CHAPTER TEN

MADNESS

In the madness which prevails here, I will not undertake any prediction of what will happen. …

—ELIHU WASHBURNE

I

The terms of the surrender became public on the twenty-ninth day of the new year, 1871. All troops in Paris were immediately to give up their arms. Cannon on the ramparts were to be thrown in the moats. The Germans would not enter the city for several days, and agreed to remain a brief time only. There was to be no occupation of Paris.

For France it had been the most ill-advised, disastrous war in history, with total defeat coming in little more than five months. The cost to France in young men killed and wounded in battle was 150,000. For the German Empire it was 117,000. The death toll in Paris was reported to have been 65,591, of whom 10,000 died in the hospitals. Three thousand had been killed in the battle for Paris. The infants who died in the city also numbered somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000.

By the terms of the surrender, France was subjected to a staggering war indemnity of 5 billion francs and forced to cede to Germany the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, a point of extreme humiliation to the French that was only to fester.

Emotions in Paris ranged from stoic acquiescence to abject gloom and bewilderment to burning fury, and this especially among the poor and those of the political left who had wanted to fight on and felt they had been betrayed by their own government.

“The enemy is the first to render homage to the moral strength and courage of the entire Paris population,” read the government’s own proclamation. “France is dead! Long live France!” declared the conservative paper Le Soir. But the liberal Le Rappel expressed the mood of tens of thousands that “Paris is trembling with anger.”

Olin Warner spoke for nearly every American who had been through the siege when he wrote of the utter relief he felt just to have it over. If ever again he found himself in similar circumstances, he assured his parents, he would remain no longer “than packing up of my clothes requires.”

Yet to Mary Putnam, who refused to abandon her faith in the ideal of a republic, the surrender had been unwanted and unnecessary. Paris could have held out another three months, she insisted, as did so many Parisians. “We are all furious,” she told her father in a letter written from the legation, where she had gone partly to get warm but also because she knew the letter would have a better chance of getting out.

The very gloom of the streets, shrouded day after day by a persistent, thick fog, seemed entirely in keeping.

Shipments of food, including barrels of flour from America, began arriving in increasing quantities. In a matter of weeks food of all kinds had become widely plentiful and cheaper than before the siege. Trains ran once more, people were free to come and go. News and mail from elsewhere began circulating. And the weather at last cleared. By late February, with a spell of “pleasant days,” Elihu Washburne could report that Paris was again “quite Parisian,” its “bright-hearted population” back filling the streets.

He eagerly anticipated the return of his family and, in the meantime, was being warmly commended for all he had done through the crises to help so many in distress, everyone assuming, as did he, that the worst was over. When his friends the Moultons asked what those shut up in Paris would have done without him, he answered, “Oh, I was only a post-office.” And praise was plentiful at home:

Henry James.

Mary Cassatt, self-portrait.

John Singer Sargent.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Kenyon Cox.

Augusta Saint-Gaudens by Thomas Wilmer Dewing.

Living room interior of the apartment at 3 rue Herschel by Augusta Saint-Gaudens.

Farragut Monument, Madison Square Park, New York City, unveiled in 1881. In the distance, Saint-Gaudens’s Diana stands atop the tower of Madison Square Garden, built later.

Reading Le Figaro by Mary Cassatt, the portrait of her mother, Mrs. Robert (Katherine Johnson) Cassatt, that marked her arrival as an Impressionist.

Lydia at a Tapestry Frame by Mary Cassatt (above). Lydia Cassatt, who suffered from Bright’s disease, posed repeatedly for her sister, Mary, as in The Cup of Tea (below).

Carolus-Duran by John Singer Sargent, the portrait of the celebrated French master that launched Sargent’s career at age twenty-three.

Vernon Lee by Sargent.

Sketches of Sargent reading Shakespeare (top) and painting by his fellow student and roommate James Carroll Beckwith.

El Jaleo (left top) and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (left bottom) by John Singer Sargent. El Jaleo, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and Sargent’s Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) were all painted in Paris within just two years, 1882 to 1884, when Sargent was still in his twenties. Below, the painter in his studio with the portrait that caused a sensation like no other.

The Statue of Liberty rises over Paris in a painting by Victor Dargaud.

The grounds of the 1889 Exposition Universelle with the newly completed Eiffel Tower, the world’s tallest structure.

