Raoul Rigault, as he himself made plain, was the epitome of the impassioned Left Bank radical, half journalist, half student, bent on destroying all established privilege and authority, and at the moment he held more power than any other man in Paris. He despised nearly every social convention, the upper class, the middle class, and the church and its clergy most of all. “I want sexual promiscuity. Concubinage is a social dogma,” he had earlier proclaimed.
Lillie Moulton described him later as “short, thick-set, with … a bushy black beard, a sensuous mouth, and a cynical smile.” Extremely nearsighted, he wore heavy tortoiseshell glasses, but even these, she said, “could not hide the wicked expression of his cunning eyes.” Washburne, with reason, was to call Rigault one of the most “hideous” figures in history, “strange and sinister … [with] the heart of a tiger.”
Lillie was admitted to Rigault’s office only after being kept waiting a considerable time. When finally she stood before the desk where he sat writing, he neither looked up nor acknowledged her presence. Again she waited, feeling, she said, “like a culprit.” Two uniformed policemen stood immediately behind his chair. Another man, whom she did not recognize, leaned against a small mantelpiece at the other end of the room. He was Pascal Grousset, the Commune’s delegate for external affairs and someone Washburne had had dealings with and liked. Possibly, Washburne had something to do with Grousset’s presence in the room. Otherwise, one wonders why he would ever have allowed Lillie to face Rigault alone.
Breaking the silence, she told him she had come for a passport and handed him Washburne’s card.
Did she wish to leave Paris? he asked. Yes, she said, and as she later wrote, “He replied, with what he thought was a seductive smile, ‘I should think Paris would be a very attractive place for a pretty woman like yourself!’ ”
Was she an American? Yes, and glad to be so, she answered.
“Does the American minister know you personally?”
“Yes, very well.”
Opening a desk drawer, he took out a blank passport form and began filling it in while asking the standard questions, but in a slow, insinuating way that she found “hateful.” She thought she might faint. It was only when Pascal Grousset stepped forward to intervene and speed things along that the ordeal ended and she was safely out the door.
“No Elsa ever welcomed her Lohengrin coming out of the clouds as I did my Lohengrin coming from the mantelpiece,” she later wrote.
For several days and nights the roar of cannon fire was heard again, exactly as during the siege, except this time it was the French firing on the French.
On April 4, the Commune formally impeached all members of the government at Versailles and confiscated their Paris properties. After dark that night, moving swiftly and with great secrecy, Chief of Police Rigault had the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Georges Darboy, arrested and jailed, along with twenty other priests. The archbishop had committed no offense, nor was any reason given for the arrest. Like Washburne, he had refused to leave the city, feeling it his duty to face every danger and stay with his people in their time of trial.
News of the arrest spread great alarm and outrage among many. Newspapers reported that the archbishop was taken before Raoul Rigault, who proceeded with “icy coolness” to interrogate the prisoner.
At first M. Darboy attempted his usual clerical attitudes, turning his eyes up and called the persons present, “Mes enfants!” Citizen Rigault, however, immediately interrupted him with the remark that he was not speaking to children, but to judges.
As the cannonading grew heavier, the exodus from Paris became a stampede of hundreds of thousands of people, everyone carrying as much money as could be safely concealed. All the gold and silver found in churches had been confiscated by the Commune. Placards on buildings denounced priests as thieves.
By the second week of April, all able-bodied men were forbidden to leave the city. Railroads suspended service. When cannon fire began hitting close to the American minister’s home on the avenue de l’Impératrice—one shell striking within fifty feet—Washburne moved his family to a safer part of town.
“Big firing this morning and shells coming in fast,” he wrote in his diary on April 10.
I started downtown to the Legation. The shells were hissing through the air and exploding in the neighborhood of the Porte Maillot and the Arc de Triomphe. I got within about two hundred yards of the Arc when pop went the weasel—a shell struck [and] burst against the Arc. A piece of shell fell in the street, which a National Guard picked up, all warm and smoking, and sold to me for two francs.
April 17. … The firing is going on all the time … so near it seems almost under the windows. … Every day makes things worse. … The house adjoining ours was entered and sacked the night before last. … I hardly know what to do.
April 19. … All is one great shipwreck in Paris. Fortune, business, public and private credit, industry, labor are all in “the deep bosom of the ocean buried” [from Shakespeare’s Richard III]. The physiognomy of the city becomes every day more sad. All the upper part of the Champs-Élysées is completely deserted in fear of the shells. Immense barricades are going up at the Place de la Concorde. The great manufacturies and workshops are closed. … Where I write, at 75 [avenue de l’Impératrice], always the roar of cannon, the whizzing of shells and rattling of musketry. When I came home at 61/2 this evening the noise was terrific. … Gratiot went to Fontainebleau today to find a place for the family, but was unsuccessful.
When the pope’s nuncio, Monseigneur Chigni, made a strong appeal to the American minister, as the only senior diplomat still in Paris, to intervene on behalf of the imprisoned archbishop, stressing how perilous the situation had become, Washburne agreed to do what he could.
