V1.2.3. CIVIL WAR AND CARNAGE

MENU: 6.2.3. Civil war & carnage

"BLOODY WEEK:" KILLINGS BY VERSAILLAIS* ANNOUNCE

THE 20TH-CENTURY GENOCIDES

(MAY 21-28, 1871) 

*As the the Versailles government's troops were called 

       Le Monde illustré, a news weekly

"A view of Paris on May 24" 

In brief

• The humble against the powerful

• The slaughter of the wretched   

• Escape by socializing with the enemy

• The Latin Quarter after victory

• The fate of a political painter

• Soldiers whom officers mistrust

• The officers' responsibility

• The adversaries

• Parisian sequels

• The past sways pop culture: Piaf and Sinatra

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Next,

The humble against the powerful

THE HUMBLE AGAINST THE POWERFUL

"I WAS A MODEST EMPLOYEE AT CITY HALL. PEOPLE HAD SEEN ME SHED TEARS...

When fathers brought newborns wrapped in their shirts as they shivered in the cold. I had known some who died, and had gone to their funerals. Ten years later, that was remembered." 

Jules Vallès is elected deputy. 

# # #

"Many men were frightening to see: Small, gaunt, deformed... They fought so that their children would be less small, less gaunt, less vicious..." 

-- Louis Rossel,* cited by Pierre Milza, "The Terrible Year: the Commune," 2009 (in French).

*The sole officer of the regular army to join the Commune, hoping that it would continue the fight against the Prussians. Versailles shot him. He was 27.

L'Appel ("The Call") by André Devambez, 1906  / zoom

Painting based on the memories of the artist's father and survivors. In the foreground, paving stones have been torn up to build a barricade.

Women 

      Daniel Vierge, Ma Commune de Paris

The myth that all were killed on a barricade they defended shows men's respect. 

 La Barricade de la place Blanche défendue par des femmes (recadré), artist and date unknown / zoom

 Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited

On another occasion: "Bearing the red flag unfurled, about 20 women came to join us, among them..." [their names follow]. Again: "They bandaged the wounded on the battlefield and often picked up a dead man's gun."   

-- Louise Michel

"Lost children"

Prisonniers à Versailles

      -- Les Enfants perdus de la Commune

• "V. Thiebaut, aged 14, ran through the bullets to bring water. When the guards were forced to pull back, they had to sacrifice supplies. The boy rushed forward on a barrel of wine that he shattered while shouting, 'They won't drink our wine!' He seized the rifle of a guard who had just fallen..."

-- Lissagary, Appendix V, an account he says chosen among many.

• Maxime Vuillaume calls them "terrifying kids" when they join a platoon to execute hostages (Les Cahiers rouges p. 109).

   "A Marriage during the Commune" by Félix Guerie / zoom 

An anti-Communart painting

They transmit messages, build barricades, carry shells and although battalions in principle do not accept anyone under 17, Louise Michel finds much younger boys defending the forts with her.

Many are orphans, obliged to fend for themselves. 

They resemble the right-wing mobile guards in origin and behavior, but the way in which they are taken in hand is very different. That mentoring helps explain the rarity of crime (scroll down to the American pastor's observation).

# # #

Bismarck sends 100,000 POWs back to France so that its government can repress social change that could spread: The drawing below shows the army then filling what is said to be the world's largest avenue.   

         Le Départ de Versailles by Crafty, 1871 / zoom

     Avenue de Paris,Versailles / zoom

# # #

Someone from the wealthy neighborhood on the route from Versailles opens the city gate. The troops enter without a fight and residents hail them with joy. The first image indicates a crowd to whom the commander waves his sword and the second shows well-dresssed couple cheering.

                         Les Troupes entrent à Paris, le 21 mai 1871 by Charles Vernier, 1871 / zoom

Le 24 mai 1871 l'armée réunie à Versailles parvient après un siège en règle entre dans Paris. La population manifeste sa joie et fait à nos soldats l'accueil le plus sympathique. L'insurrection est vaincue, et les coupables qui ont sacrifié les otages et incendié la capitale, sont punis de leur crimes.

"On May 24 1871the army gathered at Versailles manages after a by-the book siege [does not say by treason] succeeds in entering Paris. The population shows its joy and gives our soldiers the most sympathetic welcome. The insurrection is defeated, the guilty who sacrificed the hostages and burned down the capital, are punished for their crimes."

