The Milliets. X. The Commune and the Second Siege of Paris

Paul Milliet

1871

I — 1871. THE COMMUNE

The rurals. — First demonstrations. — The cannons of the National Guard. — The Central Committee. — March 18, the proclamation of the Commune. — The rights of Paris. — The sortie of April 3. — Death of Flourens. — First successes of Dombrowski. — Reforms: Public Assistance, Finances, Labor, the Federation of Artists, Education. — The delegates to War.

1

The Assembly of Bordeaux was elected under the eye of the Prussians, while the province, ill-informed and too credulous, lent credence to the calumnies of the monarchists. These represented the Parisians as braggarts and traitors who had wished to deliver up the city on October 31.

In Paris, on the contrary, the province was believed to be animated by the ardent patriotism that Gambetta had sought to inspire in it; it was supposed ready for all sacrifices to continue the struggle.

On February 8, 1871, having to nominate 43 deputies, we had placed at the head of our list: Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, Gambetta, Dorian, Delescluze, Clemenceau, Littré, Raspail, Edgar Quinet… But, among the members of the Government of National Defense, very few were re-elected by the Parisians, who had seen them at work.

The aberration of the rurals seems today inconceivable; they named Trochu, d’Aurelle and their like. Evidently they did not know them.

Three hundred and fifty Republican deputies, resolved to continue the war, were sent to the Assembly, against four hundred reactionaries, who had promised to put an end to it. And yet, even among the electors most starved for peace, very few had had the intention of calling to power an emperor or a king.

Bonapartists and royalists, coalesced, were going to take advantage of this misunderstanding to try to overthrow the Republic.

They were dupes of words, those moderate Republicans who believed they were defending universal suffrage by allying themselves with the partisans of hereditary power. As if a generation had ever the right to bind future generations by its commitments.

By its eagerness to accept all the conditions of the conqueror, the Bordeaux Assembly manifested a lack of dignity which was, alas! only the echo of the sentiments of the majority of Frenchmen. It seems that the rurals had lost the notion of honor. Whom shall we make believe that a country like France could have been subjugated, if the entire nation had risen up in a unanimous burst of patriotic indignation? Emasculated by a long servitude, and having no other ideal than to pile up crowns, cowards wanted peace at any price, the shameful peace. These are hard truths that must be told.

Hatred against Paris immediately translated into insolent provocations. For governor they sent us Vinoy, accomplice in the December coup d’état, signatory of the capitulation. And whom were they going to impose on us as commander-in-chief of the National Guard? — D’Aurelle de Paladine, the bigoted and pusillanimous Bonapartist whom Gambetta had too tardily dismissed!

In Paris, indignation was extreme and legitimate: “The marbles no longer obey the brain,” it was said. “It is a head that thinks on a corpse.” (1)

Centralization, so favorable to despotism, had killed life in the province. No great city was free to manage its own affairs. To this evil, the Parisians proposed a remedy: replace a government centralized to excess by the free federations of autonomous communes, in imitation of the Swiss cantons.

The capital made no claim to impose its municipal organization on other cities; it wanted only to give the example of progress immediately achievable.

“Paris, which is accused of governing France, has always been the serf of France. Paris makes the revolutions, but the province makes the governments. The revolutions last three days or three months; the governments last twenty years. — Paris makes the July days of 1830; the province surrenders itself to the Orléans and maintains Louis-Philippe for eighteen years. — Paris makes the 24th of February and the June days of 1848; the province sends it Falloux and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. — For twenty years, Paris votes against the Empire, and for twenty years the province consecrates the Empire by the nomination of official candidates and two plebiscites whose crushing majorities are known. — Paris makes the 4th of September and proclaims a second time the Republic; the province nominates the Bordeaux Assembly which affirms its intention to re-establish the monarchy. — Paris endures famine and gives its blood to save the honor of France and the integrity of the national territory; the province votes peace, five billions of indemnity to the Prussians, the cession of Alsace and Lorraine.” (1)

If the rurals want a king, let them take one; we do not want one.

Thus, after having fought the enemies of France, we were going to have to fight the enemies of the Republic.

When he had to give his opinion on the acts of the Commune, Louis Blanc, grown old, who had understood nothing of this movement and had separated himself from it, yet rendered it a tardy justice:

“One must not confound the revolutions to which ambition, anger, cupidity, the envious passions of one or several men give birth, with the revolutions which are evolutions, and which arise from the historical development of social life, thwarted by blind or tyrannical powers; the first deserve all reprobation, but it is not so with the second. As to these, it is true that they bring, alas!

(1) Arthur Arnould, History of the Commune.

(1) Arthur Arnould, I, page 116.

with them too often a mixture of good and evil, but their effects are explained by their causes; the intensity of the evils they produce is measured by the gravity of the abuses that made them inevitable, and when, at the price of passing sufferings, a revolution brings into the world a liberating truth, it is as vain to complain of it, as it would be to curse that law of nature which associates the pains of childbearing with a man’s entry into life.” (1)

Louis Blanc is right: it is thanks to the Commune that certain fruitful reforms have come to maturity. This revolution was at once political and social.

2

Jules Favre had solemnly promised that France would cede “not an inch of its territory, not a stone of its fortresses”; — and our dear Alsace was delivered to the enemy, along with Metz and part of Lorraine.

Ducrot had sworn to re-enter Paris only “dead or victorious.” — A fine oath, forgotten the next day.

Trochu, energetic in words, had said: “The Governor of Paris will not capitulate.” — Then, jesuitically, he had charged Vinoy with signing in his place a surrender that his guilty inertia had prepared.

Everywhere incompetence, everywhere falsehood.

How could the people, so often deceived, have trusted the wily diplomat who resigned himself with such bad grace to maintaining that shady regime he called “a Republic without Republicans”? Could we forget those massacres of the rue Transnonain with which Thiers the Cruel had stained his judicial record? Joyful, he was already sniffing the Bloody Week.

Paris had borne cold, hunger, privations of every kind, the shells… One consolation alone remained to it: the Republic, pledge of social justice. How would it not have distrusted this man whom it frightened and by whom it felt itself detested?

(1) Speech of September 17, 1871.

Too many words had been mendacious; it believed only in acts. Now, Thiers was striving to disarm the National Guard; the Republic was in danger.

This disarmament, neither Jules Favre nor even Bismarck had dared to order. As soon as there was talk of permitting the Prussians to enter the enclosure, spontaneously, fifty thousand men in arms went out to meet them: “This movement of indiscipline and pride was all the more beautiful in that the forts were already occupied by the Prussians and their cannons trained on the city. The Parisians would have sacrificed themselves and the salvation of France could have been bought at that price: ‘Rather Moscow than Sedan,’ was repeated everywhere.” (1)

On the Place de la Concorde, the majestic stone statues that personify the principal cities of France had been veiled in long black crepes, poetic symbol of the patrie’s deep mourning.

The demonstrations began on February 24 on the Place de la Bastille. In the evening, the column was illuminated and the battalions paraded all around, bringing wreaths of immortelles to decorate the monument from base to summit. The floating folds of the red flag enveloped the torch of the Genius of gold so boldly cast into the sky. Lower down, one read in enormous letters:

Long live the universal Republic!

This cry was premature, but its hour will come. Inflamed speeches, full of generous illusions, were delivered. Who would not have been moved to see this indomitable people forget its long sufferings and the distresses of the odious present, in a prophetic vision of the future?

“At that very moment when Germany was making a war of race upon her, when William and his agents did not hide the desire and the hope to annihilate France, what were these Frenchmen thinking, what were these Parisians saying? — They were proclaiming the Federation of peoples! In response to the shells of Bismarck, they offered to Germany Liberty, Fraternity! Under the fire of the Krupp cannons, trained against the great revolutionary city, they confessed human Solidarity!” (1)

Meanwhile, a council of war was judging the accused of October 31. Flourens, Blanqui and several others were condemned to death.

A former representative of Paris, Victor Considérant published on April 10 an address to the Parisians. He hoped to extract us from this terrible situation and proposed

(1) Arthur Arnould.

(1) Arthur Arnould, I, 96.

a peace founded “on the free and juridical character of every society, of every cooperation”; he claimed, he too, “the absolute autonomy of urban communes and canton-communes.” He even dreamed of one day extending this peace, “absolute, European, definitive… by the juridical Confederation of all united Peoples.”

3

On February 28, the Parisians perceived with indignation that, by an unpardonable negligence, the government had abandoned the cannons of the National Guard, near the Place Wagram, in the zone granted to the occupation of the Germans. (1) Without waiting for official orders, each battalion went to the park and removed the pieces belonging to it. The women harnessed themselves to the cannons, escorted by armed National Guards. An officer, mounted on the piece, held the deployed flag. (2)

“It was truly a grandiose spectacle, recalling the most beautiful days of enthusiasm of the first Revolution. A number of sailors and soldiers, won over by the general fever, joined these processions.”

“Paris no longer had a government. The men of the Hôtel de Ville had left for Bordeaux. The army was without arms. No police in the streets. The Commune already existed in fact. Paris, left to itself,

(1) Thirty thousand Germans were to enter the Champs-Élysées on March 1. (2) The cannons were transported to the Batignolles, to Montmartre, to Belleville and to the Place des Vosges. See Vuillaume, Mes cahiers rouges, IV, 107.

lived its own life. There was indeed, somewhere, a December general named Vinoy, but without authority; no one paid him heed.” (1)

In the suburbs, men were resolved to receive the Prussians with rifle fire. Fortunately, the leaders, understanding the impossibility of resistance, set themselves to calming spirits. They charged the National Guards with forming a cordon around the quarters conceded to the brief enemy occupation. It was by entrusting to them the task of containing themselves that the redoubtable violences of their despair were prevented.

Aware of this effervescence, the mayors wisely counseled leaving its artillery provisionally to the National Guard. The generals themselves supported this proposal, and civil war could have been avoided. But Thiers, blind and obstinate, gave the army the order to go and retake the cannons by force.

4

On March 18, the line soldiers charged with this operation fraternized with the people, and Paris covered itself with barricades. At the Place Vendôme, General Vinoy, with four thousand men, fell back before a few hundred insurgents.

Less prudent, General Lecomte commanded a discharge upon the crowd, but his soldiers knocked him over with their rifle-butts; he was handed to the National Guards, who led him away a prisoner. Clément Thomas, an old man

(1) Arthur Arnould.

with white beard, whom his friendship for Trochu had rendered unpopular, was going from group to group with a busy air. “He is recognized, seized and thrown into the same guardhouse as General Lecomte… The unfortunates, led into a garden, were placed against the wall and fell struck down, the ex-commander-in-chief of the National Guard by ten balls from National Guards, General Lecomte by the balls of his own soldiers.” (1)

Thiers and the entire government were maddened with terror, the forts were abandoned, and if the Central Committee had immediately seized the Mont-Valérien, victory might have been assured to it. It is in such circumstances that promptness of glance decides success. The panic gained two or three hundred thousand citizens. Thiers thought himself very clever in ordering all the functionaries to come and rejoin him at Versailles. The “decapitalized capital” suddenly found itself deprived of all administration. A fatal and irreparable blunder. Thiers did not know the resources of the Parisian spirit.

The rapidity with which all the municipal services were reorganized borders on the prodigious. (2) Not one day of delay in the payment of the troops’ wages!

Elected by two hundred and fifteen battalions of the National Guard, the Central Committee found itself the sole government of Paris. In a manifesto, it rejected

(1) Élie Reclus, La Commune au jour le jour, Schleicher, publisher. (2) It is principally to Jourde and to Varlin that the honor of this reorganization belongs. One could see then the uselessness of a great number of high functionaries, true parasites whom favor endows with fat sinecures.

the unjust accusations brought against it. This power it had not sought, it had been imposed upon it; it promised to cede it immediately to the Commune whose election it was going to hasten. Would that it had kept its promise!

March 18. — “Behind a coffin coming from the Gare d’Orléans, an old man, bareheaded, followed by a long cortège; Victor Hugo leads to Père-Lachaise the body of his son Charles. The Federates present arms and half-open the barricade to let pass glory and death.” (1)

5

The mayors and deputies of Paris unfortunately could not come to an agreement either among themselves or with the Central Committee. Some, understanding the urgent necessity of electing a new Municipal Council, judged that the people of Paris had the right to convoke themselves and to fix the date of the vote. Others, slaves of a strict legality that was hardly seasonable, wanted to wait for a regular convocation of the electors to be made by the Assembly. They had not made so many formalities on the 4th of September.

I was accompanying Captain Delbrouck when, on March 19, he went to the town hall of Montmartre to confer on this subject with Clemenceau. The young mayor, whose authority was already great, showed himself very irritated by the murders accomplished the previous day. And indeed, those summary executions were going to serve as pretext for abominable

(1) Lissagaray, Histoire de la Commune de 1871, librairie Dentu, page 104.

reprisals. Despite the efforts of Babick and a few others, the Central Committee did not disavow them loudly enough and refused to seek out their authors.

When, on March 23, the mayors of Paris presented themselves before the Assembly, the left rose as a sign of respect for these men who represented a city of two million souls. But as to the cries of “Long live France!” the mayors replied “Long live the Republic!” the furious rurals refused them speech: “To order! to order!” they cried, “have them evacuated!” — The tumult grows, the deputies of the right withdraw, dragging away those of the centers and with them the President and the members of the government. (1)

However, in the night session, the majority, understanding the grave responsibility that was going to weigh upon it, approved with “very good” the apologies presented in its name. The conciliatory proposals were none the less referred back to the bureaus, that is to say buried.

The Versailles Assembly claimed to meddle, as in the time of the Empire, in our municipal affairs. Paris defended its rights. One cannot misjudge the justice of its claims: How could the poor people who had bravely fought during the siege have economized out of their meager pay the price of their rent? Was it not necessary to impose on the proprietors a slight sacrifice and to grant at least to the tenants a delay? The merchants asked likewise for the postponement of bills of exchange and the necessary revision of a law called the “law of the hundred thousand

(1) Élie Reclus, page 36.

bankruptcies,” because it would have made of all the Parisian merchants so many bankrupts.

The League of Republican Union for the rights of Paris was founded by the deputies Ranc, Clemenceau, Floquet, Lockroy, Corbon, Laurent Pichat. Its manifesto of April 5 demanded: the official recognition of the Republic; then, for the capital, the free management of its municipal affairs, of its finances, of public assistance, of primary education. An elected council would organize the National Guard and the urban police. (1)

6

By disorganizing all the services, Thiers had constrained the Parisians to seize the government. By attacking our forts, he obliged the National Guard to defend them. The Federates, however, committed a mad imprudence when, without order of the Commune and against the formal advice of the Executive Commission, they attempted a coup against Versailles. Imagining perhaps that the soldiers would lift their rifle-butts as at Montmartre, they sallied out of Paris on April 3.

Before daylight, under the leadership of Bergeret, six thousand

(1) Among the adherents to this league one may cite: Maurice Lachâtre, Isambert, the architect Émile Trélat, the painters Manet and Lobel-Duval, Bouloy, Frédéric Morin, Laisant-Plassat, Stupuy, André Lefèvre, Mario Proth, Yves Guyot, Chauvin, Paris-Aval, etc. The journals le Rappel, le Temps, le Siècle, le National, la Vérité rallied to its program, as did the syndical chambers of employers and workers. — However a few deputies refused their adhesion: Louis Blanc, H. Brisson, Éd. Adam, Tirard, E. Farcy, Peyrat, Edgar Quinet, Langlois and Dorian were blind enough to trust the Assembly, powerless against all evidence that it would not dare to attack the Republic. Their inertia remains inexplicable.

men and eight pieces of artillery were heading for the bridge of Neuilly, with cries of: “To Versailles!” — “The battalions were gaily climbing the Bergères plateau, when a shell falls in the ranks, then a second. The Mont-Valérien has fired.” (1)

The commander of the fort had promised Lullier (2) to remain neutral and to let the Parisians pass. The Federates cried out treason and, scattering in confusion, returned to Paris.

“The army had taken a great number of prisoners on the Châtillon side. The officer began by making all the soldiers found among the insurgents step out of the ranks. Shot. Then the column continued its march. At little Bicêtre, General Vinoy was met. He halts the column: ‘Are there any leaders?’ — Duval steps out of the ranks with two staff officers. ‘You know what awaits you, have the platoon formed.’ The three Federate officers jump a ditch, lean against a small house, and fall crying: ‘Long live the Commune!’