Thomas Alva Edison by Abraham Archibald Anderson. So great was popular interest in Edison that he spent much of his time in Paris hiding out with his American friend Anderson, who took the opportunity to paint Edison’s portrait.

Students at the Académie Julian in a painting by Jefferson David Chalfant (detail).

Robert Henri.

Henry O. Tanner by Hermann Dudley Murphy.

Henri’s plan of the apartment he shared with four other American art students and their sleeping arrangement on “little iron beds.”

Cover of a 1900 Exposition Universelle guide book.

Henry Adams.

The continuing thrill of the fair—Paris seen from the Eiffel Tower.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens in his Paris studio, with a variation of his Amor Caritas.

Gus and Gussie aboard ship on a trip to Spain, 1905.

Sherman Monument (with Victory) at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City at the entrance to Central Park.

The conduct of Mr. Washburne during the war, and especially during the siege of Paris [wrote the New York Tribune] was marked by such discretion, such courage and energy that it gained the respect and esteem of the French and the German people. … We do not recall an instance in our diplomacy of a more brilliant and successful performance of duty in circumstances of such gravity and delicacy.

From Secretary of State Fish came a personal expression of gratitude. “No Minister … ever discharged a difficult and trying duty with more tact and ability and skill than you have. …”

Washburne longed only for peace and rest. He hoped he had done his duty, he told a friend, but feared too much praise. “It is always perilous to be too popular. …”

As soon as he saw his way clear, he was off to Brussels for a few days with Adele and the children.

The German army marched into Paris and down the Champs-Élysées on Wednesday, March 1. The city looked as if closed for a funeral. By general “understanding,” shops and restaurants along the path were shut tight. No omnibuses or carriages were to be seen. No newspapers were published, no placards posted.

The first of the conquerors appeared at nine in the morning, three blue-uniformed German cavalrymen advancing slowly down the avenue, their horses at a walk, their carbines cocked, their fingers on the triggers. More of the advance guard followed, both cavalry and infantry.

The day had started out cloudy and grey, but after noon the sun appeared bright and warm. By half past one, the Royal Guards of Prussia, with glittering bayonets, surrounded the Arc de Triomphe. Then came the main body of the army marching by for two hours.

Washburne, who watched much of it from the balcony of a friend’s apartment on the Champs-Élysées, wrote that a good many people were on the sidewalks on both sides of the avenue.

At first the troops were met with hisses, cat-calls and all sorts of insulting cries, but as they poured in thicker and thicker … the crowd seemed to be awed into silence, and no other sound was heard but the tramp of the soldiery and the occasional word of command.

That evening no crowds appeared on the boulevards. Not a restaurant opened its doors, except for two on the Champs-Élysées that the Germans had ordered to stay open. “Paris seemed literally to have died out,” Washburne wrote.

The gas was not yet lighted, and the streets presented a sinister and somber aspect. … It is just to say that the people of Paris bore themselves during all that cruel experience with a great degree of dignity and forbearance which did them infinite credit.

Trying to see as much as possible, he had been, he reported to Adele, “about on foot all day and at night was used up, feet blistered, etc.”

On the morning of March 3, after an occupation of little more than forty-eight hours, the conquerors marched away. Stores, restaurants, and hotels threw open their doors. The Champs-Élysées was scrubbed clean. Fountains in the Place de la Concorde began to spout again. “At 3 o’clock in the afternoon (the day was splendid) … people looked happier than I had seen them for many long months.”

Gaslights burned once more. A sum of 200,000 francs was received from the city of New Orleans in aid of the French wounded. Work began to repair the damages done to the Tuileries Garden and the Bois de Boulogne. Some of the galleries at the Louvre reopened. People who had fled the city were pouring back by the thousands.

But any thought that things might go smoothly into spring was soon dashed. On March 17, Washburne mentioned in a dispatch to Washington that units of the National Guard had seized more than a hundred cannon and fortified themselves on the heights of Montmartre. As he later said, he had no premonition of what followed early the next day, Saturday, March 18, 1871.

In a surprise move the government sent a force of army regulars to recover the cannon, and almost instantaneously the National Guard soldiers on Montmartre were joined by a huge angry crowd in which many were armed. At the moment of confrontation a regiment of regulars suddenly held their rifle butts in the air and joined in shouting down the government.

