People :
Author : Louise Michel
Text :
Somehow I managed to escape from the soldiers trying to arrest me. Finally the victorious reactionaries took my mother and threatened to shoot her if I wasn’t found. To set her free I went to take her place, although she didn’t want me to do it, the poor, dear woman. I had to tell her a lot of lies to convince her, and as always she ended up believing me. Thus I saw to it that she returned home.
They took me to the detention camp in the 37th [sic: 43rd] Bastion, near the Montmartre railroad. Even that far out, fragments of paper ash coming from the burning of Paris blew like black butterflies. Above us the lights of the fire floated like red crepe. And always we could hear the cannon. We heard them until May 28, and right up to that day we said to each other:
“The Revolution will take its revenge.”
At the 37th Bastion, in front of the dust-filled square where we were penned up, there are casemates under a mound of green lawn. There, as soon as General de Gallifet arrived, the soldiers shot two unfortunate people in front of us. They resembled each other and must have been brothers. They both struggled until the shots rang out, for they did not want to die. They hadn’t even been on our side. They had come out into the street, perhaps to insult us, and had been arrested. Before they were shot, they had said they weren’t worried, because they were sure they’d be freed. Then General de Gallifet gave an order to shoot into the crowd if anyone moved. The two brothers were terrified and tried to flee. We cried out:
“We don’t know them. They’re not ours.”
But it did no good. They were shot anyway. They weren’t even able to stand up for the volley. They were so frightened that all they could say was that they were Montmartre merchants; they couldn’t even remember their addresses so that they could commend their children to those of us who remained. We didn’t think we could figure out who they were either. People thought that one of them was saying “Alas.” I have always guessed that he said “Anne,” and that she was his daughter. How many people were seized like this, how many who really were enemies of the Commune, like those two unfortunate men of Bastion 37?
After this execution we were lined up and marched off toward Versailles. As we arrived there, a bunch of bullies threw rocks at us as if we were rabbits, and a member of the National Guard had his jaw broken. One thing I owe to the cavalry who were guarding us: They pushed back the ruffians and their girl friends who had come to the prisoner-baiting. We didn’t stop at Versailles, however; we were led beyond, south to Satory.
The prisoners filing past from Montmartre to Satory are present now in my mind. We were marching between the lines of a cavalry escort. It was night. Nothing could have been more horribly beautiful than the place where they made us climb down into the ravines near the Chateau de la Muette. The gloom, barely lit by the wan moon, transformed the ravines into walls. The shadows of the horsemen on either side of our long file formed a black fringe that made the path seem lighter. The sky, hovering with the promise of heavy rains on the morrow, seemed to press down on us. Everything became blurred and appeared dreamlike—except for the horsemen who led the column and the first groups of prisoners. A sudden flash of light filtered from below between the hooves of the horses and lit them up; scattered red reflections seemed to bleed on us and on the uniforms. The rest of the file stretched out in a long trail of ink, ending in the murky depths of the night.
People said they were going to shoot us in those ravines, but the soldiers had us climb out, although I didn’t know why. I felt no fear, for I was wrapped up in the picture I saw and no longer thought of where we were. Thrilled by my perceptions, I earned no merit at all for despising a danger I wasn’t thinking about. Gripped by the tableau I only looked, and now I remember.
Satory! As we got there during a downpour which made the slope slippery, we were told: “Move! Climb as if you were charging up the Butte of Montmartre.” And everybody climbed at full charge, and then we had to walk in front of some machine guns that they rolled after us. We told an old woman who was on the verge of hysterics, and who was in our group only because her husband had been shot, that the machine guns were only a formality they went through each time new prisoners arrived. We weren’t so sure of this, but at least the woman fell silent. We believed the soldiers were going to kill us, and there would only be time enough for us to yell, “Long live the Commune” before we died. But then they pulled back the machine guns.
Satory! In the middle of the night the soldiers would call out groups of prisoners. They’d get up from the mud where they had lain down in the rain, and follow the soldier’s lantern that led their way. They’d be given a pick and shovel to dig their own graves, and then they’d be shot. The echoes of volleys shattered the silence of the night.
Satory! The prisoners drank from their hands at the little pond when they were too thirsty and when the heavy rain which was falling on them had swept away the pink foam. There the victors washed their hands, which were often redder than those of butchers.
Who will record the crimes that power commits, and the monstrous manner in which power transforms men? Those crimes can be ended forever by spreading power out to the entire human race. To spread the feeling of the homeland to the entire world, to extend well-being to all people, to give science to all humanity—that will save humanity.
