THURSDAY 25TH--THE WHOLE LEFT BANK FALLS INTO THE HANDS OF
THE TROOPS--DELESCLUZE DIES--THE BRASSARDIERS[192]
STIMULATE THE MASSACRE--THE MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL EVACUATE
THE MAIRIE OF THE ELEVENTH ARRONDISSEMENT.
A few thousand men could not indefinitely hold a line of battle several
miles long. When night had set in, many Federals abandoned their
barricades in order to snatch a little rest. The Versaillese, who were
on the look-out, took possession of their defences, and the glimmering
of dawn saw the tricolor where on the eve had floated the red flag.
In the darkness the Federals evacuated the greater part of the tenth
arrondissement, whose artillery pieces were transported to the Chateau
d'Eau. Brunel and the brave _pupilles de la Commune_ still stood their
ground in the Rue Magnan and on the Quay Jemappes, the troops holding
the top of the Boulevard Magenta.
On the left bank, the Versaillese erected batteries at the Place
d'Enfer, the Luxembourg, and the bastion 81. More than fifty cannon and
mitrailleuses were levelled at the Butte aux Cailles; for, despairing of
taking it by assault, Cissey wished to crush it with his artillery.
Wroblewski, on his side, did not remain inactive. Besides the 175th and
176th battalions, he had under his command the legendary 101st, which
was to the troops of the Commune what the 32nd brigade had been to the
army of Italy. Since the 3rd April the 101st had not rested. Day and
night, their guns hot, they had roamed about the trenches, the
villages, the fields; the Versaillese of Neuilly, of Asnieres, ten times
fled before them. They had taken three cannon from them, which, like
faithful mastiffs, followed them everywhere. All citizens of the
thirteenth arrondissement and the Mouffetard quarter, undisciplined,
undisciplinable, wild, rough, their clothes and flag torn, obeying only
one order, that to march forward, mutineering when inactive, when hardly
out of fire rendering it necessary to plunge them into it again.
Serizier commanded, or rather accompanied them; for indeed their rage
was their only commander. While at the front they attempted surprises,
seized outposts, kept the soldiers in alarm. Wroblewski, uncovered on
his right since the taking of the Pantheon, secured his communications
with the Seine by a barricade on the Bridge of Austerlitz, and furnished
the Place Jeanne d'Arc with cannon, in order to check the troops who
might venture along the railway station.
That day M. Thiers dared to telegraph to the provinces that Marshal
MacMahon had just, for the last time, summoned the Federals to
surrender. This was an odious lie added to so many others. Like
Cavaignac in 1848, M. Thiers, on the contrary, wanted to prolong the
battle. He knew that his shells were setting Paris on fire, that the
massacre of the prisoners, of the wounded, would fatally entail that of
the hostages. But what cared he for the fate of a few priests and a few
gendarmes? What cared the bourgeoisie if it triumphed amidst ruins--if
on these ruins it could write, "Paris waged war with the privileged;
Paris is no more!"
The Hotel-de-Ville and the Pantheon in the power of the troops, their
whole efforts concentrated upon the Chateau d'Eau, the Bastille, and the
Butte aux Cailles. At four o'clock Clinchant resumed his march towards
the Chateau d'Eau. One column, setting out from the Rue Paradis, went up
the Rues du Chateau d'Eau and De Bondy; another advanced against the
barricade of the Boulevards Magenta and Strasbourg; while a third from
the Rue des Jeuneurs pushed on between the boulevards and the Rue
Turbigo. The corps Douay on the right supported this movement, and
endeavoured to remount the third arrondissement by the Rues Charlot and
De Saintonge. Vinoy advanced towards the Bastille by the small streets
that abut upon the Rue St. Antoine, the quays of the right and of the
left banks. Cissey, with more modest strategy, cannonaded the Butte aux
Cailles, before which his men had so often turned tail.
Painful scenes were enacted in the forts. Wroblewski, whose left wing
was covered by them, relied for their preservation upon the energy of
the member of the Council who had assumed the functions of delegate. The
evening before the commander of Montrouge had abandoned that fort and
had retreated to Bicetre with his garrison. The fort of Bicetre did not
hold out much longer. The battalions declared that they wanted to return
to the town in order to defend their quarters, and the delegate, in
spite of his threats, was unable to retain them; so, after having spiked
their guns, the whole garrison returned to Paris. The Versaillese
occupied the two evacuated forts, and there at once erected batteries
against the fort of Ivry and the Butte aux Cailles.
