A MONTAGE SHOWS LA COMMUNE BORN OF MUTINY AND PREMEDITATED MURDER
The autopsy report shows the bullets shot from behind.* But even without that information one should know that posing such a photo in the midst of the drama would have been impossible given the matériel of the time, that it must be a montage and so suspect and especially, that so extraordinary an event must be explained...**
*Pierre Milza, "L'Année terrible: La Commune," 2014.
**Conscripts have killed officers spontaneously, as before the October Revolution and during the Vietnam War, but I have never heard of them organizing their executions.
First of the series "The Crimes of the Commune," montages that Versailles commissioned from the royalist photographer Charles Edouard Appert. The next pages show others.
Yet only Victor Hugo found it "curious" that troops shoot their generals. Even popular accounts favorable to La Commune it, skip but do not contest it, by including the firing squad implicitly accept it.
- Marx says it due to conscripts' hostility to officers. Yet these soldiers had no reason to oppose Clément, who as head of the Parisian National Guard but had never been linked to the army.
- The Soviet film The New Babylon skips the drama by having the Lecomte character tell the troops to abandon the cannons and return to Versailles, after which they will may go home. That is the exception mentioned earlier in a movie that otherwise follows the sources.
- Raspou'team, whose street art commemorated La Commune's 140th anniversary, takes the montage at face value:
General Clément "who was already known for repressing the insurrection of 1848, is recognized while inspecting the barricades in civilian dress. Thomas and Lecomte are led to the rue des Rosiers, on the Montmartre hilltop. Both are shot. While about it, the National Guard parades under the windows." (The last sentence is an invention.)
- A graphic novel has Louise Michel oppose the illegal execution:
"No ! Wait for the Committee! This needs a court martial!"
- A Bulgarian illustration captures the chaos, but keeps the firing squad:
Gone from the web
Execution of generals Thomas and Lecomte.
- A televised series shows the crowd making up the firing squad, which erases mutiny but keeps premeditation.
-- Karambolage, "March 18, 1871" (in French)
- The 13th's historical journal* adopts it:
*Right-leaning but not deliberately biased.
La Commune de Paris,"Histoire et histories du 13e," n°7, June 2011
"General Lecomte is arrested then shot, rue des Rosiers, by his soldiers. General Clément Thomas suffers the same fate..."
# # #
Louise Michel on Clément's arrest: "the guns went off on their own."
Memories of June, the siege and its sufferings, the useless attempts to break it with their wounded and dead, the incompetence and suspected treason of generals, the shooting into a largely unarmed crowd, the launch of an attack that was sure to fail, the shameful capitulation, the firing of over 600 officers for "agitating noisily," the Prussian victory march without announcing the quid pro quo, the army's arrival by surprise when the cannons' return had been offered, the mortally-wounded guard...
The effect of tolling bells and drum rolls.
As well, Montmartrois villagers were not alone, since residents joined them from the bottom of the hill. The sense of personal responsibility is lost in a crowd: "It was as if my gun took over."
In that context Lecomte refuses to have the wounded guard taken to the hospital, calls the furious residents "vermin" and orders his troops to fire on them — three times.
Clément does not realize that having repressed the demonstration of May 1848, been decorated for his role in the June massacre and fired more than 600 officers for "agitating" means that "observing" in civilian clothes is to stroll into the lions' den.*
*In History of the 1848 Revolution Marie Agoult (Daniel Stern) mentions officers attired in that way observing the June barricades. So the practice must have been common knowledge, and remembered.
# # #
General Trochu imagines Clément "rushing to the scene as good soldiers go toward the fighting, believing, I am sure [...] that his notoriety as Commander of the National Guard and veteran of the republican cause would impress the hysterical crowds..."
By believing that "hysterical crowds"
will listen to a killer of the people closest to them,
the privileged show how completely they ignore
their "dancing on corpses."
The left does not wish to find
the soon-to-be-Communards
guilty of such crime.
It would be better to admit it,
while pointing out that the generals killings
was due to their myopia.
* * *
Next,
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