Paris in Ruins

CHAPTER 14 Music in the Tuileries

IN 1862, AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS SPANISH INFATUATION, Édouard had painted Music in the Tuileries, a crowd painting that doubled as a kind of manifesto. Although much smaller (and this was surely intentional), it was Manet’s answer to Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio, a twenty-foot-wide painting that, with his usual orotundity, Courbet had subtitled “A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.” The Painter’s Studio attempted to present a kind of synopsis of French society, conveying Courbet’s aims as a painter and paying tribute to his friends and supporters. Courbet had painted it in 1855 for the great Exposition Universelle. Alas, the jury for the Beaux-Arts portion of the exhibition, seen by almost a million people, had excluded the painting.

Seven years later Édouard had wanted to do something similar—but in his own style and with less bombast. Music in the Tuileries was his first major depiction of contemporary life in Napoleon III’s Paris. In a style that, for its time, was startlingly brisk and unpolished, it shows a well-to-do crowd, arrayed almost like royal courtiers, gathered under the chestnut trees in the Tuileries Garden, an extension of Napoleon III and Eugénie’s palace, where concerts were staged twice weekly. Édouard loved the setting. He used to go there with Baudelaire, sketching children and their nannies, before retiring together to the cafés on the boulevards. When he set out to paint Music in the Tuileries, Édouard had in mind a painting then thought to be by Velázquez: The Little Cavaliers, which imagines a meeting of seventeenth-century Spanish artists, including Velázquez and Murillo. It inspired Manet to transpose the conceit to his own milieu.

In the same way that Velázquez, in his great masterpiece Las Meninas, had put the viewer in the position of the scene’s central characters—Spain’s king and queen—Manet deliberately omitted the orchestra that the crowd had come to hear. So there are no musicians and no instruments and no way of knowing if the concert has finished or is about to begin. Instead, Music in the Tuileries is a group portrait of the gathered audience—which is to say, of Manet and his friends. Among the group identifiable in the foreground are Bazille and Baudelaire, both of whom Manet had first met at the salon of Commandant and Madame Lesjosne. (Courbet’s earlier manifesto painting had also included Baudelaire.) The Lesjosne salon had connected Manet to Paris’s burgeoning creative avant-garde, including Zola and Nadar. Madame Lesjosne is one of the two seated women in the foreground, Manet’s sly hint at the maids of honor in Velázquez’s masterpiece. The other is the wife of the composer Jacques Offenbach.

Manet also included Offenbach himself; his brother Eugène; Théophile Gautier and Baron Taylor, both passionate promoters of Spanish art; Fantin-Latour; the poet and sculptor Zacharie Astruc; the novelist Champfleury (a great champion of Courbet); and Aurélien Scholl, a republican dubbed the “journalist of the boulevards.” These friends and associates were almost all passionate republicans, opposed to Napoleon III. So for Manet to set his “manifesto painting” not in his studio, as Courbet had done, but in a festive, open-air setting right beside Napoleon III’s seat of power was a subtle statement of political opposition. If Manet was a modern court painter—a “Velázquez of the Boulevards,” as he would later be dubbed—he wanted it known that these people, not the entourage of sycophants around Napoleon III, constituted his court.

At the painting’s far left, behind Comte Albert de Balleroy, the animal painter with whom Manet had once shared a studio, stands Édouard himself, partially cropped by the frame and holding a cane. The pairing of Manet and de Balleroy evokes the pairing of Velázquez and Murillo in The Little Cavaliers. Manet’s cane, flicked up to rest on his invisible shoulder but cut off by the frame, may also be intended to suggest a painter’s brush—as if he were standing in the same pose as Velázquez in Las Meninas. Manet wanted to suggest that, like Velázquez in the Spanish court, he was both a participant in the scene and a proudly detached observer. This was also the characteristic attitude of the flâneur—the modern figure Baudelaire had so brilliantly evoked in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” For Baudelaire, the flâneur was “an ego in search of a non-ego.” He was “independent, intense and impartial,” a “prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.” Modern life, believed Baudelaire, was grand and heroic but also melancholy and fragmented. The task of the poet or artist, he wrote, was to “distill the eternal from the transitory.” And this was the task Manet had set about.

Baudelaire had also argued that beauty was made up of two parts: one eternal and unchanging; the other circumstantial and variable. The best way to paint this second aspect of beauty, he wrote, was quickly—with “a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist an equal speed of execution.” In Music in the Tuileries, Manet had done just this, brushing on colored paint in dabs and patches with virtually no modeling or chiaroscuro, conjuring a vision of staccato glimpses and stabbing glances in place of focused or synthesized seeing. He had used visiting card photographs as cues for his quickly sketched portraits, and he distributed the figures democratically across the painting’s horizontal expanse.

Nine years after Manet painted Music in the Tuileries, Baudelaire was dead; Napoleon III was no longer in power; Édouard had served briefly, desultorily, as a soldier; and Paris was controlled by radical republicans from whom he felt increasingly alienated. His vision of himself as a modern Velázquez, a flâneur who was “independent, intense and impartial,” as Baudelaire had put it, had crumbled in his hands. And now the Tuileries, where he had set his great, break-through painting, was about to stage not just a travesty of Baudelaire’s early vision of modern art but a full-scale tragedy.

