themselves inside the _enceinte_, and the fighting has been incessant
ever since; this is hard work enough for the assailants, who number
nearly 150,000 men; but for the soldiers--if soldiers they can be
called--of the Commune, the effort has already been almost superhuman.
Gradually diminishing in numbers, constantly finding themselves forced
upon a smaller area, and, therefore, the target of a more concentrated
fire, hemmed in upon all sides, with ammunition and provisions falling
short, exposed to a heavy rain, which has been falling incessantly for
48 hours, unable to seek repose in any spot sheltered from the shells of
the enemy, which are pouring in unremitting showers upon every corner of
their position, the situation of the Insurgents is desperate in the
extreme, and it cannot be denied that they are fighting with an energy
and a heroism worthy of a better cause. Reports are so varied and
contradictory as to the fate of their leaders that even the Generals of
the French army do not know positively who is commanding them; but if
the prisoners are to be believed, the irrepressible Cluseret has again
risen to the surface, and is the heart and soul of the defence. As the
position of the Insurgents becomes desperate, it seems to produce a
greater ferocity on both sides. The rebels neither ask nor give quarter;
they have made up their minds that death, whether as combatants or as
prisoners, is their only alternative, and men and women seem to be
lashed up to a frenzy which has converted them into a set of wild beasts
caught in a trap, and rendering their extermination a necessity. I went
yesterday to the Jardin des Plantes, as the entire left bank of the
Seine is now in the hands of the Government troops, and found M.
Decaisne, the celebrated botanical professor, still safe and sound,
after having passed through three days of unparalleled suspense. On
Wednesday the _rappel_ had been beaten by the Insurgents, and notice was
publicly given that the Panthéon was to be blown up at 2 o'clock. The
result was a general "stampede" of the inhabitants in an agony of terror
and dismay. For two or three hours women and children came pouring out
of the doomed quarter, unable to save any of their property, and not
even yet assured that they had escaped the limits of the explosion. At 5
o'clock no explosion had occurred, and the rumour spread that the
attempt had failed for want of a sufficient quantity of powder. I told
you how the Panthéon was saved; the people went back to their houses,
only to witness severe street fighting, the result of which was to drive
the Insurgents slowly across the river, where they made a fierce stand
at a _tête du pont_ erected at the end of the bridge of Austerlitz. This
had only been carried the evening before my visit to it, and bore all
the marks of an actual battlefield. Here were eight or ten bodies strewn
behind the barricade, with groups of women and young children gathered
round inspecting them, and lifting, with a morbid curiosity, the cloths
which had been thrown over them to conceal their distorted countenances.
These men had been killed in hard fighting, men and accoutrements were
strewn thickly around, the houses were smashed and riddled with shot.
The barricade, a formidable earthwork and battery, was pounded into a
mere heap--everything betokened a bitter struggle; and, indeed, I had
already heard from a Staff officer that the Line had lost more heavily
at this point than elsewhere. Passing along the side of the canal, we
endeavoured to reach the Bastille, but were stopped by a battery which
was firing at Père-Lachaise, and which was receiving shells in reply
from the cemetery. We therefore retraced our steps past the long gaunt
skeleton of the Prefecture of the Police, which was still smoking, and
which had contained a body of political prisoners incarcerated by the
Insurgents, but released by them in order to work at barricades. This
proved their salvation, as they were enabled to effect their escape on
the approach of the troops. It is reported, nevertheless, that some
still lie buried beneath these smouldering ruins. To the right of the
Bastille we could see a heavy volume of smoke rising apparently from a
point corresponding to the position of the prison of Mazas. We are still
in utter darkness as to the fate of the Archbishop and the clergy in
confinement with him, but the tragedy of the Dominicans leaves us little
hope. About 20 of these priests were imprisoned on Friday, the 19th, at
Fort Bicêtre. On Thursday, when this had to be abandoned, they were
hurried away to the Gobelins on the promise of being set at liberty.