General Le Flô, minister of war, said to a member of the Assembly: ‘They died like good fellows.’” (3)

Thiers none the less wrote to the archbishop of Paris, taken as hostage: “Never have our soldiers shot prisoners.” And Vinoy in his book recounts that “their leader, the so-called Duval, died during the affair.”

(1) Lissagaray, page 181. — Vuillaume, IV, page 180 and following. (2) A former naval officer, Lullier had a certain military instruction and “when he was not burned by alcohol, moments of lucidity enough to create illusion.” (3) Camille Pelletan, La Semaine de mai, page 14.

Meanwhile, by the Asnières road, Flourens advanced with a thousand men toward Rueil. Ten thousand infantry and two brigades of cavalry sent against them put them to rout.

Flourens vainly tried to rally his troops… Abandoned by them, he would not resign himself to retire. (1)

He dismounted and sadly followed the bank of the Seine, not answering Cipriani, his former comrade in Crete, a young and valiant Italian ready for any audacity, who begged him to spare himself. Weary and discouraged, Flourens lay down on the bank and fell asleep. Cipriani spotted a small house; Flourens followed him there, laid down his sword and threw himself on the bed. An individual sent on reconnaissance denounced them, and some forty gendarmes surrounded the house. Cipriani wants to defend himself; he is struck down. Flourens, recognized by a dispatch found on him, is led to the bank of the Seine where he stands, bareheaded, arms crossed. A captain of gendarmerie, Desmarets, galloping up on horseback, howls: “It is you, Flourens, who fire on my gendarmes!” and, rising in his stirrups, splits his skull with a furious sword-blow.

“Cipriani, still living, was thrown with the dead man into a small dung-cart and rolled to Versailles. Thus ended this good knight-errant whom the Revolution loved.” Solomonic, even when they are mistaken, are those who know how to die for an idea.

Generals Eudes and Duval had also to retire before superior forces. National Guards

(1) I summarize the account of Lissagaray, page 182.

were surrounded. “Surrender, your lives will be spared,” General Pellé had told them. They surrender. “Immediately the Versaillais seize the soldiers who were fighting in the Federate ranks and shoot them. The other prisoners are sent to Versailles. Their officers, bareheaded, the stripes torn off, march at the head of the convoy.” (1)

Numerous leaders were shot without trial, which brought the exasperation of the Parisians to its peak.

The Commune made for its defenders solemn funerals: “Three catafalques, each containing thirty-five coffins, wrapped in black veils, bedecked with red flags, drawn by eight horses, rolled slowly, announced by clarions and the avengers of Paris. Delescluze and five members of the Commune, the red sash, bareheaded, led the mourning. Behind them, the relatives of the victims, the widows of today supported by those of tomorrow. Thousands and thousands, immortelles in their buttonholes, silent, marched to the step of the muffled drums. Some muffled music burst forth at intervals like the involuntary explosion of a too restrained sorrow. Women sobbed, many fainted. Delescluze cried out: ‘What an admirable people! Will they still say that we are a band of factionists!’ At Père-Lachaise, he advanced upon the common grave. The cruel ordeals of the prison of Vincennes had broken his so frail envelope. Wrinkled, stooping, sustained only by his indomitable faith, this dying man saluted these dead: ‘Justice,’ he said, ‘justice for the great

(1) Lissagaray, page 184.

city, which, after five months of siege, betrayed by its government, still holds in its hands the future of humanity… Let us not weep for our brothers fallen heroically, but let us swear to continue their work and to save Liberty, the Commune, the Republic.’

Nothing was noble as this old man thirsting for justice, devoted to the people without phrases and in spite of all.” (1)

On April 6, the Versaillais advanced to the old park of Neuilly. Bergeret, who had pledged himself to hold this position, was replaced by Dombrowski, a Polish officer whose value Garibaldi had appreciated in the army of the Vosges. Delescluze and Vaillant had the new general accepted. — “The Federates of Neuilly saw a young man, small in stature, of modest uniform, (2) inspecting the outposts, at walking pace, under fire. In place of the furia francese, of dash and brilliance, the cold, almost unconscious bravery of the Slav. Within a few hours, the new chief had won over his men. The officer soon revealed himself. On the 9th, during the night, with two battalions from Montmartre, Dombrowski, accompanied by Vermorel, surprised the Versaillais in Asnières, drove them from it, seized their pieces; then, from the railway, with armored cars, he cannonaded Courbevoie and the bridge of Neuilly from the flank. His brother carried the château of Bécon which commands the Asnières road. Vinoy, having wished to retake this position on the night of the 12th, his men, repulsed, fled all the way to Courbevoie.” (3)

(1) Lissagaray. (2) This simplicity contrasted with the luxury of gilt which had rendered Bergeret and his staff ridiculous. (3) Lissagaray, page 304.

The energy of the National Guard during the second siege of Paris, in this madly disproportionate struggle, is the most striking refutation of the disdainful reproaches of Trochu and Vinoy, the proof of a courage that incompetent leaders had not known how to employ against the cuirassiers. But it is strangely to reverse the roles and to falsify the truth to throw on Paris the responsibility for the blood shed. In Russia, when political prisoners are unjustly mistreated, they let themselves die of hunger, and, since their jailers are men, they are taken with pity. This sentiment was unknown to the enemies of the Republic.

7

One of the most odious measures for which Thiers bears responsibility was the disorganization of Public Assistance. (1) The situation of the indigent was exceptionally hard, and Treilhard, named director by the Commune, had a heavy task. He acquitted himself of it with conscience and probity, and strove to reorganize promptly the services. The personnel of the Beaujon hospital was secularized.

The Commune apportioned its labors among nine commissions and delegated one of its members to each of them. (2) These nine delegates assembled constituted the Executive Commission.

Reforms are ripe in Paris thirty years before

(1) There were 600 sick in the hospitals and ambulances. (2) Cluseret to War, Jourde to Finances, Viard to Subsistence, Paschal Grousset to Foreign Relations, Frankel to Labor and Exchanges, Protot to Justice, Andrieu to Public Services, Vaillant to Education, Raoul Rigault to General Security.

they have germinated in the province. A long separation could only accentuate the divergences between the country and its capital. — The Commune committed many errors and many faults; discord prevented it from formulating and realizing a coherent overall program, but its action did not remain sterile; some of its decisions, premature then, have since passed into practice:

As early as April 2, the Commune decreed the separation of the Churches and the State, the suppression of the budget for religious cults, the confiscation as national property of the goods of the congregations.

Other reforms also showed an excellent spirit:

The plurality of offices was forbidden. The maximum of salaries was fixed at 6,000 francs.

The political oath was abolished.

Certain acts, such as wills, donations inter vivos, recognitions of natural children, adoptions, marriage contracts, etc., were to be drawn up gratuitously by public officers.

A simple sergeant, I found myself in personal relations with none of the members of the Commune; but I know all the same and I affirm that most of them were of scrupulous probity, full of courage, of devotion, and gifted with remarkable intelligence.

I shall cite only a few examples: (1) Camélinat, bronze-worker, delegate to the Hôtel des Monnaies, showed himself equal to his task. (2)

(1) The Cahiers rouges of Vuillaume furnish many others. (2) Readers of the Cahiers will remember the interesting details given by Vuillaume (IV, 213, and VI, 360) on the famous coin with the trident.

At the Post, Theisz, chiseling-worker, found means to re-establish in part communications with the province.

“But Jourde surpasses them all by his calm lucidity of a good accountant. He watches with exactness over the legitimate receipts and forces the Railway Companies to pay their tax arrears, in all, two millions. He has only legal relations with the financial oligarchy and preserves intact the 214 millions in securities found at the Ministry of Finance.” (1)

The Bank of France, which had in its coffers more than three billions, had been imprudently abandoned by the government. Beslay, named commissioner-delegate, managed to protect it against Raoul Rigault. In his deposition to the Commission of Inquiry, M. de Ploeuc acknowledged that “without the assistance of Beslay, the Bank of France would not exist.” (2)

Some of the members of the International successfully resisted the violent measures proposed by the Central Committee: Frankel, delegate to the Commission of Labor, Industry and Exchanges, began the organization of workers’ cooperative associations. His goal was the emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves. A locale was put at the disposal of the syndical Chambers. On April 20, he had the night-work of bakers forbidden. In agreement with Malon, he proposed having recourse to workers’ associations for

(1) Georges Bourgin, Histoire de la Commune, Cornély, publisher, page 138. — “Jourde’s administration was judged so good that his resignation, offered on the occasion of the election of the Committee of Public Safety, was refused.” (2) All these people died poor.

the making of military clothing. He fixed a minimum wage for day labor or piece labor. Circumstances did not allow him to reduce, as he would have wished, the workday to eight hours. In the workshops of the Louvre, where arms were being repaired and transformed, the ten-hour day was adopted. The director and the workshop chiefs were elected by their workers. Everywhere Frankel sought to replace the irresponsible despotic authority of employers or of administration by the autonomy of workers organized in unions. (1)

Frankel also concerned himself, with Vaillant, with developing professional education. On May 13, a school of industrial art for young girls was opened in the rue Dupuytren.

Vaillant, engineer and physician, delegate to Education, appealed to corporate initiatives. The courses of the School of Medicine were suspended; he asked the doctors, the independent professors and the students to designate delegates, in order to elaborate a new program. (2) He associated himself with the action of the Federation of Artists which, under the presidency of Courbet, occupied itself with the conservation of the Museums. The School of Fine Arts certainly needed reforms, but I believe that Vaillant was mistaken when he proposed to suppress the budget of this school. A higher education is the necessary condition of a good secondary or practical education.

A Commission examined the titles of candidates for the teaching of drawing.

(1) See Georges Bourgin, page 126 and following. (2) Journal officiel of April 23, 24 and 25.

For primary education, Vaillant organized at the Turgot School meetings of male and female teachers who, in agreement with the parents, were to study the programs and the methods.

He would have wished to furnish the schools the resources necessary to resolve the problem of secular, free and obligatory instruction, (1) and to assure the teachers a salary commensurate with their important functions. All these wishes have so far been but imperfectly realized. Already the school of the 20th arrondissement was clothing and feeding the children, thus founding those School Funds which today render such great services and which are called to render still greater ones in the future.

At the National Library, J. Vincent, an incompetent administrator, was replaced by my learned friend, Élie Reclus. This choice was excellent.

At a moment when one scarcely thought of diverting oneself, Vaillant understood the educational importance of public festivities. — As to the theatres, he wished to suppress the subsidies that create privileges, and to replace the officially imposed directors by free associations among the actors.

8

The Commune was less fortunate in the choice of delegates to War. It had suppressed the title of commander-in-chief, but at such a moment, unity of

(1) The question was posed as early as April 27.

direction was a necessity. Cluseret, a career officer in France and in the United States, tried to reorganize the marching companies and placed most of the Federates under the orders of Colonel La Cécilia, after having had “the incompetent and pretentious” Bergeret arrested.

The rapidity with which the army of Versailles was formed proved that Gambetta was right, and that the struggle could have been continued against the Prussians. Le Flô, minister of war, had at first only 6,000 soldiers, but, it is true, with the permission of Bismarck, who returned to him 60,000 prisoners, he very promptly gathered 130,000 well-armed men, supplied with provisions and all the matériel of siege. (1)

These troops were placed under the orders of generals Mac-Mahon, Vinoy, Cissey, Ladmirault, Douay, Clinchant and Ducrot, all monarchists, hating the republican capital and “detesting a population full of contempt for their incompetence.” (2)

The most absurd legends were spread about the men of the Commune by people whom fear and hatred blinded: To believe them, the National Guard would have been only a rabble of malefactors: 12,000 according to M. Claude, head of the Sûreté, 35,000 according to d’Aurelle; not counting 8,000 ex-convicts whom the Commune would have brought in from the province! These improbable lies were forged to excuse acts of

(1) “The finest army in the world,” according to Thiers. What the Commune does not seem to have realized is that, had it triumphed, even partially, the Germans would have united with the Versaillais to crush it. (2) Georges Bourgin.

cruelty which, themselves, were only too real. The Commune was elected by two hundred and thirty thousand votes. (1)

The Germans had kept the forts of the East and the North. The Federates occupied the forts of Ivry, Bicêtre, Montrouge, Vanves and Issy; the villages of Neuilly, Asnières and Saint-Ouen.

The numbers of the National Guard were considerable on paper, but the flight of a great number of officers had disorganized the battalions. There were members of the Commune who respected liberty of conscience enough not to impose on anyone taking part in a civil war.

The decree which made service obligatory raised lively and legitimate protests. Le Rappel wrote: “A war between citizens is a war between opinions. At the bottom of this one, there is the duel of the Monarchy and the Republic. But how to force Frenchmen to kill Frenchmen? If the one you enroll is a monarchist, you will do what the Versailles government does in constraining the republicans of the departments to march against Paris… what the Prussians did when they forced French peasants to work on their trenches. In a foreign war, the levée en masse is needed; but in a civil war only volunteers should be taken.”

This principle was much better respected by Thiers than by the Commune. He had pitilessly shot all the soldiers who refused to march against their brothers of Paris. — I remember that in our company there was a very silent young Breton, very con-

(1) All ex-convicts, no doubt!

scientious and very brave. From the start of the Commune, he frankly confessed to us that he was a Catholic and a royalist. — “Then go to Versailles,” I answered him, and he left.

As during the first siege, what Paris lacked was unity in the supreme direction of operations. I do not even know if a man of genius would have succeeded in triumphing over the envious, the calumniators, and in making himself obeyed. The National Guard had chosen its chiefs and felt free to revoke at any hour those it had elected. Simple soldiers always take great account in an officer of his indulgence, his good humor, his affability; they cannot judge of his knowledge and they do not love severity, even just and necessary. They divine courage and energy, but “dash and élan are not sufficient to give to the movements of the troops that coherence and unity of direction which alone assures victory.” (1)

After the disorderly sortie of Bergeret, Flourens, Eudes and Duval, the necessity had been felt of nominating directly the superior officers and of concentrating the command; but Cluseret was delegate to war only from April 3 to the 28th; Rossel gave his resignation eleven days after his nomination; Delescluze replaced him only for a few days and ceded the military direction to Billioray.

None of these chiefs was secure from the jealous denunciations that paralyzed all action. M. Bourgin seems to have been right to write that Félix Pyat and the Central Committee were, from the military point of view, “the evil geniuses of the Commune.”

(1) Georges Bourgin.

Annex to the first chapter

“Cluseret was tall; he was perhaps forty, white-complexioned, with black hair and beard, a handsome face. His handwriting is very clear, his composition much less; which gives the lie to the analysts who claim to judge the man by his handwriting. Cluseret’s character lacked above all clarity, and his spirit of decision… He was perhaps a good and intelligent infantry captain… A distinguished young man, he had become a mediocre man… Delegate to War, he did not know how to will, nor to continue what once he had willed; he did not know how to submit himself to the secondary role given him by the intelligence of the Commune; he did not have the second either… Cluseret went into fire very squarely. He did not put on the uniform a single time; he marched in front, in round hat and frock coat, and people followed him… He did not know how to choose men; all those he favored were perfect mediocrities. Rossel, his chief of engineers, and Colonel Mayer were the most disastrously mediocre of all.” Rossel, Papiers posthumes, page 205.

Flourens was 32. He was the son of the perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, whom he replaced

in his course at the Collège de France in 1863. The following year the Clericals had him refused authorization to resume his teaching. He gave lectures at Brussels, wrote articles in the republican journals l’Espiègle and la Rive Gauche. In 1865, he is in Constantinople where his course in the French language obtains a great success. (1)

Under this title, l’Orient, justice pour tous, he wrote in the Courrier de Constantinople a series of articles destined to bring about fraternization among the diverse Eastern races. He founded the journal l’Étoile d’Orient, which the Turkish government did not delay in suppressing. — At Athens, he was persecuted by the Greek government for having wished, according to law, to speak in the open air. In 1866 he took part in the Cretan insurrection.

