CHAPTER 15

“Paris Is on Fire”

THE VERSAILLAIS ARMY PRESSED ON, MEETING WITH MORE resistance than its soldiers anticipated, which only increased their ferocity. Thiers’s retaking of Paris had been sold as a resolute action that would prevent the Commune from establishing a second Reign of Terror, but it had taken on the character of a holy war. “I shed torrents of [Parisian] blood,” boasted Thiers in a speech that Thursday, as victory appeared at hand. “Over Paris hang pillars of dense smoke, so many that they cannot be counted,” reported The New York Times. “Now and then a sudden sharp crack, followed by a dull thud, is heard; a convolvulus-shaped volume of smoke rises, as from Vesuvius in eruption, and Paris rocks to its center.”

As news of the atrocities committed by the Versaillais filtered through, a group of appalled and frantic Communards told Rigault’s new prefect of police, the twenty-five-year-old Théophile Ferré, that it was past time to shoot their hostage, Archbishop Darboy. The Commune’s ferociously anticlerical leaders had converted many of the city’s churches into club halls. Rigault, in particular, took every possible opportunity to show his contempt for the clergy. And yet his hostage, the archbishop, was no reactionary royalist. He had a proud record of reform, had openly opposed the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, and had once been refused a cardinal’s hat by Pope Pius IX for his liberalism. Courageously, he had chosen to stay in Paris during both the siege and the Commune. Some even believed Darboy’s liberal sympathies might have increased Thiers’s willingness to sacrifice him. (Marx later went so far as to claim that Thiers was “the real murderer of Archbishop Darboy.”) More likely Thiers believed, as he said at the time, that negotiating with the Commune was a mistake and that exchanging Darboy for Blanqui would provide the Communards not only with a leader but with an incentive to take more hostages.

In any case, Darboy’s time was up. After so many weeks in captivity, he was gravely ill. Ahead of the Versaillais army’s advance, he had been moved to the prison of La Roquette. A court-martial was now hastily improvised. A number of prisoners, including Darboy, were put on a list to be executed, and after much bureaucratic back-and-forth—a reprieve for one, bad luck for another—six names were settled upon. Rebukes (“You’ve done nothing for the Commune. You are going to die!”) and insults (“Papists,” “traitors”) were flung at the prisoners as they were marched out of their cells and led down long, musty corridors. Darboy was so ill he could barely walk. What ensued could easily have been brief and mercifully decisive. But it was not to be. Like the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico four years earlier, it turned into a protracted horror show.

The firing squad was made up of young volunteers, most of them doubtless eager to avenge fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends who had been killed or wounded by the Versaillais. Some were still teenagers. Naïve and vulnerable, they were now being ordered to kill six defenseless men of the cloth. In front of the condemned men, they discussed with their captain, Verig, the best place to do it—the exercise yard or the alley that led to the guillotine? They settled on the alley. The prisoners sang prayers in a low voice as they were led to the spot. At one point, Darboy raised his arm skyward, calling out, “My God! My God!” then knelt down with the others to say a prayer. He stood again to bless his companions. Amid shouts from onlookers to hurry up and get on with it, the prisoners were finally lined up against a wall.

Raising the sword he had been lent for the purpose by Ferré, Verig gave the command. There immediately followed two ear-splitting volleys in quick succession. When the smoke cleared, dismayingly, Darboy remained alive. Felled by the first bullets, he got back to his feet once, then a second time, then—incredibly—a third time.

“This old bastard Darboy did not want to die!” one of the firing squad later said. “Three times he got up, and I began to be afraid of him!” The seconds ticked by. Darboy’s heart pumped away in his bloodied chest, which expanded and fell back with each breath. Verig lurched forward and, according to his own account, used his pistol to deliver the coup de grâce. To make sure of it, the spooked men in the firing squad fell on his body with their bayonets, repeatedly piercing his chest. The dead men’s bodies were left lying in pools of their own blood for six hours. Finally, at two a.m., they were carted to Père Lachaise Cemetery—which was about to become the final stage of a long night of ghastly theater—and thrown into an open ditch.

The demise of Darboy, the archbishop of Paris, was well documented, and the consequences of his murder were far-reaching. But similar scenes were playing out all across Paris. As the city burned, sending vast drafts of smoke into the sky, the danse macabre continued. By Thursday, the Versaillais were advancing toward the city’s eastern arrondissements. Communards who hadn’t been captured or killed had retreated to Belleville and Ménilmontant. Rigault wasn’t among them. He was discovered that day in an apartment on the Left Bank, using a pseudonym and in the company of an actress. He was shot in the head, his body left on the street, to be spat on and kicked at by passersby. Victor Hugo, from his forlorn perch in Belgium, later condemned the killing of Rigault and his fellow Communard leaders; they should have been tried, he said.