When I arrived at Satory the soldiers said they were going to shoot me the next day, in the evening; then the next day they said they would shoot me the day after. I don’t know why they didn’t, for I was insolent to them, as insolent as one is in defeat to ferocious victors.
Shortly thereafter, a group of us was sent to the prison of Chantiers at Versailles. As we were marching, a strange thing happened. A furious woman dashed in front of us, crying out that we had killed her sister, that she knew it, that there were witnesses. A cry rose up from our midst. It was her sister, who had been arrested by the Versailles government.
When we arrived at the prison of Chantiers, we were kept in a huge square room on the second floor, sitting on the floor by day and stretching out any way we could at night. At the end of two weeks they gave us bundles of straw, each of which had to do for two people. At night two lamps lit our morgue, where we hung up our rags and tatters on strings above our sleeping bodies. Above the room was a hole through which we climbed to the interrogation room; another hole led to the ground floor, where they kept the children who were prisoners, the children whose fathers they couldn’t find. Some of those children, like Ranvier, were courageous and we were proud of them.
For a long time I was forbidden to see my mother, who came often from Montmartre without being able to speak to me. One day she was pushed back while she was offering me a bottle of coffee, and I threw the bottle at the gendarme who had pushed her. A nearby officer rebuked me, and I told him my only regret was that I had thrown the bottle at a tool of the government rather than at the head of it. They finally did allow my mother to see me, but it was a long time later.
At the prison of Chantiers I saw grotesque things...
A deaf and dumb woman spent several weeks there, charged with having cried out, “Long live the Commune!” An old woman, both of whose legs were paralyzed, was charged with having built barricades. For three days, another woman just walked around the room, her basket under one arm and her umbrella under the other. In her basket were some poems that her employer had written in praise of the victors. Ironically, the soldiers believed those poems were in praise of the Commune, even one with a line that ran:
Good gentlemen of Versailles Enter into Paris.
But laughter quickly dies. The cries of the insane, uncertainty about relatives and friends whose fate was unknown, mothers left alone—all that I feel even now.
We were proud in defeat, and the ruffians and their girl friends who came out to see the vanquished as if they were going to look at animals in the Jardin des Plantes didn’t see our tears. Instead, we sneered at their idiotic faces.
On the floor of our prison room there were so many lice they made little silver nets as they meandered about, going to their nests that resembled anthills. They were enormous lice, with bristling backs that were a little bit round-shouldered, so many lice that you believed you could hear the noise of their swarming.
Constantly guarded by soldiers, we women couldn’t change our underwear easily (those of us who had any to change into). I was finally able to get some from my mother, who pushed it through the openwork gate in the courtyard.
I spent my nights looking at the tableau of this morgue. I have always been taken by views like that, so much so that I often forget people in the face of the horrible eloquence of things. Sometimes this morgue looked like dusk or dawn playing on a field where the crop had been harvested. I could see the empty stalks, thin bundles of straw, gilded like wheat. At other times, light mirrored off them. When daybreak paled the lamps, it looked like a harvest of stars.
On 15 June 1871, the worst forty of us were sent from the prison to the reformatory at Versailles. Mme Cadolle and Mme Hardouin have related what happened at Chantiers after we left.
Of course I was one of the worst forty sent to Versailles. We had to wait in the courtyard under a beating rain, and an officer said he was sorry. I couldn’t keep myself from saying that making us stand in the drenching rain fitted in with all their other acts, and anyway I liked it better that way.
At the reformatory of Versailles, conditions for us forty were strangely eased. To get ready for the trial of the members of the Commune, the government tried a number of unfortunate women and sentenced them to death, although they had only been ambulance nurses. Because of her name, Eulalie Papavoine was sentenced to forced labor and was sent to Cayenne, even though she was not related to the legendary Papavoine. The Versailles government carefully kept from sentencing the boldest women to death; they didn’t execute either Elisabeth Retif or Marchais, although they proved the two had conspired with each other, in spite of the fact that they had never met.
On the third of September, the eve of the first anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, the sentencing of the chief members of the Commune was drawing to a close. By decree the governor general of Paris had established the Third Military Court-Martial. Colonel Merlin was president and the members were Major Gaulet, Captain de Guibert, M. Mariguet, Lieutenant Caissaigne, Second Lieutenant Leger, Warrant Officer Labbat, Major Gaveau, and Captain Senart. The Third Military Court-Martial tried eighteen persons, among them Theophile Ferre.