Instead of this they were driven to work on the barricades, then dragged
to a prison in the Avenue d'Italie. At half-past 4 in the afternoon they
were visited by a certain M. Cerisier with a company of the 101st
battalion of the National Guards, who deliberately loaded in their
presence. The outside door of the prison was then thrown open, and they
were ordered to leave it one by one. As they marched out singly they
were shot successively by order of Cerisier, with the exception of the
narrator of the occurrence, and one or two others who were either missed
or slightly wounded and escaped. Twelve bodies of these unhappy men have
already been recovered.
There is also no doubt that M. Gustave Chaudey, one of the principal
editors of the _Siècle_, and a literary man of some eminence and high
character, who had incurred the displeasure of the Communists, has been
shot by them. On the other side the executions are wholesale. It is
estimated that upwards of 2,000 persons have been shot already on the
left bank of the Seine alone, evidently a small proportion of the total
number. Wherever women and children are to be observed leaning over the
parapet of the Seine intently regarding some object below, one may be
sure that the attraction is a group of hideously mutilated corpses of
men who have been brought down to the river side, and then with their
backs to the wall have met their doom. On the sloping roads leading down
from the _quai_ to the river may also be seen inequalities where the
road has been recently disturbed and where the freshly-turned earth
indicates burial-places. Not far from these bodies were lying several
dead horses, from which the people were cutting steaks. The inside of
the Hôtel de Ville presents a curious scene, the solid masses of stone
and lime of which the rubbish is composed having fallen in in the form
of a crater, which fills up the whole central place. Under this mound
are said to be buried from 200 to 300 Insurgents who were unable to
escape at the last moment, and thus fell the victims of the
conflagration they had themselves originated. The mutilation of the
ornamental work of this magnificent specimen of architecture is simply
hideous; there is scarcely a square inch of the _façade_ untouched by
shot or shell. Anxious, if possible, to judge of the progress of the
attack which was being made on the Insurgent position at Père-Lachaise,
I reached the Place Château d'Eau, which had been taken the day before
from the Insurgents. I found it, however, impossible to go beyond the
angle of the Wall near the Ambigu. Here a small crowd was collected
which was dispersed by a shot just as I approached, and the place itself
was a solitary desert, for it was swept from the heights of Belleville
down the Faubourg du Temple. Passing along the Boulevard Magenta, we
obtained from the point where the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis traverses
the Rue Lafayette, a view of an Insurgent barricade, on which a red flag
was still flying, and which was turned by the troops while we were
there. We were looking down the long, straight line of street totally
deserted, and in the far distance watching the barricade, beyond which
rose the occasional puffs of smoke from a musketry fire, when we
suddenly saw the red trousers scampering across in twos and threes, and
then in larger numbers, and knew that the barricade had been taken, and
that it was safe to come out of our cover and walk on the opposite side
of the street. All this time the whistling and bursting of the shell
overhead was as incessant and loud as I have ever heard on the field of
battle. We were directly in the line of fire between Montmartre and Père
la Chaise, although completely protected from it, as everything passed
overhead. But the terrific rushing through the air of the projectiles,
and the cracking and bursting at each end when they reached their
destination, made a music which it requires a Parisian education
thoroughly to appreciate. Heavy volumes of smoke rose from the besieged
quarter, and the destruction of life and property upon the doomed area
which the Insurgents have chosen as their final stronghold must be
something appalling. Near the angle of the street at which we stood lay
the dead body of a man, covered with a cloth, who had been shot not many
hours before in an adjoining Court. It was evident from the looks and
tone of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood that their sympathies were
strongly with the Communists. They muttered gloomily and savagely to
each other, scarcely daring to raise their suspicious glances from the
ground, for they knew not which of their neighbours might not have
denounced them, and that the day of danger was by no means past.
