The Insurrection in Paris

by Davy

A certain number of the troops were inside the enceinte before any one but themselves knew of it, and Auteuil and the Point du Jour were shelled for nearly two hours after they had fallen into possession of the forces of Versailles.

One man, M. Clément, an officer of Engineers, played a prominent part in this historical affair. Soon after midday, proceeding cautiously in advance of a party of his men, who were lying in concealment between the nearest parallel and the Porte de St. Cloud, he crept up to the bastion and found it and the ramparts adjoining without a single sentinel. Keeping near the ground, he waved a white handkerchief; it was seen by the small party of Engineers who were lying outside the last parallel, and also by Lieutenant Trèves, of the French Navy. At first the signal was not understood; but M. Clément continued to wave the handkerchief violently, and beckon to those who saw him to come on immediately. It was with difficulty 100 men could be collected in the trenches, but about that number advanced and occupied the deserted position. In the meantime the word was passed from post to post in their rear, and a batallion was soon on its way after them. By half-past 3 o'clock dispositions had been effected for occupying both Auteuil and the Point du Jour with a sufficient force, and proceeding to the other gates both right and left. The gates and drawbridge of Auteuil had been demolished several days previously, but the Insurgents had substituted an enormous barricade, which shut off the iron bridge uniting the Railway Station with the Viaduct.

The Division of General Vergeé marched direct upon Auteuil. Scarcely had the first column arrived there, when volleys of musketry were opened by the Insurgents concealed in houses. A few of the troops were put hors de combat by this fire, but the artillery of the Division turned their pieces on the ramparts against the enemy, Mitrailleuses were also brought into requisition by the troops, and within an hour the Insurgents had fled to a distance.

The Division of General Douai entered by the gate of St. Cloud, which is at the Point du Jour, and occupied the salient between the ramparts and the viaduct. Here there was a second bastion of considerable solidity. The soldiers entered the half-ruined barracks and casemates, and made prisoners of a number of Insurgents whom they found concealed there.

Immediate preparations were then made for the advance right and left, but as the enemy was still keeping up a fire from 7-pounders and Mitrailleuses, along the bastions between Vaugirard and Montrouge, a regular assault of these positions by the division under General Cissey was determined upon. I have already announced that it has been successful.

The Division began to march in by the Gates of Vaugirard and Montrouge. At 2 o'clock this morning La Muette was occupied without serious resistance.

A Division subsequently advanced to Passy to join that which had taken La Muette.

Such was the suddenness with which the occupation of the Point du Jour had been effected that, as I have stated, the firing from the military batteries continued for a considerable time after the first of the troops were in it. It was not till 4 o'clock that the order to cease firing in that direction left the Head-Quarters. In the meantime, hundreds of people stood on the Avenue and Terrace of Meudon watching the cannonade, and believing that all the posts of the Insurgents were still occupied by the enemy. Even the officers and men in the batteries did not know why the order to cease firing had been sent round.

I have just returned, after having followed in the rear of General Vinoy's last column, going to take up positions in the neighbourhood of the Trocadéro. I have wandered all over the Point du Jour, visited Auteuil, and have walked along by the bastions between the Gate of St. Cloud at the Point du Jour and the Gate of Auteuil. Having watched the other side of the Sèvres Bridge, I was surprised on passing along the Sèvres road to observe that, very little damage had been done to the houses at the end of it near the enceinte. One or two bore the marks of shells, but the fact is that nearly all had escaped, and what I saw at the enceinte and within it, shows that the artillery practice of the Versailles side had been exceedingly good throughout the bombardment. The people on the Sèvres road had kept their shops open amid all the terrible firing. Only some two or three houses had been closed. They stood at a dangerous angle to the batteries at Meudon. On one of them was chalked "fermée pour cause du bombardement." Between the last of the houses and the ramparts, and at a distance of not more than 100 yards from the latter, were the newly-cut trenches which the troops had constructed. Good gabions protected them in front, and there was a plentiful supply of fascines lying all about. The doors of the Porte were no longer to be seen, except in little bits on the roadway. The drawbridge had succumbed bodily, and its place was supplied with some planks. The posthouse was in ruins, and the stone walls on either side between the gates and the parapet of the fortifications had been crumbled into rubbish; the glacis from the Point du Jour to Auteuil had been ploughed up in such a manner that not a yard of it was to be seen without a shell hole. To say that the parapet had been riddled would not be correct. It is smashed here and there, and at intervals everywhere, but in no place between the two Gates I am referring to is the earthwork inside the parapet laid bare, nor has a breach, properly so called, been anywhere made. The doors and gate walls of both gates are smashed through, but all along, despite serious disfigurement, the parapet is strong still.

