CHAPTER XLVIII. Return of French Soldiers from Germany-New Formation of the Army of Versailles under Marshal MacMahon-The Batteries fire against Paris-Rapid progress made-Forts Issy and Vanves Belleville and the Buttes de Chaumont-The Troops reach La of Jesuits and Dominicans-Fate of the principal men of the MEANTIME the vanquished and imprisoned soldiers of France-sad victims of the immorality and folly of the Empire-began to return in great numbers from Germany. A new organisation of the army became necessary. Three provisional corps d'armée, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, were formed, commanded respectively by Generals Ladmirault, De Cissey, and Bu Barail. The 3rd Corps was exclusively composed of cavalry. These troops were designated the First Army, and placed under the supreme command of Marshal MacMahon. Two other corps, the 4th and 5th, under the command of Generals Douay and Clinchant, were added soon afterwards. The livisions Faron, Bruat, and Vergé formed an Army of Reserve under General Vinoy. But the distinction between the two armies seems to have been little more than nominal. The division Faron continued to fight in the front line nearly to the last, while both the other divisions bore a prominent part in the severe fighting which followed the entry of the troops into the city. The division Vergé supplied the battalion which was the first to scale the rampart, on the memorable 21st May, 1871. The new organisation was completed by the 12th April, on which day Vinoy handed over the command to Marshal Mac Machon. From the 4th to the 24th April, while heavy guns were being brought up from distant arsenals, and the places for batteries marked out and got ready, the troops about St. Cloud, Sèvres, Meudon, and Clamart, though holding their ground, were exposed to a continual fire both from forts and batteries, from which they suffered much loss without the power of making an effectual reply. At last everything was ready, and, on the 25th April, De Cissey, who commanded on the right, opened fire on the forts of Vanves and Issy. It was not long before a considerable effect was produced, for the Commune could not command sufficient engineering skill to utilise against the Government to any serious extent the works which. during the first siege, had so efficaciously served to neutralise for the defenders the effects of the terrible Prussian artillery. The attack was therefore pushed on vigorously, and on the night of the 29th April two brigades of the division Faron, aided by the brigade Paturel, carried the cemetery, park, and trenches of Issy. On the following day the fort of Issy was summoned, but refused to surrender. On the night of the 1st May, the division Faron took the Château of Issy, but failed to drive the Federals out of the railway station of Clamart, of which the troops only obtained possession on the 5th May. On the 8th, the first of the forts which the Commune had occupied, that of Issy, was regained. It had been terribly dismantled by the fire of the batteries; and a regiment of the brigade Paturel, forcing their way in, found the fort evacuated. De Cissey then turned his attention to the fort of Vanves, which, after some sharp and murderous fighting in the village of the same name, surrendered to him on the 14th May. Ladmirault, who commanded on the left, had made less, though still considerable progress. A night attack which he ordered to be made on the Château de Bécon, near Asnières, was repulsed by the Federals. This, according to General Vinoy, was the one real success which they gained in the course of the struggle; but so defective was their military knowledge that they seemed scarcely aware of it, and their official bulletins, so "grotesquely mendacious" on other occasions, made no mention of this real advantage. On the 10th April, Ladmirault drove the Federals out of Asnières, and the result of this success was to place the whole line of the Seine from St. Dénis to Meudon in the hands of the Versailles troops. The Château de Bécon was taken a few days after the unsuccessful attack upon it. Continual fighting took place between the troops holding the bridge of Neuilly, and the Federals occupying the eastern portion of the village; but it resulted in nothing, because there was no intention of making a serious attack at this point. But the unfortunate people of Neuilly were placed in a position of continual danger and hardship; and to give them time to quit their houses and remove into the city, a short suspension of arms was granted by Marshal MacMahon on the 23rd. The real point of attack was the Point du Jour, that salient south-west angle of the enceinte facing St. Cloud and Sèvres, where the Seine issues from the fortifications of Paris. The besieging lines were here under the command of General Douay, who, besides his own corps. could dispose of the division Vergé of the Army of Reserve. A formidable battery had been prepared at Montretout, but could not open on the rampart without risk of being enfiladed until the fire of Fort Issy had been subdued. This was accomplished by the 8th May, and on that day the Montretout battery commenced firing on the Point du Jour. After nightfall Douay's troops crossed the Seine, and began to open trenches. The distance from Montretout to the Point du Jour is not more than a mile and a half, and as the guns were of large calibre, and the practice good, the ramparts thereabouts soon became untenable for the defenders. The first parallel was established at 1,200 métres from the A.D. 1871.] GRADUAL RE-POSSESSION OF PARIS BY THE ARMY. wall, and breaching batteries were then constructed, which in a few days turned the wall about the gates of Sèvres and St. Cloud