For a year, in the midst of these brave mountaineers, he suffered hunger, cold, all the fatigues and all the dangers of an insurrectionary war, sleeping in the snow and feeding on roots and wild herbs boiled. He sent correspondences to the journals of Europe, in order to interest minds in the cause of Cretan independence, and sustained the hopes of the insurgents. In 1868, elections having been held in Greece for the Hellenic parliament, Crete, which wished to be represented there, sent a deputation of which Flourens was named president. — At Athens, he was arrested by night and thrown on a steamer which brought him back to Marseille. Scarcely at liberty, he returned to Athens, and there, hidden, continued a violent polemic

(1) The following information is taken from biographical notes written by Flourens himself and reproduced in the work of Élie Reclus, la Commune au jour le jour, page 17.

against the Bulgaris ministry. Obliged to leave for Naples, he was incarcerated by the Italian government for an article published in the Popolo d’Italia. Back in France in 1869, he was condemned to three months in prison for having continued two meetings at Belleville, despite the dissolution pronounced by the commissioner of police. Having finished his sentence in August, he fought a duel with Paul de Cassagnac, who, in Le Pays, had violently attacked the orators of public meetings. After 45 minutes of assault, he was wounded by a sword-thrust in the full chest. When Victor Noir was assassinated by Prince Bonaparte, Flourens and Rochefort led the cortège and had the command of the day. Flourens wanted to march against the police, but the unarmed people would have been mowed down. Rochefort had the good sense to lead the coffin to the cemetery of Neuilly.

Implicated by the imperial police in the Plot of the Bombs, Flourens was condemned by the High Court of Blois to forced labor in perpetuity. — Returned to France on September 4, he commanded the battalions of Belleville. Trochu gave him in mockery the title of major of the rampart, not wishing to name him colonel. On October 31, he installed Blanqui at the Hôtel de Ville.

II — DELBROUCK

The armed conciliation. — Letters of Madame Pape. — Intervention of Freemasonry. — Delbrouck mediator. — Dombrowski at Neuilly.

“That is why the trembling thinker is forced To employ the light upon sinister things; Before kings, before evil and its ministers, Before this great need of the world, to be saved, He knows that he must combat after having dreamed.” Victor Hugo

1

In the Legion of the Auxiliary Engineers, Delbrouck did not accept the commander-in-chief command that was offered him after the departure of Viollet-le-Duc and numerous superior officers, but he kept there a considerable influence, because he was loved and venerated by all. Persuaded that in continuing their fortification works they were defending not only Paris but the threatened Republic, almost all our soldiers and some of our officers rallied to the Commune. I did as they did.

Delbrouck did not tire of repeating: “At all costs the shedding of blood must be avoided.” We had only one idea, only one goal, conciliation, appeasement. But we understood also that the Versailles Assembly would make no concession if it did not find itself in the presence of an armed people, resolved to support by force its just claims.

Thiers had declared war on Paris when generals Chanzy (1) and de Langourian were incarcerated. Delbrouck visited them in their prison and forwarded their correspondence to their families. His eloquence certainly contributed much to their being set at liberty. (2)

As during the first siege, our work, purely defensive, consisted in repairing the breaches made in the ramparts or in the forts. We installed embrasures for the cannons, and for the men armored shelters which saved the lives of more than one soldier. Delbrouck never carried arms, neither sword nor revolver. A mystic, a little in the manner of Tolstoy, he always listened to the inner voice that told him to let himself be killed rather than defend himself by murder. In the present anarchy of international relations, it is to be wished that, should such sentiments come to be generalized, it be first in Germany. One cannot misjudge their beauty; the future belongs to them, a future still distant, alas! — The power of suggestion

(1) At the Gare d’Orléans, a general officer in full uniform had been seen. He was arrested. They believed they held d’Aurelle; it was Chanzy. Léo Meillet protected him by having him entered in the sector prison. (2) Chanzy had to make a written promise not to serve against Paris. — On his side Victor Considérant, who commanded Raoul Rigault, succeeded in having M. Émile Allard, inspector of Bridges and Roads, set at liberty, who had been unjustly arrested and who, without this intervention, would probably have perished.

of our captain was so great that we underwent it with the certainty of following the right path.

A pacifist in theory, I would have liked to attenuate in my own eyes the apparent contradiction between my principles and my acts. — I am not of those who resign themselves easily to being illogical. — I have the satisfaction of not having killed by my own hand; I did not fire a rifle-shot and I pursued no one. However, it must be admitted, the distinction is subtle between legitimate defense and murderous attack. The embrasures we constructed for the cannons, the trenches behind which the sharpshooters sheltered, made us accomplices in odious but necessary butcheries. Our way of understanding conciliation will be found singular, but there are circumstances stronger than an individual will.

2

Madame Pape-Carpentier to Paul M.

Versailles, April 25, ‘71.

Forgive me this insistence, (1) dear Monsieur Paul, and see in it less the mark of a friendship though very real, than a proof of the value at which I esteem your existence and your action for the very triumph of the idea you believe yourself to serve. The hour is not come when the blood of the just is fecund. It is not come, or rather it is past. It is by life and by thought that henceforth one must combat for justice, not by homicide, beneath whatever flag it may be accomplished. A cannon-shot is not a reason, and the

(1) This was the second letter that Madame Pape wrote to me to dissuade me from rallying to the Commune.

triumph thus obtained is a defeat for the definitive success. It is now that one must say: woe to the victorious!

But woe is also for the march of progress. Blood shed for the Republic is the greatest accusation that the populations bring against it. And I would bear it bitter resentment for making perish men like you and our worthy friend M. D. (Delbrouck.)

I must also pray you to reject all that I have said to you about the complicity of motors and agents that are to be found at the bottom of the present movement. (1) The new information I have gathered does but confirm what I have already told you on this subject. If you must one day cause your admirable mother the appalling pain of seeing snatched more than another bloodless being from the arms that have so many times pressed a cherished son, wait still, in order not to poison that grief by the thought of an unappreciated sacrifice.

I shake your hand, dear Monsieur Paul, with the most maternal supplications of a heart wholly devoted to you and to the Republic. Embrace for me your mother and your sister. How I should wish to be able to tell M. D. all that I think and I write him also. The sight and the thought of his poor little Marie upon him.

Come, dear sir, down with pride, and from the heart, from the heart, from the heart, tenderness for those who love you, humanity for all.

Madame Pape to Madame Milliet

Compiègne, April 30, 1871.

Dear friend,

Give me news of yourself and of your dear son, of your dear children. Has M. Paul received my letter from Versailles? What has come of it? I think of you ceaselessly, this is no exaggeration. My heart and my

(1) Assuredly very disparate elements were gathered there; nevertheless all remained in agreement on one point: the maintenance of the Republic.

mind are strained toward you with an inexpressible anguish. I have just learned that you no longer suffer from hunger; that is a relief. If I learn that you are all well, I shall breathe. When I say all, I think of M. Delbrouck also and of his dear little Marie. My God! must one assist at this monstrous and heroic struggle at the same time? History saw nothing like it. Is it the childbirth of which the Gospel speaks? Is it the consolation of agony? No, no, France is expiring, but she will not die. Paris brings forth in pain; it redeems itself by martyrdom. Paris is a sublime madman. Do not say that to your son.

News of you, for mercy’s sake; we embrace with all our hearts you and Louise, and I love you with the most devoted heart.

Marie

If you could send us a few newspapers in an envelope, it would give us extreme pleasure.

My mother replied to Madame Pape. As for me, I do not believe I wrote a letter at that time; we had other things to do. There remain to me only my memories.

3

On April 17, the Commune of Lyon had sent to Paris M. Barodet “to offer his good services to the patriots of conciliation.” — A hundred and seven syndical chambers of employers and workers, representing more than a hundred thousand citizens, delegated for the same purpose a commission of eighteen members to the Versailles government.

Dufaure, minister of Justice, replied with an ironic harshness “that he adored conciliation, but after triumph.”

On April 25, four National Guards, surprised by

mounted chasseurs, had laid down their arms. An officer arrived and discharged his revolver upon them. “Two were killed; the others, left for dead, dragged themselves to the neighboring trench, where one of them expired; the fourth was transported to the ambulance.”

The next day, Léo Meillet recounts to the Commune this assassination. Indignation shakes the most moderate. Lissagaray has given a kind of minute of this session: “This cries for vengeance!” people exclaim. “Reprisals must be used. Let us shoot the prisoners we have in our hands. — Several: ‘The archbishop of Paris!’ — Antoine Arnaud: ‘Let twelve gendarmes be publicly executed!’ — Tridon: ‘Why take twelve men against four? You have not the right!’ — Ostyn opposes the executions. — Vaillant: ‘It is property that must be struck.’ — Avrial and Jourde: ‘Let us proceed legally!’ — Arthur Arnould: ‘Let us strike at Thiers by demolishing his house!’ — The generous Cambon rose: ‘If the people of Versailles shoot our prisoners, let the Commune declare before France, before the world, that she will respect, herself, all the prisoners she takes.’”

The discussion was becoming very lively when the announcement of a delegation of Freemasons imposed a little calm. Ranvier conducted them: they proposed to go and plant the masonic banners on the ramparts: “If a single bullet touches them, the Freemasons will march as one clan against the common enemy.”

“The intervention of this mysterious power had cast a great hope into Paris. On the morning of the 29th, six thousand brothers, representing fifty-five lodges, were

arrayed in the Carrousel… A music grave and of ritual character preceded the cortège: superior officers, the grand masters, the members of the Commune and the brothers with the wide ribbon blue, green, white, red or black, according to the grade, followed, grouped around sixty-five banners for the first time appearing in the sun. The one that marched at the head, the white banner of Vincennes, displayed in red letters the fraternal motto: Let us love one another. A lodge of women was especially acclaimed.

“A free balloon, marked with three symbolic dots, went to scatter in the air the manifesto of Freemasonry.

“The white banner was raised at the most perilous post, the advance of the Porte Maillot. The Versaillais ceased their fire. — At the bridge of Courbevoie, before the Versailles barricade, an officer receives the delegates and General Montaudon permits them to go to Versailles.” (1)

But Thiers, resolved to grant nothing, refused even to admit the deputation. The next day Versaillais balls pierced the banners.

In its turn, the Republican Alliance of the departments came to adhere to the Commune. Millière presented to the Assembly a numerous crowd of citizens originating from the province.

A congress assembled at Lyon declared responsible before the sovereign nation that one of the two parties which should reject conciliation. — Thiers menaced to send twenty-five thousand men against the rebel city.

(1) Lissagaray.

4

“When Thiers had launched his first bomb against Paris, we thought that all the deputies of Paris who were still at Versailles would solemnly protest against this infamy and would come to share with us the danger. We had dreamed that Louis Blanc, that Langlois, that Dorian, that Farcy, that Brisson, that Victor Schœlcher, that Edgar Quinet would go and post themselves at the Porte Maillot, and, before the Vinoys, the Charettes, the Cathelineaux, the Galliffets, would extend their hands: ‘We forbid you to touch Paris!’ Yes, we dreamed that. We were mistaken. One alone acted, one alone employed himself for conciliation: Victor Schœlcher. He published with Floquet and Lockroy the proposal to the Assembly of a treaty of peace.” (1)

When Schœlcher, Lockroy and Floquet brought to Versailles this project of transaction, Thiers refused to recognize in the Federates the quality of belligerents and refused all armistice. Victor Considérant was no more fortunate.

Delbrouck undertook to act alone. Two or three times he tried to interpose himself as mediator between the Hôtel de Ville and Versailles. “And there he is running from the one to the other, very ill-treated indeed by both parts. He crossed the lines several times, marching by night as well as by day. Once he was arrested at the Versailles posts, held with malefac-

(1) Élie Reclus, page 100.

tors, and conducted under the rain as far as the quarter of Longjumeau.” (1)

It is, I believe, during the first absence of my captain that I was charged with leading by night, to the Porte Maillot, a small detachment of sappers. I began by placing my men a little sheltered behind a parapet, then I set out in search of the colonel who was to explain to us the work to be done. Exhausted with fatigue, he had thrown himself for an instant fully dressed on a bed, in a neighboring house that was pointed out to me. The colonel rose at once and led me to the redoubt constructed in advance of the Porte Maillot. There, an important battery commanded the great avenue of Neuilly. But the fire of the Versaillais was so precise that most of the embrasures had been demolished. In place of one of them especially there was now only a heap of debris: “You see,” said the colonel to me, “they have good gunners. Our artillerymen have had to retire with their pieces, but I shall have them return as soon as you have repaired the damage.”

During all these explanations, the colonel, with a bravery I admired, stood erect in the middle of the most maltreated embrasure, at the most perilous spot.

The day had not yet broken and the cannon was thundering, a little less frequently it is true at this early hour. Our sappers were waiting for me, and, noticing nearby a construction yard, one of them gave me the idea of requisitioning some beams to hasten the execution of our work.

(1) Émile Trélat.

Two by two, our men took on their shoulders heavy planks. We were crossing the great bare square called the round-point of the Porte Maillot, when a shell fell very near us. A splinter struck in the back one of the porters, who flattened himself on the ground, half-crushed by the beam. Instead of fleeing, his companion, with a truly admirable presence of mind and devotion, knelt beside the wounded man, opened the fold of the garment that covered him, and sucked it for a long time, quickly spitting out the blood. Explosive substances are indeed poisons whose virulence can be attenuated by treating a wound like a snake bite. It is probably the courage of this good man that saved the life of his comrade.

Meanwhile a few of our sappers had been taken with a kind of panic and had scattered behind the houses. To rally them, I employed a means which had already succeeded for me another time: I placed myself at the very spot where the shell had just fallen and, aligning my little troop, I began the roll-call. I had not finished when the fugitives, hastily returned, were answering: “Present!” I would have said their names and they feared to pass for cowards.

I led them to the redoubt, but there, when they saw the lamentable state of the battery, they began to murmur: “They want to have us killed. It is traitors who command such works!” and some of the discontented seemed ready to refuse to obey. Then, remembering the example the colonel had just given me, I climbed up and stood in the middle of the ruined embrasure and, while the shells passed

over our heads, I explained the work to be done and its importance: “If the shells fall too near, shelter yourselves in the trench; meanwhile: to work, and lively!” None refused, and the work was carried out with a zeal and a rapidity for which the colonel paid us compliments.

That is, I believe, the only very small exploit I have accomplished, and I confess it, I felt immediately afterward a sort of physical fatigue arising no doubt from the effort of will I had had to make.

Our company was called in very diverse directions, most often outside the enclosure, in the forts, or at Neuilly. Our works were commanded by La Cécilia and his staff, but I had not the occasion to be placed directly under the orders of Rossel. This valiant officer was “ranged like us without hesitation ‘on the side of the party which has not signed the peace and which counts not in its ranks generals guilty of capitulation.’”

Delbrouck knew personally a few of the members of the Government of National Defense. A second time, he left the uniform, crossed, I do not know how, the lines of the besiegers, and managed to be introduced to Ernest Picard. He eloquently pleaded conciliation and was listened to with a certain benevolence. However the minister, having judged his propositions unacceptable, asked him:

— And now, what are you going to do?

— I am going to rejoin my company, simply replied Delbrouck.

— And you do not immediately have this

man arrested! cried with indignation a secretary present at the scene.

But the moral authority of Delbrouck was such that he inspired respect even in his enemies.

He returned saddened, not discouraged; on the contrary, more than ever resolved to defend the rights of Paris.

The Central Committee considered every attempt at conciliation as a treason. The steps taken by Delbrouck had been denounced; he was beginning to become suspect, and, without the protection of Delescluze, he would already have been arrested. Commander Roselli-Mollet, who was having him watched, took advantage of his absence to send to the Lowendal barracks the following order:

“The first company of the Legion of Engineers will leave immediately to put itself at the disposal of General Dombrowski. In case of refusal, have the captain arrested.”

This order was handed to me, a mere sergeant, around four in the morning. Not one of our lieutenants at the barracks! Hastily assembling the fifteen or twenty men of the company we had at hand, (1) I left at once.

5

Dombrowski had installed his staff that day in a greenhouse, at the bottom of a garden, between the boulevard Inkermann and the rue Borghèse. Our small detachment, placed with a few others under the orders of a captain

(1) Our complement was far from being full and, after long fatigues, married men had at times leave to spend the night with their families.

we did not know, arrived early in the morning. The general was seated before a table covered with plans. He was a man of small stature, with a blond moustache, with pale-blue eyes, scrutinizing and penetrating behind their gold spectacles. His physiognomy was calm, impassive and energetic. He rose and gave our officers very precise instructions: “You will cross the rue Perronet. A Versailles mitrailleuse is installed at the end of this street, which it sweeps regularly. You will wait until it has fired, and you will give your men the order to cross rapidly, sheltering their heads by means of the shovels and the pickaxes. You will replace troops who have spent the whole night in the houses of the boulevard d’Argenson. The Versaillais occupy the other side of this boulevard. Pile furniture and obstacles behind the carriage doors; hang the mattresses of the bed before the windows and recommend not to raise them except to fire on the assailants. You will be replaced at the fall of night.”