EARLIER IN MAY, the Commune’s ruling committee had decided to open the Tuileries Palace to the public. Enough musicians remained in the city to form several ensembles. And so a certain Dr. Rousselle, the Commune’s director-general of ambulatory hospitals, now planned to use the palace’s Salle des Maréchaux—a lavish ballroom—and the adjacent Galerie de Diane for a series of musical concerts. Dr. Rousselle hoped to raise funds for the wounded, but he also wanted to provide a little communal uplift at a time when morale was flagging. For by this time, the Commune’s supporters were under tremendous strain. Conscious, at some level, of the coming catastrophe, they clung to whatever illusions weren’t already in tatters.

By choosing the Tuileries as the concert venue, Rousselle and the committee wanted the public to be appalled by the lavishness of Napoleon III’s and Eugénie’s living quarters. “People! The gold that streams down these walls, it is your sweat!” read a proclamation posted throughout the palace. “Now that the revolution has liberated you, you reenter into possession of your own welfare; here, you are at home.”

Tickets to the concerts sold briskly. The standard of playing was excellent (much better, everyone agreed, than anything they might be trying to stage in Versailles). Performances were accompanied by recitations from Hugo’s Les Châtiments—his scathing 1853 condemnation of Napoleon III as usurper, dictator, and traitor. Despite the egalitarian rhetoric, class distinctions remained in play. The seats closest to the orchestra in the Salle des Maréchaux were more expensive and thus taken by wealthier patrons, while the rest of the audience crowded into the Galerie de Diane, where the music was harder to hear. At one point, competing cries of “Vive la République!” and “Vive la Commune!” crisscrossed the two rooms, snuffing out the music. Nonetheless, the music stimulated a sense of solidarity and elevation. And it was a way to push back against the idea, heavily publicized around Versailles, that the Communards were barbarous brutes. The Communard Prosper Lissagaray observed his fellow citizens “making a collection for the widows and orphans of the Commune” at the entrance to the hall, before sitting down to enjoy the music of “Mozart, Meyerbeer, Rossini” driving “away the musical obscenities of the Empire.”

At the second Tuileries concert, on May 11, Rousselle arranged for three different orchestras to perform in three different halls. The third concert was planned for the following Sunday, May 18. Thiers’s forces were massing on the city’s edge, ready to swarm through the Commune’s increasingly shaky defenses. Guns were pounding away to the west and south. But Rousselle was undeterred.

VIOLENT CRIME AND VANDALISM were rare under the Commune, in part because Rigault’s police were so ruthless. But as the fear of treason and spying grew more hysterical, more newspapers were suppressed and even vaguely suspicious behavior prompted arrests. Pyat’s journal, Le Vengeur, however, had been allowed to continue. It now reported that 45,000 regular army troops were massed in the Bois de Boulogne and preparing to attack.

On May 10 the Committee of Public Safety decided that, in retaliation for the bombardment Thiers had ordered, his mansion on the Place Saint-Georges—his residence for over half a century and the home he had been given by his mother-in-law, Madame Dosne, on the occasion of his marriage to Elise—should be seized, its contents confiscated, and the building itself demolished. When the decree was proposed, Courbet worried aloud about the fate of Thiers’s art collection, so he was appointed to oversee its removal and distribution among museums, libraries, and public institutions.

But when the dismantling began the next day, it degenerated into a free-for-all. Opportunists made off with Thiers’s expensively acquired prints, mementos, and objets d’art. The house itself was then razed. Edwin Child, who watched the looting, called it “as striking an instance of futile spite” as any revolution had ever furnished. Informed of what had taken place, Thiers used the attack to earn sympathy from critics on the right who couldn’t understand why it was taking him so long to retake Paris. “I no longer have hearth or home,” he lamented, “and that house where I received you all for 40 years is destroyed to the foundations. My collections dispersed! Add a few slanders and you have all that one gains from serving the country.” What Thiers didn’t reveal was that he had been given prior warning of the ransacking and managed to arrange for supporters to move his most treasured belongings to safety. “M. Thiers has taken the assassination of his house nobly,” wrote Jules Ferry. “He has lamented his bronzes and his souvenirs, but, after all, it is not something that happens to everybody, and it is one form of glory.”

More destruction followed three days after the Versaillais troops took Vanves, on the southern edge of the city, when Pyat and Courbet got their heart’s desire. The Vendôme Column, after several postponements, was finally torn down. This symbolically charged action was planned as a ceremony, scheduled to take place at two p.m. The authorities were vigilant about security, so the square was cleared of all who had not purchased tickets, and the abutting alleys and side streets were jammed with onlookers. Dignitaries spilled onto balconies draped with flags. Communards wearing red belts and red scarves arrived in the square, which an enthusiastic committee had renamed Place Internationale. National Guardsmen readied cannons to be fired. A band played revolutionary songs as a wedge was cut out near the base of the column, and ropes were tied to the top, to be pulled on in the direction of the wedge.

