The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (61 page)

Flames raged through the night. The Hôtel de Ville had been set afire, along with the Palais de Justice and the Prefecture of Police. The Palais Royal and houses along the rue de Rivoli were burning. After nearly a month with no rain everything was dry as tinder.

Punishment for anyone caught, or suspected of, setting fires was immediate and merciless. Correspondents for the foreign press wrote of the
“savage feeling” among the Versailles troops. Such hatred as was let loose in Paris had become terrifying beyond description, Washburne stressed in another hurried dispatch. The victims were strewn everywhere in the streets. That afternoon on the avenue d’Antin, an employee of the legation had counted the bodies of eight children, none more than fourteen years of age, who had been caught distributing incendiary boxes and shot on the spot.

The insurgents fought on “like fiends,” and the killing continued through Thursday and Friday as the first rain fell—heavy rain. Many hundreds of insurgents taken prisoner were summarily executed in the streets, in prisons, in the Luxembourg Gardens, and outside the Louvre. Thousands more were herded off through the rain, along streets where enraged crowds screamed for their death.

“They are as they were when caught, most without hats or caps, their hair plastered on the foreheads and faces,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt, as he watched several hundred prisoners pass on their way toward Versailles.

There are men of the common people who have made a covering for their heads with blue-checked handkerchiefs. Others, thoroughly soaked by the rain, draw thin overcoats around their chests under which a piece of bread makes a hump. It is a crowd of every social level, workmen with hard faces, artisans in loose-fitting jackets, bourgeois with socialist hats, National Guards … two infantrymen, pale as corpses. … You see middle-class women, working women, street-walkers, one of whom wears a National Guard uniform. … There is anger and irony on their faces. Many of them have the eyes of mad women.

The nearer the end came, the more the atrocities accelerated on both sides. On Friday, 50 prisoners of the Communards were taken from La Roquette Prison and shot. That night another 38 were led to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and executed, followed by another 4 the next day, making 92 victims in all.

On Sunday, May 28, when the last of the Communards still fighting
were finally overrun, Marshal MacMahon declared Paris “delivered.” But the atrocities continued, growing still more horrific. One of the most infamous took place again at Père Lachaise when 147 Communards were lined up and shot against a wall to be henceforth known as the Wall of the Communards.

“There has been nothing but general butchery,” Washburne wrote in his diary.

The rage of the soldiers and the people knows no bounds. No punishment is too great, or too speedy, for the guilty, but there is no discrimination. Let a person utter a word of sympathy, or even let a man be pointed out to a crowd as a sympathizer and his life is gone. … A well-dressed respectable looking man was torn into a hundred pieces … for expressing a word of sympathy for a man who was a prisoner and being beaten almost to death.

“The vandalism of the dark ages pales into insignificance before the monstrous crimes perpetrated in this great center of civilization in the last half of the nineteenth century,” he wrote in an impassioned dispatch to Secretary Fish.

The incredible enormities of the Commune, their massacre of the Archbishop of Paris and the other hostages, their countless murders of other persons who refused to join them in their fiendish work, their horrid and well organized plans of incendiary intended to destroy almost the entire city … are crimes which will never die. I regret to say that to these unparalleled atrocities of the Commune are to be joined the awful vengeances inflicted by the Versailles troops. … The killing, tearing to pieces, stabbing, beating, and burning of men, women, and children, innocent and guilty alike, by the government troops will stain to the last ages the history of France, and the execrations of mankind will be heaped upon
the names who shall be found responsible for acts which disgrace human nature. …

Although estimates of the total carnage inflicted by the regular troops vary, there seems little doubt that they slaughtered 20,000 to 25,000 people. No one would ever know for sure what the total numbered, but nothing ever in the history of Paris—not the Terror of the French Revolution or the cholera epidemic of 1832—had exacted such an appalling toll. At one point the Seine literally ran red with blood.

The value of the architectural landmarks and other treasures destroyed was inestimable.

Olin Warner, like Washburne an eyewitness to events, was later to write a lengthy defense of the Communards, in which he compared their initial idealism to that of the American rebels of 1776. At the time, however, in a letter to his “Dear Ones at Home” he said he had seen more than enough. “I hope it will never be my lot to see a drop of blood shed again. I never want to hear another cannon roar as long as I live. … I am disgusted with everything pertaining to war.”

On June 1, three days after the fighting had ended, Elihu Washburne went to La Roquette Prison to see the cell in which the archbishop had been held, and to pay homage at the spot in the prison yard where the archbishop and the five priests had been executed. The marks of the bullets on the wall could be plainly seen.

The body of the archbishop, having been rescued from the ditch at Père Lachaise before decomposition had taken place, lay in state at the palace of the archbishop at 127 rue de Grenelle. For several days thousands came to pay their respects, Washburne among them. On June 7, still greater numbers lined the streets to see the funeral procession pass on the way to Notre-Dame, where services were held with all appropriate majesty. To Washburne it was one of “the most emotional and imposing” services he had ever attended.

Charred beams, dead animals, shattered doors and window frames, the remains of broken lampposts, wagons, mountains of wreckage, and all the barricades were hauled away. With people working day and night, life steadily resumed. Omnibuses began running, restaurants opened. It was not that the horrors of what had happened were put out of mind, any more than the horrendous damage done vanished entirely from sight. The blackened ruins of the Palace of the Tuileries were to be left standing for more than ten years as a mute reminder.