Theophile Ferre, who once had been Clemenceau’s deputy mayor, was the brother of my great friend Marie. In the Dossier [sic: Cahiers] de la magistrature by Odysse Barot I found an account of Theophile Ferre’s arrest, and I quote those pages which were written under the vivid emotion of the horrible scene. People will understand why, when I am discussing these terrible sorrows, I quote friends who have related the events of those sad days instead of telling about them myself. Courage has limits, and one doesn’t pass them unless duty demands it.
There is a detail about which people do not know and which has not been written about until now: the manner in which Ferry’s arrest took place and the way the authorities discovered his hiding place.
All inquiries had been fruitless. The authorities had arrested five or six pseudo-Ferres, just as they had shot five or six pseudo-Billiorays and five or six pseudo-Valles.
What did they do then? They went to the little house on the rue Fazilleau in the suburb of Levallois-Perret, where the former member of the Commune used to live with his parents.
Theophile Ferre was not at the house, but the authorities had known when they went to Levallois-Perret that there was no chance of finding Ferr£ at his parents’ home. Why did they go there? How naive you are! He lived there with his family, and what good is a family if it does not inform on and surrender its own?
Needless to say, the authorities pushed their way brutally into the little cottage surrounded by its garden. Ah! Wait, I do not know if my pen will have the courage to finish. The other day business took me to Levallois, and when I passed down that street and came to that house, whose number suddenly came back to mind, I was forced to stop for a few minutes. Blood rushed to my head and sweat ran down my forehead; a simple memory caused waves of anger and rage to overwhelm me. Please excuse me for this involuntary emotion, but you will share that indignation, that anger, and that rage.
The authorities entered the house. The father had left for his daily job, and only two women were there, the old mother and the young sister of the man they were looking for. The sister, Mile Marie Ferre, was in bed, dangerously sick with a high fever.
The authorities fell on Mme Ferre and questioned her harshly. They ordered her to reveal the hiding place of her son. She swore she didn’t know it and that, if she did, it was terrible to tell a mother to betray her own son.
They increased their pressure and used both gentleness and threats.
“Arrest me if you want to,” Mme Ferre said, “but I can’t tell you what I don’t know and you will not be so cruel as to tear me away from my daughter’s sickbed.”
The poor woman trembled all over just thinking about that. One of the men smiled fleetingly, for her words had given him a diabolical idea.
“Since you won’t tell us where your son is, we are going to take your daughter away.”
Mme Ferre cried out in despair and anguish, but her prayers and tears were unavailing. The men set about getting her sick daughter up and dressing her, at the risk of killing her.
“Courage, mother,” said Mile Ferre. “Don’t worry, I’ll be strong. It will be nothing. They will have to let me go.”
They were going to take her away.
Mme Ferre was faced with the horrible alternative of sending her son to his death or killing her daughter by allowing her to be taken off. In spite of desperate signs which the heroic Marie made to her, the hapless mother in a frenzy of grief lost her head in her anguish, hesitated...
“Be silent, mother! Be silent!” murmured the sick girl.
The authorities were taking Marie off...
It was too much for her mother to bear. She broke down. Her reason became dark, and incoherent phrases escaped from her lips. The execu¬ tioners listened for a clue.
In her hysteria the tormented mother let the address “rue Saint-Sau- veur” slip several times.
Alas! No more was needed. While two of the men kept the Ferre home under observation, the others ran to finish the job. The rue Saint-Sauveur was sealed off and searched, and Theophile Ferre was arrested.
A week after the horrible scene at the rue Fazilleau, the courageous Marie was freed. But they didn’t free her mother, who had become insane, and soon died in the asylum of Sainte-Anne.
At the court-martial, Theophile Ferre refused to have a defense lawyer, but the president of the court, according to law, appointed Maitre Marchand to defend him. Ferre explained the role of the Commune, after having discussed the coup d’etat prepared by the enemies of the Republic, who had gone so far as to deny Paris the right to elect its municipal council.
“Honest and sincere newspapers were suppressed,” Ferre said to the court-martial. “The most patriotic among us were condemned to death while Royalists were preparing to divide France. Finally, during the night of March 18, they believed they were ready, and they tried to disarm the National Guard and arrest all republicans. Their attempt failed because it was faced with the complete opposition of Paris and even the mutiny of their own soldiers. The royalists fled and took refuge at Versailles.
“Paris was now free, and some vigorous and courageous citizens tried to reestablish order and safety at the risk of their lives. A few days later the population voted and created the Commune of Paris.