These counsels were excellent; they were followed to the letter. Arrived at the corner of the rue Perronet, we waited for the mitrailleuse to have fired. The shots followed one another at short intervals, with a formidable regularity. Scarcely had the noise of the discharge been heard when we leapt forward at the run. But we were greeted by a lively fusillade. I had at my side a good young and vigorous lad named Lazergues; he fell struck by five wounds and dragged me down with him crying: “Long live the Commune!” His body had protected me; no ball had reached me. I rose briskly and we entered through the gardens into the house we were charged with defending.

The Federates we were going to relieve were exhausted with fatigue, bloody, black with powder, and in an indescribable state of overexcitement, eyes feverish, speech brief. They gave us some precious indications: to go up to the upper floors from which one better dominated the enemy, and even onto the roofs to make a plunging fire; to shelter behind the chimneys.

— They left, carrying off a few wounded.

I shall never forget this scene. People spoke little. Each took cover as best he could beside the windows on which the balls rained. Like a hunter at watch, each sapper slipped the barrel of his rifle behind the mattress, which formed a kind of supple shield, cast a furtive glance outside to aim, loosed the trigger and withdrew. A young workman named Mazier, a gentle and honest lad who had been the orderly of Lieutenant de Vesly during the first siege, was at once wounded in the shoulder.

Meanwhile the Versaillais, who occupied the other side of the boulevard d’Argenson, were receiving reinforcements. The houses were filling with soldiers whose fusillade became more and more sustained and more deadly. Then the artillery joined in. The roof of the house we occupied collapsed under a shell. Our situation was very nearly that of the soldiers represented in the famous painting entitled: “Les dernières cartouches.”

Already the Versailles sappers were beginning to strike with axes against the carriage door, ready to give way under their efforts. To fire on them, one would have had to lean out the windows, and that was certain death. No doubt it would have been more heroic to be killed

to the last man; but the position was no longer tenable. The captain, very calm, not wishing to let us be taken and shot uselessly, ordered the retreat. We left in good order, preceded by the dead and the wounded our men carried on their shoulders. We had to cross the rue Perronet again, but this time the mitrailleuse did not fire. (1)

Dombrowski, with his young brother, was pacing back and forth on the boulevard Inkermann, a region into which fell a veritable rain of spent balls. Seeing us return before night, he frowned, but the funereal procession made him understand that the game was momentarily quite compromised on this point.

We were broken, even more by emotion than by fatigue. — For my part, I have never felt that reaction which makes the blood rush to the brain, that blind fury that makes one see red. I wondered what Delbrouck would have done in my place. We could not refuse to obey a chief who ordered us to put a house in a state of defense, and on the other hand, how to forget that, behind that door ready to give way, I might have seen my brother rise up? The idea of blowing out the brains of a Frenchman or driving my bayonet into his belly horrified me. What would I have done if I had had to defend myself in a hand-to-hand struggle? I have difficulty today in analyzing the complex sentiments that agitated me. Would the instinct of preservation have prevailed over the deep respect I have always had for human life, or, as a disciple of Delbrouck, would I have

(1) It had probably been directed against the house we were to fortify.

let myself be killed rather than become an assassin? I do not know. (1)

A long heredity has shaped us in such a way that we cannot refuse our admiration to physical courage, necessary so long as war shall subsist. Worthy of respect and of reward from the military and patriotic point of view, this bloody fury remains none the less odious from the human point of view.

As to surrendering, the idea did not come to us a single moment.

More opinionated than Ducrot, Dombrowski did not easily consider himself beaten. He had us crenel the walls of the gardens and put into a state of defense a few houses of the rue Perronet. Finally, the artillery for which he had been calling in vain for a long time having arrived, the situation changed. Soon the enemy’s mitrailleuse was reduced to silence, and, the general having granted us a rest of which we had great need, we regained the barracks, while the Federates, with admirable dash, retook by assault the positions momentarily lost.

The next day, my mother, visiting the Luxembourg ambulance, learned from our wounded the dangers we had run. Her anxiety was extreme. It was perhaps at her urging, — I suppose at least, —

(1) Sergeant Bérail knew how to analyze with remarkable precision what a sanguine and vigorous temperament feels in hand-to-hand combat: “I use my bayonet red with blood, I crack heads with rifle-butt blows, I no longer know, my sight is troubled, a formidable noise stuns me, I am of a prodigious strength, and the powder intoxicates me. My lips are dry and I do not even perceive that a thread of blood is running from my forehead.” — (General Ambert, Récits militaires.)

that M. Delbrouck charged me with the inspection of our quartering. I had to indicate the number of available beds. Moreover, the Lowendal barracks contained an important depot of equipment, and numerous misappropriations had been committed at night. I organized active surveillance and, with the help of a young architect, I began a plan and an inventory of the dormitories. But these functions could be fulfilled by men older than I, and I often asked my captain to accompany him in his works at the outposts.

Louise M. to her father

Paris, Monday April 24, ‘71.

I should much like to come and join you at the Colony, but we cannot leave Paul and Alix, for they are continually exposed. Alix has made herself an ambulance nurse and follows Henri everywhere. She has been at the fort of Issy, she is now at the fort of Vanves. The life she leads is very fatiguing and full of dangers; she is truly courageous; what devotion! but one must be very happy to make oneself useful.

Mama, Marie Delbrouck and I go every day to the Luxembourg ambulance to see the wounded of Paul’s company. They have amputated an arm of Mazier. Another, Lazergues, wounded at Neuilly, received five bullets to the head. He dragged Paul down in his fall. He held his head with one hand, with the other he took his kepi and extended his arm crying: Long live the Republic! Long live the Commune! Paul has only a slight scratch on the knee. (1)

(1) Lazergues had served as shield. Of the five wounds he had received, three were to the head, but the balls had not penetrated deeply; he had a vigorous skull and miraculously recovered. Mazier, on the contrary, poor boy of a scrofulous temperament, died of a wound to the left clavicle; the ball had remained in the scapula and the head of the humerus, and the surgeons did not know how to extract it.

It is sad to see all these martyrs of the Republic, victims of their courage and their devotion. There are atrocious wounds, bellies split open, skulls half torn off; it hurts to hear the moans of pain. Captain Lefort of the 3rd company received a ball in the full chest, it came out through the back. He has a lung pierced through, however he is so vigorous that there is hope of saving him. He is already eating his cutlets.

M. Delbrouck and another gentleman, furnished with a pass from the Commune, went to Versailles to try to bring the Rurals to reason, but with such cretins no conciliation is possible. Gendarmes arrested them. If their pass from the Commune had been found, they would have been shot on the spot, but they had chewed it and thrown it away in little balls. They remained more than 5 hours without eating, led between two gendarmes like malefactors, insulted all along the way. The Versaillais cried: “Look! do they not have a sufficiently scoundrelly air!” — When we tell that to our poor wounded at the Luxembourg, they were indignant, especially the brave Lazergues; he wept with rage over it. When they speak of M. Delbrouck and Paul, it is with enthusiasm and veneration; all would give their lives for them. Finally M. Delbrouck was able, not without trouble, to accomplish his mission; but to speak to the Rurals, one might as well speak to a log. — They say the Assembly is going to ask aid of the Prussians; that does not astonish me, they are vile enough for that. In any case, it is not for us to yield, we shall not bend. — When the pagans wanted to force the Christians to adore their gods, they asked only a small prayer to Jupiter; it was very little, and yet these preferred death. They had faith. We too have ours, we want the Republic. The royalists want to spirit it away and make us adore their idol, a king! Let us hope that honest people will triumph over the reaction; if not, we shall still be happy to have done our duty, to have defended progress and liberty, and to die martyrs of the Republic.

By what right does the Assembly come to meddle in the affairs

of Paris? This flock of geese has done nothing, except evil. The Commune, itself, has burned the guillotine; its decrees are always aimed at the physical and moral improvement of the people. — The victims of Saint-Jacques have been regularized. Brigitte and Madeleine (Pape) saw them crossing the church all bewildered. They were disguised as men, with false moustaches and collars. They kept their top hat to hide their tonsure; they had a cigar in their mouth and a lady on their arm.

Madame Milliet to M. Félix Milliet

Paris, May 4, ‘71.

My dear friend, I have received your little note. To answer you I must put my letter in a mysterious envelope, and I do not like these mysteries, having nothing to hide. Opportunities will not be lacking for me to write you, but you, ask the people who come to Paris to put the letters in the mail there, that is easy. As for coming back to us in the state of health in which you are, I do not see what you would come to do here; stay peacefully digging your garden. I very often have the wish to come and join you at the Colony, but I should be too anxious about the children; I shall wait for an armistice. Things are so tense that they cannot remain long in this state. In Paris one would make light of the Commune, which commits foolishness after foolishness, if one did not hate the Assembly more.

Madame Milliet to M. Félix Milliet

Paris, May 13, ‘71.

We are well distressed by the long duration of this sad state of affairs. When Paris has its municipal franchises (and it will indeed have to end by having them), it will have earned them. As in all sieges, the assailants lose more people than the place. There have been, it is said, three thousand killed and wounded on the Ivry side, Federates and Versaillais; the latter were there for fully two-thirds. Since yesterday morning and all night we hear the cannon

and the fusillade; we do not yet know the results. Generally, after these massacres, the two parties find themselves at the same point. At Neuilly, for the past 15 days, the ones take a barricade, the next day the others retake it.

Our hope is that the great cities claim like Paris the municipal franchises. The Assembly would still not dare to bombard all the cities over twenty thousand souls.

The poor fort of Issy is in sad state; it will probably blow itself up, but the position will not be more tenable for the Versaillais than for the Federates.

I hope you do not believe a word of all the lies put forth by the journals of Versailles. It is impossible to be in worse faith. The government persists in considering the revolution of Paris as the act of a handful of factionists. A handful of factionists which has made the government flee and which holds in check the finest army that has ever been seen, and this for six weeks, and the end is not near. They should understand that there is something at bottom there, an idea that is worth the trouble of being discussed; but no, they are blind, like everything that is old and destined to fall. For me I believe that this is the laborious childbirth of a new era, and not at all the agony of France. I look and I listen. The great misfortune is the lack of superior men; some are too old, others are green fruits, not ripe at all.

Alix is at Levallois-Perret, always much exposed, but full of spirit and even of gaiety, as much as it is possible to have in such painful circumstances.

III — ALIX PAYEN AMBULANCE NURSE

The cemetery of Issy. — Vanves. — The Convent of the Birds. — Abandonment of the fort of Issy. — The Porte Bineau. — Levallois-Perret. — Neuilly. — The end of the drama. — Letters.

1

Though they were not aware of the intrigues, the jealousies, the dissensions which paralyzed the action of the high command, the soldiers of the Commune always lacked discipline and scarcely knew passive obedience. One had to explain to them the reasons of each order and the goal that was being proposed. But this defect was in part redeemed by the intelligence and the often happy initiative of these men devoted to their cause and animated by a robust faith in the success of their efforts.

As well during the second siege as during the first, I often witnessed this moving spectacle, the departure for combat of our citizen soldiers, and I can certify the perfect exactness of the fine description given by Victor Hugo:

The Second Siege of Paris

The cold dawn pales, vaguely appeared. A troop files in order through the street; I follow it, drawn on by the great living noise That human steps make when they go forward. They are citizens departing for the battle. Pure soldiers! In the ranks, smaller in stature, But equal in heart, the child with pride Holds his father by the hand, and the woman beside Marches with her husband’s rifle on her shoulder. It is the tradition of the women of Gaul To help the man bear the armor, and to be there, Whether one defies Caesar, whether one braves Attila… They arrive at the walls… Suddenly the wind drives off a flake of smoke; Halt! it is the first cannon shot. Come on! A long shudder runs through the battalions, The moment is come, the gates are open, Sound, clarions! see down there the green plains, The woods where creeps far off the invisible enemy, And the treacherous horizon, motionless, asleep, Tranquil, and yet full of thunders and flames. Voices are heard saying: Farewell! — Our rifles, women! And the women, brow serene, heart broken, Give them back their rifle after having kissed it.

Henri Payen, sergeant of the National Guard, had defended Paris against the Germans; he continued his service during the second siege against the adversaries of the Republic. His young wife, who loved him too much to resign herself to living separated from him, enlisted as an ambulance nurse, in order to be able to accompany him even under the fire of the enemy.

How was a frail young woman accustomed to comfort and to the attentive cares of her family found animated by an unforeseen energy, to face such dangers? — It is that the defense of a just cause gives the enthusiasm that lifts hearts; it is also and above all that a reciprocal love transfigures beings: of the most timid it can make heroes. (1)

Alix Payen to Madame Milliet

Issy, April 1871.

Dear mother,

You are astonished, are you not, to receive a letter from me dated from Issy? It is a whole story and I am stupefied at having had all alone so much decision. You will perhaps scold me, too bad! it is done. For some days, my husband’s battalion had left the Prince Eugène barracks and was occupying the huts of the Champ de Mars. Yesterday Sunday I leave early to make a visit to my big fellow. Disappointment! They had left in the night. — This is the moment, I thought, to put my plan into execution. I dreamed of being an ambulance nurse in Henri’s battalion and of following him everywhere. I run to the town hall, I address myself to M. S., who, after a thousand objections, ends by granting me my request. He has been extremely obliging. While I prepared my little pharmacy, he went to the Hôtel de Ville to have my brevet signed, then we leave in an open carriage for Issy.

This little voyage seemed charming to me. It was a beautiful April day, intermingled with rain and sun. Think that since the siege I had not crossed the fortifications; so the budding greenery, the fields, the trees, the Seine flowing in the countryside, all that seemed to me new and ravishing. Even the little showers, which fell without

(1) The letters that follow, written in pencil and rarely dated, do not bear postmarks that would permit classing them in a certain order.

hiding the sun, were gay and did good. How long it had been, good God, since I had breathed raw air! How have we been able to live so long in this great prison!

At Issy we are told that my battalion is camped in the cemetery. We go there. M. S. brought me there much against his will and kept repeating to me that there was still time to change my mind.

A few balls pass near us without reaching us, and here we are in the cemetery, where I find Henri again. He was radiant, dear mother, what a voice his face. He was radiant, moved. He tried however to scold a little, saying that I was not reasonable, but how his face gave the lie to his words! I proudly exhibited to him my brevet, and then he embraced me with all his heart, in a manner even to crush me a little, and, my faith, Father S. withdrew alone… Henri then presented me to a crowd of good people; they love their sergeant so much that they were at once very kind to me. I also made the acquaintance of the canteen-woman, a young negress very original and very witty. The captain’s wife seemed to me, on the contrary, of a surprising stupidity.

Returning to Paris, the battalion did not delay in going back a second time to Issy.

Alix Payen to Madame Milliet

Dear mother,

I arrived safely and I am with the canteen-woman and another in a room in Issy. The battalion is in the cemetery whose walls are crenellated and whose state is appalling. Already in the time of the Prussians, the bombs had opened vaults. It is there that the guards take shelter.

Two of our men have on this subject a very droll struggle of generosity. As the rain hardly ceases, each offered the other a shelter in the tomb he had chosen for lodging, and it was who would best show off his

(1) Jeweler-worker at Henri Payen’s factory.

real estate. — “Mine,” said Chanoine, (1) “has colored glass! — Mine,” retorted the other, “has a step where one can sit. — Get on then!” replied Chanoine disdainfully, “with your wretched vault for five years; mine is a concession in perpetuity!” This decisive reason closed the debate, but I have stayed outside, rolled in my blanket. It is indescribable to see these multi-story vaults filled with soldiers who snore, each on his slab.

Tonight, the fusillade has been continual; I could not close my eye; and with that it was pouring rain. A man of Henri’s company was wounded in the leg; they amputated him this morning. The surgeon will not come into the trenches, and yet that is where he would be useful, since the attacks happen every night.

I have brought my little embryo of a pharmacy and I am staying tonight in the trench. I hope not to have wounded to care for.