into a shapeless mass of ruins. The sap was carried forward with great energy, and by the 18th May the troops were arrived at the foot of the glacis. The National Guards of Passy and Auteuil had all along been favourable to the Versailles Government, and had held possession of several gates in the interest of order as late as the 31st March. Emissaries of the Commune had since then made a house-to-house visitation, and had deprived them of their arms; but their ill-will to the Commune was as keen as ever, and it was hoped that means might be found, through their cooperation, to bribe the guards of one of the gates, and obtain an entrance for the troops. In this way it was expected that the Communal authorities would be surprised, and a desperate final struggle averted. But the endeavours of the Versailles Government were foiled, information having been in some way conveyed to the Commune of the treason that was in contemplation. In an address issued on the 12th May, the Committee of Public Safety informed the citizens that the Republic had just escaped a mortal danger. Treason, they said, had found its way into the Communal ranks; gold had been lavished with unsparing hand, and had found some who were capable of being bought. The abandonment of Issy," continued the proclamation, "was only the first act in the drama of a domestic monarchical insurrection; the surrender of one of the gates of the city was to follow. All the threads of this dark conspiracy are in our hands; most of the guilty men have been arrested, and their punishment will be exemplary." In this instance the statement of the Commune was founded on fact, as we know from the admission of General Vinoy.* 66 But though the attempt on the fidelity of the defenders failed, the effect, whether of their negligence or their despair, resulted for the Versailles troops in a speedy attainment of their object. General Vinoy says that he finds himself at a loss fully to understand or explain the causes of the remissness of the Federal troops; but certain it is that about three o'clock in the afternoon of Sunday, the 21st May, M. Ducatel, an inhabitant of Passy, and a simple overseer of roads, seeing that the ramparts about the Point du Jour were left without sentinels or defenders, advanced unchallenged to the gate St. Cloud, and from the ramparts waved a white handkerchief to the foreposts of the besieging army. The signal was perceived in the trenches; a naval officer, M. Trèves, ran up; explanations were rapidly exchanged between him and M. Ducatel; M. Trèves went back and brought up the battalion then on guard in the trenches: it belonged to the division Vergé. A sous-officier of this battalion was the first to plant the tricolour on the walls of Paris. General Vinoy, summoned by telegraph, came upon the ground at 5.30 P.M.; he found that his men had effected a secure lodgment within the enceinte, but their farther "L'Armistice et la Commune," p. 300. 551 advance was checked by a Federal fire from behind the Auteuil viaduct. After giving the necessary instructions to the division Vergé, the General went to Versailles, and as quickly as possible brought up the divisions Faron and Bruat. It was now dark, and in spite of every precaution, it was impossible to prevent the various columns moving upon the Point du Jour from becoming more or less entangled; but the block was of no long duration, and at two o'clock on Monday morning General Vinoy found himself in Paris. Finding itself thus supported, the division Vergé moved cautiously forward, passed the Auteuil viaduct, which the Federals had abandoned, captured a barricade, and advancing to the eminence of the Trocadéro, occupied it in force. Soon after sunrise on Monday, May 23rd, the division Bruat, which had marched along the left bank of the Seine, together with the troops of General de Cissey, entered the enceinte without opposition ia rear of Fort Issy, and advancing through the suburb of Grenelle, gained possession of the Champ de Mars and the Ecole Militaire with little loss. On the right bank, the division Vergé was simultaneously pressing forward, and about noon made a dash at the Palace of the International Exhibition in the Champs Elysées, which was then used by the Commune both as a depôt and as a hospital, and carried it without loss. Okolowicz, one of the best military chiefs of the insurgents, was here captured. Assi had fallen into the hands of the troeps on the previous day. From the Champ de Mars the division Bruat advanced to, and occupied, the Hôtel des Invalides and the Palace of the Legislative Body. Here they found themselves in presence of a formidable defensive position, which the Federals had fortified with great care. The walls of the Tuileries gardens facing towards the river and the Place de la Concorde were lined with riflemen; on the terrace inside the gardens a powerful battery had been planted; massive barricades with deep trenches in front of them, carried across the quays from each end of the garden to the river, made a flank attack on the position exceedingly hazardous; while similar barricades had been raised in the Rue Royale and other outlets of the Place de la Concorde. Long before this Marshal MacMahon had come to the front, and had established his head-quarters on the Trocadéro. The leaders of the army resolved, after a consultation, not to attack the Federal position in front, as it was certain that it could not be carried without a serious loss of life. It was resolved to turn the barricades in the Place de la Concorde, and for this purpose engineers were sent into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, and carried on a sap through the houses towards the Rue Royale. Perceiving this, the