@ -1585,4 +1585,55 @@ This army, and especially its senior officers, had made its hand during the conq
Long at the head of this army, General Vinoy defines himself as \enquote{a man who has always regarded order as the first duty of any society.}\footnote{Communication by Jean-Claude Freiermuth, in Maintien de l'ordre et polices, Créaphis, 1987, pp. 41-51.}
This army was enlarged by Bismarck, who freed the prisoners of war. Class internationalism.
To the extent of hatred and fear, Paris is transformed into slaughterhouses. Among the many witnesses, Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross:
\enquote{This relentless repression… ended with appalling scenes of slaughter that turned Paris into a human mass grave.
We killed to kill… A real war of extermination with all its horrors, let us say it well, because it is the truth; and those who have ordained him boast and praise themselves:
they thought they were fulfilling a sacred duty; all those who belonged to the Commune, or were sympathetic to it, were to be shot.}
Extra judicial killings are innumerable: barracks, prisons (1,900 shootings at La Roquette on 28 May), gardens and squares (Luxembourg, Parc Monceau, Jardin des Plantes), cemeteries (Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse) are all mass graves; the casemates of fortifications, full of corpses, serve as incineration furnaces. The height of cruelty: Communards are buried alive, especially in the Square Saint-Jacques. According to the British newspaper Evening Standard,
\enquote{It is doubtful that we can ever know the exact figure of the butchery that is prolonged. Even for the perpetrators of these executions, it must be quite impossible to say how many corpses they made.} Between 20,000 and 30,000.
These atrocities elicit enthusiastic applause. \emph{Le Gaulois} of May 31:
\enquote{Insane people of this kind and in such large numbers and getting along together constitute such an appalling danger for the society to which they belong that there is no other possible penalty than a radical suppression.}
A few days later, \emph{Le Figaro} added: \enquote{Mr. Thiers still has an important task to do: that of purging Paris… Never such an opportunity will arise to cure Paris of the moral gangrene that has been eating away at it for twenty years… Today, clemency would be dementia…
What is a Republican? A ferocious beast… Come on, honest people! A helping hand to put an end to democratic and social vermin.}
Alexandre Dumas fils, author of \emph{La Dame aux camélias}, lowers himself to write: \enquote{We won't say anything about their females out of respect for all the women they look like when they die.}
The fear of epidemics stops the slaughter. An author of best-selling plays, Émile de Girardin, advocates that mass burials be carried out in the suburbs:
\enquote{There, nothing to fear from the cadaveric emanations, an impure blood will water and fertilize the furrow of the ploughman.}
The White Terror — \enquote{the cold blood bath} says Louise Michel — follows the bloodbath.
43,522 prisoners were taken to the cellars of the Palace of Versailles, to the Satory camp or, like the convicts, to the pontoons of the ports (Brest, Cherbourg…).
Their long march is described by the Versailles journalist Léonce Dupont as follows:
\enquote{Passes before our eyes a human flock emaciated, tattered, all in rags, a mixture of robust men, old men still firm, poor devils folded in half and dragging painfully leaning on the neighbors.
Some have shoes, others savates, others are barefoot… The crowd that sees these prisoners parade before it does not know how to moderate itself… It would like to rush at them and tear them to pieces.
I have seen ladies of very soft appearance, at the height of exasperation, forget themselves until they strike poor devils with their umbrella.}\footnote{Léonce Dupont,\emph{ Souvenirs de Versailles pendant la Commune }(Memories of Versailles during the Commune), 1881.} Ladies of the world and the half-world. The great photographer and writer Nadar makes a similar account\footnote{Nadar, 1871. \emph{Enquête sur la Commune} (Inquiry on the Commune), Paris, 1897.}.
The councils of war sat for five years.
The Versailles \enquote{justice} pronounces 13,440 convictions (including 3,313 in absentia):
death sentences (9,323 executed), deportation, prison. Many Communards were sent to prison in New Caledonia.
One of them, Jean Allemane, recounts the brutality of the reception, then the inhuman discipline, the corporal punishment inflicted with sadism, hunger, isolation, despair, suicides…\footnote{Jean Allemane, \emph{Mémoires d'un Communard. Des barricades au bagne }(Memories of a Communard, from barricades to prison), Paris, 1910.}.
After this terrible bloodletting, Thiers plays the prophets: \enquote{We no longer talk about socialism and that's a good thing. We are rid of socialism.} Oracle quickly denied. As Pottier sings:
\enquote{On l’a tuée à coup d’chassepot (She was killed with a Chassepot)
À coup de mitrailleuse (With a machine gun)
Et roulée dans son drapeau (And rolled in her flag)
Dans la terre argileuse (In clay soil)
Et la tourbe des bourreaux gras (And the peat of fat executioners)
Se croyait la plus forte (she believed herself to be the strongest)
Tout ça n’empêch’pas (Not everything prevents)
Nicolas
Qu’la Commune n’est pas morte! (That the Commune is not dead!)}
\section{Claude Willard}
Claude Willard is a historian, professor emeritus of the University of Paris VIII and president of the association of friends of the Commune.
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