"All along the Grands Boulevards well-bred crowds

came out to join the red-trousered troops.

They clapped their hands as if they were at the opera, and called 'Bravo!' as if a battle had been won. Above the marching soldiers, coins showered down from the windows and jingled on the pavements. In this part of Paris, the stones had stayed firmly in place [that is, no barricades]. The people here sat tight, mostly, waiting to be saved, playing cards to pass the time. As soon as they knew they were safe, out they rushed, wine bottles waving. Gentlemen stood smiling while their wives' arms opened, smothering sweaty necks with silk and satin, sowing kisses under kepis."

-- Liberty's Fire, pp. 229-30

After a detour to punish residents of Montmartre where the insurrection began, the soldiers head toward the working-class east to continue retribution... 

Advance of the Versaillais troops / zoom

Prise d'une barricade by Daniel Vierge, reproduced in l'Humanité

Those territories are considered

"nightmares of the forces of order."

-- Louise Michel

*   *    *

Next,
The slaughter of the wretched

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE WRETCHED

THE ARMY'S BARBARISM IS CLEAR FROM THE START

(WITH THE FIRST COMBAT ON APRIL 3)

Thiers takes back the hilltop he forgot and its cannons stop a Communard march on Versailles:

YouTube account by the late Alain Decaux, 2019, now gone from the web

Exhausted and separated from his troops, their leader Gustave Flourens takes refuge in an inn. Denounced, he comes out unarmed and...

"A police captain strikes him on the skull with such force that he turns it into epaulettes, says a policeman with a sense of humor."

-- Lissagary, 

Flourens's biography, Gustave Flourens, le chevalier rouge / the Red Knight  1987, ebook 

     Raspu'team

The soldiers take his corpse to Versailles in a cart with a ton of manure. The killer becomes a judge and obtains the Legion of Honor. 

Versailles thinks Communards are criminals to whom rules

regarding p.o.w.s do not apply:

• "Bloody Week" begins by shooting 300 guards who have surrendered at the barricade if of place Concorde (on May 23). 

Photographer unknown / zoom

The barricade at place Vendôme, a few steps from place Concorde

Souvenirs de la Commune - Enlèvement des barricades de la place Vendôme 

• "The rumor that furies threw flaming petrol led any badly-dressed woman to be dragged to the nearest wall and shot." 

-- Lissagary

    Type de la Commune by Lefman, 1885, zoom

• Versaillais pursue guards even into the catacombs, "with dogs and torches, but fear took over." Soldiers lost in the maze of tunnels expect to die until a prisoner leads them out. They spare his life but "kept it secret. Their masters would have punished them by death."

-- Louise Michel

   Combat des Catacombs gone from web

-- Musée Carnavalet, not exhibited

• Estimates of the killings, which range from 5,500 to 40,000, are impossible to verify since bodies were thrown into mass graves or the river, or heaped up and burned. Nor do we know how many died from wounds, in prisons or in deportation. For recent and serious investigation, please click and scroll down.

Illustration, Internet

"Removing corpses by passers-by, as required after the action" 

A surreal city

• Flowerpots crown the barricades. The May weather is beautiful, and guards' wives bring picnics.   

• Cafés and restaurants stay open, even when the fighting is so intense that "there's hardly time for a drink at the bar." 

 --  Both remarks, Vallès

 

Soon...

• "The stench of the immense graveyard drew a horrible swarm of charnal-house flies to the defunct city; the victors feared an epidemic and suspended the executions."

-- Louise Michel

"Summary execution of insurgents on ... [illegible] Street on May 25" /  Internet (gone)

• Memories told Hemingway 50 years later

"They were the descendants of the Communards [... ] they knew who had shot their fathers, their brothers and their friends when the Versailles troops took the town after the Commune and executed anyone they could catch with calloused hands." (Bolding mine)

-- The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Hemingway came to Paris in the 1920's and lived in the then blue-collar 5th district.

"Examining hands of Commune prisoners at Belleville" (gone from the web)

          Adolphe Eugène Disderi, the Emperor's photographer, Musée d'Art et d'histoire de Saint-Denis 

Photos that a high-school teacher made accessible: please click and scroll down.

• "The Senate and the surrounding streets looked like a vast battlefield after victory. The dead were spread out in the sun. Blood stained the streets. No corner was without two or three cadavers." 