The general attack on the Butte did not begin till mid-day. The
Versaillese followed the ramparts as far as the Avenue d'Italie and the
Route de Choisy, with the view of making sure of the Place d'Italie,
which they attacked from the side of the Gobelins. The Avenues d'Italie
and De Choisy were defended by powerful barricades which they could not
dream of forcing; but that of the Boulevard St. Marcel, protected on one
side by the conflagration of the Gobelins, could be turned by the
numerous gardens intersecting this quarter, and the Versaillese
succeeded in doing this. They first took possession of the Rue des
Cordillieres St. Marcel, where twenty Federals who refused to surrender
were massacred, and then entered the gardens. For three hours a long and
obstinate fusillade enveloped the Butte aux Cailles, battered down by
the Versaillese cannon, six times as numerous as Wroblewski's.
The garrison of Ivry arrived towards one o'clock. On leaving the fort
they had set fire to a mine which sprung two bastions. Soon after the
Versaillese penetrated into the abandoned fort, and then there was no
struggle, as M. Thiers tried to make it appear in one of those bulletins
in which he very cleverly intermingled truth and falsehood.
Towards ten o'clock on the right bank the Versaillese reached the
barricade of the Faubourg St. Denis, near the St. Lazare prison,
outflanked and shot seventeen Federals.[193] Thence they went to occupy
the St. Laurent barricade at the junction of the Boulevard Sebastopol,
erected batteries against the Chateau d'Eau, and by the Rue des
Recollets gained the Quay Valmy. On the night, their debouching on the
Boulevard St. Martin was retarded by the Rue de Lanery, against which
they fired from the Ambigu-Comique Theatre. In the third arrondissement
they were stopped in the Rue Meslay, Rue Nazareth, Rue du Vert-Bois, Rue
Charlot, Rue de Saintonge. The second arrondissement, invaded from all
sides, was still disputing its Rue Montorgueuil Nearer the Seine, Vinoy
succeeded in entering the Grenier d'Abondance by circuitous streets, and
in order to dislodge him the Federals set fire to this building, which
overlooks the Bastille.
_Three o'clock._--The Versaillese invaded the thirteenth arrondissement
more and more. Their shells falling upon the prison of the Avenue
d'Italie, the Federals evacuated it, at the same time taking out the
prisoners, amongst whom were the Dominicans of Arcueil, who had been
brought back to Paris with the garrison of Bicetre. The sight of these
men, doubly odious, exasperated the combatants, whose guns, so to say,
spontaneously went off, and a dozen of the apostles of the Inquisition
fell under the bullets at the moment they were running away by the
Avenue. All the other prisoners were respected.
Since the morning Wroblewski had received the order to fall back upon
the eleventh arrondissement. He persisted in holding out, and had
shifted the centre of his resistance a little further to the rear, to
the Place Jeanne d'Arc. But the Versaillese, masters of the Avenue des
Gobelins, made their junction with the columns of the Avenues d'Italie
and Choisy in the thirteenth arrondissement. One of their detachments
continuing to file along the rampart, reached the embankment of the
Orleans Railway, and the red-coats were already showing themselves on
the Boulevard St. Marcel. Wroblewski, almost hemmed in on all sides, was
at last forced to consent to a retreat. Moreover, the subaltern chiefs
had, like their general, received the order to fall back; and so,
protected by the fire of the Austerlitz Bridge, the able defender of the
Butte aux Cailles passed the Seine in good order with his cannon and a
thousand men. A certain number of Federals, who obstinately remained
behind in the thirteenth arrondissement, were surrounded and taken
prisoners.
The Versaillese did not dare to disturb Wroblewski's retreat, although
they held part of the Boulevard St. Marcel, the Orleans Station, and
their gunboats were ascending the Seine. The latter were delayed for a
moment at the entrance of the St. Martin's Canal, but putting on full
steam, they overcame the obstacle, and in the evening lent assistance in
the attack on the eleventh arrondissement.
The whole left bank now belonged to the enemy; the Bastille and the
Chateau d'Eau became the centre of the combat.