But it was too late for that. The Versaillais side of the scales sank lower and lower. Bullets kept ripping through skulls and tearing through chests. Ferré, who had ordered Darboy’s execution, would himself be shot by a government firing squad in the days after the Commune was finally extinguished.

“PARIS IS ON FIRE,” wrote Cornélie in that day’s letter to Berthe. “This is beyond any description!” And so it was. The previous day she had watched from the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where strong winds carried charred papers, like a “swarm of black butterflies,” as Zola later wrote. Some of these papers were still legible. Cornélie could hear continual explosions and detonations. “We were spared nothing,” she wrote. Rumors had reached her that the insurrection had been crushed, “but,” she added ominously, “the shooting has not yet stopped. Hence this is not true.”

She was right. Some Communards were still holding out. But the shooting Cornélie heard was more likely the sound of summary executions. “New fires are bursting out in Paris,” announced The New York Times. “The insurgents put boxes of petroleum everywhere. The Versaillists, since Tuesday, are killing all prisoners. I saw numbers of the Communist sympathizers killed, and among them was a young man, handsomely dressed, with hands tied and brains blown out.”

By ten p.m., the fires seemed to have died down. But the next morning a dispatch arrived informing Cornélie of all the buildings that had been gutted. “The Tuileries is reduced to ashes,” she told Berthe, “the Louvre survives, the part of the Finance Ministry building fronting onto the Rue de Rivoli is on fire, the Cour des Comptes is burned down. . . . Paris is strewn with dead.”

Just writing those sentences must have had a stunning effect. Reading them was quite as shocking. The Louvre—for any French artist—was a kind of spiritual home. For Berthe, as a woman, it was the only place she could go to learn and mingle with her fellow artists on level terms. It was the place she used to visit with Edma and Rosalie Riesener to paint copies of Rubens; the place where she had been introduced to Manet. That it had only just survived . . . ?! It was hard to believe. The need to assign blame—a need that would soon consume the entire French nation—had already taken root in Berthe’s mother’s heart. Cornélie could not set aside the fact that Berthe’s new painter friends, Manet and Degas, had expressed sympathies for the kinds of people who, in her mind, had caused all this. They were on the side of people who had turned on their country and held their friend Thiers in contempt. And now just look where it had all ended! “Should Degas have got a bit scorched, he would have well deserved it,” she wrote. How Berthe received her mother’s commentary is not known. At this point, well practiced in discretion, she chose to reveal nothing of her opinions.

On Friday, after months of dry weather, there was a storm. The rain helped subdue the fires that had engulfed central Paris and was a decisive factor in saving the Louvre. Now that most of the city had been retaken, the Versaillais killing machine became at once more organized and more brutal. The army’s soldiers were complemented by ordinary civilians acting as de facto military police. Sporting tricolor armbands, they responded to denunciations and followed up on rumors, making hundreds of arrests, often on the slimmest of pretexts. It is not clear how much Thiers and his top generals knew about the scale of the killings or how much they cared to curtail them. But plenty of evidence suggests they turned a blind eye. The killing was very nearly arbitrary. Gray-haired men were assumed to be veterans of 1848 and thus Communards. Men wearing watches were marked out as Communard leaders. Shirts were yanked open to reveal bare shoulders that might bear marks left by recoiling rifles. All were presumed guilty. Anyone known to have previously served in the regular army was assumed to have deserted and joined the Commune. And anyone with a foreign accent was similarly stained: they surely had ties to the International. Arrests led directly to executions.

ON THURSDAY EVENING, Delescluze had sat down to write a final letter to his sister. He was the radical journalist whom Gambetta had defended and who, since May 11, when he was made the civilian delegate of the war committee, had been the Commune’s de facto military leader. “I no longer feel I possess the courage to submit to another defeat, after so many others,” he wrote. He stood up, went outside, and made his way to one of the barricades. Walking with the slow, almost floating gait of one who fully expects to die, he deliberately wandered into an exposed position and was promptly shot. Four men rushed to retrieve his body. Three of them were also shot.