My trial as a nurse was for my poor big fellow. All day long the federates skirmished, and the snuff-box of Henri’s rifle cracked in his face. He has his right eye all blackened, full of powder grains, but the eye is intact.

I assure you that never had I heard so well the shells, the balls, the cannonballs; the rampart-balls especially are most frightening. — Our camp is very picturesque, but the men are very tired. They will only be relieved tomorrow morning.

I am at this moment in the ruins of the lodge of the cemetery concierge, and there is a big cannon on the road, just nearby, which deafens me every ten minutes. I see only the roofs of the fort of Issy, which are in a state of frightful dilapidation. They do not give permission to enter the fort, and yet I should be very glad to know if Paul is there. — Through the loopholes we see distinctly whence come the gunshots of the Versaillais.

They have skirmished all day, but no one on our side has been hit today.

Try to give me news of you all and especially of Paul. Address the letter to Sergeant Payen, 153rd battalion, 3rd company, at Issy. — In a few days, I shall come to see you, for one comes and goes fairly easily.

I embrace you very strongly. Your affectionate daughter.

Issy, Tuesday (April 11?)

I am so harassed that I scarcely know how I am going to write to you. I spent all the night near the crenellated wall, in the cemetery, beside Henri. And first of all, his eye is better. He has the eyelid and the area around the eye black and bleeding, the powder has made little holes there, but he no longer suffers from it; it is only inconvenient, for he can scarcely see because of the swelling of the eyelid.

I have lived entirely like the soldiers, for the canteen-woman does not seem to know her trade and stays always in the village. The men are very proper and even very kind to me. I eat with them, I peel vegetables with them; I amuse myself much during the rests in hearing them talk. There is so much natural wit, such droll repartee, in these true children of Paris! Our camp in the cemetery lends itself to it much. When I say camp, I am mistaken, for there are no tents and we have no blankets. The rain hardly ceases falling; so one finds soldiers in all the mausoleums. We crush the coffee on the marble of the tombs; the bacon is stored on the tomb of the Juillet family. All the tombs are more or less damaged, and these debris serve to reinforce the barricade on the road. We gather dandelion, and we feast on it without worrying about the fertilizer that produced it. This is amusing for a few days; however if I had no occupation, I should quickly grow bored of this picturesque, but very common society.

I have not yet been able to see the surgeon, he is not even at Issy. His infirmary attendant has had brought up to the cemetery a stretcher, so that we may, the two of us, give

the first aid, if it is needed. All the services are equally badly organized. The men sent to the trenches have neither equipment nor camping gear. So you hear every day Henri who has “chiseled at the Champ de Mars what they have of canteens and mess-tins. Provisions arrive two days late, and we are thirsty at the distribution, just at the hour when it is forbidden to have fire.

There are cannons behind the cemetery and the shells pass over our head like big globes of fire. One remains deafened for a few minutes by them, especially when it is a big piece called Père Duchesne. I was also shown an old gunner, named Joly, who is a remarkable pointer. His piece is in front of the cemetery gate, and he prevents the Versaillais from establishing a battery. They have no artillery at all in these parts, and they receive our shells from the forts and from the cemetery.

April 24? (16)

I now know what a combat is: Tonight they first let the Versaillais approach to within 30 meters of our walls; the National Guards had orders not to speak, and it was when they were quite close that the fusillade burst out through the loopholes. Never, as you may think, had I heard such a fusillade. I was crouched against the wall, beneath Henri’s loophole. The Versaillais used many rampart-rifles, and one heard that whistle hard. As soon as the fire had shown the place they

(2) “Yesterday,” recounts le Rappel of April 13, “the fire was on both sides notably slowed… All at once, at nine o’clock, detonations rang out with violent and pressed blows. It was Marshal Mac-Mahon who was trying to force Paris by a nocturnal surprise.

“The horrible combat lasted an hour and a half with a frightful intensity, then the shots slowed and soon all calmed. Mac-Mahon and the battalions of Versailles were repulsed. One can guess what hand of the politician or of the soldier, — of M. Thiers who lays for the Parisians the trap of negotiations, or of Mac-Mahon who must try to take on Paris his revenge for Sedan.” — (Paul Meurice.)

occupied, our artillerymen joined in. What a din, what chaos! Yet that did not prevent hearing the officers crying as they ran: “Feed the fire! Oblique to the left! Cease fire!” — It was not raining. The weather was clear and the fires lit up at intervals the crosses, those pyramids of white marble and the dark cypresses. What a strange scene! I really did not know whether I was dreaming or not.

This infernal racket ceased all at once, and the silence appears deeper, more solemn. Suddenly, in the midst of this calm, a nightingale began to sing. The contrast was so great between this pretty song so pure, so sweet, and what we had just heard, that I was left quite surprised. While the bullets were whistling, the little bird had remained hidden in its cypress; no doubt its nest was already there. Tears came to my eyes; it seemed I understood the nightingale: it sang love, family, peace. This moment of rest was not long, and the racket recommenced until day. No one on our side was wounded. I should be astonished if the Versaillais could say as much, for one saw them distinctly running to the right and left, with nothing to protect them, and our artillery hardly missed them.

The battalion is to be relieved this evening; it will be quartered in the village of Issy; that is not too soon; all are broken with fatigue. I think I shall come to see you one of these days. I should much like to know how your rheumatism is and what is becoming of Paul. Dear mother, how do you do to love still children who give you so much torment? Until soon, the daughter who loves you.

Alix

After a short stay in Paris, Alix Payen went to the Convent of the Birds.

2

Friday morning.

You no doubt imagine that on leaving you I peacefully returned to the Oiseaux. Well, not at all. The

battalion had left the day before and had spent the night in the trenches of the fort of Vanves. A small detachment had been sent to fetch provisions, Henri was part of it, and I rejoined them in the provisions wagon. This little voyage was not without emotion, for no one knew how to drive and we did not know the way. But in the end we arrived at the fort of Vanves without accidents.

Henri would have wished me to have a lodging there, but the commander of the fort was as amiable as a bulldog. On the other hand, on arriving at Issy, Henri presented me to his commander, who received me as graciously as possible. He offered me a cup of coffee, he had me given a blanket and a coat-blouse. This reception pleased me all the more in that this commander had just sent back, after a very dry admonishment, the captain’s wife; she was preventing her husband from doing his service. They are indeed newly married and our captain often left the trenches to go to his wife. I assure you that we shall not be reproached with that. Henri had too much received in his blanket, he has his nose and the it gave me from him; that is worth more. Commander Lalande pleased me much; he has a face still young, very lively and very black eyes, and entirely white hair. He must be a Southerner. Always ill, he has not left his bed since his arrival at Issy. He is said to be very energetic and very brave; his physiognomy indicates it well. Then we reached the trenches. I do not know if Paul knows them; it is in full clay-earth. You can see from here what the rain had made of it. To be sheltered, one had to follow a little rivulet full of water, so I am already dirty and muddied like a horror.

A few men of our battalion came out of the trenches… they skirmish with the Versaillais… They have the air of playing hide-and-seek. They fire a shot, then leave the tree that had hidden them, to put themselves under shelter of a stone or a mound. There they re-enter at full complement… We believed it at least, but one perceives in the plain a man making signals… I should have wanted to go and bring him aid, but I arrive too

late; he was seen from the fort, stretcher-bearers with a red-cross flag are bringing him back. He has his kneecap pierced by a ball and I believe his case very grave, because of the great quantity of blood he has lost.

A few hours later, as we were at dinner, another wounded man is signaled. Seated in a field of alfalfa, he was making great signs with his arms. No stretcher, no ambulance flag! My faith, never mind! There we are off out of the trenches, four men without arms and I, with no other safeguard than my armband. As we were no longer very far from the man, here he is rising suddenly and fleeing like a hare.

You can conceive our stupefaction. The captain shouts at us to come back running, and to deploy as skirmishers. No one fired at us. — Since, the same individual has begun his trick again. He has a uniform of a National Guard. It was probably a ruse to draw our men into the open. Resuming the girl ran in zigzag, jumping so as not to catch her dress in the bushes, and arriving stumbling at the embankment, or holding very anxiously, my poor big fellow, who holds out his hand to me and helps me to cross it.

The men shelter themselves in little holes, little hovels they construct with vine stakes. A blanket forms the roof. I slept in one of these shelters with the canteen-woman. A few officers did as we did. The night passed without a rifle shot, but we had a frightful tempest of wind and rain. We splash in a true marsh. I do not know if we are going to be left out here still tonight; there is talk of having us alternate: one night at the fort, one night at the trenches.

We eat all kinds of good things, which the men find in the surrounding fields, sorrel, asparagus, radishes. — Only it is not very substantial, and the provisions continue to arrive very little.

I am always astonished at the attentions one has for

me. Thus, the water for the kitchen is fairly far away, and one brings only just what is needed, but I always find in the morning a mess-tin of water for my toilet. Today, as it was cold, Chanoine had even warmed my water! This Chanoine is a true Parisian of the faubourg, gay, mocking, a bit of a rascal and chatty as a magpie. He is very amusing to hear. Another original type is Paul Parledon, professor at the Vanves college, very instructed and refined. He improvises verses our situation inspires in him. A violent heartbreak makes him bizarre, our soldiers say a bit cracked. To chase away his black ideas, he has taken the unfortunate habit of drinking immoderately. Henri alone has on him a great influence, and the poor lad, all ashamed to find someone who takes interest in him, confides his pain to my husband, begging him to give him only what he needs. That does not prevent him from getting tipsy sometimes, and it is Henri whom they hold responsible for it.

This morning they skirmished a little. Imagine that three mounted gendarmes came brazenly to lodge themselves this morning in a little house, facing us. I do not understand that the fort did not send them a few shells. We have facing us the plateau of Châtillon…

I take up my letter again after lunch. Your father was welcome, for the provisions have not yet arrived. Henri has had a gourbi arranged for me next to him. I think the canteen-woman has had enough of walking by night in the trenches, and that she is going to sleep in the village. The chief surgeon is going to name shortly a stretcher-bearer and a bag-bearer in the company. We are going at last to be a bit organized.

Drop your letters at the cour des Petites-Écuries, no. 16, where there is a special box for the 153rd.

Until soon, I think, I embrace you well.

Your daughter who loves you.

Alix Payen

My boots are working wonderfully. Understand that I have not yet taken them off. We shall not be relieved still today. There is discontent among the men, because of the bad administration, the excess of fatigue, and

above all because the trenches are very badly defended; there is a quarter of the men there that there should be.

I have just cast a glance at my gourbi. It is superb, more beautiful than that of the officers. It is four of my friends who built it for me.

Our last wounded, Corporal Moulin, is at the Luxembourg ambulance. You can go see him.

Convent of the Birds, April 24, ‘71.

Dear mother,

I have received no letter from you. I was counting on coming to see you tomorrow, but it is not possible. I believe however that they will not delay in bringing the battalion back into Paris. We have been unfortunately in these horrors of trenches; the rain has not left us. You cannot imagine in what state of filth, of mud, we all were. I spent the second night in my pretty gourbi; unfortunately, as it was covered with espalier branches, the water came through quite well. Henri found a way to cover me with all our blankets and to remain, himself, exposed to the rain…

We remained three days in this cloaca, and we should perhaps still be there, but for the dissensions of the captain. The discontent was at its peak. Save two, all the officers had disappeared. No one to distribute a little. A street-urchin of 16, who had drunk a little too much, leaves like an arrow out of the trenches to skirmish. The shots do not delay. Two of ours go to back up this bad lad, and there they are all three running, lying in the mud, and drawing on themselves a hail of bullets. We were very anxious. They returned, however, safe and sound; but, as evening was arriving and we were not being relieved, the battalion mutinied and declared it would not stay this night at the trenches. Think that with our stay at the cemetery of Issy, that made the ninth night out, always without camp. The captain goes himself to the fort, and this time he is told formally that a battalion is going to replace us. Nothing. Finally, at ten o’clock, the captain declares to the furious men that we are leaving all the same.

They had found the trench empty on arriving; they were rendering it the same. Think that since four o’clock the bags were made and that we no longer even had the insufficient shelter of the gourbis; we had had to strip them of the blankets and coverings that were there.

There we were off then in the dark night, in pouring rain, in mud up to the knee, and in the deepest silence. Scarcely had a few bullets whistled on us. After an hour and a half of march, we were at the fort of Vanves. We were not expected; there was no room. What a ruin this unhappy fort! There are not in the barracks two rooms where water does not fall. No candles, no straw. The blankets were too soaked to be used, so that our night was hardly better than at the trench.

In the morning, clarions of another battalion offered us hospitality in a room with a chimney, with a good fire, and revived us all. Then we leave again for Issy. La Lisbonne on horseback takes the head of the battalion to lead it to the trenches of Montrouge. But this time everyone protests, and there we are at the Oiseaux. Since the time this house has served as barracks, one might have, it seems to me, organized the rooms; but no; one must always sleep on the floor. Henri found, for the canteen-woman and for me, a little room which he managed to furnish, except for the mattresses. Impossible to procure any, so that I slept on an iron bed, directly on the iron slats arranged in squares; in the morning it seemed to me that I had all these squares imprinted on my back; but I slept, I dropped, on thorns. Today I have straw galore: Lisbonne gave me, reluctantly, two trusses, taken from his horse’s feed.

This house and the garden make my admiration. One cannot dream of something better for founding a Colony. I found in a cellar piles of pious books torn, burned. Perhaps there were valuable books, but there are imbeciles who amuse themselves only at destroying. I must say however that all the volumes I looked at were accounts of idiotic miracles or examples

of piety for seminarists. I am quite glad to note that the men of our side have committed no degradation; they have neither broken nor burned as their predecessors had done.

Until now I have not had grave wounds to care for, but only little ouches. People come to me for a pin, a needle of thread… I have also offered myself as public ground.

Arriving here, Henri inaugurated, to calm the general discontent, the organization of a concert for the benefit of the wounded. The commander gave his authorization; all the Staff will attend. It is not pianos that are lacking. The cracked poet will declaim something; there are a few good singers; many know little songs; perhaps our negress will sing too; then pianists are not lacking.

I am going to go gather flowers to decorate the hall, and this evening I shall make the collection. That will give me the men’s rage is forgotten; one thinks now only of the concert. However the officers are warned that we shall be called this night, probably at three o’clock, for the trenches of Clamart. I greatly fear that many will refuse and that there may be some revolt. They are not, however, cowards, but the fatigue is extreme. Moreover, almost all, returned at first to the Prince Eugène barracks for 25 days, have not been able to get permission to fetch linen. You can imagine their filth!

What is sad is that, if these men are brought back to Paris, they will not want to leave again; whereas, if care had been taken not to exhaust them all at once, they would ask nothing better than to continue the service.

The ambulance has no wounded; they are quickly sent off to Paris; there are only a few tired men. Besides, it is not a happy idea to put an ambulance in a barracks. It is a continual noise. The beds are horrible and there are no medicines. A man of ours has fever; for four days the surgeon has promised to have quinine brought, and every day he forgets it.

My companion, the mulatto woman, is a true spoiled child, a real baby, who cries when she is weary, and yet does not want to leave her husband. She took the title of canteen-woman only to follow him, but now she entirely renounces her canteen. She always sleeps at her inn and eats there too. Her childish manners annoy her husband, but displease everyone. As for me, she does not displease me. She is original and not stupid, though a little lazy. The captain’s wife left us long ago, by order of the commander.

I am always the object of the attentions of part of the battalion. I have done nothing for that, but Henri is such a good fellow, so loved, it is to him that these cares are addressed. They scrounge for something good, that I be invited to taste it, and I am sure many would put themselves to trouble to please me.

As I was busy decorating the concert hall, someone cries out to me: a wounded man! I run there. It is an artilleryman, brought by the good old pointer of Père Duchesne. A ball has pierced his calf; I fear the bone is touched. Naturally there is no doctor. With the infirmary attendant we make a first dressing. The poor wounded man has fever; he speaks ceaselessly of his four children and of his fear that they will cut off his leg. His old companion lifts his morale as best he can: “Four children,” he says, “what a fine thing! As for us, we are nine boys and me who makes ten.”

I leave you, dear mother, without hoping to have a letter from you, but I shall not delay in seeing you. I embrace you all very tenderly.