Federal batteries in the Tuileries gardens and on the Place opened a tremendous fire; but the troops, being now sheltered by the houses, sustained but little loss. On the evening of the 22nd the proper arrangements were made for deploying the army in Paris. General Clinchant had entered the city on the left of Douay, and Ladmirault's corps, penetrating the enceinte somewhere about the Porte Maillot, had gained possession of the Avenue de la Grande Armé and the Arc de Triomphe. portion of the day; but on the left a great and decisive success was obtained. The attack on the heights of Montmartre, which with Belleville were the two great strongholds of the insurrection, had been committed to Generals Ladmirault and Clinchant, and the arrangements for the The entire army was now ranged on a line extending acress Paris, from the railway station of Batignolles on the north to that of Mont Parnasse on the south. De Cissey held the right; next to him was General Douay; the centre, pushed considerably in advance, was formed of the three divisions of the Army of Reserve; the centre-enterprise had been carefully and skilfully planned. left was held by the 4th and 5th Corps; on the extreme The great strength of the Montmartre position was on left was the 1st Corps, under Ladmirault. On the the side towards Paris; the insurgents had not contemMonday evening one-third of Paris was already in pos- plated the possibility of the line of the enceinte being in session of the army. hostile hands, so that the heights could be attacked from The morning of the 23rd June saw the deadly struggle the north. Accordingly, the troops of Ladmirault, imme renewed. On the right General de Cissey advanced his position in the course of the day from the Mont Parnasse station to the Observatory. In the centre the sap was continued along the Rue du Faubourg de St. Honoré, in order to flank the barricades in the Place de la Concorde. The garden of the English Embassy was taken advantage of for this purpose. Colonel Piquemal, chief of the staff of the division Vergé, was killed by a shot fired from a house at the corner of the Rue Boissy d'Anglas. To keep down the fire of the Tuileries battery, Marshal MacMahon ordered a battery to be constructed on the quay at the corner of the Boulevard Latour Maubourg. From a desire to be sparing of the lives of the troops, little progress was made in this quarter during the early diately after daybreak, moved from Batignolles along the enceinte, taking bastion after bastion with ease, and almost without firing a shot. By this masterly movement the Federal troops occupying Clichy, Levallois, and the last houses of Neuilly were isolated; behind them were the ramparts, lined by the soldiers of Ladmirault, while before them there was the Seine on the one hand, guarded by the Versailles troops, and St. Dénis with its forts on the other, where the Prussians barred the way. This large force, being thus completely cut off, was compelled to surrender, together with a numerous artillery. Then the 1st and 5th Corps marched to the attack of the heights. "At that moment," says Marshal MacMahon in his report, "the heights of A.D. 1871.] PARIS BUILDINGS FIRED BY THE INSURGENTS. 553 Montmartre were surrounded on the north and west by By the capture of Montmartre the insurgent positions the troops of the 1st and 5th Corps, and a general attack at the Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, al was made through all the streets running parallel with the Tuileries were in effect turned, for they could be the slope. The Clinchant corps, advancing through the easily shelled by guns planted on that commanding Rue Lepic, took the Mairie of the 18th Arrondissement. height. The subsequent movements of the Federa's The Pradié brigade of the 1st Corps, at the head of which showed them to be conscious of this fact. In the after were the volunteers of the Seine, arrived first at Moulin de la Galette; and soon afterwards a company of the 10th battalion of Chasseurs, supported by a vigorous attack from General Wolff, hoisted the tricolour on the Tour de Solferino. It was one o'clock. We were masters of the great fortress of the Commune, the heart of the insurrection-a formidable position, from which the insurgents could cover all Paris with their fire. More than a hundred cannon, with considerable stores of arms and ammunition, fell into our hands." VOL. IX.-No. 461. noon the 4th Corps, meeting with little resistance, pressed forward beyond the church of the Madeleine, and made themselves masters of the Place Vendôme. About five o'clock a wild and rapid fire was kept up by the Federals from the Tuileries battery for about half an hour. After that all was still; but soon a lurid glare in the sky gave testimony that the threats of the Communal leaders had been no mere idle vaunts. "If we cannot rule in Paris" such seems to have been their thought-"you shall have but a desolated Paris to rule over; we may be weak, but we will prove that we are not innocuous." About seven o'clock an immense fire burst out on several points at once-from the Ministry of Finance, near the Rue Castiglione, from the houses of the Rue Royale, from the Palais Royal, the Tuileries, and the Louvre. Along the whole façade of the Tuileries a line of fires, starting out almost simultaneously, showed to the troops-the indignant spectators of this frightful spectacle-the designed and systematic character of the conflagration. The central cupola of the palace succumbed to the flames, and fell in about half an hour after midnight. Happily the night was singularly calm; the buildings that were fired were consumed, but the fire did not spread. Nature, says General Vinoy, 'seemed unwilling that the monstrous