COMMUNE MEMBERS CANNOT SAVE 50 VICTIMS FROM A MOB PANICKED BY THE ARMY ADVANCE
(On May 26)
A second shooting gives Versailles more justification* of its infinitely more extensive violence.
-- Main source: My Red Notebooks, a Bit of Truth on the Death of the Hostages, pp. 68-127 (in French) by Maxime Vuillaume, toward 1910. He describes the drama after examining records, following the route from prison to execution site and interrogating witnesses.
Another Crimes of the Commune montage
The horde seeks revenge on people who have no tie with the fighting but who side with Versailles: " 'They've been shooting our own in heaps! And you want to spare such people!' " cries an elderly combattant, aiming his revolver at a Commune official who tries to protect the prisoners.
# # #
Four fédérés (Commune soldiers, that is, men with guns), demand that all remaining prisoners be handed over. With their platoon and about 30 "lost boys" they march with trumpets, singing a drinking song, through screaming crowds to empty terrain next to Belleville's eastern rampart.
The sight that rue Haxo presented was terrifying. Between howls of the mob one heard the clash of battle. Fugitives rushed to the nearby gate in the rampart to try to cross the Prussian lines.
Mixed with the whistling of bullets and the boom of shells were the sounds of German music just beyond the rampart buffer.
-- p.114
Commune officials have fallen back to a nearby inn, at 78 rue Haxo. From a corner window they see the crowd, the hostages and the empty terrain.
They try to prevent the massacre.
"Cournet, Délégué [Minister] of Security, ties on his red shawl and tries to speak. The crowd covers his voice. He is threatened.
Varlin makes superhuman efforts. He asks his colleagues and several friends to join him in the space where the crowd is about to bring the prisoners.
-- ' No,' Roulier [a cobbler, member of the Commission of Labor] objects. " 'It must not be said that members of the Commune were present.' "
"All efforts to tear them [the hostages] from death were then useless. Those horrified by the useless disaster could only throw themselves into the battle or flee.[... ]
Varlin went back to signing orders, to delivering orders and money for requisitions, with apparent calm.
Suddenly shots broke out."
# # #
A memorial at the Belleville cemetery honors the murdered
guards:
# # #
Web accounts unhesitatingly accept the Versaillais version, ignoring the terrified mob and the Commune members who begged it not to shoot. As well, their errors show that they have not read easily available texts.
For example:
- "During the Commune, in reprisal for the massacres by Versaillais, 51 hostages, republican guards, policemen, priests and Jesuit fathers, the Abbot Planchet, were shot during Bloody Week by the fédérés on May 28 1871."
The number of hostages was 50, though in the confusion a person in the crowd was also killed. The date was May 26.
- "The shooting took place behind the cemetery wall at the Villa des Otages, 85 rue de Haxo."
# # #
That bias plus error is all the more reason to appreciate
a panel that, exceptionally,
gives accurate information and says what counts:
" ...during Bloody Week of the Commune de Paris [...] on May 26, 1871, 50 hostages from the prison of la Roquette, mostly priests, Paris Guards and policemen, were taken there and slaughtered without judgement. [...]"
"Eugène Varlin and members of the Central Committee tried in vain to oppose the massacre. But nothing could stop the crowd, made desperate by the exactions and summary executions of the Versaillais, who were reconquering Paris street by street, house by house.
Firing-squad shootings, first a few isolated shots then a long, long salvo that seemed never to end... (Jules Vallès, The Insurgent, 1885)"
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