Probably two-thirds of the men now gathered at their shopdoors had
fought actively for the Commune. At the Prévôté of the 5th corps I had
an interesting instance of the effect of denunciations. While there some
men who had been intrusted with the arrest of General Henry returned
from their expedition. General Henry, it will be remembered, was one of
the earliest leaders of the movement, and I went down to see where he
had openly established himself as Commander-in-Chief of the National
Guard in the Vaugirard quarter. About the 16th of March, or two days
before the Revolution several attempts were made to arrest him but the
task was so dangerous that they all failed. Throughout the movement this
man has exhibited daring and intelligence, and his capture is much
desired. In consequence of the information received his haunt was
visited, and the result I saw in the shape of a blue Prussian overcoat
stained with blood and perforated with a bullet-hole, a tunic still
more bloody and torn, a very jaunty braided jacket quite clean and new,
a Prussian undress cap, and a very handsome sword. The proprietor had
evidently been wounded, and had succeeded in evading his captors, if
still alive, by some secret contrivance, which, however, the honour of
the denouncer was pledged to discover; it was evident that he had
provided himself with a Prussian uniform, in the hope of passing through
the German lines, and the blood on his coat would seem to indicate that
he had made the attempt and failed. From this barrack, just prior to my
visit, had been removed several wounded children, most of them under
eight years old. One of the most horrible features of the war in a
thickly-peopled city is to be found in the sufferings which it entails
upon the innocent who are thus early familiarized with scenes of blood
and violence, and who too often, unfortunately, are themselves the
victims of them. The _gamins_ of Paris love to dabble in petroleum and
play with lucifer matches, and revel in destruction and conflagration.
More daring than their elders, they stick with their mothers to
barricades after the father of the family has deemed it prudent to
retire, and numerous are the stories of their heroism and courage.
Unfortunately, their propensities for arson render them liable to be
shot, and it is sad to see how many children are often comprised in a
band of prisoners. I went underground to the cells in which the
prisoners were confined at the Prévôté, and wandered along narrow,
subterranean passages, where the noisome exhalations were almost
stifling, into dark cells, where the eye got at last sufficiently
accustomed to the light to distinguish the relics left by the prisoners:
here a pair of stays of which some female prisoner had divested herself,
there a red cockade, all kinds of articles of clothing steeped in slime
of indescribable foulness; and cowering at one end of the corridor a
dozen prisoners waiting to know their fate. They were more respectable
than usual, and not apparently of a very sanguinary type. They were all
men. To-day no less than a hundred women were marched down the streets
in one gang. The papers are so full of false reports that it is scarcely
safe to give news which has not been verified. Thus, unless I had seen
the Genius of Liberty on the top of the column in the Place de la
Bastille, and visited the Jardin des Plantes, I might have reported the
accounts, of which the papers are full, of the destruction of the figure
on the Column and of the animals and rare plants in the gardens, which
you will be happy to hear are all in a state of perfect health and
preservation. I am afraid, however, it is only too true that half the
Gobelins are destroyed, and that 67 of the "Frères de la Doctrine
Chrétienne" have been shot by their fellow-Christians of the Commune. A
friend of mine saw Madame Millière in a prisoners' gang, and we have
authentic intelligence to-day that her husband, one of the most
pestilent of the apostles of Fraternity and wholesale slaughter, has
been executed.
The streets are full of the National Guards of Order, carrying their
rifles to the different dépôts to be given up, for the disarmament of
the entire National Guard has been determined on, and it is to be hoped
that this most useless body in time of foreign invasion and most
dangerous one in moments of internal trouble will be extinguished and
abolished for ever throughout all the towns of France. Meantime the
Boulevards and streets from which the fighting has receded are slowly
waking into life, the tricolor waves from the windows in token of
loyalty and sympathy with the Government, and at least two cafés are
open on the Boulevards, but as yet only here and there the shutters of a
shop are lowered.
The roar of the batteries from Montmartre is still continuous, but it is
hardly possible that the Insurgents can continue the struggle for 24
hours longer.