But by five p.m., the obstinate column was still standing. Finally, at 5:35 p.m., a signal was given, and the band began playing “La Marseillaise.” Two teams of men began pulling on the ropes—a strange reprise and inversion of the launch of Gambetta’s balloon the previous October. Cries went up. A party of Americans, watching from the first floor of the adjacent Hôtel Mirabeau, began singing “Hail Columbia” to a rollicking piano accompaniment. There were loud cheers. The side streets swelled with emotion. But the column proved sturdier than anyone thought. It was another half hour before it finally came down. When it did, instead of a satisfying din, the crowd heard an anticlimactic creaking as the column bowed before history like a wistful clown exiting the ring.

The Paris Commune was beginning to crumble from within. Later that same night, about one a.m., a gang of three hundred armed Communards broke into the Grand Hôtel du Louvre. They claimed to be trying to capture traitors who, they said, were being protected by enemies of the Commune. Insisting that there must be a secret passage leading out of the city all the way to Versailles, they poured into the basement. But it was all a ploy. By dawn, they had emptied the vast hotel of all its supplies of food, alcohol, tobacco, tableware, and other valuables. Twelve hours later an arms depot on the Avenue Rapp, near the Champ de Mars, exploded with a mighty boom. It was heard all over Paris. Millions of cartridges were lost. “A pyramid of flame, of molten lead, human remains, burning timber and bullets showered down,” wrote Lissagaray. As if to parody the balloon flights that had provided so much hope during the siege, the explosion sent up a pall of black smoke that was “exactly in the shape of a mighty balloon.”

Thiers continued his relentless bombardment. The Commune, displaying near-comical levels of denial, continued to pass futile legislation and issue arbitrary edicts. On the seventeenth, it passed a law removing legal discrimination between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. The next day it abolished all titles, privileges, liveries, armorial bearings, and honorific distinctions. And on the nineteenth, it voted to end theater subsidies and to place all theaters under the control of the Commission of Education.

Confused by reports about the arms depot explosion—or perhaps simply by the escalating artillery fire—Cornélie reported in a letter to Berthe in Cherbourg that the Trocadéro had been blown up. “Everything has surely been pulverized,” she wrote. The news was false—the Trocadéro remained intact, as did the nearby Morisot home. But the thought that Berthe and Edma’s paintings might have been destroyed appalled Cornélie. Her reaction was a rare acknowledgment, fired by emotion, of the centrality of art to her daughters’ shared lives. “I should have liked to preserve all the memories of your youth and of your common hopes,” she wrote. “Now I am deprived of all those things that were realized, and that might someday have had value in eyes other than mine.

“You had better set to work!” she concluded.

Berthe didn’t need to be told.

Cornélie had also heard reports—in this case true—of the destruction of the Vendôme Column. “To think that people could be found who would do such a thing, and others who would stand by and see it being done,” she wrote. Her words could have been a caption to a print by Goya.

IT HAD BEEN A MONTH and a half since Rigault arrested Archbishop Darboy. The Commune’s chief of police was still trying to use his most eminent hostage to secure the release of Blanqui. Washburne, of the American legation, visited the clergyman and came away believing Darboy in “the most imminent danger.” He urged Thiers to reconsider his refusal to negotiate. But Thiers, who was about to give the order for his Versaillais army to retake Paris, would not relent. His recalcitrance provoked outrage in Paris, amplifying calls for Darboy to be shot. The revolutionary journal La Montagne declared—erroneously, as it turned out—that “not one voice would be heard to damn us on the day when we shoot Archbishop Darboy . . . and if they do not return Blanqui to us, [Darboy] will indeed die.”

Washburne made a second visit to Darboy and found him confined to a small, gloomy cell, “without appetite” and “very much reduced in strength.” The American was right to be concerned. Rigault’s anticlerical bloodlust was up. On the day of Washburne’s visit, he divided his collection of hostages into two categories: priests (including Darboy) and policemen. The latter were put on trial, then sent back to prison, ignorant as to whether they would live or die. The clerics’ fate was to be decided the following week.

The next day, as more than fifteen hundred musicians convened for the fourth concert at the Tuileries, Thiers’s Versaillais army prepared to invade Paris in earnest. A crowd of between 15,000 and 20,000 gathered at the Tuileries Palace, many of them workers and shopkeepers who had brought their families, all of them astonished, given the circumstances, to be in such splendid surroundings and listening to music. At the conclusion of the program, a military band began playing outside the palace. But their music was suddenly accompanied by the shriek and thunderclap of an incoming shell.

Very soon more shells began falling among the chestnut trees where Manet had set Music in the Tuileries. Incredibly, as if under some strange, waking spell, the crowd continued their celebrations, even as people were being injured and killed around them. “They were singing, two steps away from the dead, all of whom were French,” wrote Jules Claretie, unable to conceal his abhorrence. The concert ended at around four-thirty p.m. when a lieutenant colonel, announcing a fifth concert for the following Sunday, declared: “Citizens, Monsieur Thiers promised to enter Paris yesterday. But he is not here.”