-- Mes Cahiers rouges. Souvenirs de la Commune 

 by Maxime Vuillaume, ed. 2011, p. 54

• Burials in the cemeteries of Paris, the suburbs and Versailles plus corpses thrown into mass graves or the Seine, or piled up and burned, bring an estimate of 20,000-30,000 dead.  

"One counts those who die on one side only;
not on the other side,
which would be impossible."

-- Louise Michel

*     *     *

Next,

Escape by socializing with the enemy

ESCAPE BY SOCIALIZING WITH THE ENEMY

JULES VALLÈS AND MAXIME VUILLAUME SURVIVE BY PURE LUCK AND BY CONSORTING WITH OPPONENTS,

AS SHOTS FROM FIRING SQUADS RING OUT

Vallès is saved when a canteen lady offers him her wagon in which she harbors wounded, so that he can pretend to be a doctor taking them to the hospital.

Portrait of Jules Vallès by Courbet, 1861

An officer says there are no wounded because they take no prisoners, but that he can remove the pestilential corpses. He officer invites Vallès for a drink in a neighboring café, who to maintain his alibi shares a bottle of champagne.

# # #

 

A Day in the Luxembourg Military Court, the first "Red Notebook (Memories of the Commune)." There is no translation of this classic. I have shortened the 30-page account, omitting the hours at the military court, the friend who accompanied Vuillaume and a second policeman. 

Vuillaume is arbitrarily arrested in front of the Luxembourg palace (now the Senate) and by a slip of the tongue calls the policeman "citizen." That makes him a Communard and he is sent to the line of those waiting to be shot:

• The prisoners were led out by this exit and shot at the balustrade a few steps away:

Zoom  (please scroll down)

"Mass execution federated prisoners [the insurgents] in the gardens of Luxembourg"  

 

He is young and well dressed: An officer of about his age notices him and says, "I will claim that you're my cousin." He persuades the policeman to let Vuillaume go and they all walk out of the Luxembourg together. 

"Not a single officer, not one civilian who in those odious days did the hideous and voluntary job of supplying the martial courts, turned around to see where we were going. 

Two minutes after leaving the queue of the condemned, we were on the sidewalk, on the same spot where we had been arrested that morning by the men who accompanied us.  

"Good lord!" [said the policeman] "What would your parents have said, when they learned of this?"

That man who surely had led hundreds of strangers to the military court, to the slaughterhouse, with never a question, was pitying, almost crying at the fate of two young men whom he did not know from Adam and Eve, relatives, or so he thought, of a sergeant whose name he did not know either.  

We heard firing behind the railings" 

• The policeman invites them for a drink in a wine shop across the street.* Then...

* On the corner of rue de Vaugirard and rue de Servandoni.  

" 'Ah! Guys! I'm glad I got you out of that... But I have to go back... time's up...' 

And, busy, wiping his mustache, he rushed off...  

He held out his hand... That handshake still makes me shudder.  

Oh ! how I stare at that cabaret every time I come to this place [...] I search for the little round table at which we sat. I see again the grand portal of the Senate, the soldiers who enter, the prisoners that are pushed with yells. And ringing in my ears is the sonorous laugh of the policeman, joyous and sinister at the same time."

• Vuillaume invites the officer for déjeuner. 

"The Senate and the surrounding streets looked like a vast battlefield after a victory. The dead were spread out under the sun. Blood stained the walls. There was no corner where two or three cadavers did not lie [...]. At all the windows were officers, soldiers. [...]

When we were dining, in an isolated cabinet, I told the stupefied sergeant the real story [that he is an editor of the widely-read Communard newspaper, 'Le Père Duchêne'...].

# # #

The officer protects him as long as he can. Finally he says it has become too dangerous. Vuillaume continues to hide for a time, then manages to slip out of the city. 

That is another story of arbitrariness and pure luck. If you know French read My Red Notebooks, even if on La Commune you read nothing else.

# # #

The wine shop is now a restaurant. Walking by one night, I saw that it was still open:

Customers had left and the owner and friends were chatting at the bar: "I know it's late," I said, "but may I ask if you know for how long a restaurant as been here?"

They did not but when I explained the reason for my question and told them the story of Vuillaume and the officer, they listened attentively and posed for this photo.

Vuillaume would smile

if he could look on.

*     *    *

Next,

The Latin Quarter after victory