In the Boulevard Voltaire might now be seen all the true-hearted men who
had not perished, or whose presence was not indispensable in their
quarters. One of the most active was Vermorel, who during the whole
struggle showed a courage composed at once of fire and coolness. On
horseback, his red scarf tied round him, he rode from barricade to
barricade, encouraging the men, fetching and bringing reinforcements. At
the Mairie another meeting was held towards twelve o'clock. Twenty-two
members of the Council were present; about ten more were defending
their arrondissements, the others had disappeared. Arnold explained that
the evening before, the secretary of Mr. Washburne, the ambassador of
the United States, had come to offer the mediation of the Germans. The
Commune, he said, had now only to send commissaries to Vincennes in
order to regulate the conditions of an armistice. The secretary,
introduced to the meeting, renewed this declaration, and the discussion
began. Delescluze showed great reluctance to accept this plan. What
motive induced the foreigner to intervene? To put an end to the
conflagration and preserve their guarantee, he was answered. But their
guarantee was the Versaillese Government, whose triumph was no longer
doubtful at this moment. Others gravely asserted that the inveterate
defence of Paris had inspired the Prussian with admiration. No one asked
whether this insensate proposition did not hide some snare; if the
pretended secretary were not a simple spy. They clung like drowning men
to this last chance of salvation. Arnold even set forth the basis of an
armistice similar to that of the Central Committee. Four of the members
present, and amongst them Delescluze, were charged to accompany the
American secretary to Vincennes.
At three o'clock they reached the gate of Vincennes, but the commissary
of police refused to let them pass. They showed their scarfs, their
cards of members of the Council. The commissary insisted upon a
safe-conduct from the Commission of Public Safety. While the discussion
was going on some Federals came up. "Where are you going?" said they.
"To Vincennes." "Why?" "On a mission." A painful controversy ensued. The
Federals thought the members of the Council wanted to abscond, and they
were even about to ill-use them, when some one recognised Delescluze.
His name saved the others; but the commissary still insisted upon a
safe-conduct.
One of the delegates run off to the Mairie of the eleventh
arrondissement to procure it, but, even on Ferre's order, the guards
refused to lower the drawbridge. Delescluze addressed them, said that
the common weal of all was at stake; but prayers and threats proved
alike unable to overcome the idea of a defection. Delescluze came back
shivering all over. For one moment he had been suspected of cowardice;
this was to him a death-blow.
Before the mairie he found a crowd shouting at some flags, surmounted by
eagles, which had just, they said, been taken from the Versaillese.
Wounded were being brought from the Bastille. Mademoiselle Dimitrieff,
wounded herself, supported Frankel, wounded at the barricade of the
Faubourg St. Antoine. Wroblewski just arriving from the Butte aux
Cailles, Delescluze offered him the command-in-chief. "Have you a few
thousand resolute men?" asked Wroblewski. "A few hundred at most,"
answered the delegate. Wroblewski could not accept any responsibility of
command under such unequal conditions, and continued to fight as a
simple soldier. He was the only general of the Commune who had showed
the qualities of a chef-de-corps. He always asked to have those
battalions sent him which everybody else declined, undertaking to
utilise them.
The attack was coming nearer and nearer the Chateau d'Eau. This place,
constructed with the object of checking the faubourgs, and opening into
eight large avenues, had not been really fortified. The Versaillese,
masters of the Folies-Dramatiques Theatre and of the Rue du Chateau
d'Eau, attacked it by turning the Prince Eugene Barracks. House by house
they tore the Rue Magnan from the _pupilles de la Commune_. Brunel,
after facing the enemy for four days, fell wounded in the thigh. The
_pupilles_ carried him away on a litter across the Place du Chateau
d'Eau amidst a shower of bullets.
From the Rue Magnan the Versaillese soon reached the barracks, and the
Federals, too few in number to defend this vast monument, had to
evacuate it.
The fall of this position uncovered the Rue Turbigo, thus enabling the
Versaillese to occupy the whole upper part of the third arrondissement,
and to surround the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. After a rather
long struggle the Federals abandoned the barricade of the Conservatoire,
leaving behind them a loaded mitrailleuse. A woman also remained. As
soon as the soldiers were within range she discharged the mitrailleuse
at them.