“It was the duty of the Versailles government to recognize the validity of the vote of Paris and to confer with the Commune about restoring tranquility. On the contrary, as if foreign war had not already given France enough misery and ruin, the government added a civil war. Breathing hate and vengeance against the people, the Versailles govern¬ ment attacked Paris and subjected it to a new siege.
“Paris resisted for two months, and then it was conquered. For ten days, without making any pretense at legality, the Versailles government authorized the massacre of citizens. Those terrible days remind us of St. Bartholomew’s Massacre and surpassed the atrocities of June and December. When will the machine-gunning of people stop?
“Because I am a member of the Paris Commune, I am in the hands of the victors. They want my head. Let them take it. Free I have lived, and free I expect to die.
“I add only one word: Fortune is capricious. I entrust to the future my memory and my revenge.”
Ferre was condemned to death. Of the eighteen defendants at that court-martial only he and Lullier were sentenced to death. Urbain and Trinquet were sentenced to life at hard labor. Sentenced to deportation to a fortification were Assi, Bilhoray, Champy, Reg£re, Ferrat, Verdure, and Grousset. Jourde and Rastoul were sentenced to simple deportation. Courbet was sentenced to six months and fined 500 francs, and Des- champ, Parent, and Clement were acquitted.
Another murder took place, too. Flourens was killed in an outpost as punishment for letting some men escape on October 31. They slipped away through windows, doors, and water closets, and he didn’t join the hunt for the vanquished.
The Board of Pardons reviewed the verdicts of the court-martial, and that board is guilty of the volleys at the execution stakes. The fifteen members of the Board of Pardons were only fifteen executioners. If the soldiers were drunk with blood up to their ankles, the Board of Pardons had blood up to its belly.
Theophile Ferre and I were able to exchange a few letters from our prisons while we were both at Versailles. I still have some of them, and some of the poetry I wrote for him. The year of seventy-one! I have a notebook of black-bordered mourning paper in which Marie copied down some of my poems, a number of which she copied in red ink, red like blood. Marie had given this notebook to her brother Hippolyte, who lent it to me, but he won’t get it back until I’m dead and the pages that are now blank are written upon.
I think I still have Ferre’s last letter to me from his cell at Versailles. None of the house searches took those papers away from me, and my friends didn’t want to disturb them because the people mentioned were either dead or prisoners. It is too painful to quote his letter; I will say only that Ferre, instead of being moved by his own fate, looked at liberty rising on the faraway horizon across the blood of 1871.
I do have a copy of the last letter Ferre sent to my dear Marie. This fragment came to me on May 24 of this year; I did not need to see the accompanying letter to guess that it came from you, my dear Avronsart.
Prison of Versailles, no. 6 Tuesday, 28 November 1871, 5:30 a.m.
My beloved sister,
In a few moments I am going to die. At the last instant, thoughts of you will be in my mind. I beg you to ask for my body so that it may be reunited with that of our unfortunate mother. If you can, have the hour of my burial put in the newspapers, so that friends can accompany me. Of course, no religious ceremony: I die a materialist, as I have lived.
Place a wreath on the tomb of our mother.
Try to cure my brother and to console our father. Tell them both how much I loved them.
I give you a thousand kisses and thank you for the attention you have never ceased to lavish on me. You must overcome your sorrow and, as you have often promised me, be equal to events. As for me, I am happy. I am going away to be done with my sufferings, and there is no reason to feel pity for me.
All yours,
Your devoted brother,
Th. Ferre
All my papers, my clothing, and other objects are to be returned, except for the money in the clerk’s office which I leave to more unfortunate prisoners.
Th. Ferre
At seven o’clock on the morning of 28 November 1871, Ferre was assassinated on the plain of Satory along with Rossel and Bourgeois, who had been condemned to death in another trial. Here are the terms in which a reactionary newspaper related the heroic death of FerreFst :
The condemned are very firm. Ferre, backed up to his post, throws his hat on the ground. A sergeant comes forward to place a blindfold over his eyes; Ferre takes the blindfold and throws it on his hat... The three condemned remain alone. The three firing squads, which have just ad¬ vanced, fire.
Rossel and Bourgeois fall immediately; as for Ferr6, he stays standing for a moment and then falls on his right side. The surgeon-major of the camp, M. Dejardin, hurries over to the cadavers. He signals that Rossel is quite dead and calls the soldiers who are to give the coup de grace to Ferre and to Bourgeois.
Finally the march past begins.
Marie recovered somewhat, and being the only member of the family who was free, she proved her courage by going from prison to prison as long as her brothers and her father were locked up, and she came to claim Theophile’s body for burial.