designs of these enemies of their own country and of mankind should take full effect. At the first dawn on the following day (Wednesday, May 24th) the brave Admiral Pothuau, darting forward at the head of a party of sailors, seized the Ministry of Marine (the French Admiralty), and was in time to prevent the arson there contemplated. The rescuers surprised a number of miscreants placing rows of bottles containing petroleum in the different apartments of the building, preparatory to setting it on fire. The Bibliothèque Nationale in the Rue Richelieu is said to have had an equally narrow escape. Soon afterwards the division Vergé, pressing on to the Louvre, was in time to save the greater part of the building from destruction; but the Pavillon du Louvre, though the outer walls were little injured, was completely gutted, and the valuable library of 80,000 volumes which it contained was reduced to ashes. The day was warm and still, the bright Paris sun shone down on the streets, gardens, and fountains of the fair city with its wonted lustre, but its rays were intercepted by a cloud of lurid smoke, ashes, and dust, rising partly from the throats of hundreds of pieces of artillery, and partly from the ruins of burning and crashing houses; while beneath this dismal shroud the work of vengeance and despair went uninterruptedly on. Like a demoniac, Paris had turned her raging hands against her own entrails, and was tearing herself to pieces. All day the division Vergé pressed on step by step, amidst flames and death. In the evening it reached the Hôtel de Ville, only to find it blazing through its whole extent, so that no human power could extinguish the flames. That incomparable hall, that palatial centre of the fullest and most varied municipal life that the world ever saw, within whose walls the troops of the Convention seized Robespierre and St. Just, and beneath which the innocent "son of St. Louis" and the innumerable victims of the Terror shed their blood, was now given to destruction by the Revolution itself, arrived at its last and logical development of atheism, anarchy, and insane pride. Passing by it, the division arrived at the barracks on the Place Loban, and halted there for the night. Following at some distance in the rear, the division Faron bivouacked on the Place de la Concorde. On the other side of the river the operations of the army were not less successful. The division Bruat cleared the long Rue de l'Université, and occupied the Palace of the Institute, and the Mint. The division Lacretelle, of De Cissey's corps, carried the Panthéon, for the destruction of which every preparation had been made. The palace and gardens of the Luxembourg were the object of a well-combined movement, a body of sailors advancing by the Rue Tournon, and De Cissey closing in from the south, on the side of the Observatory. At the close of the day considerably more than half of Paris was occupied by the army, its left being at the station of the Northern Railway, and its right close to the enceinte beyond the park of Montsouris. In the course of Thursday, the 25th May, the insurrection may be said to have been almost entirely suppressed in all that part of Paris which lies on the left bank of the Seine. The three forts which still remained in the hands of the Federals after the reduction of Issy and Vanves namely, Montrouge, Bicêtre, and Ivry-were evacuated in the course of the day, their garrisons all falling back upon the Place d'Italie. Up to the previous day, the fort of Montrouge had galled by its fire the Versailles troops, while advancing along the line of the enceinte; its evacuation was therefore a valuable advantage gained. The division Bruat, which had won its way the day before as far as the Mint, continued its advance this day in a direction parallel with the Seine, occupying before night-fall the Jardin des Plantes, and the passenger station of the Orleans Railway, close to the bridge of Austerlitz. Here it could open communication with the troops of General de Cissey, which had advanced as far as the goods station of the same railway at Ivry. On the north bank affairs did not run so smoothly. Forced to quit the Hôtel de Ville, the Commune had now installed itself at the Mairie of the 11th Arrondissement, in the Boulevard du Prince Eugène. This Mairie is but a short distance from the prison of La Roquette, to which the hostages had been removed from the Mazas prison on the 23rd inst.; and this proximity had probably much to do with the selection of the new head-quarters, for the Commune was resolved not to lose its hold on its prisoners under any circumstances. But there were also other and military reasons for the choice. Τπο strongholds and centres of resistance were still left to the insurgents-the Place de la Bastille and the heights of Belleville; and nearly in a line between these is the Mairie of the 11th Arrondissement. The Place de la Bastille is the common centre and outlet, on which the streets and boulevards leading from several suburbs of Paris (the population of which was generally friendly to the Commune)--Bercy, Picpus, Charonne, and Menilmontant-debouche and converge. It had accordingly been fortified by strong barricades, armed with artillery. A strong position in front of it, the bridge of Austerlitz, was also firmly held, barricades having been erected at both ends of the bridge, and across the mouths of the Rue Lacuée and the Boulevard Mazas. Other barricades had been constructed in other streets leading to the Place; in particular, there was a very formidable one in the Rue St. Antoine. This group of positions formed, says General Vinoy, a sort of place d'armes, roughly triangular, protected by the fortifications and the Seine |