Lejeune in the Commune

Although, for health reasons, Lejeune was unfit to serve in the French army, he joined the National Guard to fight against the siege of Paris by Otto von Bismarck’s troops. He was a sergeant in the 2nd Company of the 28th Battalion. On 18 March 1871, by his own account, Lejeune ‘did not hesitate for an instant’ and went up the Butte de Montmartre, the hill dominating northern Paris, to defend the cannon of the National Guard. He was therefore among those who proclaimed the Commune that same day.

They went into the barracks to get weapons, for not long before, they had been taken from them. No one stood in their way: that morning, the government had fled to Versailles and concentrated there the troops still loyal to them, leaving the barracks unguarded. But despite this initial success, in Lejeune’s eyes, serious errors were subsequently made.

He wrote in later accounts, espousing a familiar Marxist-Leninist analysis, that the Communards should have organised a real defence of the city, prevented the government from leaving Paris and seized the houses of the bourgeois who had joined the Versailles government of Adolphe Thiers.

In short, they should have opposed a genuine workers’ power to the Versaillais, who began to prepare the offensive against Paris. Instead, on 26 March, elections were organised for the Council of the Commune. As for Thiers, who had rebuffed attempts at mediation by moderate republican mayors in Paris, he wasted no time in concentrating the troops that Bismarck had put at his disposal since the armistice ending the Franco-Prussian War. By the time the Council elections were over, Thiers was ready to go on the offensive.

It was the working population of Paris that made the revolution and organised the Commune, even though there were still no sizeable factories offering mass employment, only small workshops. Many worked at home. There were no big stores, just small shops dispersed throughout the city. In its immense majority, Lejeune claimed in his later accounts, all this labouring population sympathised with and supported the Commune.

According to his writing, Lejeune served in the National Guard from the beginning to the bloody end of the Commune, and seemed unafraid to follow the ruthless precept of Marat if need be: ‘I stood guard on the fortifications of Paris and in front of the city gates. We made round-ups and searched suspect houses at night. That’s how it was during the Commune.’ He also states that he was well-connected, claiming to have known, since before the insurrection, Théophile Ferré, chief of the revolutionary police, Alexis Trinquet, councillor for the militant 20th arrondissement, and Aimé Félix Pyat, a member of the Committee of Public Safety.

But during the Commune, ‘each of us was at his post. I was just a man in the rank and file, they were leaders and we did not have time to see each other.’ Lejeune also knew the famed ‘Red Virgin’, Louise Michel, a redoubtable anarchist schoolteacher and poet: ‘but what Communard did not know her? She was a woman extraordinarily committed to the cause of the Revolution. How many calumnies and insanities have been spread about this heroine?’

The Commune was ‘above all war, civil war’. Nevertheless, Lejeune recognised that the Commune introduced some progressive measures during its brief lifetime, noting that the decree cancelling rent arrears was of ‘great importance to the working population’, along with the decrees on the separation of Church and State, and on public education.

However, in a situation of civil war, the main concern of the National Guard was not to let the Versaillais enter Paris. Lejeune recalled the treacherous role of one Ducâtel, a city roadworks foreman, who, on 21 May, indicated to the Versaillais that some of the western bastions of the Paris fortifications were unprotected. Regular troops, under the command of General MacMahon, surrounded the city and went on the attack, quickly seizing the beaux quartiers of the south-west and obliging the defenders of the Commune to fall back towards the centre. Barricades had been erected in secure places before the troops invaded.

As soon as Lejeune and his comrades heard the news of the Versaillais entering Paris, they threw themselves on the barricades and the final struggle began. In retrospect, Lejeune paid homage to the romantic heroism of the Communards while acknowledging their military shortcomings:

Was there a defence plan? Probably there was. There was also a certain organisation of the defence, because we were supplied with munitions and even food. We were relieved. We went to rest, slept, then returned to our posts. However, we acted rather as revolutionaries who had long been ready for sacrifice, who had decided to die and not surrender, rather than as military men serving under the command of leaders.

The Communards defended the barricades in districts across Paris, but by the evening of 24 May, the invading troops had taken the Hôtel de Ville. Within another three days of fighting, the last pockets of resistance were in the north, where the Parisian insurrection had begun.

Seeing the hopelessness of their situation, they knew that the cause of the Commune was lost, but, as Lejeune recalls, ‘we fought on, falling back from barricade to barricade, extracting a heavy price for our lives.’ It was thus that Adrien Lejeune claimed to have ended up on the barricades of the rue des Pyrénées, in Belleville, in the night of the 27 to 28 May.

Lejeune was therefore involved in the last days of fighting by the Communards, who were methodically crushed by an army far superior in numbers, equipment and training. Despite undoubted acts of heroism and even military skill, this disputatious and amateurish citizens’ militia was doomed to fail. Lenin’s Bolsheviks would not hesitate to draw lessons from that defeat, noting the lack of organisation and insufficient harshness of the Communards, despite the hostage-taking, round-ups and searches that Lejeune claims to have taken part in.

The humiliated prisoners had to face the ferocity of a bourgeois crowd hell-bent on revenge after ten weeks of the ‘riff-raff’ in power. Lejeune remembered a priest who passed them and began to yell: ‘Shoot them all! God will know how to tell between those who are guilty and those who are right.’