Our concert was very varied; some things very pretty, others of a completed ridiculousness. The success was this a poor poet who, though a bit drunk, recited very fine verses of his own. Our little mulatto woman said very nicely a charming little song; finally, what gave me great pleasure, a sailor sang one of papa’s songs. Henri took such trouble! ordering everything, watching over everything. I collected in his kepi and the receipts have been superb, nearly

80 francs. It was midnight when everyone went to bed. — At two o’clock in the morning the call sounds for departure. Half of our battalion is going to occupy the trenches of Clamart, under the leadership of the captain of the 2nd company, a young Polish careless and lazy. Henri, seeing me very weary, had me turn back, telling me to rejoin him a little later. From five o’clock in the morning the batteries of Châtillon were raining on the fort of Issy a veritable hail of projectiles. I was on foot, accompanying a convoy of munitions; one had to run and shelter as best one could. I then reached the Clamart station, and I saw there an awful artillery combat. The three batteries of Châtillon were indefatigable and overwhelmed principally the fort of Issy. The latter replied, as did Vanves and a gunboat; but little by little our fire slowed; that of Issy was soon extinguished, save for a single piece. The Versaillais have excellent gunners. The shells fall just right; they scarcely deviate by a few meters. One by one they dismount the pieces of the fort of Issy. One sees fly into the air baskets garnished with earth, then a few sections of wall collapse with a crash. Shell splinters are thrown into a station where I am; these splinters arrive whirling with a noise resembling a mewing.

A wagon and several men of the 108th arrive running and staggering. They come from the fort where they had gone to fetch provisions. They say the position is no longer tenable. In the fort 40 men have just been killed or wounded. I see a horse whose muzzle has been carried off by a splinter. The unhappy beast leaps, takes a few steps at a gallop, then falls. Discouragement has set in among the garrison of the fort and the gates had to be closed to prevent desertions.

Weary of waiting at this station, I venture into the trenches; the beginning is occupied by the 108th, we are quite at the end. In many places, the embankments not being high enough to shelter a man standing, stones have been arranged to form loopholes at the top. A Versailles ball catches the angle of one of these stones and arrives shredded at our feet. Another

strikes at the tip of the nose a man who bleeds like a steer; it grazes the cheek of another and falls, deadened, on a small one. — The commander comes to pay us a visit: he has learned that the gates of the fort of Issy are closed, so that we shall have no dinner there. Fortunately a few old foresighted soldiers have a little reserve, and I am invited by them; then the neighboring battalion offers us a few loaves.

Night comes, the cannonade slows, but the fusillade begins with rage; one would say a swarm of big bumblebees passing ceaselessly over our heads. We fire without rest, but the cartridges approaching are not all of good caliber; then the rifles have been too long exposed to the rain. In no time here are a dozen men blinded by these bad snuff-boxes, and their rifles out of service. Needless to say there is neither armorer nor spare arms. I bathe with fresh water all these poor ill-treated eyes.

The combat is fierce and our position becomes very critical; we are going to run out of cartridges. The captain has the fire cease. It is now toward the cemetery that the attack of the Versaillais is directed. Believing the trench abandoned, they approach. Our men silently fix bayonets. The Versaillais are no more than 50 meters away. The captain comes back on tiptoe; he has collected a few packets of cartridges, our last resource. He commands two successive platoon fires. That succeeds marvelously. The surprised Versaillais retire in haste. As day was beginning to break, that was for us a powerful aid.

I had a great anguish: the idea of attending a combat with cold steel made me shudder. If the enemy had suspected our destitution, we should easily have been taken prisoner.

They come to relieve us. As we leave we must step over the corpse of the man killed this night. I am told for my consolation that he was a boy without family and a fairly ugly fellow. However the captain is somber. This man had refused to go to the trenches, saying he was tired, badly shod,

and the captain had had two men called to make him march by force.

On returning to the Oiseaux I was able to sleep a few hours. There were several wounded last night. M. Mallet, the husband of the young mulatto woman, who had just been named sub-lieutenant, was killed by accident. I have the sad mission of bringing his wife back to Paris.

She lodges in furnished rooms with a horrible woman who roughly turns her out, because she owes her money. I installed the poor negress at our place, promising her to come back the next day.

Almost the whole company obtained permission to come to the burial. The poor woman wept much, sobbed, but she is so childlike, so light, that her grief will last little. Our cracked poet has really a good heart, he promised to pay little by little the debt, so that this little woman would not be tormented. Henri made a collection that was very productive. So here she is for the moment sheltered from need. Before the burial she had the coffin unnailed to embrace once more her husband; he was already much changed.

The cortège was of eight hearses.

3

The chances of appeasement diminished more and more. The situation of Neuilly and the suburban communes, Asnières, Clamart, Bellevue, Châtillon, was terrible. Placed between two fires, the inhabitants did not know how to escape the projectiles. “They could not even peacefully carry their dead to the cemetery. At Bellevue, the mother-in-law of Charles Edmond was dragged to her last resting-place, at night, by her daughter and a servant, obliged to improvise a bier with the first crate that came to hand, to

dig the hole themselves and to bury the corpse near the surface.” (1)

When an armistice was finally signed on April 25, the fire ceased only at a quarter past nine: “At once relief was organized for the inhabitants of Neuilly. These unfortunates had been living for twenty days in their cellars; their destitution was extreme. Never was a spectacle more harrowing than that of this population, inoffensive victim of civil war.” (2)

On April 30, the fort of Issy, which since the start of the second siege had served as target for the Versaillais, was now only a heap of debris. “Its garrison of 300 men, abandoned by their commander, left in the morning, spiking the cannons.” (3)

For several days, the Versaillais did not dare enter the fort. Retaken by the Federates, it was abandoned only after a heroic defense, on May 9.

The Committee had named Éd. Moreau, civil commissioner to Rossel. These two men had entirely opposed views, and despite their remarkable intelligence, never came to agreement.

4

Dear mother,

Thursday May 11, 1871.

We left again toward two o’clock from the barracks, music at the head, I in carriage. Quite a few

(1 and 2) Henri Martin. (3) “In the night from the 30th to the 30th, a trench situated on the right of the fort of Issy had been surprised by the enemy and the battery it covered. Mégy, the incompetent commander of the fort, seeing his ruin. The French extending on his right, had taken fright and evacuated the fort with its garrison. Cluseret, on this news, had set out for Issy, and, gathering some troops, had brought them back to the fort, where he had remained the first. It was on his return from this expedition that the Commission had had him arrested.” — Rossel confined Mégy and sent General Eudes to the fort of Issy.

refractories had been rounded up and their bad mood was visible. At Courbelles, we made a halt, and the men began to disperse, but the band having played a quadrille, there they all were dancing like mad. However, when it was a matter of passing the fortifications, almost the whole 2nd company mutinied and refused to advance, under the pretext that the battalion was transformed into a free corps. I do not know what is true in all that. Anyway it made a most sad scene. The poor commander was in an atrocious anger; he wept with rage, treating them as cowards. I too was indignant; the carriage had stopped, I jumped down and crossed the powder-magazine. I heard as I passed: “Bravo, there is a plucky little woman!” And everyone crossed the fortifications.

We stopped at a very short distance, at the Porte Bineau. It is the beginning of Levallois-Perret. The wine merchants bustled, multiplied themselves, to serve everyone; but as soon as the commander had cried that we would spend the night there, change of scene most comic: the wine merchants close their shops and put up the shutters. Fortunately, there are fine new houses, with numerous signs for apartments to let; so we are perfectly lodged, though in rooms without furniture. The concierge was of a charming complaisance; she put in my room a straw mattress and a feather bed. I shared this singular bed with a new canteen-woman. Her husband is not from Paris, and she made this profession by taste, for she is said to be rich.

In the day, my big rascal Chanoine, who now styles himself my batman, goes for a stroll to his mother’s, in the village of Clichy. There is a little passage between the two villages, where shells fall well. We have already had many visitors at Clichy. The good old woman received her son grumbling, but

Issy, and, gathering some troops, had brought them back to the fort, where he had remained the first. It was on his return from this expedition that the Commission had had him arrested.” — Rossel confined Mégy and sent General Eudes to the fort of Issy.

embracing him. Only the good lad has so numerous a family, so many cousins with whom he had to go drink a glass, that I finally grew impatient, and I decided to go away alone.

Judge of my anxiety: night had come, and I did not know in what direction to go. There are enormous avenues completely deserted. Finally, from National Guards to National Guards, I ended by finding my battalion again; but you understand that it was not difficult, since I did not know what address to give. The battalion, arrived in the morning, could not yet be known.

This morning we left in superb sunshine. We are in a jumble of villas, most of which seem to be lace, so riddled they are. I do not think Saint-Cloud is worse. We are in full sunshine, near a fine barricade equipped with four cannons. Our flag has just been shredded by a discharge of grapeshot. You judge of the joy of all: it is a trophy, such a flag! They already think of the day when they will go to the Commune to bring it, to ask for another.

More than ever I am the object of the cares and attentions of all. They have raised a great tent for me and they have brought me, from the abandoned houses, a mattress, carpets, chairs, tables, dishes, and flowers in bundles.

The battalion is divided in two; there is no canteen-woman with us, so I have helped to cook. Father Chrétien brought, I do not know from where, cabbages, salad, little new potatoes, etc. They have just brought me a year of the Magasin Pittoresque, but I scarcely feel like reading. Others have fashion plates, serial novels cut out of newspapers.

The doctor returned to the Porte Bineau, leaving his bag. I think he will come back for the night. They say tomorrow the letter service will be done more regularly.

Good evening, dear mother; I embrace you all three. If you were sick, or Paul with his Porte Maillot, write to me, putting

your letter at no. 16, cour des Petites-Écuries. The orderly fourrier goes to collect them every day.

Until tomorrow another little note. I embrace you.

Alix

Levallois-Perret, Friday.

Dear mother,

… The pretty villas whose gardens we occupied are the village of Neuilly, and ahead of us, our battalion occupied that rue Perronet that Paul had so much trouble crenelling. The men we relieved at this post tell us that they wrote a letter and threw it with a stone to the line soldiers, to urge them to fraternize. The latter answered by the same route that this was impossible for them, but that the Federates would do well not to fire, because they could easily be cut up.

The night was fairly calm. With us, all day, the men amuse themselves visiting the villas and bring back, one a mattress, another a carpet or dishes. The captain gets angry when incongruous objects appear, such as a syringe, parasol, crinoline, etc. That does not prevent our fool Chanoine from dressing as a woman, and using an atrocious breath. The hats are picturesque. The sun is so ardent that one sees lots of women’s straw hats. One of the artillerymen who serve the pieces of the barricade has put on a tricorne hat of a city sergeant, that he wears as a tricorne. Old Father Chrétien has adopted the cuirass of our coffin of a large Norman bonnet; it is a true nature; moreover, he uses, as a mess-tin, a porcelain chamber pot.

I have visited a few of our houses. It is deplorable: ruins, and always ruins. In the midst of all that, the gardens flourish and grow at random. I have a bouquet as big as a bundle. The red strawberries are already, and the green currants find amateurs.

During the night, they fired at each other as usual, but with less violence. The weather was glacial, we were all frozen. We had only one wounded man, lightly hit in both legs by a shell splinter. A few meters from

us, there is a man killed four days ago. We should like to go pick him up, but the bullets rain on us each time we try. As it is useless to be killed for a dead man, he is left there. What rendered our position disagreeable is that we had the enemy’s crossfire both in front and on the left side. At four in the morning, the 106th came to relieve us and we returned to our quarters at Levallois. But we had in vain razed the gardens, lined the walls, from Mont Valérien, the Versaillais have our lodging, and the shells began to bombard the poor village. At once the shops close, the inhabitants go down into the cellars. They aim quite well. We had so far escaped with broken windows, when a young girl was killed in her room next to us. The commander narrowly escaped being killed by a shell that burst under our carriage door, doing no other harm than a strong contusion to a man’s thigh.

This morning I wrote for a soldier a letter to his sweetheart! When I had finished, another approaches and says to me with an air of pity: “How can one not know how to write? Me, I have a handwriting that should earn me the rank of major; see rather.” And he shows me a letter he was about to give to the vaguemestre; I read in block letters: “To Mademoiselle Clarisse, lady of the world.”

5

All hope was lost for the Commune. Thiers held the victory; “he exulted. In vain was he pressed to spare the horrors of bombardment to the populations of Montrouge, Issy and Vanves, the batteries of the army kept firing.

“It was only on May 9 that the Versaillais dared to occupy the fort of Issy, which permitted them to attack the fort of Vanves. They began to crush La Muette

and Auteuil under the shells of the formidable batteries of Montretout, which counted 70 naval pieces.” (1)

The members of the Commune accused each other mutually. Rossel gave his resignation and Delescluze replaced him as delegate to war. In the night from the 13th to the 14th, the fort of Vanves surrendered.

As the situation of Paris became more desperate, exasperation grew, and violent measures were decreed.

On May 11, it was decided to raze the house of Thiers “the patricide,” despite the opposition of Beslay, who gave his resignation.

April 12, 1871, the Commune of Paris,

Considering that the imperial column of the Place Vendôme is a monument of barbarism, a symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult of the victors to the vanquished, a perpetual attack on one of the three great principles of the Republic, decrees:

Sole article: The column of the Place Vendôme shall be demolished.

The artists and historians did not approve this decision. Victor Considérant, making himself their interpreter, wrote to the members of the Commune the following letter: “Citizens, the considerations of your decree are admirable. The conclusion, the demolition, is, in my sense, radically bad. A great enlightened people no more effaces its history than it destroys

(1) Georges Bourgin.

its monuments: it leaves these procedures to the barbarians. It judges its history and it judges its monuments.

“In fact, the column is a national monument. The Commune does not, alone and without the assent of France, have the right to destroy it. But Paris has the right to inscribe its judgment on a monument whose significance it finds dishonors it. — Leave then the column in place; leave it even this statue, where Napoleonic art had wished to fuse, by coupling, Caesar, Charlemagne and Louis XIV, in the figure of the chief of this nefarious race. Only, of the crowned head, with the face of a living man, make the head of Death wearing a diadem, and let the hand, skeletal, hold either the scepter or the scythe, same emblem. It will be macabre, imperial, hideous and superb.” (1)

“The logic of demolition would necessitate that of twenty other monuments, notably of the Arch of Triumph of the Étoile. Do better. This monument is not finished. The idea was attributed to M. Thiers of giving it, as crowning, a colossal eagle with extended wings. That was in the aesthetic of this adorer of glories of prey. — Propose that the monument receive as crowning a heap of corpses, French, English, German, Russian, Egyptian, — synthetic and terribly realistic representation of all the slaughters that the great man of war commanded as chief; and let the statue in the frock coat, that M. Thiers had placed on the column, fished out of the Seine, — where it had been thrown, I believe, — be raised, sunk to the knees, atop the tumulus of his throat-cut.

(1) That would have been only attenuated vandalism.

“The Arch of Triumph will be preserved, crowned — and judged.”

The column Vendôme was thrown down on May 16. (1)

6

Alix Payen to Madame Milliet

Neuilly, Sunday May 13.

Dear mother,

We rested two days and only this morning at 3 o’clock did we arrive here. I have made fuller acquaintance with the doctor; we understand each other very well. He is a very proper man, and that changes agreeably from the rest of the company. The commander has taken upon himself to accept four ambulance nurses, much to the displeasure of the major and of me. The doctor received these women badly, but one must make the best of it. What is most annoying is that, of the four, three are veritable geese, and the other a woman envious, embittered, finally a bore. The doctor has declared that in his absence I alone shall have the disposal of the bag and the direction of the ambulance. I want to try to make it go well, but there will surely be vexation, because of the cantankerous woman and her husband, who is still more so.

We are installed in the stables of a splendid mansion. The gardens are magnificent. The house is almost entirely collapsed. The stables are in the basement, which one enters by a slope from the garden side. They are fine boxes, with marble drinking troughs, and it is furnished in a sumptuous manner, with the lintels of all the rooms; it is of an unheard luxury. They say this property belongs to the Duke of Mouchy. We have mattresses, but it is cold.

Though we are in the second line, we very well distinguish the rurals. Those of the first trench have been hailed by the Versaillais. One of them cried: “Will you stand

(1) See Maxime Vuillaume, Mes cahiers rouges, V, page 179.

us a drink?” And the National Guards answered: “Come fetch it, pig!”

In the evening, before our departure from Levallois, we were lying down, but a few men were still chatting on the doorstep, when a ball pierced the leg of one of them. The doctor being absent, it was I who bandaged him. This ball must have come from a neighboring house. Searches were made which remained without result.

