MENU: 8.1. In the footsteps of "demons"
LOW-COST MODERN BUILDINGS REPLACE HOVELS, AND SOCIAL SERVICES, GREENING AND INNOVATIVE ART MEAN THAT MISERY IS ALMOST FORGOTTEN*
*Though social services lead to beggars on the main street (rue de Tolbiac).
We start with the church where the last battle was fought and the passage by which surviving Communards took flight.
The huge space behind the church, built to let the army assemble with horses and cannons, must be the place "in the west" where fiery Sérizier and his battalion of "demons" fought their last battle (for the context, please click back here, here and here).
-- "In the west:" Éléments d'histoire de la Commune dans le 13e arrondissement by Gérard Conte, 1981,
study based on archival documents.
Harald Wolff
Toward 17h, the defeated survivors dispersed to their homes, via the passage behind the Church and rue des Château des Rentiers (we will come to it). Sérizier, too well known to go home, took refuge in a house there as his battalion spread out.*
My reasoning is based on the account of Gérard Comte, whose topic is the massacre of Dominican monks earlier that day. He says that Sérizier and the battalion leave the monks in apparent safety, go off to fight "in the west," after which the fighters disperse and Sérizier falls back to a house on the street just mentioned.
The fight must have taken place in the space around the church, which had been built by an earlier government to let troops assemble. That part of the Versaillais army would have marched from the center, which by that time it controlled, along the long, straight street to the space meant for assembly in the front of the church. Defeated, the Communards could not have taken the artery their opponents occupied, so much have rushed to rear of the church and fled through the passage that leads to the other (much smaller) street that cuts through the neighborhood, rue du Château des Rentiers.
The next pages follow
the fleeing Communards' route.
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Adapted from a map of 1900 / zoom |
In brief
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