On the morning of Sunday, April 23, accompanied by young McKean, he made an official call on General Gustave-Paul Cluseret, the secretary of war under the Commune, who had the unusual distinction for a French officer of having served in the Union Army during the Civil War. With help from Senator Charles Sumner he had become a Union colonel and commanded troops in the Shenandoah Valley. Washburne had known him at the time, and Cluseret received him now most cordially and expressed his sympathy for the archbishop. But unfortunately, given “the state of feeling in Paris,” he said, “no man would be safe for a moment who proposed his release.”
Like an attorney in court, Washburne “remonstrated” against the “inhumanity and barbarism” of seizing such a man accused of no crime, dragging him to prison, then allowing no one to speak to him. If it was not within Cluseret’s power to release the archbishop, then he, Washburne, must be permitted to visit him in prison.
Cluseret thought it a reasonable request and agreed to go at once with Washburne to see Chief of Police Rigault.
“So we all started off (Mr. McKean was with me) and made our way to the Prefecture,” Washburne recorded. Arriving at about eleven o’clock, they were told Rigault was still in bed. Cluseret went alone to see him and soon returned with a pass. Washburne and McKean then proceeded directly to the infamous Mazas Prison on the boulevard Mazas, opposite the Gare de Lyon, where the archbishop was being held.
To their surprise they were admitted without delay and ushered to a visitors’ cell. Minutes later the prisoner was led in.
Monseigneur Georges Darboy was fifty-eight years old. Born in Fayl-Billot, in the Haute Marne, he had come to Paris thirty years earlier to serve as inspector of religious instruction at the colleges of the diocese of the city. He became the archbishop in 1863. Washburne, who had never met him, was stunned by his appearance.
With his slender person, his form somewhat bent, his long beard, for he has not been shaved apparently since his confinement, his face haggard with ill health, all could not have failed to have moved the most indifferent.
He was extremely pleased to see them, the archbishop said, for until then he had been permitted to see no one from the outside. Nor had he been allowed even to see a newspaper.
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He seemed to appreciate his critical situation, and to be prepared for the worst. He had no word of bitterness or reproach for his persecutors, but on the other hand remarked that the world judged them to be worse than they really were. He was patiently awaiting the logic of events and praying that Providence might find a solution to these terrible troubles without the further shedding of human blood.
He was confined, he told his visitors, to a cell ten by six feet with one small window, a single wooden chair, a small table, and a prison bed. In the same prison forty other priests were now being held. When Washburne offered him any assistance he might want, he said he had no need for anything.
Washburne, a Protestant and un étranger, left determined to do everything possible to have the archbishop released. He would be an agent of freedom still again, as he had been for so many during the siege and in battles at home in Congress against slavery. Two days later he was back at the prison bringing a stack of newspapers for the archbishop and a bottle of old Madeira.
On April 25, Adele and the family, with McKean as their escort, left the city to stay in Vieille-Église, thirty miles from Paris, beyond Versailles. “It is a little French village four hundred years old,” Washburne wrote to a friend in Galena during an overnight visit. “We occupy a cottage near an old château, splendid yard, garden, etc. It is very pleasant and healthy and Mrs. W. and the children are very well, happy, and contented.”
He himself was not so well, however. “I have been so run down and so overwhelmed with care and responsibility. …” What he did not say was that he had lost so much weight his suits hung on him. “The children are growing,” he added, “and they chatter French like birds. …”
Back in Paris an incident involving the elderly Charles Moulton provided a momentary lift of spirits for Washburne, as it did for every American in Paris who heard the story.
For years Moulton had been known for his inability to say almost anything in French as it should be pronounced. After more than twenty years in Paris, he remained the ultimate Yankee mangler of the language, and much to the embarrassment of the rest of his family. He had no trouble reading French, and, seated in his favorite parlor chair, he often insisted on reading aloud to the others from the Paris papers, which, as he keenly appreciated, was enough to send them scurrying from the room.
On the morning of May 9, a mob of Communards descended on the Moulton estate on the rue de Courcelles. As the family well knew, anyone of obvious wealth was by this time in grave risk. “We thought our last day had come,” said Lillie Moulton.
When no one in the house, neither servant nor family member, expressed sufficient courage to step out and face the mob, Moulton decided to go himself—“like the true American he is,” wrote Lillie, who volunteered to go with him.
Small, slight, and bespectacled, he was hardly an imposing figure, and, against the backdrop of the enormous house, he seemed smaller still.
A rough-looking leader of the crowd pushed forward holding a sheet of paper with the official seal of the Comité de Transport and demanded in the name of the Commune every animal on the premises.
Mr. Moulton took the paper [Lillie wrote], deliberately adjusted his spectacles, and … read it very leisurely (I wondered how those fiery creatures had the forbearance to stay quiet, but they did. I think they were hypnotized by my father-in-law’s coolness). …
No sooner did Moulton open his mouth to reply than the crowd began to giggle, his pronunciation working its spell. When, raising his voice to an unusually high pitch, he declared they could have the horse, “le cheval,” but not “le vache,” using the masculine pronoun le for cow, it was more than they could bear.
