The Insurrection in Paris

by Davy

Active measures are being taken to cleanse the streets and rid them of the dead bodies, some of which had been buried where they fell under the barricades, with a foot or two of soil over them. Passers-by are pressed into the service as burying parties, and the English Embassy has received complaints from Englishmen of having been seized for this purpose. The smell of corpses in some places is offensively strong, and it is feared this hot weather following upon the heavy rain may breed a pestilence.

Traffic in the streets at night is getting easier, though the cafés have to be closed at 11. The unpopularity of the troops is no doubt, in part due to the deeply-rooted Parisian dislike of military rule and the abolition of the National Guard—a measure which, however necessary, under no circumstances is likely to be welcome.

The firemen of Havre who came to Paris to aid in extinguishing the recent conflagrations have returned home to-day.

One of the most important of the "hostages" who suffered death at the hands of the Commune—the most important person of their lay victims—M. Bonjean, was President of the Court of Cassation, and it was only the fact of his holding a high position, and being respected by all persons whose respect was worth having, that can have rendered him odious. He was a very old man, as old at least as the Abbé Deguerry. It was chiefly as a Judge and not as a politician that his name was known to the world, yet, all that was known of him as a politician was in his favour. Indeed, he enjoyed the rare distinction of being, perhaps, the one Liberal member of an Assembly so bigoted and so subservient as was the Senate under the Empire. Notwithstanding his advanced age, he remained firm at his post during the siege and during the far more perilous period of the conflict between M. Thiers and the Comité Central. His arrest was, so to speak, an accident, as he happened to be paying, or expected to pay, a visit, by appointment, to the house of his friend, the Procureur-général, when the police of the Communists were taking possession of the house of the latter officer. He bore his imprisonment, old as he was, with patience and resignation, remarking that for the last 40 years he had been self-condemned to upwards of 12 hours' hard labour a day over his books and papers, and that he could work as well at these in a prison cell as in a palace.

june 2^d, and 3^rd.

Two days ago I was so fortunate as to meet Mons. Petit, the Secretary of the late Archbishop, who had only escaped from the prison in which he had been confined with the unfortunate Prelate the day before. M. Petit did not himself see M. Darboy executed, though he saw the procession pass and heard the firing. Out of 16 priests and 38 gendarmes confined in the prison, 26 were shot, and the fate of the remainder had been decided upon when an attempt to escape made by the criminal prisoners, who were the original occupants of the gaol, succeeded, and with the help of one of the gaolers the whole body made an attack upon the Insurgent guard, who, in fact, did not wait for it, but abandoned their post as soon as they perceived that all their prisoners were at liberty. The priests succeeded in changing their clerical costume, but not in sufficiently disguising themselves, for M. Petit saw four of his companions shot at the first barricade they reached; he therefore fled back to his prison, and, finding a common prison shirt, he reduced his costume to that garments and took refuge in a bed in the hospital ward. The prison was not again guarded, but those who casually passed through it supposed him to be a sick prisoner not worth notice; and here he remained until Sunday evening, when his suspense was put an end to by the arrival of the soldiery. In the Chapelle Ardente of the Madeleine lies the body of the curé of that church, who was shot by the side of the Archbishop, and a stream of persons, mostly women, with saddened, awe-struck faces passed through it all yesterday afternoon. The body of the Archbishop has been recovered, and is at the Palace.

I have now explored Paris in every direction to judge with some degree of accuracy of the extent of the damage done, but I will spare you any detailed account of those scenes of havoc and ruin, that I have partly described already which differ in their character according to the agent of destruction, and which consist of ruins caused by shells and ruins caused by fire. Houses which have been destroyed by shells present a far more ghastly appearance than those which have been burnt, and the aspect of the street at Point du Jour is calculated to strike the imagination of those who are now entering Paris for the first time from Versailles by that gate. The same may be said of the houses on both sides of the Avenue de la Grande Armée, and in the neighbourhood of the Porte Maillot; but nothing that I have seen equals the Auteuil Railway Station, where the building, the line, and the railway bridge have all been crumpled up together, as if some giant hand had squeezed them into a shapeless mass. The iron bridge still spans the road, but with rails and girders so contorted and covered with débris that we were afraid to drive under it for fear the slight concussion caused by a carriage passing beneath might bring the tottering mass down on our heads. A little beyond, a sentry is placed to prevent people passing beneath a house which is on the verge of crumbling to the ground. It is a lofty, handsome building, elegantly furnished, and quite new, which has been completely cut in two, and the furniture of each successive story is thus exposed. One room on the fourth floor was apparently a boudoir, for the rich crimson-covered furniture stands trembling at the edge of the "parquet," and a heavy armchair threatens with the least jar to come down with a crash into the middle of the road. It was reserved for French artillery to complete the work which the German artillery began. I drove round this same road some days after the first siege, and, compared to their present condition, these suburbs might then have been considered well preserved and habitable. Looking at the long enceinte of fortifications with its battered breaches and crumbling embrasures, one is puzzled whether M. Thiers deserves more credit for the skill with which he put it up or for that with which he has knocked it down.