A general in command of the regulars, Claude Lecomte, was pulled from his horse, and with another general, Jacques Clément-Thomas, who had been taken captive irrespective of the fact that he was in civilian clothes, marched away to a nearby house on the rue des Rosiers with the mob following after and shouting for their death. General Thomas, an elderly man known for his Republican sympathies, had been doing no more than watching from the sidelines, but he had been long despised for his part in crushing the Revolution of 1848.

In an improvised mock trial, by a show of hands, the two captives were found guilty, then taken into the garden, tied together against a wall and shot, after which, reportedly, a number of the women from the crowd urinated on the bodies.

The violence on Montmartre marked the start of the insurrection that became known as the Paris Commune.

II

The Commune, as often mistakenly assumed later, had nothing to do with communism. The word commune, meaning something communal or shared, was used for a town or city government as a mark of regional autonomy. Thus the Paris Commune was now in charge of Paris and, ideally, devoted to politics more representative of the will of the people of Paris.

Washburne, who had gone to the country that Saturday with his friends the Moultons, did not learn of what happened on Montmartre until the following day, and by then, Sunday, March 19, the Central Committee of the National Guard had taken over at the Hôtel de Ville and the government, led by Adolphe Thiers, had fled to Versailles. Placards posted everywhere proclaimed a comité now in charge. As no one needed to be told, the National Guard in the city numbered 50,000 troops, all still armed. No less than 20,000 were now encamped outside the Hôtel de Ville with forty to fifty cannon drawn up.

It seemed the “culmination of every horror” to Washburne, whose family arrived from Brussels late that same day.

On March 21, several thousand citizens calling themselves the “Friends of Order” staged a protest, parading down the rue de la Paix to the Hôtel de Ville unarmed and without incident. But when, the day after, thousands more of Les Amis de l’Ordre marched down the same route to the cheers of spectators, a contingent of the National Guard stood ready at the Place Vendôme to stop them. Someone opened fire. From which side was never determined. Instantly the street was filled with gunfire and screaming, and a dozen of the Amis and at least one guardsman lay dead.

Through the week that followed, Washburne sent off one letter or dispatch to Washington after another in an effort to describe what was happening. With the official government now at Versailles, and little chance of its return to Paris anytime soon, he was obliged to travel back and forth by carriage almost daily to Versailles, twenty miles round-trip. He was gravely worried, concerned about the safety of his family, exhausted, and feeling ill much of the time.

The situation, he wrote, was already worse by far than during the siege. In a city of 2 million people there was “no law, no protection, no authority except that of an unorganized mob.” In the first days of the Communards, he had spoken in their defense among friends, saying they were acting in good faith, but by now he was “utterly disgusted” by them.

True to form, he had no more intention of leaving Paris than he had had on the eve of the siege. And again he was the only chief of mission of a major country who chose to stay. The rest had moved to Versailles, where he set up a temporary office with Wickham Hoffman in charge, but where he refused to reside himself so long as other Americans remained in Paris.

On March 28, with great to-do, the Commune officially installed itself at the Hôtel de Ville. Military bands played. Officers of the Guard and members of the Comité Central wore red scarves. Red flags flew everywhere and the crowd, Washburne reported to Secretary of State Fish, exceeded 100,000 people. In response to every speech by members of the Comité, great cheers went up, and shouts of “Vive la Commune!”

At the same time, as Washburne also reported, the Paris journal Nouvelle République, a semiofficial organ of the Commune, announced that the deliberations of all representative bodies would no longer be public, and there would be no further reports of the sessions. Only decrees would be issued.

Newly printed placards posted in the streets of Montmartre announced the appointment of certain citizens who would henceforth receive any “denunciations” of anyone suspected of being in “complicity” with the government at Versailles.

Elsewhere, in several other parts of the city, houses were being searched and arrests made—more than four hundred arrests in a matter of days—on the orders of the new chief of police, Raoul Rigault, a former journalist in his twenties.

Such a system of “denunciation,” Washburne assured Secretary Fish, would very soon fill the prisons of Paris. His private secretary, a young man named James McKean, had been to the Prefecture of Police and found an enormous crowd gathered, all looking for friends who had been arrested and “spirited away.”

Washburne was not only disgusted with the Communards, but had come to think of pronouncements from the government at Versailles as mostly “rubbish.” “Imbecility and indecision rule … at Versailles,” he wrote privately. Adolphe Thiers, whom he admired, told him it would take at least two weeks for Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, the government’s commander, to gather a sufficient force to attack the insurgents in Paris. Jules Favre, on the other hand, thought that once such a force was in place the insurgents would immediately cave in. “He is mistaken,” Washburne wrote in his diary.