BUT HIS TROOPS were getting close. At around three p.m., as eighty thousand troops awaited orders in the Bois de Boulogne, Jules Ducatel, a civil engineer on the side of the Versaillais, was strolling by the ramparts at Point du Jour, on the Seine south of the Bois de Boulogne. The Versaillais army’s cannons had been pounding the fortifications there for several days. As Ducatel passed Bastions 65 and 66, he noticed that no one was guarding them. He notified a Versaillais naval officer, who approached the bastions on high alert in case a trap had been set. But it hadn’t. Minutes later, while the officer telegraphed the generals, Ducatel climbed the ramparts and began waving a flag, signaling to the army that they could enter.

General Félix Douay was soon leading his troops into Paris—just as the fourth Tuileries concert was concluding. The troops secured two of the gates and swept into Passy. At a munitions depot on the Rue Beethoven, just down the slope from the Morisot residence, they surprised a large group of Communards, taking a hundred prisoners.

That night, as troops poured into the city and wheeled north toward Montmartre, Thiers, dining with family and friends in Versailles, received regular updates. In Paris, his Communard counterpart, Delescluze, had been informed that the city’s defenses had been breached. At first he refused to acknowledge it. He later issued a call to the barricades: “Enough of militarism! No more General Staffs with badges of rank and gold braid at every seam! Make way for the people, for the fighters with bare arms! The hour of revolutionary warfare has struck!”

Earlier in the day, Goncourt, hoping fervently for news of the Versaillais’s success, had “wandered around for a long time in search of information.” He found “nothing, nothing at all. The people who were still in the streets were like the people I saw yesterday. They were just as calm, just as dazed.” So he returned home and went to bed “in despair.” But he was awoken in the middle of the night by murmuring sounds. He went to the window but again saw nothing, his ears recognizing only the usual minor commotion as one company was relieved by another. Telling himself he had been imagining things, he returned to bed. But it wasn’t long before he heard the unmistakable sounds of bugles and drums. He rushed back to the window. “The call to arms was sounding all over Paris,” he wrote, “and soon, drowning the noise of the drums and the bugles and the shouting and the cries of ‘To Arms!’ came the great, tragic booming notes of the tocsin being rung in all the churches.” The church bells’ “sinister sound,” he wrote, filled him with joy because it “sounded the death-knell of the odious tyranny oppressing Paris.”

The initial gains of the Versaillais army were impressive. They quickly liberated Passy and took the Communard positions at the Trocadéro. They also captured the heavily sandbagged Arc de Triomphe before sweeping down the Champs-Élysées. But already in Passy and neighboring Auteuil, there were dark signs of what was to come. Both suburbs had been taken with virtually no resistance, but the Versaillais—stirred into a hysteria by weeks of anti-Communard propaganda—were in a ravening mood. A journalist for Le Gaulois later discovered thirty bodies in a ditch—all victims of summary executions. They had been lined up and gunned down by a mitrailleuse, a mounted volley gun capable of firing twenty-five rounds in quick succession.

Within twenty-four hours of the first breach of the ramparts, more than 130,000 Versaillais troops had entered Paris. Haussmann’s wide boulevards, designed to facilitate government responses to guerilla-style insurrections, facilitated their progress. But the Communard fighters were determined and resourceful. As church bells sounded, drums rolled, and trumpets blasted, they rushed to consolidate barricades built around overturned trolleys or carts. Sandbags, paving stones, and bricks plugged the gaps. On the wider boulevards, the barricades were expanded into small fortresses, replete with cannons poking through holes. It was at the sight of the previous afternoon’s concert that the Versaillais troops had met their first serious resistance. Fired upon from the terraces of the Tuileries Garden by Communard cannons and rifles, they sustained heavy losses and were forced to withdraw.

That day, a Monday, Goncourt could not bring himself to stay indoors: “I simply had to see and know.” Others, too, had left their apartments, gathering in carriage gateways, fearful, angry, and excited. Goncourt saw a National Guardsman with a shattered thigh being carried along. He overheard rumors that the Versaillais army had taken the Palais de l’Industrie—the venue of the annual Salon—and turned it into a prison. He saw Communard National Guardsmen returning from the city’s western quarters “in small bands, . . . looking tired and shamefaced.” He soon realized that anyone found walking the streets was at risk of being press-ganged into service on the barricades, so he took refuge in the apartment of the art critic Philippe Burty, near the Bibliothèque Nationale.

IT WAS SPRINGTIME IN PARIS. The lilacs were in flower. Only days earlier, National Guardsmen had been coming home at night with bunches of flowers on the ends of their rifles. But now reality itself seemed altered, as when the panoramic view from a train window is suddenly impeded by a roar of displaced air and the racket of carriages hurtling past in the opposite direction. The Commune’s leadership was crumbling. People who saw a way out took it. The passionate republican Henri Rochefort was among them. Prior to the war, Rochefort had used his journals, La Lanterne and then La Marseillaise, to undermine Napoleon III’s authority. During the siege, he had joined the Government of National Defense and then the Commune. But even he could see that the situation was hopeless. Attempting to flee, he was captured by Thiers’s troops and escorted to Versailles, a disgraced and disheveled trophy trailed by a jeering crowd. Cornélie, still in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was at lunch when (she wrote) “we heard a terrible hubbub, a rumbling of carriages, at full speed, people running, cavalry squadrons galloping, and cries in the midst of it all. We flung down our napkins and in no time we were in the street, and learned that it was Rochefort being escorted to Versailles.”

