"A Versailles, tous les moyens ont été employés pour assurer l'instruction la plus sérieuse, la plus attentive, la plus complète de tous les procès qui ont été juges.... Je tiens donc que les jugements qui ont été rendus ne sont pas seulement en droit, d'après toutes nos lois, inattaquables, mais que, pour la conscience la plus scrupuleuse, ils sont des jugements qui ont dit la vérité.—('Très bien! très bien!')"—Le Garde des Sceaux Dufaure, Discours contre l'Amnistie, Séance du 18 Mai 1876.
"Les conseils de guerre ont jugé, je l'admets, pour le mieux."—Allain-Targé, député Gambettiste, Séance du 19 Mai 1876.
THE COURTS-MARTIAL—THE EXECUTIONS—BALANCE-SHEET OF THE CONDEMNATIONS.
Twenty-six courts-martial, twenty-six judicial mitrailleuses, were at work at Versailles, Mont-Valérien, Paris, Vincennes, St. Cloud, Sèvres, St. Germain, Rambouillet, as far as Chartres. In the composition of these tribunals not only all semblance of justice, but even all military rules had been despised. The Assembly had not even troubled itself to define their prerogatives. And these officers, hot from the struggle, and for whom every resistance, even the most legitimate, is a crime, had been let loose upon their overwhelmed enemies without any other jurisprudence than their fancy, without any other rein than their humanity, without any other instruction than their commission. With such janissaries and a penal code comprising everything in its elastic obscurity, there was no need for exceptional laws in order to attaint all Paris. Soon one saw the most extravagant theories invented and propagated in these judicial dens. Thus, being at the place of the crime constituted legal complicity; with these magistrates this was a dogma.
Instead of removing the courts-martial into the ports, the prisoners were forced to again undergo the painful journey from the sea to Versailles. Some, like Elisée Reclus, had thus to pass through fourteen prisons. From the pontoons they were conducted to the railway station on foot, their hands manacled; but at Brest, when they passed through the streets showing their chains, the passers-by uncovered before them.
With the exception of a few prisoners of note, whose trials I shall briefly recount, the bulk of the prisoners were thrust before the tribunals after an examination which did not even always make sure of their identity. Too poor to get a defender, these unfortunate people, without guides, without witnesses for the defence—those whom they called did not dare to come for fear of being arrested—only appeared and disappeared before the tribunal. The accusation, the examination, the sentence were shuffled through in a few minutes. "You fought at Issy, at Neuilly? Sentenced to transportation." "What! for life? And my wife, my children?" To another: "You served in the battalions of the Commune?" "And who would have fed my family when the workshop and factory were closed?" Again sentenced to transportation. "And you? Guilty of an illegal arrest. To the bagnio." On the 14th October, in less than two months, the first and second courts had pronounced more than six hundred sentences.
Would that I could recount the martyrology of the thousands who defiled thus in sombre lines, National Guards, women, children, old men, ambulance attendants, doctors, functionaries, of this decimated town! It is you whom I should honour, you above all, you, the nameless, to whom I should give the first place, as you took it in the work at the barricades, where you obscurely did your duty. The true drama of the courts-martial was not in those solemn sittings in which the accused, the tribunal, the barristers prepared for public performance, but in those halls which only saw the unhappy ones, ignored by the whole world, face to face with a tribunal as inexorable as the chassepot. How many of these humble defenders of the Commune held up their heads more proudly than the chiefs, and whose heroism no one will tell! When the insolence, the insults, the grotesque arguments of the conspicuous judges are known, it may be guessed with what ignominy the unknown accused were overwhelmed in the shade of these new prevotal courts. Who will avenge these hecatombs of unknown men, executed in silence, like the last combatants of the Père Lachaise in the darkness of the night?
The journals have left no trace of their trials; but, in default of the names of the victims, I can scatter those of some judges to the four winds of history.
Formerly, in the days of honour of the French army, in 1795, after Quiberon, it was necessary to threaten the officers of the Republic with death in order to form the courts-martial that were to judge the Vendéens. And yet those vanquished had, under the cannon, with English arms, attacked their country in the rear, while the coalesced Powers struck her in front. In 1871 the accomplices of Bazaine solicited the honour of judging the vanquished of that Paris which had been the bulwark of national honour. Through long months 1,509 officers of this degraded army, that has not an hour too much for its rehabilitation and for study, 14 generals, 266 colonels and lieutenant-colonels, and 284 commanders, were dubbed judges and commissaries. How select amongst this pick of bestiality? When I mention a few presidents at hazard—Merlin, Boisdenemetz, Jobey, Delaporte, Dulac, Barthel, Donnat, Aubert—I shall be wronging a hundred others.
Merlin and Boisdenemetz are known. Colonel Delaporte was of the Gallifet species. Old, used up, valetudinarian, he only revived after a sentence of death. It is he who pronounced the greatest number, aided by the clerk of the court, Duplan, who prepared the sentences beforehand, and afterwards committed the most impudent forgeries in the minutes. Jobey had, it was said, lost a son in the struggle with the Commune, and now he avenged himself. His small wrinkled eye watched for the anguish in the face of the unfortunate he condemned. Every appeal to good sense was to him an insult.