“The Commune is looming up and means business. Everything has a more sinister look,” he recorded on March 31. “There never was such a hell upon this earth as this very Paris.”

He kept trying every way he knew to find out what was happening. But to get to “the truth of matters” in such wild excitement seemed impossible. He was not frightened for himself, as frightening as things were, but he worried about his staff, worried constantly about his family and getting them safely away before it was too late.

The morning of that same day, March 31, Lillie Moulton, the beautiful daughter-in-law of his friends known for her exquisite singing voice, went to the office of the new chief of police, Rigault, to obtain a passport to leave Paris. The Prefecture of Police, a prison on the Île-de-la-Cité by the Palais de Justice, was enough to strike fear in anyone. Washburne described it as “a horrid place,” even in the best of times. “What mysteries within these walls, what stories of suffering, torture and crime …”

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.

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 difficulties, 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.

He and Gratiot both dressed at once and raced out to see with their own eyes. It was true. Others already on the avenue were happily congratulating one another on delivery of Paris at last.

The regulars had marched in at Porte de Saint-Cloud in force at three o’clock the previous afternoon, and against little opposition advanced steadily along the Right Bank of the Seine on the avenue that connected Versailles and Paris, heading for the Commune stronghold at the heart of the city, at the Place de la Concorde.

Nothing had foretold the attack. The Commune command was taken completely by surprise. As night came on and the Versailles troops moved forward in the dark, National Guard units manning the barricades at Porte Maillot and on the avenue de la Grande-Armée, beyond the Arc de Triomphe, hastily abandoned their positions, and so another corps of regular troops poured into that quarter of the city. An enormous barricade by the Arc nearly thirty feet high that had taken great labor to build “served no earthly purpose,” as Washburne observed.

He and Gratiot followed the regular troops down toward the Place de la Concorde, fully expecting to see the National Guard defense there quickly overrun. But it did not happen. Orders had gone out from the Central Committee at the Hôtel de Ville to throw together more barricades, barricades “in all haste,” barricades in every direction. As reported later in Galignani’s Messenger, “Everyone passing was forced to bring forward a paving stone or an earth bag, and any refusal would have been dangerous. Women and children worked just as actively as the National Guards themselves.”

At about nine o’clock the Communard batteries on Montmartre opened fire on the city and the shells came in “thick and fast.”

Tired of waiting and doing nothing, Washburne mounted a horse and rode off to see more, entirely without concern for his own safety, it would seem. “5:45 P.M. Have just taken a long ride,” he wrote. “The havoc has been dreadful—houses are all torn to pieces, cannon dismantled, dead rebels, etc., etc. One can hardly believe such destruction.”

“To arms!” read an urgent appeal posted by the National Guard. “To the barricades! The enemy is within our walls! Let there be no hesitation! Forward the Republic, the Commune and Liberty.”

By late in the day more than 80,000 Versailles troops had arrived and the western third of the city was in their hands. Still, at the Place de la Concorde and elsewhere, the fighting raged on, gunfire and the screams of the wounded filling the night.

So began “La Semaine Sanglante,” the Bloody Week.

On May 23 a city of 2 million people became a deafening full-scale battlefield. For twelve hours there was no letup in the roar of cannon. Montmartre, the symbolic stronghold of the Commune, fell to the regular army, the Communards leaving behind the dreadful spectacle of twelve regular soldiers taken prisoner who, because they refused to join the Commune, had had their hands cut off. Vicious street fighting took heavy tolls on both sides, but of the Communards especially. Some 4,000 Communards were taken prisoner. Any suspected of being deserters from the regular army were shot at once.

The Communard positions at the Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries Palace, and Hôtel de Ville continued to hold.

Everyone in Paris tried to keep out of harm’s way, indoors. Washburne, for his part, decided to make still another effort to save the archbishop. He went by carriage to the Versailles army headquarters at Passy to urge Marshal MacMahon to take possession of the Mazas Prison as quickly as possible to save the archbishop and the other prisoners. “He [MacMahon] hopes they will be there in a day or two,” was all Washburne could claim for his efforts in his diary that night.

At one o’clock (Wednesday, May 24) he was again awakened in bed, this time to be told the Palace of the Tuileries was in flames. He left as quickly as possible, and from a window at the Legation, six flights up on the top floor, much of the city was spread before him.

