Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune by Merriman John

Author:Merriman, John [Merriman, John]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-12-09T08:00:00+00:00

THE COMMUNARDS frantically began to organize resistance in the Sixth Arrondissement. On Tuesday, Jean Allemane helped organize the defense of the rues Vavin and Bréa just below the boulevard Montparnasse, thus joining defenses at the place de l’Observatoire, protecting the Luxembourg Gardens. Not far away, Eugène Varlin readied defenders at the small carrefour de la du Croix-Rouge. The task was imposing, with Cissey’s huge army of three divisions attacking only three battalions of national guardsmen. When orders came from Commune leaders that they should fall back to defend their own quartiers, the defense of the Left Bank became impossible. Two battalions of national guardsmen from the Eleventh and Twelfth Arrondissements refused to obey Allemane and crossed the Seine to their own neighborhoods, saying that if they were going to die fighting, they preferred to do so in their own quartiers.43

Communards continued to fall. An English doctor helping wounded insurgents recalled, “We took in only the worst cases on 21, 22, 23 May. Our garden, court, corridors, and floor were crowded with wounded brought in fresh from the fight. . . . Many did not make it.”44

Many of the barricades on the Left Bank had been built within a day, after the first line troops had entered Paris. They did not survive Versaillais attacks on Tuesday. A barricade on the rue de Rennes, below the Gare Montparnasse, was the largest, but no more than thirty men defended it. Yet Communard cannons firing behind sizable barricades still inflicted casualties on the attackers. Barricades fell at the carrefour de la Croix-Rouge and the rue du Dragon. The quartier was ablaze, and the barricades at the rue de Rennes fell on Tuesday, with their defenders, including the Enfants du Père Duchêne, falling back along the boulevard Saint-Germain. A Versaillais officer believed they were executing more men than had fought behind barricades.45

Allemane and others sought to impose some order on the defenses at the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and the boulevard Saint-Michel, but it did no good. Now that the fight seemed all but lost, guardsmen cared only about protecting their own neighborhoods. Versaillais troops surrounded remaining barricades and fired down on them from adjacent buildings. Calls for reinforcements brought no relief. Smoke rising from the Hôtel-de-Ville and other important buildings further demoralized remaining Communard fighters.46

At this point, forced to acknowledge that there was little hope of victory, most Communards began to prepare themselves for the end. As the battle drew nearer to the Latin Quarter, Maxime Vuillaume went to his apartment on the rue du Sommerard to burn papers that, if seized by the Versaillais, would surely mean big trouble. He had copies of the letters Archbishop Darboy had written to Thiers and Vicar Ernest Lagarde on April 12; he gave them to Benjamin Flotte, who lived nearby. They went together to have a drink at the brasserie Chez Glaser, which they found totally empty. After that brief meeting, Vuillaume never saw Flotte again.47

Jean Allemane, like so many other Communards, now also had few illusions about what lay ahead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.