The feeling in the Morisot household at Saint-Germain-en-Laye was cautiously optimistic. Berthe’s brother Tiburce was with the Versaillais forces serving under Admiral Saisset, although he was not on a tight leash and in the evenings had been staying with his parents at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Not wanting “to miss any part of the affair,” he headed once more into Paris on the morning of the twenty-second, as the army swept up into Montmartre. His plan was to get to the Morisot house on the Rue Franklin and stay there, but if he couldn’t, he would return to Saint-Germain-en-Laye and share whatever news he had gathered. Relaying this to his sisters, Cornélie expressed the hope that they might all be back in Passy in a few days—although she noted in a letter to Edma that her husband, “who is always afraid to be happy, did not believe it.”

Her husband was rightly fearful. The house on the Rue Franklin was far from safe. The Morisots heard from their servant, Louis, who had remained in Passy and was sleeping in the cellar, how bad things had become. An immense explosion—likely another arms depot—had convinced Louis that the house was collapsing. The rumbling vibrations abated, and the building appeared to have held together, but all the windowpanes were broken, and stones and dust were showered over the whole neighborhood. Worse still, for Berthe, was that only three windowpanes remained intact in the studio, and all the pictures had been dislodged from the walls.

At Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Cornélie could hear the “odious Prussians” night and day. The troops were under orders from Bismarck to stay at the ready. Thiers had successfully pleaded with Bismarck to hold off, beseeching him “in the name of the cause of order to let us carry out this repression of banditry ourselves.” But he knew Bismarck would order an intervention if the Versaillais forces failed to retake Paris quickly. Cornélie was confident that Thiers would succeed—it was now surely just a matter of time—and that, with the treaty restored, the Germans would finally go home. But in the meantime, she explained, “they are deployed and concentrated nearer to Paris. They regale the terrace with their music every day. Their arrogance is extreme. I don’t like them any better since it has been decided they are no longer our enemies.”

Chaos and violence were engulfing Paris. But Cornélie was already speculating on what would become of Thiers and the whole political scene after it was over. “I tremble to think,” she wrote. “It is said that Thiers . . . will resign, and without him there will be nothing to restrain the reactionaries.” This prospect frightened her. For all that she detested the radicals of the Commune, Cornélie was essentially a moderate and, like her husband, had no desire to see a conservative crackdown. “We shall advance,” she gloomily predicted, “to a full-fledged monarchy, new struggles, open or hidden, with no respite.” Thiers himself was alive to these possibilities. He knew that a reinstated monarchy had little chance of succeeding and that in the long term a republic remained more viable than any other form of government. Drawing the ire of conservatives, he had reassured republicans, who came to him in deputations in the weeks leading up to the retaking of Paris, that he was committed to a republic. The mayor of Lyon, a veteran republican, was one who came away cautious but convinced. “My friends and I trust you,” he wrote to Thiers, “but we mistrust the Right. . . . Count on us . . . as you direct, we shall act.”

After meeting resistance in central Paris, MacMahon had pulled the bulk of his Versaillais forces back to Passy. They had set up headquarters on the Rue Franklin, just down from the Morisot home. MacMahon himself was established in the house of their neighbors, the Guillemets. The commander of the second Versaillais army, Vinoy (whose failed attempt to reclaim the National Guard’s cannons at Montmartre had triggered the Communard uprising), occupied the home of the Cosnards, while the intendant général—a logistics specialist in charge of supplies—was in the Morisots’ home. The Communards were made aware of their presence, and from behind the barricades at the Place de la Concorde and from a gunboat on the river, they began to lob shells along the line of the Seine. They “rained all about our house,” Cornélie reported to Berthe on the twenty-third. A shell had hit an apartment on the second floor of Cornélie’s father’s nearby home, “smashing everything to atoms.” Other neighbors’ houses were badly damaged.

Incoming shells were not the only concern: Passy was not yet cleared of Communards who were willing to fight. In the house of a friend, Charles, “only the big pieces of furniture are said to be left,” wrote Cornélie, “and the Communards scrawled disgusting arabesques on his embroidered coat.” Tiburce was going in and out of Paris, bringing messages to and from General Vinoy and his officers. Moving around was extremely perilous. At one point, Tiburce tried to cross the Pont de l’Alma, but “bullets were whistling,” reported Cornélie, “and the soldiers are in such a violent mood they don’t give you time to explain yourself. . . . It is impossible to venture anywhere.” She knew that her son’s proximity to the generals was putting his life in jeopardy. Standing on the terrace at the Cosnards’, Vinoy had been startled when a bullet fired from an unseen point struck the nearby summerhouse. But Cornélie was also proud of her son and of the Morisots’ ability to be of service to their friend Thiers. Vinoy, wrote Cornélie, “was very amiable to Tiburce, who was received cordially by everyone.” Later, returning from the city, Tiburce had run into Jules Ferry—who not so long ago (it seemed another life!) had courted his sisters, Berthe and Edma. He hitched a ride in his cab all the way to Versailles and from there returned to Passy without difficulty.