It was a terrible, unimaginable spectacle. The blazing palace lighted the sky. The Legion of Honor and the Ministry of Finance, too, were on fire. For a while it appeared the Invalides was burning, but this proved not to be so. “Tremendous [cannon] firing in another part of the city and the windows of the Legation shake.”

Like so many days that had followed one after another, the morning that dawned, May 24, was perfectly beautiful, except, as Washburne wrote, that over the city thick smoke obscured the sun. He went “down town” at about eleven o’clock. The insurgents had been driven from both the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Concorde. The fires, it was said, were the insidious work of women carrying petroleum or kerosene who numbered in the thousands—pétroleuses, they were called. “Every woman carrying a bottle was suspected of being a pétroleuse,” wrote Wickham Hoffman, who found it hard to believe the story.

“I can give no adequate description of what I saw,” Washburne wrote.

All the fighting in all the revolutions which have ever taken place in Paris has been mere child’s play compared to what has taken place since Sunday and what is going on now. … You can scarcely imagine the appearance of the streets. … Went as far as the burning Tuileries, the front of all falling in and flames bursting out in another part of the building. … Fires in all directions raging—many of them under the guns of the insurgents so they cannot be put out.

With the Palace ablaze, the Louvre was in imminent danger, but as Washburne could report in a long dispatch to Secretary Fish sent that night, the museum had been saved.

Two days earlier Police Chief Rigault and a coterie of extreme Communards had met in secrecy and ordered the execution of Archbishop Darboy and five other priests. The hostages were then moved from Mazas to La Roquette Prison in the Belleville quarter, which was still under Communard control.

At approximately six o’clock on the evening of May 24, as Paris was burning, the archbishop and the others were ordered out into the courtyard of the prison. They then descended a stairway, stopping at the ground floor, where they embraced one another and exchanged a few last words. When a cluster of National Guard soldiers at the door made insulting remarks, an officer demanded silence, saying, “That which comes to these persons today, who knows but what the same will come to us tomorrow?” Darkness had come on, and the six prisoners had to be led into the courtyard and up to the wall by the light of lanterns. The archbishop was placed at the head of the line. At a signal the firing squad shot all six at once.

Late that night the bodies were tumbled into a cart, hauled to nearby Père Lachaise Cemetery, and thrown into an open ditch.

At the Mazas Prison another fifty-three priests were murdered in cold blood.

Nothing of these atrocities was reported until late the next day. Nor was it yet generally known that on the afternoon of May 24, before the execution of the archbishop, Versailles soldiers had found Raoul Rigault hiding in a hotel on rue Gay-Lussac and, upon discovering who he was, took him into the street and shot him in the head. The body lay in the gutter for two days.

Flames raged through the night. The Hôtel de Ville had been set afire, along with the Palais de Justice and the Prefecture of Police. The Palais Royal and houses along the rue de Rivoli were burning. After nearly a month with no rain everything was dry as tinder.

Punishment for anyone caught, or suspected of, setting fires was immediate and merciless. Correspondents for the foreign press wrote of the “savage feeling” among the Versailles troops. Such hatred as was let loose in Paris had become terrifying beyond description, Washburne stressed in another hurried dispatch. The victims were strewn everywhere in the streets. That afternoon on the avenue d’Antin, an employee of the legation had counted the bodies of eight children, none more than fourteen years of age, who had been caught distributing incendiary boxes and shot on the spot.

The insurgents fought on “like fiends,” and the killing continued through Thursday and Friday as the first rain fell—heavy rain. Many hundreds of insurgents taken prisoner were summarily executed in the streets, in prisons, in the Luxembourg Gardens, and outside the Louvre. Thousands more were herded off through the rain, along streets where enraged crowds screamed for their death.

“They are as they were when caught, most without hats or caps, their hair plastered on the foreheads and faces,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt, as he watched several hundred prisoners pass on their way toward Versailles.

There are men of the common people who have made a covering for their heads with blue-checked handkerchiefs. Others, thoroughly soaked by the rain, draw thin overcoats around their chests under which a piece of bread makes a hump. It is a crowd of every social level, workmen with hard faces, artisans in loose-fitting jackets, bourgeois with socialist hats, National Guards … two infantrymen, pale as corpses. … You see middle-class women, working women, street-walkers, one of whom wears a National Guard uniform. … There is anger and irony on their faces. Many of them have the eyes of mad women.