Because of the letters Theophile and I had exchanged, the Prefect of Police sent me to Arras. By a maneuver of the prefect, a name was crossed off the list of those who were being sent to wait in faraway prisons, and mine was put in its place. I must say that the Military Tribunal didn’t know about this, let alone approve it. I protested not against the prison, where we found much better treatment than at Satory or in the temporary prison camps, but against the squalid maneuvering of this transfer. I was under the jurisdiction of the Military Tribunal and not that of the Prefect of Police, who wanted to delay my trial indefinitely, while insulting me by trying the other women, Retif and Marchais, first.
On the day of Ferre’s execution I was recalled from Arras. At the railroad station of Versailles I saw Marie, who had come to claim her brother’s body. I was able to speak to her for only a moment. She was dressed entirely in black, and her thick brown curls stood out as if her skin was marble, for she was very pale. She showed neither tears nor weakness, but she looked like a corpse, and she was so cold to the touch! She was as cold as she was years later when I arranged her in her coffin.
The execution of Ferre prompted me to write to General Appert, under whose authority the trials were taking place.
Prison of Versailles 2 December 1871
Sir:
I finally believe that the triple assassination of Tuesday morning really happened.
If you don’t want to go through the legal formalities, you already know enough about me to shoot me. I’m ready, and the plain of Satory is nearby.
You and all your accomplices know very well that if I get out of here alive I will avenge the martyrs.
Long live the Commune.
Louise Michel
But they didn’t want to put me in front of a firing squad at Satory, and I am still here, seeing death mow people down all around me. No one who hasn’t experienced this kind of emptiness can know what courage it took to live.
But no weakness! None! Long live the dead Commune! Long live the living Revolution!
In May 1871 the streets of Paris were dappled white as if by apple blossoms in the spring. But no trees had cast down that mantle of white; it was chlorine that covered the corpses. Now, the ground was all white again, this time with snow. On 28 November 1871, six months after the hot-blooded butchery had ended, the cold-blooded assassinations began.
The soldiers had become tired and perhaps their machine guns were breaking down. Now there would be an end to scenes of limbs half-cov¬ ered with earth, an end to cries of agony coming from heaps of persons who had been summarily executed, an end to swallows dying poisoned by the flies that had been feeding in that enormous charnel house. Henceforth, murder would be done cold-bloodedly, in an orderly fash¬ ion.
We do not know the names of all those who died in the hunt and after. The enormous number of missing persons proves how minimal the official figures of the slaughter are. Sometimes now, in the corners of cellars, skeletons are found, and no one knows where they came from. People claim it is mysterious, but every out-of-the-way spot became a charnel house to the victory of the Versailles royalists.
And the plain of Satory. If it were excavated, corpses would be found there too. The royalists covered them with quicklime in vain, because plows will uncover them, and every stone upturned will reveal them.
As I write these pages, those places are only boneyards. Fifteen years ago they were slaughterhouses. And down in the catacombs under Paris, where the government chased the Communards with torches and dogs as if they were animals, there must be many modern skeletons among the ancient bones. Betrayals so numerous they were nauseating, stupid fear, disgust, the horror—all this was the aftermath of the Commune.
The trial of the members of the Commune was riddled with errors, but the main purpose of the appeal our lawyers filed with the Court of Cassation had been to test Versailles’s justice to its end. None of the condemned counted on it, although the legal flaws were numerous. The prosecutor, Major Gaveau, insulted Ferre in the course of the trial by saying “the memory of a murderer.” That same Gaveau twice vacated his seat as public prosecutor, did not appear even for a moment at the session of September 2, and did not attend the reading of the sentence, a sentence in which false documents appeared.
The members of the Commune did not conceal their acts. It was not easy to be found innocent, even when one had committed no crime, when people felt responsible for their own actions. Ferre carried his acts proudly and bore responsibility for them to the execution post at Satory. The others carried theirs to prison or to exile. Yet in order to convict the defendants, the authorities thought they needed to add forgeries that were established as false, forgeries that were so patently false that some were not even written in French.
By June 1872 the Versailles “justice” had delivered 32,905 verdicts. They had already condemned 72 persons to death, and sentenced another 33 to death in absentia. That made a total of 105 sentenced to capital punishment, and the Versailles “justice” kept on operating.
Forty-six children under the age of sixteen were put in reformatories. No doubt it was to punish them for what their fathers had been shot for. Small children, in the orgy of the fighting, had had their heads smashed against walls.
In the summer of 1873 they were still shooting prisoners at Satory. After a mockery of a trial in which I made no attempt to defend myself, I was sentenced to deportation to a fortification for life.
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