In the midst of the chaos, Tiburce invited Vinoy, MacMahon, and their senior staff to dinner at the Morisots’ Rue Franklin home. He tried to be as obliging as possible. “He has put the cellar at their disposal, as well as the linen, the china, etc.,” wrote Cornélie. But even for such high-ranking generals, it was difficult to secure provisions. They had to send to Sèvres for meat because the neighborhood butcher shops were closed. That night they slept on mattresses on the floor—almost in the open, since all the windowpanes lay shattered on the floor. Tiburce’s hospitality was reciprocated when the generals invited him to lunch on the twenty-second. “During the luncheon the shells did not stop whizzing, and fragments fell in the garden,” wrote Cornélie.

This was not the situation Thiers and his generals had hoped for. According to Tiburce, there was talk among the general staff of pulling back and lifting the siege. “They did not feel inclined to let themselves be killed for no reason,” wrote Cornélie. To add to the drama, halfway through writing the letter (dated May 23), she was interrupted. “I had got this far,” Cornélie informed Berthe, resuming, “when there was a new excitement—a fire alarm—everyone ran to the terrace. Paris was burning they said.”

Thiers had put out a call to all available firefighters in all the suburbs—including those in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The reason? Apparently the insurrectionists were “trying to avenge their defeat by setting fire to everything,” wrote Cornélie. “Rumors of all kinds are circulating—that the Louvre is burning, or the police headquarters, where all the hostages are being held. . . . In truth we know nothing.”

ONE PERSON WHO was witnessing much of it at close quarters was Goncourt. He was still holed up in Burty’s apartment with Burty, his wife Euphrosine, and their two daughters, Madeleine, ten, and Renée, who was not yet three. Shells had fallen on the buildings around them the previous evening, and the porch of the building on the other side of the street had been destroyed. The Burtys had made up a bed for Goncourt—“I threw myself on to it, fully dressed,” he wrote—and at daybreak on Tuesday, after an insomniac night, he “fell into a sleep haunted by nightmares and explosions.”

By now, May 23, most of Batignolles and Montmartre had fallen to Versaillais troops under the command of Ladmirault and Clinchant. The Communard resistance was disorganized. Louise Michel, who had played a prominent role in the events that triggered the Commune, led a squad of twenty-five women who fought bravely as they retreated from barricade to barricade along the Boulevard de Clichy. They were soon reduced to fifteen. By one p.m. the Versaillais troops had reached Butte Montmartre, where they reclaimed the cannons they had failed to seize in March. They pulled down the Commune’s red flag from the Solferino Tower on the Rue des Rosiers and in its place hoisted the tricolor. Forty-nine Communards were captured, among them seven women and children. And now, in the very place where the two generals, Lecomte and (the retired) Clément-Thomas, had been executed then dragged into the street and kicked and urinated upon, the forty-nine prisoners were lined up and shot.

Thiers had just announced to the Assembly at Versailles that thanks to the forces now overrunning Paris, “the cause of justice, order, humanity, civilization has triumphed.” His assertion was followed by the almost religious-sounding claim that “expiation” would soon be “complete” and that it would “take place in the name of the law, by the law, and within the law.” But in the streets of Paris, actual law was abandoned as the idea of expiation took precedence. Atrocities on both sides fueled the macabre catastrophe that now unfolded, but the extrajudicial execution of those forty-nine prisoners began an awful, accelerating sequence of retributive murders, most of them committed by the Army of Versailles.

OVER THE PREVIOUS nine months, Joseph Vinoy had suffered many humiliations. Not only was he a senior general in the army crushed by Prussia; he also bore responsibility for the bungled operation to recapture the National Guard cannons, which in turn had led to the murders of Lecomte and Clément-Thomas. Vinoy was determined not to let the current operation suffer a similar fate, so he set about his work with special ruthlessness. His attitude undoubtedly filtered down to his subordinates. There was a sense in which the vicious punishment that the Versaillais doled out was directed not just at the Communards but at Paris itself. The city had dared to set itself apart from the rest of the country. Its extravagance and venality under Napoleon III were manifestations of an arrogance that warranted more than just censure. It had to be taught a lesson.