The nearer the end came, the more the atrocities accelerated on both sides. On Friday, 50 prisoners of the Communards were taken from La Roquette Prison and shot. That night another 38 were led to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and executed, followed by another 4 the next day, making 92 victims in all.

On Sunday, May 28, when the last of the Communards still fighting were finally overrun, Marshal MacMahon declared Paris “delivered.” But the atrocities continued, growing still more horrific. One of the most infamous took place again at Père Lachaise when 147 Communards were lined up and shot against a wall to be henceforth known as the Wall of the Communards.

“There has been nothing but general butchery,” Washburne wrote in his diary.

The rage of the soldiers and the people knows no bounds. No punishment is too great, or too speedy, for the guilty, but there is no discrimination. Let a person utter a word of sympathy, or even let a man be pointed out to a crowd as a sympathizer and his life is gone. … A well-dressed respectable looking man was torn into a hundred pieces … for expressing a word of sympathy for a man who was a prisoner and being beaten almost to death.

“The vandalism of the dark ages pales into insignificance before the monstrous crimes perpetrated in this great center of civilization in the last half of the nineteenth century,” he wrote in an impassioned dispatch to Secretary Fish.

The incredible enormities of the Commune, their massacre of the Archbishop of Paris and the other hostages, their countless murders of other persons who refused to join them in their fiendish work, their horrid and well organized plans of incendiary intended to destroy almost the entire city … are crimes which will never die. I regret to say that to these unparalleled atrocities of the Commune are to be joined the awful vengeances inflicted by the Versailles troops. … The killing, tearing to pieces, stabbing, beating, and burning of men, women, and children, innocent and guilty alike, by the government troops will stain to the last ages the history of France, and the execrations of mankind will be heaped upon the names who shall be found responsible for acts which disgrace human nature. …

Although estimates of the total carnage inflicted by the regular troops vary, there seems little doubt that they slaughtered 20,000 to 25,000 people. No one would ever know for sure what the total numbered, but nothing ever in the history of Paris—not the Terror of the French Revolution or the cholera epidemic of 1832—had exacted such an appalling toll. At one point the Seine literally ran red with blood.

The value of the architectural landmarks and other treasures destroyed was inestimable.

Olin Warner, like Washburne an eyewitness to events, was later to write a lengthy defense of the Communards, in which he compared their initial idealism to that of the American rebels of 1776. At the time, however, in a letter to his “Dear Ones at Home” he said he had seen more than enough. “I hope it will never be my lot to see a drop of blood shed again. I never want to hear another cannon roar as long as I live. … I am disgusted with everything pertaining to war.”

On June 1, three days after the fighting had ended, Elihu Washburne went to La Roquette Prison to see the cell in which the archbishop had been held, and to pay homage at the spot in the prison yard where the archbishop and the five priests had been executed. The marks of the bullets on the wall could be plainly seen.

The body of the archbishop, having been rescued from the ditch at Père Lachaise before decomposition had taken place, lay in state at the palace of the archbishop at 127 rue de Grenelle. For several days thousands came to pay their respects, Washburne among them. On June 7, still greater numbers lined the streets to see the funeral procession pass on the way to Notre-Dame, where services were held with all appropriate majesty. To Washburne it was one of “the most emotional and imposing” services he had ever attended.

IV

Charred beams, dead animals, shattered doors and window frames, the remains of broken lampposts, wagons, mountains of wreckage, and all the barricades were hauled away. With people working day and night, life steadily resumed. Omnibuses began running, restaurants opened. It was not that the horrors of what had happened were put out of mind, any more than the horrendous damage done vanished entirely from sight. The blackened ruins of the Palace of the Tuileries were to be left standing for more than ten years as a mute reminder.

On June 3, Galignani’s Messenger carried an item from the Times of London declaring, “Paris, the Paris of civilization, is no more. … Dust and ashes … smolder and stench are all that remain. …” Cook’s Tours of London was already selling special trips to see the ruins of the fire. But there seemed a united, pervasive zeal to put Paris in order again as quickly as possible. By July the Tuileries Garden had reopened and some 60,000 stonemasons were at work repairing, rebuilding, building anew, a force of stonemasons equivalent to the entire population at the time of Portland, Maine, or Savannah, Georgia.

The Hôtel de Ville would be rebuilt, the Column of the Place Vendôme put together again and restored to its old pedestal.

