Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune

402 Pages·2014·3.64 MB·English

by  John Merriman

Advance Praise for Massacre
“Massacre is an absorbing and very moving read. John Merriman has found exactly the right unemotional
tone and mastery of detail—including many new stories heretofore unpublished—to produce the best
popular history of the Commune, in English or French, in a generation.”
—Steven Englund, author of Napoleon: A Political Life
“Dream of emancipation, nightmare of repression—the Paris Commune was a focal point of the political
imagination of nineteenth-century Europe. John Merriman’s new book brings vividly to life the hopes and
fears, the passions and hatreds, and the social and political struggles that inspired a famous revolutionary
regime and led to its violent destruction.”
—Jonathan Sperber, author of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life

Copyright © 2014 by John Merriman Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
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Text design by Cynthia Young Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Merriman, John M.
Massacre : the life and death of the Paris Commune / John Merriman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-46505682-8 (ebook) 1. Paris (France)—History—Commune, 1871. 2. Social conflict—France
—Paris—History—19th century. 3. Violence—France—Paris—History—19th century. 4. Massacres—
France—Paris—History—19th century. 5. Paris (France)—Politics and government—19th century. 6. Paris
(France)—Social conditions—19th century. 7. France—Politics and government—1870–1940. I. Title.
DC317.M365 2014
944.081’2—dc23
2014023988
For Don Lamm
Contents
Prologue
1. War and the Collapse of the Empire
2. The Birth of the Commune
3. Masters of Their Own Lives
4. The Commune Versus the Cross
5. The Battle Turns Against the Communards
6. Bloody Week Begins
7. Death Comes for the Archbishop
8. The Courts-Martial at Work
9. Massacre
10. Prisoners of Versailles
11. Remembering
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Prologue
ON MARCH 18, 1871, Parisians living on Montmartre awoke to the sounds of French
troops attempting to seize the cannons of the National Guard. The troops acted
under the orders of Adolphe Thiers, the conservative head of a provisional
government recently ensconced in Versailles, once the residence of the Bourbon
monarchs of the Ancien Régime. Thiers, fearing the mobilization of angry and
radicalized Parisians, wanted to disarm their city and its National Guard, whose
ranks comprised, for the most part, workers desirous of a strong republic and
angered by the capitulation of the provisional government in the disastrous war
against Prussia that had begun the previous July and brought about the fall of the
Second Empire.
Despite the efforts of the French army, the men and women of Montmartre,
Belleville, and Buttes-Chaumont courageously prevented the troops from taking
the cannons. Seeing about 4,000 soldiers arrive on Montmartre, then halt to
await the arrival of the horses necessary to haul the weapons down the hill,
women sounded the alarm. Working-class residents of the butte overlooking the
French capital prevented the heavily armed troops from hitching the cannons to
horses and, in keeping with the tradition of revolutionary defiance, began to
build barricades. Soldiers started to fraternize with the people of Montmartre.
The 6,000 troops sent to Belleville, La Villette, and Ménilmontant fared no
better. Parisians would keep their cannons.
Thwarted, Thiers withdrew his forces from Paris to Versailles, where he
planned to regroup and eventually retake the city. Thousands of wealthy
Parisians joined him there. In Paris, left-wing militants proclaimed a
“Commune” of progressive self-government that brought freedom to Parisians,
many of whom believed themselves “masters of their own lives” for the first
time. Working-class families from proletarian neighborhoods proudly strolled
into the beaux quartiers of the capital, imagining a more just society and
prepared to take steps to make it a reality. Their progressive Commune would
last a mere ten weeks before Thiers’s troops annihilated it during the last bloody
week of May.
The birth and destruction of the Paris Commune, one of the most tragic,
defining events of the nineteenth century, still resonate today. In the streets of
Paris, Thiers’s army gunned down thousands of ordinary men, women, and,
occasionally, children. Soldiers killed many for their defense of the Commune;
others died because their workers’ attire, remnants of a Parisian National Guard
uniform, or manner of speaking marked them for death. The massacres by
French troops of their countrymen anticipated the demons of the century to
follow. You could be gunned down simply because of who you were, because
you had the nerve to demand freedom. This may have been the ultimate
significance of Bloody Week, May 21 to 28, 1871, the biggest massacre in
nineteenth-century Europe.
PARIS WAS A SURGING CITY of great social contrasts and contradictions during
Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–1870). On one hand, the capital led a
rapidly growing French economy. Artisans in small workshops dominated
industry, producing the articles de Paris—high-quality gloves, and other luxury
goods that came to epitomize French manufacturing. Imperial financial
institutions helped boost industrial production in and around Paris, bringing
unparalleled prosperity to people of means, who attended lavish social events
and theatrical performances, traversing the city and the Bois-de-Boulogne in
carriages while ordinary people walked to work. Powerful trains, their engines
spewing steam, carried wealthy passengers from the burgeoning capital to
Deauville and other increasingly elegant towns on the Norman coast.
The economic boom and the incredible wealth it brought to Paris diverted
attention from widespread poverty and divisions in the city. Napoleon III and
Baron Georges Haussmann plowed spacious boulevards through the tangle of
medieval Paris. Fancy restaurants and cafés welcomed those who could afford to
frequent them. In the dilapidated and overcrowded districts of eastern and
northern Paris, working people living in miserable tiny apartments or rooming
houses struggled to get by. For them, the hard times never seemed to end.
By the late 1860s, Napoleon III faced mounting political opposition, so
much so that many Parisians anticipated a disastrous end to his reign. France
already had a lengthy history of class strife. Three revolutions had chased
monarchs from the French throne over the previous sixty years. So far, none had
brought to France the stability found across the English Channel in Great
Britain.
Napoleon III, however, was confident that he, unlike his immediate
predecessors, would hold onto power. Born in 1808, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
the son of Napoleon’s brother, had grown up in a Swiss chateau amid artifacts of
his uncle’s rule. Certain of his destiny to build on his famous family’s dynastic
heritage, which he identified with the fate of France, he added to his ambition a
shrewd political opportunism combined with notoriously bad judgment. The July
Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe of the Orléans family (a junior wing of the
Bourbons, the French royal family) maintained its policy of forcing the family of
Napoleon Bonaparte to remain in exile. Louis Napoleon had attempted to invade
France with a handful of followers in 1836, when he marched into a Strasbourg
garrison and was arrested, and then again four years later, when he landed on the
coast near Boulogne-sur-Mer, with the same embarrassing result. Imprisoned in
1840 in northern France, he escaped in 1846 dressed as a worker. These fiascos
earned him a reputation as something of a buffoon who surrounded himself with
sleazy, inept cronies. Short and increasingly corpulent, he resembled his uncle—
to whom his enemies compared him, calling him “the [Napoleonic] hat without
the head” and poking fun at his “fish eyes.”
Yet, for all his early failures, Louis Napoleon was surprisingly optimistic
and believed that economic progress under his rule could benefit all Parisians,
wealthy and poor alike. With his usual modesty, he wrote from prison, “I believe
that there are certain men who are born to serve as a means for the march of the
human race. . . . I consider myself to be one of these.”1
The February Revolution in 1848, one of the many revolutions that swept
Europe that year, brought an end to the Orléans monarchy, and Louis Napoleon