The crowd, growing heated, tried to gouge the Communards’ eyes out with the points of their umbrellas. The captives were marched down the rue Lafayette, in the beaux quartiers, before crossing the Bois de Boulogne where they were told to stop. Eventually General Galliffet, who played a notorious role in the repression of the Commune, approached them, and Lejeune describes how he made them line up so he could see every one, and began to take his pick:

‘You must have taken part in the revolution of ’48. Step out!’
‘You look more intelligent, step out!’
‘You, the wounded fellow, step out!’

The selected prisoners’ mothers and wives begged Galliffet for mercy, but he simply told them: ‘Your tears do not touch me. I’m not one of them.’ He called out twenty-five men. Lejeune was not among them. An officer of the gendarmes, who had been busy tracking down Communards, marched up to Galliffet and, saluting, said: ‘Your Excellency, I request the honour of commanding the firing squad.’

Lejeune’s account of the last days of the Commune and its aftermath certainly chimes with the two most famous accounts by former Communards, Maxime Vuillaume’s Mes cahiers rouges and Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s still authoritative, if unashamedly partisan, History of the Paris Commune of 1871: the doomed last stands on the slopes of Belleville, the denunciations, the Jardin du Luxembourg and other picturesque parks transformed into abattoirs, the public humiliation of prisoners by inhabitants of the beaux quartiers, the summary executions ordered by Galliffet, incarceration in floating prisons and fortresses on the Breton coast.

Lejeune and the other Communards were put among the common-law prisoners, including unsavoury elements who, Lejeune claims, were hell-bent on making the Communards’ lives a misery: ‘One of them had it in for me, and one day when I was standing near the wall of the cell, he ran up and head-butted my stomach. I had time to sidestep and his head crashed against the wall.’

Their spirit of resistance did not falter. Lejeune reports that one day, as a defiant revolutionary gesture, someone attached a little red pennant to the wall of their cell. The guard came and asked: ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s to scare away the flies,’ someone replied. There weren’t any flies.

Later Life

In 1905, after following the movement of Communard leader Edouard Vaillant, Lejeune joined Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde in the Unified Socialist Party. In 1917 he ‘greeted with enthusiasm the socialist October Revolution which meant the triumph of the Commune’s ideas in one sixth of the globe’.

In 1922, now aged seventy-five, the old Communard joined the young French Communist Party. Despite age and illness, his mind was ‘still combative’, which meant more run-ins with the police of the reactionary government. An international committee, specifically created to help the survivors of the Commune, arranged for him to take refuge in the Soviet Union. In 1926, Adrien Lejeune left France for what he would describe as his ‘second country’.

In 1936, he donated his meagre savings to the children of Spanish Republicans killed in the struggle against Franco. In October 1941, as Hitler’s troops approached Moscow, Adrien Lejeune, with the schoolchildren and old people of his district, was evacuated to Novosibirsk, in Siberia. Fernand Chatel concluded:

There was a ration card for everyone except for the last living Communard, whose rallying cries were read out in the units of the Red Army. His last letter, on 31 December 1941, wished a Happy New Year to the Red Army wounded being treated at the hospital of Novosibirsk. He died on 9 January 1942, at the age of ninety-five, in that Siberian city which still has a street named after him and where not a day goes by without some flowers being laid upon his grave.

L’Humanité’s account presented Lejeune as the embodiment of the perfect Communard: of modest origins but with a ferocious appetite for self-education, a freethinker, active in all the uprisings and on all the barricades, present to the bitter end.

Marcel Cerf, grand-nephew of the Communard Maxime Vuillaume, biographer of the ‘D’Artagnan of the Commune’, Maxime Lisbonne, and doyen of the Friends of the Commune, gave a somewhat different view. Cerf confessed to me that, although he had been passionately interested in the Commune early on and had followed the huge funeral procession of Zéphirin Camélinat in 1932, he had only heard of Adrien Lejeune after the war, and especially at the time of the centenary. As neither a communist nor an anti-communist, Cerf offered this judgement on the Last Communard:

Obviously, we can’t deny that Adrien Lejeune fought for the Commune, but we would have to see in precisely what conditions. During the siege, he was a member of the National Guard and even obtained the rank of sergeant, but after the armistice with the Prussians he surrendered his weapons. And when the Commune was proclaimed, he had no desire to resume a military role in the National Guard, and managed to find a job in the food supply service at the mairie of the 20th arrondissement.

That meant he could avoid being in the National Guard. So he did this work during the entire Commune, until the start of the Bloody Week. And at the start of the Bloody Week he thought it would be preferable to get out of Paris. He was arrested at the gates of Paris by the National Guard and taken to the prison of La Petite Roquette, where it was proposed to him to take back his role in the National Guard, because if he stayed in prison he would most certainly be considered a traitor.

He therefore decided it would be better to get back into uniform, and it seems he fought bravely either at the rue du Faubourg St-Antoine, or the rue Ramponneau, as he himself said [sic]. In any case, he fought to the last day and was arrested on 28 May. […] As a combatant he was not perhaps absolutely exemplary, but he did fight for the Commune and for this reason deserves our homage.

This is a nuanced judgement based on a precise knowledge of certain documents, which other evidence from Moscow and elsewhere can serve to complement. Adrien Lejeune was not the heroic Communard of Communist hagiography, but a man who played a modest yet fateful role in an event whose brief existence would come to haunt the left, and ultimately determine the rest of Lejeune’s days.