Fighting was going on at Belleville about an hour ago, but still there
is every reason the believe that the insurrection is virtually over. A
great number of prisoners, escorted by cavalry, have just been marched
down the Boulevards. They were said to be 5,000, but this is probably an
exaggeration. They came from the Buttes Chaumont, where many of them
have been kept two days and a half without food. A more villainous
collection of faces I never beheld. There were many women, among them
some in men's clothes, some as _cantinières_ or _ambulancières_, and
very young boys and old men. Nearly 1,500 were Regular soldiers, or at
least wore their uniform. Their coats were turned inside out, as a mark
of disgrace. As they passed through the crowd lining each side of the
Boulevards they were met with cries of "_A mort, crapule,
fusillez-les!_" Four women in the Amazon uniform and the Regulars
excited special indignation. One prisoner, near the New Opera, refused
to march, and was twice stabbed with bayonets. He was then tied to a
horse's tail, and afterwards placed on the horse, but he threw himself
off, and again refused to march. He was put into a cart and carried off
to the nearest place of execution to be shot. Another prisoner, who
also refused to march, was dragged by the hands and hair of the head
along the road. The crowd called out to the soldiers to shoot him, and
declared that but for the presence of the soldiers they would themselves
execute summary justice on him. The troops, headed by the Marquis de
Galifet, were loudly cheered as they passed.
I went early this morning to Père-Lachaise. Shells were still falling so
thickly near the Boulevard du Temple that no one was allowed to pass. I
had to go a very roundabout way to get to the Place Bastille, as at
numerous barricades everybody who passed was compelled to assist in
pulling them down. The barricades were of astonishing strength. Behind
the barricade on the Boulevard Mazas lay three bodies of National
Guards--apparently shot in its defence. A little lower down on the
Boulevard Voltaire lay seven men dead, as if they had there made their
last desperate stand. There were some old gray-headed men among them. We
were told that their bodies were left there for recognition, and women
occasionally came up and claimed them. The Regulars had also suffered
severely there, but their dead had been immediately removed. Further on,
the stone barricades had been protected by a second line of large sacks
stuffed with rags and papers, and piled upon each other. At the corner
of Rue Roquette lay over 70 corpses of men, executed for being found
with arms in their hands. They lay piled over each other, and the
pavement and gutters streamed with blood. The crowd were not allowed to
approach them. We entered Père-Lachaise and found it full of troops,
chiefly of the Marine Brigade. There is no truth in the stories that the
cemetery was defended tomb by tomb. There had been no bayonet or even
fusillade fighting there, but the shells had shattered many of the
tombs, here and there laying bare the coffins below. The position was so
strong that the Marines could account for its abandonment only by the
fact that the Insurgents were utterly disorganized for want of leaders.
The shelling, however, had been sufficiently vigorous to compel the
troops to retire after they took it last night, and to return for
reinforcements. They retook the position early this morning. The
Insurgents had abandoned a battery of seven guns which commanded the
whole position. We could see from it that sharp fighting was still going
on at Belleville, probably the last stronghold. As we passed the prison
of La Roquette, we heard about ninety rifle-shots and then a
mitrailleuse, and were told by the troops that prisoners were being
executed. We had great difficulty in passing through the Faubourg St.
Antoine, and were stopped by at least five _cordons_ of sentries. They
told us that the Insurgents were _en fuite_, that the Quartier was
_suspect_, and that, therefore, nobody was allowed to pass. When we got
through, many people asked us to put their letters into the post for
them, as they were close prisoners. The streets were filled with arms
and equipments.
Only a few houses in Belleville still hold out. The Insurgents are
surrendering by thousands. The insurrection is considered over.
Most of those who founded the Comité du Salut Public have been taken.
The Insurgents are being shot by hundreds. In the Faubourg St. Antoine
great numbers of men and women were found carrying petroleum, and at
once shot.
The _Moniteur_ says that Félix Pyat and Paschal Grousset left Paris
yesterday in a balloon, which passed over Niort towards the sea.
MAY 29th.
