstone and a rallying point for the French left. Out of it would spring the Front Populaire of the 1930s, and the alliance of Socialists and Communists eventually to be presided over by François Mitterrand. For over a century, at each anniversary of the final massacre at Père Lachaise, the left would process in their thousands to lay wreaths at the cemetery’s Mur des Fédérés.

The painter Auguste Renoir, who himself had narrowly escaped death at Communard hands, offered an eloquent epitaph to those terrible days: “They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame which never dies.”

At the end of May 1871, Paris presented a dreadful sight. In the Place de la Concorde, the Tritons in the fountains were contorted into hideous shapes, the candelabras twisted, the statue of Lille headless. Théophile Gautier noted the city’s oppressive silence, and was particularly struck by the Rue de Lille, on the Left Bank, where his fellow author Prosper Mérimée had once lived: “it seemed to be deserted throughout its length, like a street of Pompeii.” Of Mérimée’s old house, only the walls still stood, his famous library reduced to ashes.

A silence of death reigned over these ruins; in the necropolises of Thebes or in the shafts of the Pyramids it was no more profound. No clatter of vehicles, no shouts of children, not even the song of a bird … an incurable sadness invaded our souls.

Reaching Belleville, he was confronted by “Empty streets. People drinking in cabarets, mute in a sinister fashion. The appearance of a quarter conquered, but not subjected.”

Even so, more of the city had survived than people might have imagined. The Venus de Milo was lifted reverently from the storage “coffin” within the incendiarized Prefecture of Police, where she had been preserved since before the first siege. Gautier recorded how “everybody leaned forward avidly to contemplate her. She still smiled, lying there so softly … this vague and tender smile, her lips slightly apart as if all the better to breathe in life.” As she returned to the Louvre, it was like a symbol of the return of life to Paris herself. Indeed, normality seemed to be restored with remarkable speed. As early as 2 June, Elihu Washburne wrote of “a marvellous change … the smouldering fires have been extinguished and the tottering walls pulled down.” The couturier Worth purchased some of the rubble from the Tuileries to construct sham ruins in his garden, and the work of rebuilding Paris was soon under way. On 12 June Edwin Child wrote to his father, “in about 6 months … we shall wonder where all the fires took place.”

Once again France—and Paris—showed her extraordinary resilience. That summer omnibuses and fiacres were crowding the capital’s streets again, bateaux-mouches were chugging up and down the Seine. The enterprising Thomas Cook was despatching hordes of English tourists to ogle at the “ruins” of Paris. But some observers claimed that for a long time Parisians preferred to walk in the road rather than on the pavements—to avoid giving rise to the suspicion that they were pétroleuses intent on popping their incendiary packets through basement windows.

Age Six

1871–1940

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THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES

Haussmann’s Paris, 1851–1914

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SIXTEEN

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Belle Epoque

A great city is … a work of art. It is a collective and complex art, it is true, but this makes it an even higher form of art.

GUILLAUME CHASTENET TO THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES, IN 1909

RECOVERY AND REVANCHISM

In November 1871, Edmond Goncourt recalled Flaubert repeating to him an observation that had been passed to him by a Chinese envoy in Paris: “You are young, you Westerners, you have hardly any history to speak of … It has always been like this … The Siege and the Commune are everyday events for the human race.” To Goncourt this Mandarin vista helped place the inexplicable horrors of the past year in a sensible perspective. Once Paris had recovered, France herself was not far behind. After sketching dead Communards at the barricades, Manet was back at Boulogne painting La Partie de croquet. Renoir and Degas came back to find studios in Paris; Monet and Pissarro returned from refuge in dank and foggy London. Suddenly, as if in reaction against the drabness and the horrors of the siege and the Commune, the Impressionists burst forth into a passionate blaze of colour, redolent with the love of simple, ordinary existence. They would be immortalizing with new life places like Courbevoie, Asnières, Gennevilliers, once front-line names during the two sieges, pleasant riverside villages which, in the coming century, would be swallowed up in industrial suburbs. Seurat would be painting his masterpiece of summer reveries on the Grande Jatte, the sand bar in the Seine which had so recently seen Trochu’s National Guard charge across the river in its last, hopeless attempt to break the Prussian ring round Paris. The somnolent riverside villages of the Seine and Marne where Sisley had painted his early works, many within weekend-walking distance of the city, with their comfortable houses in ochre-coloured stone and fitted with green shutters—Champigny, Joinville, Epinay-sur-Orge, Bougival, Rueil, Issy—swiftly repaired the gaping holes left by war in roofs and walls, welcoming back the painters and the ambience of cheerfulness and leisure they brought with them. It all seemed like a symbolic regeneration comparable to the resurgence of literature that followed the cataclysm of 1815.