The Commune was now essentially leaderless. After almost a week of fighting inside Paris, Vinoy—perhaps following instructions from Thiers—appears to have issued orders to slow the executions. Prisoners, he told one underling, should no longer be shot “without careful examination” of each case. In reality, however, arbitrary executions continued for many more days. They were carried out openly, not only by the barricades that fell to the Versaillais but in places like the Jardins du Luxembourg, where thousands of men and women were lined up against a wall and shot over the course of the week. The bodies piled up. They were lifted into carts, rolled into trenches. The waters of the Seine—whose undulant, light-reflecting surfaces did so much to inspire the Impressionists—were streaked with blood. In retaliation, Communards removed fifty more prisoners from La Roquette and took them to the city’s northeastern walls. There they were gunned down—not by a firing squad but by what amounted to a rabble taking potshots. Back at the prison, the remaining hostages, recognizing what fate had in store for them, took matters into their own hands. Improvising their own barricade within the prison, they managed to hold their captors at bay for many hours, despite an attempt to smoke them out with burning mattresses. They were eventually rescued by Versaillais forces sweeping eastward.

The fighting in Belleville and Ménilmontant, the last redoubts of the Commune, was especially savage. Entire families joined the fray, aware that they were engaged with an adversary that would show them no mercy. Thiers’s forces lobbed round after round of artillery fire into Belleville, where every resident was assumed to be an enemy. As the noose tightened, the remaining Communards—about two hundred National Guardsmen with two batteries of guns—found themselves in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, amid the tombs and ornate headstones of France’s wealthiest families and its most celebrated poets, novelists, architects, playwrights, composers, and painters. Blasting open the gates to the cemetery, the Versaillais poured in, hoping to overwhelm the remaining, exhausted Communards with sheer numbers. The cemetery was immediately transformed from a decorous resting place for the honored dead into a chaotic killing field. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand. The last resisting Communard was killed near Balzac’s tomb.

But still the bloodletting was not over. When the dumped bodies of Archbishop Darboy and his fellow clergymen were discovered in an open hole, adrenaline and fear transmuted indignation into pure wrath. The cold-blooded murder of a spiritual leader—the Catholic archbishop of Paris, no less!—and the utterly disdainful treatment of his body were proofs of the enemy’s barbarity. Ruthlessness was the only conceivable response. Communards captured alive were lined up by a deep ditch in front of a stone wall and furiously gunned down. Clemenceau said he heard the frenzied clatter of machine guns pumping bullets into flesh for half an hour without so much as a pause. The following day hundreds more captives were brought to the same spot, shot, and shoved into the same mass grave. Back at La Roquette, too, the tables had turned. Captured Communards were thrown into cells, and over the next two days as many as nineteen hundred were shot. Four hundred more were shot at Mazas Prison. Those who had been marched all the way back to Versailles were stuffed into small cells with no light, food, water, or air. Many died before anyone saw to them.

When the bookbinder Eugène Varlin, who had led Communard forces on the Left Bank before withdrawing to Belleville, was captured, he was taken up the hill to Montmartre, beaten and bloodied by the rifle butts of Versaillais along the way. One eye was dangling out of its socket by the time he reached the Rue des Rosiers, where the generals Clément-Thomas and Lecomte had been murdered. Unable to stand, he was placed in a chair in the garden and shot, a martyr to a lost cause.

CORNÉLIE RETURNED to Passy with her husband Tiburce one week later, on a Sunday. The windows of their house on the Rue Franklin were all broken, the exterior was scarred, and there were signs throughout that it had been occupied by soldiers. Much work had to be done. But to their great relief, the building was basically intact. The next day they took a barge down the Seine to get a sense of the city. What they saw was beyond their worst imagining. Many of the buildings on the Rue Royale had already been demolished. Almost the entire Rue de Rivoli was a scorched ruin. The Hôtel de Ville was past saving, “ripped open from one end to the other!” as Cornélie noted. “It was smoking in several places, and the firemen were still pouring water on it. It is a complete ruin.”

The battle to regain control of Paris had taken a week. No one produced a reliable tally, but between 20,000 and 30,000 insurrectionists and their supporters are estimated to have been killed—a number that surely included many noncombatants and disturbingly high numbers of women and children. Théodore Duret, the wealthy art critic and collector to whom Manet had sent his paintings at the start of the siege, only narrowly escaped execution. He had been out trying to inspect the aftermath of the fighting with his friend Henri Cernuschi, a banker, collector, and veteran of 1848. Versaillais troops, taking them for Communards, seized them and immediately put them before a firing squad. They were saved from death only at the last moment.

Degas’s father, Auguste, witnessed the carnage after listening to what he described as “six days and six nights of incessant machine-gun volleys, shelling, shooting.” He had seen piles of corpses bundled onto the large carpets customarily used to move household furniture and taken to the closest places for burial. Before they were collected, he wrote, “one had to climb over them in order to walk down the street.” He couldn’t erase the memory.