In the arrondissements taken by the Versaillais, house-by-house searches led to thousands of arrests. Soldiers were sent down into the sewers and catacombs to hunt down any Communards who might be sheltering there. The Commune still held large parts of the city, but its grip was loosening by the hour. Its defenses on the Left Bank crumbled after National Guardsmen abandoned Fort de Bicêtre, to the southeast, and returned to the city to defend the quarters they lived in. The Communard commander at Fort de Bicêtre, Léon Meilliet, became convinced that members of a nearby Dominican order had been in cahoots with the Versaillais army, so as he withdrew, he took about forty of the clergymen and their staff prisoner. In the chaos, some were released or managed to escape, but the rest were taken to a temporary prison at the Place d’Italie. That afternoon they were ordered to join fourteen National Guardsmen, who had been imprisoned for disobedience, on the barricades. Despite protestations, the Dominicans and errant Guardsmen were herded together into the prison courtyard and then led through the gate. But as they emerged into the street, a combination of prison guards and Communard soldiers fired on them, felling thirteen, among them five clergy.

That same hilltop neighborhood, the Butte-aux-Cailles, fell to the Versaillais a short time later—although only after three attacks were repelled. It was the last Communard bastion on the Left Bank. Fifty-five captured Communards were forced by the Versaillais to stand on the bodies of their fallen comrades and then shot. Over the next few days, the Place d’Italie became “a veritable slaughterhouse,” according to Julien Poirier, a soldier in the Versaillais army. Several thousand executions may have taken place there alone.

If order among the Communards had broken down, so had discipline among the Versaillais. The massacres carried out in Montmartre were not limited to revenge killings in the Rue des Rosiers. One Communard, Camille Pelletan, described seeing twenty bodies lined up along the pavement in front of a house. Communards cut up with bayonets were left for dead at the Place de la Mairie. There was similar carnage outside the Moulin de la Galette. And at Château Rouge, more than fifty bodies were seen being carted into a school courtyard. “As many people defending the barricades,” wrote Pelletan, “the same number of bodies.” The two generals who retook Montmartre, Paul de Ladmirault and Justin Clinchant, were among the most scrupulous in the Versailles army. Clinchant, a republican, explicitly banned executions of captured Communards in the parts of Paris he controlled. And Ladmirault, who was from an old aristocratic family that had resisted the French Revolution, was exceptional in his eagerness to abide by standards of decency. He expressed sympathy for Parisians who had joined the National Guard in a desperate time to guarantee a daily wage of 1.5 francs, only to find themselves associated with an insurrection. Nonetheless, in the frantic heat and paranoia of street-by-street fighting, even responsible generals wielded limited powers over their officers’ and soldiers’ baser instincts. A kind of frenzy took hold.

Elsewhere in Paris, wounded soldiers were thrown into mass graves along with the dead. John Merriman recounts one story of laughing soldiers taking turns to throw stones “at a small arm that seemed to be moving in a pile of bodies until it stopped.” Prisoners being frog-marched to Versailles were suddenly stopped and killed for no reason, in some cases by sword. One prisoner on just such a march couldn’t keep up, so soldiers tethered his arms to a horse, which was then made to gallop. Reduced in short order to a bleeding wreck, his state was so wretched that onlookers begged the soldiers to shoot him. “One of the troopers halts his horse, comes up and fires his carbine into the moaning and kicking parcel of meat,” wrote the novelist Alphonse Daudet, who witnessed the scene. “He is not dead. . . . The other trooper jumps from his horse, fires again. This time, that’s it.” A woman wearing a red belt was simply shot on sight. “Like other female victims,” wrote Merriman, “she had managed to survive the Prussian siege without complaint only to be shot by a French firing squad.” In La Débâcle, the novel he wrote twenty years later, Zola described summary executions on the Rue de Richelieu and continuous firing squads in session at the Lobau barracks. “Men and children,” he wrote, were “condemned on the strength of a single piece of evidence, that their hands were black with gunpowder or merely that they happened to be wearing army boots; innocents falsely denounced, victims of private vengeance, screaming out explanations, unable to make themselves heard . . . so many wretched people at one time that there weren’t enough bullets for all of them and the injured had to be finished off with rifle butts.”

To eyewitnesses in their homes, urban warfare is impossible to interpret. In central Paris, Goncourt and Burty were worried that soldiers might try to force their way into the Burtys’ apartment and use it as a perch for sharpshooting, trampling books and papers in the process. They could hear the sound of gunshots getting closer. From the window, they looked down at a squad of frightened workers who, having received orders to build a barricade, were putting in a desultory effort, when suddenly the two writers heard bullets whizzing around them. The Communards vanished down the street. More soon appeared, however. At first, they headed south in formation along the Rue Vivienne. But the retreat soon degenerated, wrote Goncourt, into a “general stampede.” Burty and Goncourt saw four men carrying “a dead man” by his arms and legs, “like a bundle of dirty washing.” His head was covered in blood. They took him “from door to door without finding a single one open.” At another point, the writers saw a National Guardsman and a lieutenant standing over a dead body under a small tree. A fusillade of bullets suddenly dislodged all its new green leaves, which rained down upon them. A woman nearby was lying flat on her stomach holding a peaked cap in one hand.

By the end of the day, that street was in the hands of the Versailles troops. But the taking of each street in this manner came at a terrible price. Even in recaptured territory, any soldier could be gunned down at any moment from the window of any apartment. The atmosphere of arbitrary terror surely contributed to the army’s murderous bloodlust. Learning from the Communards’ tactics, the Versaillais placed sharp shooters high up in the buildings surrounding the unfinished Opéra Garnier. From there they fired down upon Communards entrenched behind barricades. The tactic worked, and by evening, the Opéra was retaken. More executions were committed at the Madeleine. “I fear there is a very revengeful disposition among the regular troops, which is much to be regretted,” wrote Alan Herbert, an English doctor living just behind the Madeleine.

