I quote at hazard, and could quote pages: "We must make a Communard hunt" (Bien Public). "Not one of the malefactors in whose hands Paris has been for two months will be considered as a political man. They will be treated like the brigands they are, like the most frightful monsters ever seen in the history of humanity. Many journals speak of re-erecting the scaffold destroyed by them, in order not even to do them the honour of shooting them" (Moniteur Universel). "Come, honest people, an effort to make an end of this democratic and international vermin" (Figaro). "These men, who have killed for the sake of killing and stealing, are taken, and we should answer, Mercy! These hideous women, who stabbed the breast of dying officers, are taken, and we should cry, Mercy!" (Patrie).[215]
To encourage the hangmen, if that were necessary, the press threw them crowns.
"What an admirable attitude is that of our officers and soldiers!" said the Figaro. "It is only to the French soldier that it is given to recover so quickly and so well." "What an honour!" cried the Journal des Debats. "Our army has avenged its disasters by an inestimable victory."
Thus the army wreaked on Paris revenge for its defeats. Paris was an enemy like Prussia, and all the less to be spared that the army had its prestige to reconquer. To complete the similitude, after the victory there was a triumph. The Romans never adjudged it after civil struggles. M. Thiers was not ashamed, under the eye of the foreigner, before still smoking Paris, to parade his troops in a grand review. Who then will dare to blame the Federals for having resisted the army of Versailles as they would have the Prussians?
And when did foreigners show such fury?[216] Death even seemed to whet their rancour. On Sunday, the 28th, near the Mairie of the eleventh arrondissement, about fifty prisoners had just been shot. Urged not by an unworthy curiosity, but by the earnest desire to know the truth, we went, at the risk of being recognised, as far as the corpses lying on the pavement. A woman lay there, her skirts turned up; from her ripped-up body protruded the entrails, which a marine-fusileer amused himself by dividing with the end of his bayonet. The officers, a few steps off, let him do this. The victors, in order to dishonor these corpses, had placed inscriptions on their breasts, "assassin," "thief," "drunkard," and stuck the necks of bottles into the mouths of some of them.
How to justify this savagery? The official reports only mention very few deaths among the Versaillese—877 during the whole time of the operations, from the 3rd April up to the 28th May.[217] The Versaillese fury had then no excuse for these reprisals. When a handful of exasperated men, to avenge thousands of their brothers, shoot sixty-three of their most inveterate enemies[218] out of nearly 300 whom they had in their hands, the hypocritical reaction veils its face and protests in the name of justice. What, then, will this justice say when those shall be judged who methodically, without any anxiety as to the issue of the combat, and, above all, the battle over, shot 20,000 persons, of whom three-fourths had not taken part in the fight? Still some flashes of humanity were shown by the soldiers, and some were seen coming back from the executions their heads bowed down; but the officers never slackened for one second in their ferocity. Even after the Sunday they still slaughtered the prisoners, shouted "Bravo!" at the executions. The courage of the victims they called insolence.[219] Let them be responsible before Paris, France, the new generation, for these deeds of infamy.
At last the smell of the carnage began to choke even the most frantic. The pest, if not pity, was coming. Myriads of flesh-flies flew up from the putrefied corpses. The streets were full of dead birds. The Avenir Libéral, singing the praises of MacMahon's proclamations, applied the words of Flèchier: "He hides himself, but his glory finds him out." The glory of the Turenne of 1871 betrayed him even up to the Seine.[220] In certain streets the corpses encumbered the pathway, looking at the passers-by from out of their dead eyes. In the Faubourg St. Antoine they were to be seen everywhere in heaps, half white with chloride of lime. At the Polytechnic School they occupied a space of 100 yards long and three deep. At Passy, which was not one of the great centres of execution, there were 1,100 near the Trocadéro. These, covered over by a thin shroud of earth, also showed their ghastly profiles. "Who does not recollect," said the Temps, "even though he had seen it but one moment, the square, no, the charnel of the Tour St. Jacques? From the midst of this moist soil, recently turned up by the spade, here and there look out heads, arms, feet, and hands. The profiles of corpses, dressed in the uniform of National Guards, were seen impressed against the ground. It was hideous. A decayed, sickening odour arose from this garden, and occasionally at some places it became fetid." The rain and heat having precipitated the putrefaction, the swollen bodies reappeared. The glory of MacMahon displayed itself too well. The journals were taking fright. "These wretches," said one of them, "who have done us so much harm during their lives, must not be allowed to do so still after their death." And those that had instigated the massacre cried "Enough!"
"Let us not kill any more," said the Paris Journal of the 2nd June, "even the assassins, even the incendiaries. Let us not kill any more. It is not their pardon we ask for, but a respite." "Enough executions, enough blood, enough victims," said the Nationale of the 1st June. And the Opinion Nationale of the same day: "A serious examination of the accused is imperative. One would like to see only the really guilty die."
The executions abated, and the sweeping off began. Carriages of all kinds, vans, omnibuses, came to pick up the corpses and traversed the town. Since the great pests of London and Marseilles, such cart-loads of human flesh had not been seen. These exhumations proved that a great number of people had been buried alive. Imperfectly shot, and thrown with the heaps of dead into the common grave, they had eaten earth, and showed the contortions of their violent agony. Certain corpses were taken up in pieces. It was necessary to shut them as soon as possible into closed waggons, and to take them with the utmost speed to the cemeteries, where immense graves of lime swallowed up these putrid masses.
The cemeteries of Paris absorbed all they could. The victims, placed side by side, without any other covering than their clothes, filled enormous ditches at the Père Lachaise, Montmartre, Mont-Parnasse, where the people in pious remembrance will annually come as pilgrims. Others, more unfortunate, were carried out of the town. At Charonne, Bagnolet, Bicêtre, &c., the trenches dug during the first siege were utilised. "There nothing is to be feared of the cadaverous emanations," said La Liberté "an impure blood will water the soil of the labourer, fecundating it. The deceased delegate at war will be able to pass a review of his faithful followers at the hour of midnight; the watchword will be Incendiarism and assassination." Women by the side of the lugubrious trench endeavoured to recognise these remains. The police waited that their grief should betray them, in order to arrest those "females of insurgents."