By Saturday evening the various Corps of the Versailles troops, steadily
converging on the Insurgents from the North, South, and West, had forced
them into their last strongholds of Père-Lachaise, and at the Buttes
Chaumont, in Belleville; and M. THIERS on Saturday announced that the
final attack would be made on Sunday morning. But the troops waited no
longer to finish their terrible work. On Saturday Père-Lachaise was
taken by General VINOY; in the evening the Buttes Chaumont were carried
by General LADMIRAULT. The two corps united, and the remaining
Insurgents were forced into narrow space at the edge of the _enceinte_,
where they are hemmed in between the Versailles troops and the
Prussians, and must surrender or be killed. They have also been driven
out of all the Forts except Vincennes, and those who hold that Fort have
asked the Bavarian troops outside to permit their escape. At five
o'clock yesterday all fighting had ceased.
"The Revolution is crushed;" but at what a cost, and amid what horrors!
"Peace," says M. THIERS, "is about to be restored, but it will not
succeed in relieving all honest and patriotic hearts of the profound
sorrow with which they are afflicted." We know not, indeed, how or when
such relief is to come; for ruin has been wrought and crimes have been
perpetrated which will leave on Paris and on Frenchmen an ineffaceable
brand. After the first appalling news of the great conflagrations, a
faint hope had arisen that the ultimate result might prove less
disastrous than had been apprehended, and it is true that a few of the
noble buildings which were thought doomed have escaped. But the almost
universal wreck would of itself almost obliterate for the moment the
sense of relief, and the material ruin now constitutes the least horror
in the scene. It is sufficiently distressing to picture every Quarter of
the great Capital, which but the other day was the beauty of the world,
scarred by conflagrations, torn by shells, pitted with musketry, and
stained with blood. It is terrible to think that in a city "like Paris"
fire and sword, and instruments of destruction still more hellish, have
swept from West to East, and from South to North; that most of its noble
palaces are but gaunt and blackened walls, and its finest streets laid
in heaps of as utter ruin as the mounds of Nineveh. The mind is
overwhelmed by the mere physical spectacle of this whirlwind of blazing
destruction suddenly bursting over a noble city so near us, which we
knew so well, and the inhabitants of which were but yesterday our
neighbours and our friends. But even this is overpowered by the awful
human ruin which it expresses and reflects. On both sides alike we hear
of incredible acts of assassination and slaughter. The Insurgents have
fulfilled, so far as they were able, their threats against the lives of
their hostages as mercilessly as their other menaces. The Archbishop of
PARIS, the Curé of the Madeleine, President BONJEAN, with priests,
gendarmes, soldiers, and other victims to the number of 64, have been
shot, and 168 others were only saved by the arrival of the troops. This
massacre of distinguished and inoffensive men is one of those crimes
which never die, and which blacken for ever the memory of their authors.
But in the spirit of murder and hatred it displays the Communists seem
not very much worse than their antagonists. It sounds like trifling for
M. THIERS to be denouncing the Insurgents for having shot a captive
officer "without respect for the laws of war." The laws of war! They are
mild and Christian compared with the inhuman laws of revenge under which
the Versailles troops have been shooting, bayoneting, ripping up
prisoners, women and children, during the last six days. We have not a
word to say for the black ruffians who, it is clear, deliberately
planned the utter destruction of Paris, the burning of its inhabitants,
and the obliteration of its treasures; but if soldiers will convert
themselves into fiends in attacking fiends, is it any wonder if they
redouble the fiendishness of the struggle? Fury has inflamed fury, and
hate has embittered hate, until all the wild passions of the human heart
have been fused into one vast and indistinguishable conflagration.
So far as we can recollect there has been nothing like it in history.