Dear mother, Monday morning.

The night has been stormy, but, thank God, without great damage. Only one killed and four lightly wounded. Our house has collapsed under the bombs, but our stable was in the basement, has had nothing. There was express prohibition to fire: we had the guard of the munitions, and the shells were raining quite enough. The fusillade no longer had the same sound. They were exclusively explosive balls. (1) Henri was chief of post and we were only twelve, where thirty should have been. Fortunately our wounded could be brought in while it was still daylight, for there was prohibition to have light.

Two of the new ambulance nurses are going to be, I believe, sent back; they had an atrocious fear; but the grumpy one and another have bravely earned my esteem. Our men have been truly heroic, and yet the Versaillais excited them by a thousand insults and bravados. We were silently mounting two cannon pieces, when these scoundrels send a kerosene bomb into the house we occupied. We had to clear out, and the glare of the fire prevented our artillerymen from finishing their work. It was superb!

We were relieved this morning; here we are at rest for 48 hours; so I am tranquil. Besides my major is very prudent, too prudent in my opinion. Your letter arrived yesterday, you think how pleased I was. This morning we

(1) Madame Payen had kept some splinters of them that had pierced the hood of her waterproof.

continue to hear the fusillade. Do not count on seeing me yet; permissions are granted with difficulty, and I prefer not to ask for one. If you write to me again by the same route, I pray you to go up to the house, and to take from my wardrobe a chemise, drawers, especially new, and a pair of stockings. If I have an occasion, I shall have all that picked up at your place.

I think that tonight it will again be very hot. I hope our battalion will be brought to the order of the day.

Farewell, mother. I love you and embrace you all very tenderly.

7

Dear mother,

I have just brought back my poor Henri seriously wounded. A shell splinter took off a finger and badly damaged another; then it entered into his side and pierced the thigh through and through. They wanted to send him to Beaujon, but he preferred to return home, where he will be cared for by the major of our battalion, who also returned this morning. I shall write to you in the ambulance carriage; I do not know if you will be able to read me. — I embrace you and count on your visit.

Alix

Dear mother,

I am very troubled about Paul and about you; write to me to tell me where he is and what he is doing. Is it not desolating not to be able to be together at such a moment! Yesterday morning I went to the town hall, where M. Salomon gave me a letter for a surgeon. He came immediately. He is an aged man. He made a dressing that seemed to me very well done; in any case, he put much care and attention into it. The finger cannot be saved. Today he will put something on it to bring out the splinters. The two other wounds frightened him. He pushed into one a probe that disappeared up to 15 centimeters. He believes it is the same splinter that pierced through. Finally I see that these wounds, which I considered

as much less grave than those of the hand, are not without danger. This doctor recommends extreme cleanliness. He must be changed often of linen, and you know that is not easy, but I shall watch over it carefully, for the smell is already horrible.

Yesterday this dressing had tired him much, and the fever is quite violent. The doctor desires that he eat as little as possible, and the poor big fellow feels need; nothing but a little soup doubles his fever.

I scarcely know what is happening, since I do not go out. Our battalion returned yesterday morning; a few men came to see Henri. As for M. Peraldi, he did not appear; thus I am vexed with him. I do not regret him as surgeon. I believe this old gentleman is quite as good.

Write to me, dear mother, I am anxious about Paul. I am gloomy, I assure you, and I am in mortal anxiety.

I embrace you all very tenderly. Your daughter who loves you.

Alix

8

On May 21, the gate of bastion 64 near the Porte de Saint-Cloud having been opened by treachery, the troops of generals Douay, of Cissey, Ladmirault and Vinoy entered Paris.

The partisans of the Versailles Government, in order not to be confounded with its enemies, hastened to take as insignia a tricolor armband. My mother, who trembled at the idea of seeing me shot, said to me timidly: “Let me sew this armband to your sleeve.” I took the ribbon and tore it. At once I saw my mother’s face light up with joy. On one side she would have wished to save me from danger; on the other she would have a little despised me, had I committed this cowardice of renouncing my convictions at such a moment.

Madame Milliet to M. Félix Milliet

Paris, May 26, ‘71.

We are alive. — No, my dear friend, it is not possible to depict to you the horror of yesterday’s day, Paris in flames. On all sides they were fighting on the boulevard Montparnasse and at the Observatoire, when all at once fire takes hold of the Luxembourg huts and, an instant later, of the powder-magazine blows up. Our house rocks as by an earthquake; doors and windows fly in splinters. With Paul and Louise we rush into the garden; shell splinters and bullets rained there. We were about forty people there; impossible to flee, fighting was on the boulevard. The attack and the defense were furious at the Pantheon which they had ordered to blow up. There was there an immense quantity of powder. We awaited our fate, resigned.

During that time the Hôtel de Ville was burning, then the Tuileries, the Ministry of Finances, the Palace of Justice, what do I know? I cannot help believing that those who burn all these monuments are people sold, paid to commit these crimes. — Then, alongside these madmen, how many heroic souls!

They are fighting today with an unheard violence; on both sides no quarter. The dead are piled up by cartloads; all that is horrible, horrible.

Henri is gravely wounded. I am without news of him.

Alix to Madame Milliet

Dear mother,

I do not know if you are in Paris or near my father. Come back quickly, Henri is dying. I doubt that you will see him again. It is horrible! I beg you, come. Yesterday the doctors warned me.

In a letter, written a short time after these events, I recounted to J. Nicole the consequences they had for our family:

Dear friend,

I must tell you how I escaped. Exhausted with fatigue, I was coming home in the early morning, a few moments before the explosion of the Luxembourg powder-magazine. You know that we live quite near; we thought the house was collapsing. My mother and my young sister threw themselves into my arms. Louise had slightly wounded herself in the face with glass splinters. We awaited the probable explosion of the Pantheon; the whole quarter would perhaps have collapsed into the catacombs.

We went down into the garden like all the people of the house. A few stray bullets still whistled above our heads, and we awaited death with that stunned calm given by emotions which exceed measure. — Impossible to leave: the Versaillais already occupied the boulevard Saint-Michel; some ladies shook their hands and threw themselves on their necks, calling them “our saviors.” Our house was not shot at.

A word spoken then and I was shot like a dog. My elder sister, crossing the city in the midst of the shells and the bullets, ran to us, to know whether we lived and to tell us that the state of her husband was becoming graver. I spent some nights at his bedside with my sister. She helped the doctor to dress a deep and hideous wound.

Henri died in awful sufferings, teeth clenched, no longer able to drink or eat. It was tetanus.

One of his relatives, an officer in the army, knocks at the door; he enters almost joyous, knowing nothing, happy to see again his cousin, and finds him dead.

They were rare, those of Henri Payen’s friends who dared to follow him to the cemetery.

The very day of the burial, Henri’s relative

brought my mother a pass and the next day she took us away, my two sisters and me, almost by force; we did not want to leave our dear Paris, so heroic and so unhappy; we should have liked to die with it.

Madame Milliet to M. Félix Milliet

Paris, May 30, ‘71.

My dear friend, I have very sad news to give you, this poor Henri is no more. He died yesterday at 5 o’clock after ten days of illness. Alix is in despair. I should like to take her away as soon as it shall be possible, but I do not wish to leave anyone behind me, I wish to take them all. And no doubt some days will yet pass before it shall be possible to obtain a pass. I am broken with fatigue and emotion. We came close to all perishing when the Luxembourg powder-magazine blew up.

ARMY OF VERSAILLES GENERAL STAFF. — PLACE OF PARIS

The chief of post at the Porte de Saint-Cloud will allow to leave freely Madame Milliet, née de Tucé; M. Paul Milliet, her son, student of the École des Beaux-Arts; Mademoiselle Louise Milliet, her daughter; Madame Veuve Payen, née Milliet, her daughter, to go to Rambouillet, via Versailles.

The present pass is valid only for the day of June 1, 1871.

Paris, May 31, 1871.

The General Commanding the Place, H. DE GESLIN

9

At the news of the blow that had just struck us, Fernand wrote from Algeria to his sister:

My dear Alix,

Jemmapes, June 13, 1871.

You know if I loved him. I appreciated all the good qualities of this poor dear Henri, his good heart, his frank and loyal character. That is to tell you how much I share your grief and how much I regret him.

I had grown attached to him. In my thought he was so much part of the family; I regarded him as my brother, and I wept, indeed I wept, I swear to you, on receiving Louise’s letter announcing his death.

After having worked through so many rough ordeals, at the moment when this awful struggle was going to end, he succumbed. I wrote you lately, at the end of the siege of Paris by the Prussians, if he had been killed by them, defending his homeland, I would have wept much, but what doubles my grief is to know that he was killed by a French shell. What a horrible thing these fratricidal wars, where each party believes it is fighting for a just and good cause!

Tell mama that I have received her letter, but that she never gave me details about the explosion of the Luxembourg powder-magazine, where she ran danger. She does not speak to me of Paul either. What has become of him in all this brawl, and how did he do to come out of it? Tell her then to write me. Be without anxiety on my account. I can answer for the tranquillity of my district, but it is necessary that we have troops. None of those that were announced has yet arrived. I do not know what they are thinking of. The towns are blockaded, the columns being too few in number to be able to operate effectively, at least thirty thousand more men would be needed in the province. It is here as in France, the race of lawyers and journalists that has fomented this insurrection and lost Algeria.

You have personally run many dangers, dear sister, during all this war. I know from mama that you did not spare yourself, and that you were of an outstanding devotion. You have unfortunately not been able to keep the one to whom you had given your affection. Rest now; you have found your place again in the family; try to calm your grief, our affection will work at it.

Embrace for me all the family. It is in these moments of trial that it is good to tighten the bonds that unite us.

I embrace you very tenderly. Your brother who loves you.

Fernand

IV — VICTIMS AND EXECUTIONERS

Our dead. — The war of the streets. — Order reigns. — Doctor Faneau. — Mourning and ruin. — Delbrouck. — The children. — The future.

Their blood makes a frightful pool upon the earth… O dead for my country, I am your envier. Victor Hugo

1

In 1840, Thiers, presenting his project of fortifications, indignantly rejected the idea that his cannons could ever be turned against the Parisians: “It is to calumniate a government, whatever it may be,” he said, “to suppose that it could one day seek to maintain itself by bombarding the capital.”

On August 5, 1871, the same M. Thiers declared to the National Assembly: “We have crushed an entire quarter of Paris,” and on May 24: “I have shed torrents of blood.” (1)

In effect, as early as May 8, the Javel quay, the Grenelle quarter

(1) He had handed his right of pardon over to a Commission he called: “My execution squad.”

and half of Passy were covered with shells by the Versaillais.

Lissagaray brings close to these odious violences the eloquent protest signed a few months earlier by all the members of the Government of National Defense:

“The greatest infamy of which modern history has kept memory is being accomplished at this hour, Paris is being bombarded.” (1)

The partisans of order, suddenly become very numerous, “make the Versaillais advance without danger by complicit houses. The night lights up with formidable fires.” (2) Thus burn the Tuileries, the Legion of Honor, the Council of State, the Court of Accounts, the Ministry of Finances, the Library of the Louvre, then on the 24th, the Hôtel de Ville (3) where had been deposited the body of the heroic Dombrowski, killed beside Vermorel.

It is principally members of the International who courageously opposed the violences of the inflamed: “Theisz prevented the burning of the Post; Camélinat, that of the Mint. Beslay protected the Bank; Varlin tried to save the hostages devoted to death by the Blanquists. The bourgeoisie afterward remembered only its fear.” (4)

The war of the streets lasted eight days. “The killing began from the first moments. Nothing explained it then, neither the horror of the fires, which no one fore-

(1) Signed: Trochu, Jules Favre, Ernest Picard, Jules Simon, Jules Ferry, Emmanuel Arago, Garnier-Pagès, Pelletan. (2 and 3) Georges Bourgin, pages 178 and 179. (3) Burned by Pindy, governor of the monument.

saw, nor the execution of the hostages, still distant, nothing, I say, save precise orders.” (1)

“A Marquis de Galliffet, stopping a column of prisoners, plucked from the ranks, on the simple inspection of their physiognomies, eighty unfortunates whose faces did not appeal to him, aligned them along the outer crest of a rampart, in such a way that their corpses, in pirouetting, would fall from on high into the ditch at the foot of the wall, and had them shot at point-blank range by his chasseurs. The former officer of the Empire still believed himself in Mexico under the orders of Bazaine the traitor.” (2)

2

The infamy of the Prussians was greatly surpassed by that of the Versaillais. Shortly before the probable explosion of the Luxembourg powder-magazine, the two hundred sick and wounded who were in the huts of the Pépinière had been transported to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. The direction of the ambulance had been confided to one of our friends, like us a disciple of Fourier, to the young and distinguished doctor Faneau. As soon as the Versaillais had entered Paris, he had a severe search made in the ambulance, and the few arms still there were deposited at the town hall. Wednesday morning, after the terrible combats of the rue de Vaugirard and of the Vieux-Colombier, a sergeant of the line, helped by ambulance attendants, brought down the red flag flying over

(1) Camille Pelletan. (2) Henri Martin.

the door of the seminary and replaced it with a tricolor flag.

A few hours later, a ferocious brute, Captain L…, entered the ambulance at the head of his troops: “Are there Communards here? — I have only wounded,” answers the doctor. “But these are insurgents and you are the friend of these rogues. Where is the chief here? — It is I.” The captain trained his revolver on Faneau. “Do not kill him,” cried an aide-major. “Go in, or I begin with you.” A revolver shot barely reached the victim. A soldier finished him with a rifle shot at point-blank range. A thread of blood spurted from the wound. Death was instantaneous. (1)

“Thus perished, while still young, in the midst of his sick, a doctor of great merit and great future. Surgeon of the Press ambulances during the siege, esteemed, loved by all, doctor Faneau paid with his life the crime of having remained faithful to a ministry honored by all civilized peoples.”

In the chapel, two ambulance attendants brought in the dead of the previous day; both are massacred. By a ladder leading to the attic and the steeple, those who can save themselves hastily climb, then pull up the ladder and close the trapdoor. In the ambulance, recounts the aide-major, the sick had been distributed two by two in each of the small rooms of the seminarists, along a corridor. The captain with his men went from bed to bed, brusquely interrogating each sick man, then he turned to the soldiers: “A

(1) This crime has been recounted in detail by Camille Pelletan, after the concordant accounts of six eyewitnesses, doctors, attendants and sick. (La Semaine de mai, pages 78 and following.)

ball in the head.” Some were shot, others pierced with bayonets, others killed with revolver shots. There were pools of blood on the mattresses.

A doctor, escaped from the massacre, went to fetch from the town hall tricolor armbands. Seventy-five corpses of shot men were carried into the chapel. The body of doctor Faneau stayed three days in the courtyard. — “The next day, his unfortunate mother arrived, mad with grief. Now she threw herself on the body, now she rushed at the officer who was there and cried to him: Assassin! assassin! I was told that the corpse had been so maltreated that, as she took hold of the hands to kiss them, the hands detached from the arms.”

A mediation by the Press had been hoped for, but the Federates refused passage to the delegates. Vermorel and Delescluze then decided to die.

“Behind the barricade of the Château-d’Eau, Vermorel fell gravely wounded; it was there that Delescluze came stoically to seek death.” (1) Millière was executed on the steps of the Pantheon, by order of Captain Garcin.

“Delescluze, if he had not been weakened by age and illness, would perhaps have been the man of the revolution. He marked his arrival at the ministry of war by several fortunate measures… A long deportation had ruined his health; he no longer spoke, he scarcely breathed; he was a walking corpse. The acceptance of power was the sacrifice of the wretched remains of his life, and yet he accepted. He accepted from

(1) Georges Bourgin, page 177. — Vuillaume, IV, pages 35 and 41; VII, page 47.

the majority of the Commune, of which he was not part, but which he dominated by the grandeur of his past, an impossible role, condemned in advance, and in which he was not supported. He fell behind a barricade, but already he had succumbed to the task… Delescluze had himself killed, after the abandonment of the barricade where he was. He was struck by a ball to the heart. His body was found disfigured by an awful burn made on him by a beam fallen from a neighboring house. The victors find words to insult his death.” (1)

It is in reprisal for these summary executions that the hostages were shot by the Federates in the rue de la Roquette. (2)

The Versaillais, exasperated by the resistance they met, massacred blindly all who fell into their hands. “The prisoners were much more numerous than the true combatants, and they were shot as if they had been behind the barricades.”