To come back to the Point du Jour—that is as much a ruin as the town of St. Cloud. From the gate to the Railway Station there is not a single habitable house; not three have roofs, and not one has its windows and walls intact. Every lamppost has been scattered about the road in small pieces, and a stranger who had not heard of the bombardment might be pardoned for supposing that the streets had been macadamized with the fragments of shells. Strange to say, the staircase leading from the Booking Office of the Railway Station to the line over head is uninjured, or nearly so, and by its means I was enabled to ascend and walk through that Viaduct which I have been looking at from a distance as shells have been battering it for the last six weeks. It is much knocked about, and so is the bridge underneath it, which in a series of arches spans the river, but both will be serviceable still after some repair. Huge stones, displaced from their settings and broken into small pieces, lie scattered on the bridge and its approaches. From the Viaduct I could see an immense conflagration in the neighbourhood of the Champ de Mars, and a combat between the troops and the Insurgents was going on. In the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli, all down to the Trocadéro, reserves were in waiting with their chassepots stacked on each side of the road, but there was no fighting along the Quays. General Vinoy had established himself in his new Head-Quarters, and the 70,000 or 80,000 men already in the heart of the city are believed to be quite sufficient to dispose of the last desperadoes of the Commune. The sounds of battle we heard from more than one point, and yet every one spoke of the Insurrection as in its last agonies. Men and women once more held up their heads and snapped their fingers at Delescluze, Dombrowski, and the Commune, but there was sad evidence all around us of what this rebellion had done. There in the little cemetery behind the ramparts lay the unburied and mangled remains of 32 National Guards who had been killed at the batteries just above. The whole place was a picture of ruin and desolation. Passing out of the Point du Jour by the opining where the Porte de St. Cloud had stood, whole and entire, even after the Prussian bombardment, but where there is not a vestige of it bigger than a splinter now, I walked along the glacis in the direction of Auteuil. I was surprised to find that, at a distance of less than an eighth of a mile from the latter place, the military had fixed their gabions, sapped right up the glacis, and to within four or five yards of the fosse. The trenches had been cut across the Bois de Boulogne. Nothing, however, like enough of the parapet and the earthwork above had been thrown down to fill up the fosse. Indeed, no effort whatever had been made in the way of filling up, except at either side of the two Portes, so that an assault at any other than these points would have been a very difficult undertaking. On the glacis I saw the dead and decomposed body of a man not in uniform. He lay on his side, with one hand under his head and the other raised in the air. A gentleman who lives close by stated that the deceased, with two or three other men, had come out to fire stray shots at the soldiers in the trenches. As he lay there to-day I perceived that he had been pierced by several rifle balls. The gates at Auteuil have disappeared as completely as those at Point du Jour, and at the Railway Station behind the iron railway bridge over the road all the habitations are, so to speak, in a heap. The French term "débris" best describes what is left of Auteuil and its surroundings. Stone, mortar, iron bridge metal, lamp posts, trees, are smashed, pounded, and scattered. No one who visited Auteuil in happier times would recognize even the spot on which it stood. As specimens of successful bombardment the Point du Jour and the three barracks behind the enceinte that lie between them may be cited among the most complete that even modern artillery has succeeded in producing.