The siege of Jerusalem may afford some parallel, but Roman soldiers
never so utterly lost their self-control as the Versailles troops appear
to have done. We are beggared for words to describe the scene, and
exclaim that it is hell upon earth. It is nothing less. There are all
the physical and all the moral accessories. Fire and brimstone, storm
and tempest, torture, insult, hatred, despair, all forms of malice,
murder, and destruction, have been raging in Paris during the last few
days. Women forgetting their sex and their gentleness to commit
assassination, to poison soldiers, to burn and to slay; little children
converted into demons of destruction, and dropping petroleum into the
areas of houses; soldiers in turn forgetting all distinctions of sex and
age, and shooting down prisoners like vermin, now by scores and now by
hundreds,--all combine to enact on civilized ground, and within the
sight and hearing of their fellow-men, scenes which find a parallel only
in the infernal regions imagined by prophets and poets. This is what
human nature is capable of; for Frenchmen are men, and we shudder for
our race. But, at all events, what hope is to be seen for France in
this seething abyss? This tragedy is the end of eighty years of
revolutions, of an eighty years' struggle after Liberty and Fraternity,
eighty years of attempts again and again renewed to rebuild French
Society on a new and harmonious basis. The end is a fiercer hatred,
deeper divisions, wilder passions, and more eternal distrust. Will these
six days of savage devastation tend to heal the existing breach between
the lower and the middle classes of France? Will the mutual slaughter of
soldiers and citizens tend towards that essential condition of a happy
State; mutual confidence between the Army and the People? Will the blood
of another butchered Archbishop sow the seeds of peace between the
Priests and their Socialist foes? That which we seem at present to see
in this outbreak of hell is the permanent creation of yawning abysses
between classes, institutions, memories, and men. Paris may, perhaps, be
rebuilt; but what is to wipe out the blood with which every street of
Paris is now stained, and when will women cease to hand down to their
children the envenomed hatreds of May, 1871? Where, above all, are the
signs of that combined generosity, firmness and foresight in statesmen
or soldiers which alone could lay the first stone of reconciliation? The
prospect is too black for France and for Europe for us to dare look
forward. We have no heart at present to balance the faults and crimes of
the two sides, or to assign the relative blame. We only see the worst
outburst ever yet displayed of human passions; we see it at the close of
fifteen centuries of Christian civilization; we see it in one of the
most gifted races of the world, and we know not where to look for hope
or consolation.
MAY 30th.
Paris is perfectly tranquil. Shops are opening. The streets are crowded
with people examining the amount of damage done. Prisoners in groups of
a hundred are being marched under escort down the Boulevards. Fighting
ceased about 3 yesterday afternoon. A few shots were fired from the
windows at Belleville, where frightful scenes are said to have been
enacted. The more desperate characters, felons and escaped _forçats_ of
the worst description, turned at the last moment on their own comrades
because they refused to continue the fight. Some women murdered with
knives two young men for the same reason. In consequence of the firing
from the windows, an immense number of executions occurred. The park of
the Buttes Chaumont was strewn with corpses. The soldiers were so
furious that the officers found it necessary to warn strangers of the
danger of incurring suspicion. A few of the inhabitants of Belleville
were declaring openly to passers by that the affair was not yet over,
and that terrible reprisals would be wreaked upon the soldiers. These
boasts have not yet been fulfilled, but general apprehensions are,
nevertheless, entertained that those of the insurgents who have escaped
justice will try to inaugurate a secret system of arson and
assassination. Constant discoveries of petroleum are still being made.
The danger is increased by the fact that women, who, on account of their
sex, are more likely lo escape notice, are really the most desperate.
Great precautions are taken at night. The streets are full of sentries
and all circulation is strictly forbidden. Any one who ventures out
without the password runs the risk of being locked up all night. There
are diversities of opinion relative to the Archbishop's fate even now.
Some people affirm that he has escaped; but the evidence is in favour of
his having been murdered at La Roquette.
Fears are entertained of an epidemic consequent upon the hurried burial
of so many dead under the pavement of the streets.
MAY 31st AND JUNE 1st.
The search for Insurgents from house to house is still going on
vigorously. It is still very hard either to leave or even to enter
Paris, Gourde, the Communist Minister of Finance, has been found. It is
said by Insurgents that Cluseret ought to be among the last batch of
prisoners taken at Fort Vincennes. This being their last place of refuge
it is expected that many other ringleaders will be discovered.