Thiers was unapologetic, saying, “May this dreadful sight serve as a lesson.” Berthe’s father took a similar tone. The debris, he muttered to Cornélie, should somehow be preserved “as a perpetual reminder of the horrors of popular revolution.” Cornélie was more inclined to let her incredulity linger: “It’s unbelievable, a nation thus destroying itself!” She described the wreckage of the Cour des Comptes (where her husband had worked as master auditor), the Hôtel de la Légion d’Honneur, the Orsay barracks, and the Tuileries. “One rubs one’s eyes, wondering whether one is really awake.”

Thiers maintained afterward that he had not condoned the drumhead courts-martial and that he had given orders urging restraint. But there is evidence that he gave instructions to kill anyone carrying arms. What’s more, he clearly should have acted sooner to curtail the catastrophe. Whatever his culpability, the scale of the slaughter became an international embarrassment.

The retaking of Paris was never going to be tidy, but by killing captured Communards on sight, the Versaillais had created a “nothing left to lose” mentality, turning a ragtag band of febrile ideologues and stubborn idealists into a group of suicidal desperadoes, deranged by fear, bent on maximum destruction. Fear, adrenaline, the panic induced by guerrilla warfare, and a powerful urge, rumbling beneath the surface, to avenge the humiliation of defeat by Prussia had all fed into a wave of irrational emotion overwhelming any impulse toward restraint. Many buildings could not be salvaged. Beyond those mentioned by Cornélie, there was damage to the Conseil d’État, the Gobelins, the Library of the Louvre, the Finance Ministry, the Prefecture of Police, the Theatre Lyrique, and parts of the Palais de Justice and the Palais-Royal. All this was in addition to the destruction wrought during the fighting with the Prussians, when bridges were blown up and the château at Saint-Cloud had been razed. Parisians now had to confront all this as they waited for the smoke to clear and the stench of decomposing bodies to abate. “A silence of death reigned over these ruins,” wrote Gautier. “An incredible sadness invaded our souls.”

Manet and Degas both came back to the city. Cornélie learned of their presence through her son, who had run into them on the street. She had them both down as Communards. She was surprised, she wrote, that they dared reveal themselves “at this moment, when they are all being shot.” The two artists were “condemning the drastic measures used to repress” the Communards, Tiburce told his mother. “I think they are insane,” Cornélie wrote to Berthe, “don’t you?” Berthe offered no reply. Cornélie thought the two painters had not yet visited the Morisot house in Passy because they were ashamed to show their faces. But it was also true, as she admitted to Berthe, “that you are not here.”

FRANCE ENTERED INTO a period of deep reckoning that would last decades. The scale of the disasters that had befallen first its army, then its political system and many of the institutions of its capital city, was so great that deep explanations were needed. Blame had to be apportioned. The apportioning was carried out not only at the political level but in private homes and community meeting places—at every level of society. Flaubert, who came back into the city to work in the National Library a few days after Bloody Week, told George Sand that he could smell the corpses. But breathing in such befouled air, he continued, “disgusted me less than the miasmas of egotism exhaled from every mouth. The sight of the ruins is as nothing compared with the immense Parisian stupidity.”

Many, like Cornélie, had no doubt about who was responsible. For Berthe, however, and for Édouard, nothing was clear-cut. Each had a foot in both camps. Both came from wealthy families whose interests conflicted with the radical left, yet they were republicans, sympathetic to the radicals who had fought the authoritarianism of Napoleon III, regretted the surrender to Prussia, and simply wanted something better. But the debacle that had just unfolded could be neither undone nor ignored. It was a new lens through which, from now on, everything had to be seen. It allowed for no illusions.

Likely prompted by his encounter with Tiburce, Édouard sat down to write to Berthe, who was still with Edma in Cherbourg. It was June 10. This was the first communication between them for many weeks—certainly since the mayhem. Édouard told her he had tried to see her at Saint-Germain-en-Laye before she went to the coast, but she had been out that day. He admitted, too, that he had planned to visit her parents but hadn’t yet managed to. Was it because he knew they would be at odds? Or was he simply overwhelmed as he tried to get his life back on track? “All of us are just about ruined,” he wrote. “We shall have to put our shoulders to the wheel.”

Édouard was not one to wallow. He finished, characteristically, on a positive note. He wanted Berthe to know that he missed her, and he implored her to return to Paris, to life: “I hope, Mademoiselle, that you will not stay a long time in Cherbourg. Everybody is returning to Paris; besides, it’s impossible to live elsewhere.”