On June 3,
Galignani’s Messenger
carried an item from the
Times
of London declaring, “Paris, the Paris of civilization, is no more. … Dust and ashes … smolder and stench are all that remain. …” Cook’s Tours of London was already selling special trips to see the ruins of the fire. But there seemed a united, pervasive zeal to put Paris in order again as quickly as possible. By July the Tuileries Garden had reopened and some 60,000 stonemasons were at work repairing, rebuilding, building anew, a force of stonemasons equivalent to the entire population at the time of Portland, Maine, or Savannah, Georgia.

The Hôtel de Ville would be rebuilt, the Column of the Place Vendôme put together again and restored to its old pedestal.

The Venus de Milo was recovered from a secret hiding place and returned to the Louvre. The incomparable Greek statue, dating from before the birth of Christ, had been buried during the siege in, of all places, the cellar of the Prefecture of Police. Packed into a giant oak crate filled with padding, it was taken in the dead of night to the end of one of the many secret passages in the Prefecture, where, as only a few knew, a wall was built to conceal it. Stacks of documents of obvious importance were piled against the wall, then a second wall built to make it appear the hiding place was for the documents. When the Prefecture caught fire the night so much of Paris went up in flames, the anxiety of those in the know about the Venus was extreme. It seems a broken water pipe “miraculously” saved the statue. Once the smoking ruins were removed, the oak crate was found intact and brought back to the Louvre to be opened.

Everyone leaned forward eagerly to look [read the account in
Galignani’s Messenger
at the end of August]. Lying in her soft bed … she seemed to look gratefully on her preservers. … All her features and limbs were complete, no injury has been done. …

To many her return from the ashes seemed a resurrection of the Paris of art and culture, a Paris that would not die.

Those Parisians who had fled the city for their safety returned like an incoming tide. With them were foreign students, business people, diplomats, and the families of diplomats, including Adele Washburne and her children. The Americans who had never left tried to pick up their lives where they had left off.

Lillie Moulton ordered several fine dresses from Worth, in preparation for a September concert tour in America. (“And if my public don’t like me,” she wrote, “they can console themselves with the thought that a look at my clothes is worth a ticket.”)

Mary Putnam, like many of her French friends, had seen her initial fervor for the Republic vanish, not because of the excesses of the Commune so much as the brutal vengeance of the Versailles government. Her engagement, too, had ended when the return of her fiancé brought “a sense of estrangement.” Part of the problem was that as a woman she would face inevitable difficulties practicing medicine in France and he was unwilling to leave France. She did, however, complete her dissertation, for which she was awarded the highest honors, just as she received the highest possible marks in each of her five examinations. “I have passed my last examination [and] … passed my thesis, and am now
docteur en médecine de la Faculté de Paris
,” she wrote to her mother on July 29. She was the first American woman ever to attain such a professional standing.

Her achievement received notice in the New York and Paris papers, and in the
Archives de Médecine,
which mattered most to her. That a woman had acquired the legal right to practice medicine, said the learned professional journal, was “not without importance at large.”

By then also, the American minister to France, Elihu B. Washburne, after several restorative weeks “taking the waters” at Carlsbad, the famous
health spa in Bohemia, decided that, if needed, he would happily stay on in Paris.

Tributes were to be published celebrating the part Washburne had played. At home he would be talked of as a possible candidate for president. There were dinners in his honor in Paris, and much said in diplomatic circles about the courage and perseverance he had shown.

“Speaking of diplomacy, hasn’t our Minister in Paris done splendidly,” wrote Frank Moore, the assistant secretary at the legation who had served with Washburne through the siege and the horrors of the Commune and was still on the job.

By the use of sound common sense, a kindly, generous disposition and a true appreciation of the right, he has during the past year brought more credit to our government and people at home than they can ever reward him for. His name is on every tongue and I am sure that he will not escape the fate of other honest men for whom thousands of boy babies have been and will affectionately and admiringly be named. … That it will ever be a pleasant chapter for Americans to read in future history which must say that the U.S. Legation alone remained in Paris throughout the siege and the fearful scenes of the Commune of 1870 and 1871.

What no one could yet appreciate, other perhaps than Washburne himself, was the additional, immeasurable value of the diary he had kept day after day through the entire ordeal, recording so much that he witnessed and had taken part in, writing often at great length late at the end of an exhausting, horrible day, aware constantly of the self-imposed duty he felt to keep such an account. He could very well have done nothing of the sort. Or the daily entries might have been abbreviated notes only, telegraphic in style, something to be “worked up later” as a memoir. But Washburne was not so constituted. He had to set it down there and then, and the wonder is that what he wrote was not only substantial in quantity,

but that he wrote so extremely well, with clarity, insight, and such great empathy for the human drama at hand.

Numbers of his famous American predecessors in diplomatic roles in Paris had written perceptively, often eloquently of their experiences and observations while there, beginning with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Still greater numbers of American authors of high reputation—Cooper, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe—had written of their Paris days before Washburne ever arrived, and many more would take their turns in years to come. But no one ever, before or after, wrote anything like Washburne’s Paris diary, and if his decision to stay and face whatever was to come had resulted only in the diary, he would have made an enormous, singular contribution.