Anxious to see to what condition the conquerors have reduced the Insurgent stronghold at Belleville, I have returned from penetrating its disagreeable recesses. As usual, even in peaceful times, the lower part of the Faubourg du Temple was densely crowded with an agitated, restless throng, composed principally of women. Most of the shops were shut, probably because their owners were either shot or in prison. Those who lounged in their doorways looked surly and suspicious; nor is this much to be wondered at, for during the last two days every domicile has been searched in this Quarter from attic to cellar, and every street swarms with denouncers and soldiers. As we approached Ménilmontant the crowd became thinner, and the soldiers more numerous, until they almost lined the street on either side. Here and there were piles of broken arms and heaps of National Guard coats and trousers. The road was literary strewn with caps, which had been torn from the heads of prisoners and flung in the mud. Old women were rummaging in the heaps for something worth taking away which was not of a military character, as their operations were closely watched by the soldiery, who were by no means of an amiable type. Here were no signs of fraternization or amicable intercourse. At one place at least a dozen omnibuses were collected and crammed with arms and military stores, a magazine of which I saw in the process of being emptied. Three thousand Orsini bombs were also found. I have specimens of two kinds in my possession; one is circular, flat, and hollow, about six inches in diameter and an inch and a half thick, and fitted all round its edge with little hammers, which play upon a glass case inside filled with nitro-glycerine. Whichever way the bomb falls it is sure to strike one of these hammers, which explodes the nitro-glycerine. The other is a zinc ball, rather smaller than a cricket ball, filled with powder and covered with nipples, upon which are percussion caps. It cannot fall without striking a cap and exploding. It is natural that the discovery of such objects should exasperate the soldiery, for whom they were intended, and who cannot yet walk with any feeling of security along streets filled with a population who employ such diabolical engines of destruction. Hitherto, in most of the instances in which they have been used, the culprit has been a woman; more reckless and vindictive than the men, they have, in many instances, literally courted death, forcing their fate by acts of violence when escape was evidently impossible. Near the top of the steep hill which leads to the Mairie of Ménilmontant were several cordons of sentries, through which we had some difficulty in passing, owing to a commotion which had scarcely yet subsided, and which showed how combustible were the materials of which the population here is composed. There had been an altercation between a sergeant of the Line and a citizen, in which the latter had offered some violence and had been shot on the spot; his body was still palpitating on the pavement as I came suddenly and unexpectedly upon it, and we were warned, by an angry cry of "au large" from a sentry, that it would be a very simple matter in the then temper of the soldiery to meet the same fate. It is easy to imagine the scowling looks and stifled curses of the men and women glaring from doorways and windows at the execution of a friend before their eyes, and we began to feel that we were objects of equal suspicion and dislike on either side. At every step we were challenged, and the fact that we had a military pass made it clear to the Bellevilleites that we were their enemies. We had now reached the crown of the hill—the very heart of Belleville, and the last stronghold of the Insurgents. It was crowded with soldiery: an hour in Belleville under existing circumstances is enough to satisfy the morbid appetite for excitement which may tempt people to go there. Notwithstanding the crowds on the Boulevards, many of the shops are still shut, in consequence of the absence of their owners from Paris. The difficulties of entering and leaving the city are still so great that many days must elapse before the ordinary population can return. Meantime, the want of gas makes the streets as they were in the darkest moments of the siege, and the gloom after dark, combined with the dangers of arrest, does not tempt people to remain abroad much later than 10 o'clock.

Yesterday, out of one of the houses from which a shot had been fired, an innocent Englishman, who, being elderly and deaf, knew nothing of what had happened, came downstairs unsuspectingly on to the pavement into the middle of the crowd, and had a very narrow escape for his life. Some ingenious self-constituted detective called out "That's the man," and the crowd, having long waited in vain for somebody, were only too glad to have a victim thus extemporized to their hands, and if a few of the cooler and more humane bystanders had not interfered, the Englishman might have been murdered in cold blood and in broad daylight. As it was, he got off with no more serious injury than torn clothes and a mauling which may keep him to his bed for a fortnight.

What, to those who have witnessed the recent transformation scenes in the great Parisian melodrama, is newest and strangest is the crowd of well-dressed holyday-making loungers streaming so thickly over the broad pavement that it is no easy matter to get through them, and occupying every available chair outside the adjoining café. Where in the world do they all come from? Many of them have stories of their recent experiences to tell which, well arranged, might make the fortune of a theatrical manager—stories so sensational that one would feel bound to refuse them credence if they were not in perfect harmony with the sensational scenes of which every third man's personal experience has supplied him with a specimen. One man has been close prisoner in a cellar two days and nights while fighting has been going on all around him and over his head. Another has had to fly amid bullets from the suffocating smoke of burning buildings, his ears still ringing with the cries of poor wretches who could not muster up their courage for the rush, and who risked a lingering death under the fallen ruins.