Vermorel could not take his waggons as far as Montmartre, the Versaillese already investing the heights. Masters of the Batignolles, they had but to stretch out their hand to seize upon Montmartre. The Buttes seemed dead; panic had during the night hurried on its underhand work; the battalions, one after the other, had grown smaller, vanished. Individuals seen later on in the ranks of the army had stirred defections, spread false news, and every moment arrested civil and military chiefs, under the pretext that they were betraying. Only about a hundred men lined the north side of the hill; a few barricades had been commenced in the night, but without spirit; the women alone had shown any ardour.
Cluseret had, according to his usual habit, gone off in a vapour. Despite his despatches and the promises of the Hôtel-de-Ville, La Cécilia had received neither reinforcements nor munitions. At nine o'clock, no longer hearing the cannon of the Buttes, he hurried up, and found the cannoniers gone. The runaways from the Batignolles arriving at ten o'clock only brought in panic. The Versaillese might have presented themselves; there were not 200 combatants there to receive them.
MacMahon, however, only dared attempt the assault with his best troops, so redoubtable was this position, so great the renown of Montmartre. Two entire army corps assailed it by the Rues Lepic, Mercadet, and the Chaussée Clignancourt. From time to time some shots were fired from a few houses; forthwith frightened columns came to a stand-still and began regular sieges. These 20,000 men, who completely surrounded Montmartre, helped by the artillery established on the terre-plein of the enceinte, took three hours to climb these positions, defended without method by a few dozen tirailleurs.
At eleven o'clock the cemetery was taken, and shortly after the troops reached the Château-Rouge. In the environs there were some fusillades, but the few obstinate men who still fought were soon killed, or withdrew discouraged at their isolation. The Versaillese, scrambling up to the Buttes by all the acclivities that lead to them, at mid-day installed themselves at the Moulin de la Galette, descended by the Place St. Pierre to the mairie, and occupied the whole of the eighteenth arrondissement without any resistance.
Thus without a battle, without an assault, without even a protestation of despair, was this impregnable fortress abandoned, from which a few hundred resolute men might have kept the whole Versaillese army in check, and constrained the Assembly to come to terms.
Hardly arrived at Montmartre, the Versaillese staff offered a holocaust to the manes of Lecomte and Clément-Thomas. Forty-two men, three women, and four children were conducted to No. 6 in the Rue des Rosiers and forced to kneel bare-headed before the wall, at the foot of which the generals had been executed on the 18th March; then they were killed. A woman, who held her child in her arms, refused to kneel down, and cried to her companions, "Show these wretches that you know how to die upright."
On the following day these massacres continued. Each batch of prisoners halted some time before this wall, marked with bullets, and were then despatched on the slope of the Buttes that overlooks the St. Denis route.[185]
The Batignolles and Montmartre witnessed the first wholesale massacres. Every individual wearing a uniform or regulation boots was shot, as a matter of course, without questions put, without explanations given. Thus the Versaillese had been assassinating since the morning in the Square des Batignolles, Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, and at the gate of Clichy. The Parc Monceaux was their principal slaughter-house in the seventeenth arrondissement. At Montmartre the centres of massacre were the Buttes, the Elysée, of which every step was strewn with corpses, and the exterior boulevards.
A few steps from Montmartre the catastrophe was not known. At the Place Blanche the women's barricade held out for several hours against Clinchant's soldiers; they then retreated towards the Pigalle barricade, which fell at about two o'clock. Its chief was led before a Versaillese chief of battalion. "Who are you?" asked the officer. "Lévêque, mason, member of the Central Committee." The Versaillese discharged his revolver in his face; the soldiers finished him.
On the other bank of the Seine our resistance was more successful. The Versaillese had been able since morning to occupy the Babylone Barracks and L'Abbaye-au-Bois, but Varlin stopped them at the cross-roads of the Croix-Rouge. This cross-road will remain celebrated in the defence of Paris. All the streets that open into it had been powerfully barricaded, and this stronghold was only abandoned when fire and shells had reduced it to a heap of ruins. On the banks of the river, the Rues de l'Université, St. Dominique, St. Germain, and De Grenelle, the 67th, 135th, 138th, and 147th battalions, supported by the enfants perdus and les tirailleurs, resisted obstinately. In the Rue de Rennes and on the contiguous boulevards the Versaillese exhausted their strength. In the Rue Vavin, where Lisbonne conducted the defence, the resistance was prodigious; for two days this advanced sentinel kept back the invasion from the Luxembourg.