“The men before us were convulsed with laughter,” wrote Lillie.
Moulton’s French saved the day, she later acknowledged, adding that, rough and threatening as the men in the crowd were, they “could not but admire the plucky old gentleman who stood there looking so calmly at them over his glasses.”
A beloved family horse was led away, but “le vache” was permitted to stay. No damage whatever was done to the house or to anyone in it.
The Commune issued a decree ordering the demolition of the famous Vendôme Column in the Place Vendôme honoring the victories of French armies under Napoleon. Other decrees followed, one to burn the Louvre, because it contained works of art celebrating gods, kings, and priests, and another to demolish Notre-Dame, the ultimate symbol of superstition.
Hundreds of laborers were already at work in the Place Vendôme, preparing to topple the 155-foot column. At the point where it was calculated to hit the ground, horse manure was being piled high to cushion the fall.
In another part of the city, on the Place Saint-Georges, Communards were busy demolishing the home of Adolphe Thiers and carrying off his possessions, including one of the finest private libraries in Paris.
For days crowds converged at the Place Vendôme, expecting to see the column come crashing down at almost any moment. Bands played as if at a festival. Thousands stood watching—as many as 20,000, Washburne judged from what he saw at midafternoon on May 16.
The engineers had cut through the bronze veneer and into the thick stone core of the column at its base, as a giant tree would be felled. Cables were attached to the top, just below the statue of Napoleon, and winches and pulleys set in position to pull.
At five-thirty, down it came, shattering in pieces even before it hit the manure pile. (“I did not see it fall and I did not want to,” Washburne later wrote.)
To most of the throng who cheered the spectacle of such destruction, it symbolized an end to imperialism and the start of the new era under the Commune. A red flag was at once mounted on the now-vacant pedestal, and for days afterward the giant statue lay on its back, the head separated from the body, the right arm broken loose.
Writing in his diary the next day, Edmond de Goncourt noted the increasing number of people he saw walking about in the streets talking to themselves “aloud like crazy people.”
A large placard in bold letters issued by the Commune went up on walls throughout the city:
Citizens,
Enough of militarism, no more general staffs loaded with stripes and gilded on every seam! Make way for the people, for fighters with bare arms! The hour for revolutionary war has struck. …
If you want the loyal blood that has flowed like water for the last six weeks not to be in vain; if you want to live free in a France that is free and equal to all; if you want to spare your children from both your sorrows and your miseries, you will rise up as one man. …
Citizens, your leaders will fight, and, if necessary, die with you; but in the name of glorious France, mother of all popular revolutions, fountainhead of the ideas of justice and solidarity which must be and shall be the laws of the world, march to meet the enemy. Let your revolutionary energy show him that they may sell Paris but cannot deliver her; nor can they conquer her.
The Commune is counting on you, count on the Commune.
Every day seemed worse than the one before, Washburne wrote on May 19. “Today they threaten to destroy Paris and bury everybody in its ruins before they will surrender.” In his official capacity he said nothing derogatory about the Communards. But in his diary they were “brigands,” “assassins,” and “scoundrels.” “I have no time now to express my detestation. …”
Demands on his time by people desperate to get away grew proportionately. Already he had issued 4,450 laissez-passers. Yet at eight o’clock that morning two hundred people stood waiting outside the legation below his window.
The precarious fate of the archbishop weighed heavily and efforts in his behalf occupied many hours. The Communards wanted an exchange of the archbishop for one of their heroes, Auguste Blanqui, an idealistic radical conspirator who had been held prisoner for so long and by so many political regimes that he was known as “the imprisoned one.” Washburne understood why the Versailles government might oppose such a trade. Yet whatever the difficu
lties, it seemed to him, the government stood to lose nothing by agreeing and thus saving the archbishop’s life. He went to Versailles to make the case in person. It was, as he later said, “a very delicate piece of business,” but he had become intensely interested in that “venerable and excellent man.” Thiers and the government stubbornly refused to exchange Blanqui.
On another visit to the Mazas Prison, Washburne found the archbishop very “feeble” and confined to his bed.
Back again at the prison on the afternoon of Sunday, May 21, he discovered “everything in a vastly different state.” There were new men in charge, most of them drunk and highly annoyed by his presence. Instead of allowing him to go to the prisoner’s cell, as he had before, they brought the weakened archbishop out into a passageway and stood by watching and listening. He had greatly changed, Washburne later wrote. “He had lost his cheerfulness, and seemed sad and depressed. The change in the guardings prevailing there foreboded evil.”
III
Like most of Paris, Washburne went to bed and slept through that night, May 21–22, unaware of what was happening, and like most of Paris he was stunned when he awakened to the news. The Tricolor flew atop the Arc de Triomphe, he was told by an excited servant at first light. The Versailles army had entered Paris.