The struggle ended on Sunday May 31 in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise:

… Nothing human survives… Bandits have killed sixty-four hostages. They reply by killing six thousand prisoners. (3)

(Victor Hugo)

(1) Rossel, Papiers posthumes, page 301. (2) See Vuillaume, II. La Vérité sur la mort des otages. (3) Georges Bourgin estimates at more than 20,000 the number of victims. “There were 38,568 arrests of which 1,058 women and 651 children. The denunciations accumulated to the number of 399,823 of which a twentieth signed, on the police register.” This register is one of the most shameful memories of human cowardice.

3

If I had had then personal enemies, it would not have been difficult for them to discover my retreat. It is from the Colony that I wrote to my friend Nicole the following letter, which summarizes the principal facts I had just witnessed. (1)

… I am very sad, dear friend, my brother-in-law is dead, his wife, who had not left him during the struggle, endured unheard fatigues and dangers. She was holding his arm at the outposts of Levallois-Perret when he was struck by a shell splinter. My sister showed an admirable devotion. She was an ambulance nurse; very often, her flag in hand, she went to fetch the wounded beyond the trenches. The Versaillais let her approach, then received her with a hail of bullets. There were explosive balls. They keep that from me now… Of my comrades, some are dead, others are in flight or on the prison hulks; they await that justice which is called the Councils of War.

The Commune has been much calumniated, and then it has had friends who have done it great harm. I would only like to give you an idea of the situation…

… What would you say in Geneva if, by an impossibility, a federal Council, nominated in a moment of panic, insulted the representatives of your city, disarmed your militia, claimed to regulate your municipal affairs, fix the price of your rents and the date of your due dates, and finally if it sought to impose on you a king. Happy Swiss, you have no pretenders. And when you spoke of your rights, what would you say if your monuments and your houses were bombarded, if women and children were killed, if they fired

(1) This letter has been mislaid, or stolen; only an incomplete draft remains to me. The reader will excuse a few repetitions.

on your ambulances, if your soldier prisoners were shot, if traitors, fit to decorate, opened your gates, and if in the city then began an infamous and nameless butchery. I have seen the corpses piled on immense carts, packed like sheaves with great chains, and letting flow behind them streams of blood; while at noon already I heard the platoon fires that were shooting brave men, condemned without trial, and the next day, on the sidewalks, lay in long files corpses hideously mutilated. The soldiers massacred the wounded in the ambulances. All these crimes have been premeditated and accomplished in cold blood by men who claimed to act in the name of faith and to re-establish order. I dare say that the Commune, if it has not been at the height of its task, has never done anything that approaches that.

Will one speak of a few arbitrary arrests? At least, it did not have the sad courage to send thirty thousand men to the prison hulks. The Commune no longer existed, its members were already killed, prisoners or dispersed, when two great crimes were committed: the massacre of the hostages and the fires. A very small number of men, overexcited by the declamations of agents provocateurs, perhaps suborned by the Prussians, were seized with a kind of furious madness. Others, knowing they were going to die, believed that Paris wanted to die with them. They acted like the captain of a vessel who, without consulting the crew, blows up ship and sailors rather than surrender. These fanatics did not know that the monuments, the museums, the libraries, treasures piously accumulated by the past, are the property of the future; no one has the right to annihilate them. I who consider the masterpieces of art as living beings and who would willingly give my life to save the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, recognize that these men are guilty; what I affirm however is that their crime, great as it is, is political. (1)

(1) I believed that the death penalty had been abolished in political matters.

4

A short time after our departure from Paris, General de Tucé wrote from Clermont-Ferrand to Madame Milliet:

I received with great pleasure the letter announcing to me that you are at last in the country. It is true that poor Henri is missing. I understand all the grief that his little wife must feel, for he loved her very much. If in the conduct of his affairs, he risked hazardous operations, it was to acquire more quickly a well-being he thought of more for her than for himself. Fortunately you are around her and can bring her many consolations.

Henri Payen had indeed launched himself, before the war, into commercial enterprises that had not succeeded. M. de Tucé and my parents had lent him fairly large sums. A premature death prevented him from rebuilding his house, whose bankruptcy was about to be declared.

Fernand to his mother

Bône, August 20, 1871.

What a thunderbolt! dear mother! What torments you must have! I was at the office when I received your letter. I had to return precipitately home; I had so heavy a heart that I felt the tears come to my eyes. Poor Alix! She has courage, I know it; but she will need it to bear this new misfortune. Certainly the loss of money is cruel, but I hear bouncing in my ears that terrible word bankruptcy. The loss of honor would be too cruel. Finally, I lose my head! — Could you have believed for a single moment, dear mother, that it would ever come to my thought to blame one of your actions? You have always been guided by your good heart, you have done well. — What grieves me and tightens my heart is to think that you are obliged to constrain yourselves, to deprive yourselves perhaps. Above all let it not be

for me, dear mother; many other sub-lieutenants live on their pay, I can well do as they do and tighten my belt a little. — I have only to cast a glance back in my life, to find myself relatively happy. What a fine misfortune, if I should go some time less to the café, or if I should wear a little longer the same tunic! What does my uncle say of all that?…

Madame Alix Payen not being married under the regime of community of goods, could have saved her dowry; she entirely abandoned it to her husband’s creditors. Completely ruined, she courageously accepted her new position and, returned to her parents, she wished to earn her living by her work. She entered first with Nadar, then with Goupil, to retouch photographs. Later, she succeeded in selling a few copies of paintings she painted in watercolor in the museums.

5

Very few, I believe, among our comrades of the Legion of Engineers survived the massacres. Those who remained found themselves scattered far away; I have seen none of them again. One of them, however, miraculously escaped from death, recounted to our friends de Vesly and Léon C… his moving story. (1)

Dollé was a young locksmith, thin little blonde with lively eye, very plucky in danger like many of our Parisian wags. He was said to have been shot; witnesses had seen him fall. Great then

(1) See for more details the interesting article published by M. de Vesly in la Normandie, 1899, page 202.

was the astonishment of lieutenant de Vesly when he saw the alleged dead man enter his home, on one of the first days of June 1871.

“As soon as the troops of Versailles had penetrated Paris,” recounted Dollé, “we had to abandon the Lowendal barracks and beat a retreat. We withdrew from barricade to barricade, overwhelmed by numbers. In the rue Gay-Lussac, fugitives warned us that we were going to be surrounded. All resistance was impossible; I threw my rifle into the basement vent of a cellar and tried to find a refuge with friends, but all the doors remained pitilessly closed. — I was prowling near my lodging, in a narrow street of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, at nightfall, when I was apprehended by a patrol and led to the École Polytechnique. There, without other form of trial, we were aligned against a wall, and they fired into the heap. The emotion made me fall in a swoon and I collapsed, just at the moment when the head of the platoon was commanding: Fire! — I do not know how much time had elapsed when I regained consciousness. It was full night, I was half buried under corpses and all covered with blood still warm. I felt myself. Not a scratch! I dared not give sign of life. A lieutenant, desirous of cleaning the courtyard promptly, ordered loading on a wagon ‘this democratic and international vermin’; I then saw a sergeant advance, a lantern in one hand, a revolver in the other, ready to give the coup de grâce to those still breathing. When he approached me, I rose suddenly with a bound. Astonished, the sergeant remained an instant perplexed, then decided to lead me

before the superior officer. — I explained that I had only obeyed my chiefs, that I had a wife and a child… The colonel, taken with pity, had me given a workman’s overall in exchange for my uniform. — ‘You have had your share,’ he said, ‘go, and do not begin again.’”

Acts of clemency were so rare at that time that I have thought I ought to signal one.

The women showed themselves admirable in courage and devotion. (1) Madame André Léo, taken with a saintly fever, “employed her great talent as a writer to explain the noble goal of the Commune. Louise Michel, schoolmistress adored by the little children for her goodness, had organized a corps of ambulance nurses who went to fetch the wounded under the fire of the enemy.”

The children performed “follies of bravery.”

I shall only recall a few verses of V. Hugo, which immortalize one of their most beautiful traits of heroism:

On a barricade, in the midst of the paving stones Soiled with a guilty blood and a blood by washed, A child of twelve is taken with men. — Are you of those, you? — The child says: We are of them. — Good, says the officer, you will be shot. Wait your turn. — The child sees the flashes shine, And all his companions fall under the wall. He says to the officer: Permit me to go

(1) To realize the blind and ferocious hatred of the reactionaries, one must read what Alexandre Dumas fils wrote about the Communard women: “We shall say nothing of their females, out of respect for the women whom they resembled when they are dead.” Even Maxime Ducamp has done justice to the absurd legend of the “pétroleuses.”

Bring back this watch to my mother at home? — You want to flee? — I am coming back. — These rascals Are afraid! Where do you lodge? — There, near the fountain. And I am coming back, Monsieur le capitaine. — Go away, rascal! — The child goes away. — Coarse trap! And the soldiers laughed with their officer, And the dying mingled with this laugh their death rattle; But the laughter ceased, for suddenly the pale child Abruptly reappeared, proud as Viala, Came to lean against the wall and said to them: Here I am. (1)

6

In the night of May 21, captain Delbrouck, always without arms, was directing the works of his company on the ramparts of Passy, when he found himself surrounded unexpectedly by Versailles troops entered into Paris by treachery. Taken prisoner, he was led to Versailles. He filed past under the insults of the crowd with his companions of captivity, when a fine lady, pointing him out, exclaimed: “Just look at that head of an assassin!” — He had a head of Christ. —

And the ferocious shrew struck him with a blow of her parasol. (2)

His health undermined by fatigues was not to recover in prison. (3) The instruction of his trial lasted more than a month. They could discover only the innumerable traces of his devotion, of his

(1) One must read the admirable commentaries with which Hugo accompanies this account. (2) This fact was recounted by Madame Mazard, adoptive mother of M. Delbrouck’s children. (3) “The mistreatments killed 1,179 prisoners.” Georges Bourgin, page 188.

liberating efforts, most often fortunate, mingled with the names of M. Bonjean, of M. Claude, of the Sisters of Boutibné, of Piépus, of Sainte-Marie, of Father Caubert, of the concierge of M. Thiers, etc. A judgment of non-lieu set him free,” (1) but only when they were quite sure that he had only a few days to live.

In the last letter he wrote from his prison, I find these touching words:

“Well! my poor Bel-Bette (his daughter aged 2) is then departed! Ah my friend, this departure is very painful to me, for it is the signal of separations. Poor Bel-Bette, poor Marie! I must have the conscience of having done my duty, and indeed an entire force to accomplish it, in order not to be overwhelmed by the misfortunes I foresee… But, have I the right to complain, in thinking of the fate of our country, of so many brave and noble victims whom I weep for all? — I can only console myself that I have done all I could to prevent this appalling result. We would, poor girls, my friends and I, we shall be punished for it. It is the justice of this world. I expected it. By the grace of God!”

Paul M. to Jules Nicole

Our venerated captain, M. Delbrouck, has just died. He was a man gentle as a child, of a simple and heroic courage; we adored him. He had formerly saved the life of Armand Barbès. It is he who refused the cross offered by Trochu; I told you what he did on October 31; his life is only one long act of devotion. Twice, he went to Versailles, at peril of his life, to attempt a conciliation. He was a saint, he is a martyr. He has died of the treatments he underwent in his prison. He leaves two orphan children. I am very sad, dear friend.

On Delbrouck’s tomb, M. Trélat pronounced these courageous words whose eloquence is made of sincere emotion:

(1) Émile Trélat.

… “Here then is the end of that incomparable self-abnegation that was all your life, my friend! What will men say? Many, the greatest number, will confound you with vulgar disturbers. Others will be indifferent or disdainful. The empire of superior souls remains a hidden hearth that the crowds do not perceive. Around it kneel together a few rare believers. These will let it be said of you, Delbrouck, that you were not adroit, and that you steered your boat badly. But this first duty of man, which is to spend one’s heart, who better fulfilled it than you? In this you were the spotless model, and for our time crushed by such great evils, and so ill furnished with devotions, your friends will not cease to repeat it, your example was the most holy and the noblest that can be cited, for you gave yourself entirely and unto death.”

The civil war was followed by long trials. The military tribunals showed themselves pitiless. Of the thirty-eight thousand citizens arrested, seven thousand five hundred were deported to New Caledonia.

Paris, vanquished, saw itself basely abandoned by its bourgeois, by its deputies, by the whole country which assisted impassively at the massacres. This indifference manifests a monstrous unconsciousness and egoism. How did France not throw herself between the combatants? And after the triumph of Thiers and the Versaillais, how did she not try to stay the hand of the executioners?

Perhaps abroad a few rare workers felt for their Parisian brothers a vague sentiment of sympathy, but they knew of the events only through the official accounts, skillfully woven of lies and calumnies. The holy idea of solidarity is besides scarcely beginning to germinate in souls.

“It is not a matter here of throwing crimes and corpses at one another’s heads. Before civil war, we feel and we wish to propagate only one hatred, that of civil war.” (1)

The Commune none the less saved the Republic, and its program will be realized.

… Paris, what thy glory attracts, The debt that comes to be paid to thee, is martyrdom. Accept. Go, it is great. Be the people hero. Let after the tyrants come the executioners. After the evil suffer the worst, and stay calm. Thy sword in thy hand becomes slowly palm… … But, Paris, nothing of thee is dead, sacred city, Thy agony gives birth and thy defeat creates. Nothing is refused thee; what thou willest shall be.

The poets have received the gift of prophesying the future. Hugo brings forth its clear vision. Whether one desires it or fears it, the social revolution is before us. The times are near when its great wave will submerge our caducous institutions:

THE OLD WORLD:

O flood, it is well. Descend now. It must be… Thy wave rises with the rumor of a prodigy! This is thy limit. Stop, I say to thee.

(1) Camille Pelletan.

The old laws, the old obstacles, the old brakes, Ignorance, misery and nothingness, underground places Where dies mad hope, deep prisons of the soul, The ancient authority of man over woman, The great banquet, walled up for the disinherited, Superstitions and fatalities, Touch them not, go away, these are the holy things. Descend again, and be silent! I have constructed these enclosures Around the human race and I have built these towers… But thou roarest always! but thou risest always! All goes pell-mell to thy frenzied shock: Here is the old missal, here is the ancient code, The scaffold in a fold of thy wave has passed. Touch not the king! heavens! he is overthrown. And these sacred men! I see them disappear. Stop! it is the judge. Stop! it is the priest. God said to thee: Go no further, O bitter flood! But what! thou engulfest me! help, God! the sea Disobeys! the sea invades my refuge!

THE FLOOD:

Thou believest me the tide and I am the deluge.

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TABLE OF THIS CAHIER

	PAGES
A family of Fourierist republicans	1
The Milliets	3
X. — The Commune	5
and the Second Siege
of Paris	7
1871	9
I. — 1871. — THE COMMUNE	11
The rurals. — First demonstrations. — The cannons of the National
Guard. — The Central Committee. — March 18, proclamation of the
Commune. — The rights of Paris. — Sortie of April 3. — Death of
Flourens. — First successes of Dombrowski. — Reforms: Public
Assistance, Finances, Labor, the Federation of Artists, Education.
— The delegates to War.
Annex to the first chapter	39
II. — DELBROUCK	43
The armed conciliation. — Letters of Madame Pape. — Intervention
of Freemasonry. — Delbrouck mediator. — Dombrowski at Neuilly.
III. — ALIX PAYEN AMBULANCE NURSE	65
The cemetery of Issy. — Vanves. — The Convent of the Birds. —
Abandonment of the fort of Issy. — The Porte Bineau. —
Levallois-Perret. — Neuilly. — The end of the drama. — Letters.
IV. — VICTIMS AND EXECUTIONERS	101
Our dead. — The war of the streets. — Order reigns. — Doctor
Faneau. — Mourning and ruin. — Delbrouck. — The children. —
The future.
Table of this cahier	123

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We gave the bon à tirer after corrections for two thousand one hundred copies of this seventh cahier and for fourteen copies on Whatman paper, on Tuesday November 21, 1911.

The manager: CHARLES PÉGUY

This cahier was composed and printed by unionized workers.

JULIEN CRÉMIEU, printer, 13 and 15, rue Pierre-Dupont, Suresnes. — 6220