The barricades of the Boulevards Voltaire and Dejazet's Theatre had
henceforth to sustain the whole fire of the Prince Eugene Barracks, the
Boulevard Magenta, the Boulevard St. Martin, the Rue du Temple, and the
Rue Turbigo. Behind their fragile shelter the Federals gallantly
received this avalanche. How many men have been called heroes who never
showed a hundredth part of this simple courage, without any stage
effects, without a history, which shone forth during these days in a
thousand places in Paris! At the Chateau d'Eau a young girl of nineteen,
rosy and charming, with black, curling hair, dressed as a marine
fusileer, fought desperately a whole day. At the same place a lieutenant
was killed in front of the barricade; a child of fifteen, Dauteuille,
went to pick up the kepi of the dead man in the thick of the bullets,
and brought it back amidst the cheers of his companions.
For in the battle of the streets, as in the open field, the children
proved themselves as brave as the men. At a barricade of the Faubourg du
Temple the most indefatigable gunner was a child. The barricade taken,
all its defenders were shot, and the child's turn also came. He asked
for three minutes' respite; "so that he could take his mother, who lived
opposite, his silver watch, _in order that she might at least not lose
everything_." The officer, involuntarily moved, let him go, not thinking
to see him again; but three minutes after the child cried, "Here I am!"
jumped on to the pavement, and nimbly leant against the wall near the
corpses of his comrades. Paris will never die as long as she brings
forth such people.
The Place du Chateau d'Eau was ravaged as by a cyclone. The walls
crumbled beneath the shells and bombs; enormous blocks were thrown up;
the lions of the fountains perforated or overthrown, the basin
surmounting it shattered. Fire burst out from twenty houses. The trees
were leafless, and their broken branches hung like limbs all but parted
from the main body. The gardens, turned up, sent forth clouds of dust.
The invisible hand of death alighted upon each stone.
At a quarter to seven, near the Mairie of the eleventh arrondissement,
we saw Delescluze, Jourde, and about a hundred Federals marching in the
direction of the Chateau d'Eau. Delescluze wore his ordinary dress,
black hat, coat, and trousers, his red scarf, little conspicuous as was
his wont, tied round his waist. Without arms, he lent on a cane.
Apprehensive of some panic at the Chateau d'Eau, we followed the
delegate. Some of us stopped at the St. Ambroise Church to get arms. We
then met a merchant from Alsace, who, exasperated at those who had
betrayed his country, had been fighting for five days, and had just been
severely wounded; farther on, Lisbonne, who, like Brunel, having too
often defied death, had at last fallen at the Chateau d'Eau; he was
being brought back almost dead; and finally, Vermorel, wounded by the
side of Lisbonne, whom Theisz and Jaclard were carrying off on a litter,
leaving behind him large drops of blood. We thus remained a little
behind Delescluze. At about eighty yards from the barricade the guards
who accompanied him kept back, for the projectiles obscured the entrance
of the boulevard.
Delescluze still walked forward. Behold the scene; we have witnessed it;
let it be engraved in the annals of history. The sun was setting. The
old exile, unmindful whether he was followed, still advanced at the same
pace, the only living being on the road. Arrived at the barricade, he
bent off to the left and mounted upon the paving-stones. For the last
time his austere face, framed in his white beard, appeared to us turned
towards death. Suddenly Delescluze disappeared. He had fallen as if
thunderstricken on the Place du Chateau d'Eau.
Some men tried to raise him. Three out of four fell dead. The only thing
to be thought of now was the barricade, the rallying of its few
defenders. A member of the Council, Johannard, almost in the middle of
the boulevard, raising his gun, and weeping with rage, cried to those
who hesitated, "No! you are not worthy of defending the Commune!" Night
set in. We returned heart-broken, leaving, abandoned to the outrages of
an adversary without respect for death, the body of our friend.
He had forewarned no one, not even his most intimate friends. Silent,
having for confidant only his severe conscience, Delescluze walked to
the barricade as the old Montagnards went to the scaffold. An eventful
life had exhausted his strength; he had but a breath left, and he gave
it. The Versaillese have stolen his body, but his memory will remain
enshrined in the heart of the people as long as France shall be the
mother-country of the Revolution. He lived only for Justice. That was
his talent, his science, the pole-star of his life. He proclaimed her,
confessed her, through thirty years of exile, prisons, insult,
disdaining the persecutions that crushed him. A Jacobin, he fell with
the men of the people to defend her. It was his recompense to die for
her, his hands free, in the open daylight, at his own time, not
afflicted by the sight of the executioner.