The Venus de Milo was recovered from a secret hiding place and returned to the Louvre. The incomparable Greek statue, dating from before the birth of Christ, had been buried during the siege in, of all places, the cellar of the Prefecture of Police. Packed into a giant oak crate filled with padding, it was taken in the dead of night to the end of one of the many secret passages in the Prefecture, where, as only a few knew, a wall was built to conceal it. Stacks of documents of obvious importance were piled against the wall, then a second wall built to make it appear the hiding place was for the documents. When the Prefecture caught fire the night so much of Paris went up in flames, the anxiety of those in the know about the Venus was extreme. It seems a broken water pipe “miraculously” saved the statue. Once the smoking ruins were removed, the oak crate was found intact and brought back to the Louvre to be opened.

Everyone leaned forward eagerly to look [read the account in Galignani’s Messenger at the end of August]. Lying in her soft bed … she seemed to look gratefully on her preservers. … All her features and limbs were complete, no injury has been done. …

To many her return from the ashes seemed a resurrection of the Paris of art and culture, a Paris that would not die.

Those Parisians who had fled the city for their safety returned like an incoming tide. With them were foreign students, business people, diplomats, and the families of diplomats, including Adele Washburne and her children. The Americans who had never left tried to pick up their lives where they had left off.

Lillie Moulton ordered several fine dresses from Worth, in preparation for a September concert tour in America. (“And if my public don’t like me,” she wrote, “they can console themselves with the thought that a look at my clothes is worth a ticket.”)

Mary Putnam, like many of her French friends, had seen her initial fervor for the Republic vanish, not because of the excesses of the Commune so much as the brutal vengeance of the Versailles government. Her engagement, too, had ended when the return of her fiancé brought “a sense of estrangement.” Part of the problem was that as a woman she would face inevitable difficulties practicing medicine in France and he was unwilling to leave France. She did, however, complete her dissertation, for which she was awarded the highest honors, just as she received the highest possible marks in each of her five examinations. “I have passed my last examination [and] … passed my thesis, and am now docteur en médecine de la Faculté de Paris,” she wrote to her mother on July 29. She was the first American woman ever to attain such a professional standing.

Her achievement received notice in the New York and Paris papers, and in the Archives de Médecine, which mattered most to her. That a woman had acquired the legal right to practice medicine, said the learned professional journal, was “not without importance at large.”

By then also, the American minister to France, Elihu B. Washburne, after several restorative weeks “taking the waters” at Carlsbad, the famous health spa in Bohemia, decided that, if needed, he would happily stay on in Paris.

Tributes were to be published celebrating the part Washburne had played. At home he would be talked of as a possible candidate for president. There were dinners in his honor in Paris, and much said in diplomatic circles about the courage and perseverance he had shown.

“Speaking of diplomacy, hasn’t our Minister in Paris done splendidly,” wrote Frank Moore, the assistant secretary at the legation who had served with Washburne through the siege and the horrors of the Commune and was still on the job.

By the use of sound common sense, a kindly, generous disposition and a true appreciation of the right, he has during the past year brought more credit to our government and people at home than they can ever reward him for. His name is on every tongue and I am sure that he will not escape the fate of other honest men for whom thousands of boy babies have been and will affectionately and admiringly be named. … That it will ever be a pleasant chapter for Americans to read in future history which must say that the U.S. Legation alone remained in Paris throughout the siege and the fearful scenes of the Commune of 1870 and 1871.

What no one could yet appreciate, other perhaps than Washburne himself, was the additional, immeasurable value of the diary he had kept day after day through the entire ordeal, recording so much that he witnessed and had taken part in, writing often at great length late at the end of an exhausting, horrible day, aware constantly of the self-imposed duty he felt to keep such an account. He could very well have done nothing of the sort. Or the daily entries might have been abbreviated notes only, telegraphic in style, something to be “worked up later” as a memoir. But Washburne was not so constituted. He had to set it down there and then, and the wonder is that what he wrote was not only substantial in quantity,

but that he wrote so extremely well, with clarity, insight, and such great empathy for the human drama at hand.

Numbers of his famous American predecessors in diplomatic roles in Paris had written perceptively, often eloquently of their experiences and observations while there, beginning with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Still greater numbers of American authors of high reputation—Cooper, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe—had written of their Paris days before Washburne ever arrived, and many more would take their turns in years to come. But no one ever, before or after, wrote anything like Washburne’s Paris diary, and if his decision to stay and face whatever was to come had resulted only in the diary, he would have made an enormous, singular contribution.