That evening, venturing out onto the balcony to see the Versaillais troops, Goncourt and Burty were startled when a bullet struck the wall just above them. Their upstairs neighbor, they realized, had drawn fire by taking it into his head to light his pipe at his window. The two writers hurried back inside. Soon the shelling resumed, this time from Communards attacking the freshly won Versaillais positions. Goncourt and Burty’s family moved farther inside, setting up camp in a less exposed anteroom. The little iron bed of the toddler Renée was pulled into a safe corner. Madame Burty sank into an armchair, and ten-year-old Madeleine “lay down on a sofa near her father, her face lit up,” wrote Goncourt, “by the lamp and silhouetted against the white pillow, her thin little body lost in the folds and shadows of a shawl.” Going to the window to look out over the boulevard, Goncourt saw a strange red glow emanating from the direction of the Tuileries. He returned to his chair, listening “to the heart-rending cries of a wounded infantryman who had dragged himself up to our door and whom the concierge, out of a cowardly fear of compromising herself, refused to let in.” When he awoke the next morning, the body of the National Guardsman killed the previous day was still there under the small, bullet-strafed tree. Someone—Goncourt had no idea who—had covered it with snapped-off branches.

Meanwhile the city was ablaze. The morning air was weirdly illuminated as if by the ambient light of an eclipse. Venturing out from Burty’s apartment, Goncourt was amazed to run into Pélagie Denis, his long-term housekeeper. Together they decided to try to return to Goncourt’s home in Auteuil. They had heard that the Tuileries Palace was on fire and hoped to catch sight of it. But suddenly, at the Place de la Madeleine, a shell exploded “practically at our feet,” and they were forced to change direction. As evening came on, wrote Goncourt, “I watched the fire of Paris, a fire which, against the night sky, looked like one of those Neapolitan gouaches of an eruption of Vesuvius on a sheet of black paper.”

Under the command of Brunel, surviving Communards in central Paris were stubbornly holding the Versaillais at bay. Brunel had established three barricades: in the Rue Royale, at the Place de la Concorde, and on the Rue Saint-Florentin. The latter barricade was positioned at the corner of the Tuileries and defended the Rue de Rivoli, which led in a straight line to the Commune’s headquarters at the Hôtel de Ville. All three barricades were coming under heavy bombardment from the guns of the Versaillais general Félix Douay. Boom by shattering boom, they were slowly reduced to rubble, at the cost of dozens of lives. At the same time, Versaillais forces attacking from the direction of the Opéra threatened the Communards’ flanks. Versaillais sharpshooters placed high up in buildings along the Rue Royale, perpendicular to the Rue de Rivoli, were even firing at the barricades from behind. To negate the threat, Brunel withdrew toward the Hôtel de Ville, ordering his men to set fire to the buildings on the Rue Royale as they fell back. His orders were carried out. The flames spread quickly. And then, as he retreated, Brunel saw an astonishing sight. The Tuileries Palace simply exploded.

Jules Bergeret, who had been imprisoned by the Commune for an earlier military failure and had only recently been released, had decided on his own initiative to burn it down. There was no pressing military reason. It was simply that the palace represented all that Bergeret loathed about the previous regimes, both royal and imperial. Its recent conversion into a concert venue for the people had not removed the stench of privilege and corruption. So with the end of the Commune well in sight, Bergeret jammed dozens of barrels of gunpowder under the central dome over the Salle des Maréchaux. When he ignited it, the dome was blown away, illuminating the sky over Paris like a mushrooming, end-of-days phantasm. The entire building then began to give way to voracious, roaring flames.

By the next night, May 24, the Hôtel de Ville, to which Brunel had retreated, was abandoned and set alight. Other buildings engulfed by fire included the Légion d’Honneur, the Palais de Justice, the Conseil d’État, a large part of the Palais-Royal, the Prefecture of Police, and the Ministry of Finance. The latter was housed in the Louvre, so the museum and all the artworks Courbet had striven to protect were in imminent danger.

“The Louvre and the Tuileries are burning,” reported The New York Times, which put the appalling news from Paris on its front page every day during Bloody Week. “They are said to have been ignited by the federals with petroleum. The Luxembourg has been partially blown up. The Palais Royal is still burning. A terrible explosion has just occurred in the center of Paris, and it is considered probable the Hotel de Ville has been blown up by the insurgents.”

“The state of feeling now existing in Paris is beyond description,” wrote Washburne to U.S. secretary of state Hamilton Fish. And indeed there were no words. Not even pictures could convey the teeming, ungraspable truth. As reports of what was taking place reached beyond France, the world responded with stupefaction and moral recoil. That Paris—that proud, exquisite city with no obvious equal on earth—could be reduced to a predicament so debased beggared comprehension.