A FAMOUS MONTAGE SHOWS LA COMMUNE BORN OF MUTINY AND PREMEDITATED MURDER
That the generals were shot by their own troops was immediately accepted. Victor Hugo alone found the tale "curious."
-- "Curious:" in Things seen ("Choses vues"), his journal
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Part of the series "The Crimes of the Commune," Versailles propaganda that the next page describes.
But the autopsy report shows the bullets shot from behind.
-- Pierre Milza, March 18th, « La Commune », 2009 (in French)
Information from Versaillais sources is suspect and in any case, an event so extraordinary must be explained.*
*Conscripts killed officers spontaneously before the October Revolution and during the Vietnam War, but I have never heard of an organized of an organized execution.
Yet the left adopts it:
- Marx explains it as due to conscripts' hostility to officers. Yet these soldiers must not have known Clément, who as head of the Parisian National Guard had no connection with the army.
- The Soviet film The New Babylon skips the drama by having the Lecomte character tell the troops to abandon the cannons. That is the exception mentioned earlier in a movie that is otherwise faithful to the sources.
"Soldiers! After Versailles you will be allowed to go home."
- 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." [Only the first sentence is true. ]
- A graphic novel has Louise Michel oppose the firing squad:
"No ! Wait for the Committee! This needs a court martial!"
- A Soviet illustration captures the chaos, but keeps the firing squad:
Gone from the web
- 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* starts a special issue on La Commune with the firing squad:
*Right-leaning but not deliberately biased.
La Commune de Paris, "History et histories of the 13th," 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,
- Fired more than 600 officers for "agitating..."
...means that "observing" in civilian clothes* when the population knows him is to stroll into the lions' den.
* Marie Agoult (Daniel Stern) mentions so-attired officers observing the June barricades in History of the 1848 Revolution. So it 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
that they "dance on corpses."
The left does not wish to find
the soon-to-be-Communard residents,
guilty of such crime.
It would be better to say
that the generals were killed
by their myopia.
* * *
Next,
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