Compare the conduct of the Minister of War of the Commune with the
cowardice of the Bonapartist Minister and generals escaping death by
surrendering their swords.
The whole evening the Versaillese attacked the entrance of the Boulevard
Voltaire, protected by the conflagration of the two corner houses. On
the side of the Bastille they did not get beyond the Place Royale, but
they were breaking into the twelfth arrondissement. Under the shelter of
the wall of the quay, they had in the course of the day penetrated
beneath the Austerlitz Bridge; in the evening, protected by their
gunboats and the batteries of the Jardin des Plantes, they pushed as far
as Mazas.
Our right wing held out better. The Versaillese had not been able to
proceed further than the Eastern Railway line. From afar they attacked
the Rue d'Aubervilliers, aided by the fire of the Rotonde. Ranvier
vigorously cannonaded Montmartre, when a despatch from the Committee of
Public Safety informed him that the red flag was floating from the
Moulin de la Galette. Ranvier, unable to believe this, refused to cease
firing.
In the evening the Versaillese formed in front of the Federals a broken
line, commencing from the Eastern Railway, passing the Chateau d'Eau and
the Bastille, and ending at the Lyons Railway. There remained to the
Commune but two arrondissements intact, the nineteenth and twentieth,
and about half of the eleventh and twelfth.
The Paris of Versailles no longer presented a civilised aspect. Fear,
hate, and fiendish brutishness smothered all feelings of humanity. It
was a universal "furious madness," said the Siecle of the 26th. "One no
longer distinguishes the just from the unjust, the innocent from the
guilty. The life of citizens weighs no more than a hair. For a cry, for
a word, one is arrested, shot." The ventilators of the cellars were
blocked up by order of the army, which wanted to give credit to the
legend of the petroleuses. The National Guards of order crept out from
their lurking-places, proud of their armlets, offering their services to
the officers, ransacking the houses, revindicating the honour of
presiding at the fusillades. In the tenth arrondissement the former
mayor, Dubail, assisted by the commander of the 109th battalion, led the
soldiers to hunt those who had formerly been under his administration.
Thanks to the _brassardiers_, the tide of prisoners swelled so that it
became necessary to centralise the carnage. The victims were pushed into
the mairies, the barracks, the public edifices, where prevotal courts
were organised, and shot in troops. When the fusillade proved
insufficient the mitrailleuse mowed them down. All did not die at once,
and in the night there arose from these bleeding heaps ghastly cries of
agony.
The shades of night brought back the spectacle of the conflagrations.
Where the rays of the sun had only shown sombre clouds, pyramids of fire
now appeared. The Grenier d'Abondance illuminated the Seine far beyond
the fortifications. The column of the Bastille, entirely perforated by
the shells, which had set its covering of crowns and flags on fire,
blazed like a gigantic torch. The Boulevard Voltaire was burning on the
side of the Chateau d'Eau.
The death of Delescluze had been so simple and so rapid, that even at
the Mairie of the eleventh arrondissement it was doubted. Towards
midnight some members of the Council agreed to evacuate the Mairie.
What! always fly before powder and shot! Is the Bastille taken? Does not
the Boulevard Voltaire still hold out? The whole strategy of the
Committee of Public Safety, its whole plan of battle, was to retreat. At
two o'clock in the morning, when a member of the Commune was wanted to
support the barricade of the Chateau d'Eau, only Gambon was found,
asleep in a corner. An officer awoke him and begged his pardon. The
worthy Republican answered, "It is as well it should be I as another; I
have lived," and he departed. But the balls already swept the Boulevard
Voltaire up to the St. Ambroise Church. The barricade was deserted.
FOOTNOTES:
[192] Armlet conspirators.
[193] Summoned several times to surrender, the Federals answered, "Vive
la Commune!" They were thrown against the wall of the prison and fell
with the same cry, one of them still clasping the red flag of the
barricade. Before such faith the Versaillese officer felt a little
ashamed. He turned to the people who had hurried up from the
neighbouring houses, and several times repeated by way of excuse, "It is
their fault! Why did they not surrender!" As though all Federals were
not regularly and mercilessly massacred by them.